T.T. 14: Growing Seeds into Wonders... by Writing Online???
Convincing, Preparing, and Expecting Success by Growing in Public
Out of all the advice my parents have shared with me over the years, this insight from my dad stands out as particularly profound professional wisdom:
“Most people find it uncomfortable to do either math or public speaking. No matter what path you take in life, demonstrating basic abilities with both math and public speaking can set you apart for success.”
The wording has varied, but the essential point remains consistent. Math and public speaking. Both skills remain valuable, and likely always will.
Although the underlying reasons for the value of math and public speaking are truly timeless, the methods of demonstrating and applying those skillsets have evolved in parallel with technological progress.
Now that calculators and coding languages — compute-rs — exist, the ability to do arithmetic in your own brain is increasingly irrelevant. The modern manifestation of mathematics’ value mainly applies through Data Analytics.
Similarly, modern technology has transformed the nature of public speaking. Although in-person connection will always remain important, the physical constraints of legacy communication — a single speaker in a single room at a single time slot to a single set of potentially-distracted audience members — have never been even remotely close to optimal. The internet transcends ALL of those problems, much like the printing press did, but with a quantum leap of improvement in every major factor for mass consumption.
In my previous post, I highlighted how the firing of Tucker Carlson stands out as a major inflection point at the intersection of massive “macro” long term trends in several MAJOR fields — not only geopolitical and economic power structures, but also the nature of “media” content itself.
I mentioned that I planned to follow up on that with additional posts about Elon’s Twitter, Substack, and the decentralized future of content platforms using Nostr.
I still plan to elaborate on all of those important topics, with the unfolding Tucker story as a connective thread. But I realized it makes sense to back up and dive into “first principles” of WHY online content matters, both for the creators themselves as well as global audiences.
Greater detail will have to be spread across multiple successive posts. For now, I’ll simply share these two links to start with, because these were fundamental inspirations to start my own “journey” into online writing:
The most relevant episode from Isaac Morehouse’s trilogy of 2021 interviews with Clint Russell, who is one of my very favorite libertarian podcast hosts, and thus how I discovered Isaac in the first place
“Why I Blog Every Day” — from Isaac’s personal site, published back in 2015, but still providing value to random online strangers like me several years later
Bonus — a picture from when I met Clint in person at the “Rage Against the War Machine” protest in D.C. a couple months ago, which I wrote about in a previous post:
P.S.
Now that Elon has taken small steps toward censoring Substack links on Twitter… you may want to download the app yourself, to cut out the middleman corporate social network, and connect more directly with myself and many other quality content producers!
Optional “gRiFtInG” via voluntary “Value-for-Value”
If you enjoyed this post, and want to help grow the Bitcoin circular economy one small Lightning Network transaction at a time, please feel free to send a direct peer-to-peer micropayment tip/boost/zap to my “Lightning Address” or “LN URL”: