This is The Nooner, a (very short) daily newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
To see the first post, which doubles as an explainer, click here.
Also a quick reminder that you can listen to the podcast version of each post wherever you listen to podcasts.
Meet Ryan
(Not his real name, sorry.)
Ryan has a shrewd and innovative mind for business. At any given time, he’s got at least two or three hustles going.
Ryan is also generous. He knows his friends don’t have the same mind for hustling as he does, and Los Angeles is an expensive place to live. So he’ll often send a couple of his friends gigs now and again. Like, for instance, making short marketing videos for an app that shall not be named.
One day, Ryan was expressing frustration to me that someone he had hooked up with one of these gigs couldn’t be bothered to do the bare minimum of research.
“It would take one search,” he said. “And you’d see what the trend is. Two minutes. That’s it.”
Back in college, I learned that almost nobody (including myself, most of the time) ever does the reading. You’re busy, distracted, overwhelmed, bored, whatever, so you game the system to maximize the ROI of efforts to grades. This almost always means ignoring the reading.
I’d even go so far as to say that no one ever does ALL the reading.
But even back then, if you paid attention, you’d notice that the students who were absolutely killing it -- getting the best grades, impressing the teachers, landing the internships -- these guys did just a bit more reading than everyone else.
And now, here, in full grown-ass life, you see the same thing.
It’s the difference between the applicant who spends five minutes perusing the company website, and the one who doesn’t even do a Google. It’s the difference between the designer who spends fifteen minutes looking at good comps, and the one who doesn’t. It’s the difference between the guy who actually READS THE EMAIL, and the one who asks half a dozen follow up questions that he would have known the answer to if he had READ THE EMAIL.
On and on.
Fewer and fewer people do any of the reading.
But that’s good news, actually! It means it’s easier to stand out. Just a tiny bit of research puts you in the tippy top percentile of all people.
So whatever you’re working on, whatever your hustle is, give yourself a massive edge...
And do the reading.
Click at least one of these or else…
…you’ll have that nightmare where you show up to class and it’s finals and you haven’t done any of the reading.
How to win everything