The people I know who have the most interesting and lucrative careers have adopted “orphan problems”.
These are problems that exist at sufficient scale and severity in the marketplace, but there’s no corresponding academic or credentialing path that supplies us with licensed experts to solve them.
So, these folks become self-made experts in solving these orphan problems, and they enjoy significant freedom in how they monetize that expertise, at the cost of working damn hard for a while and embracing significant risk along the way.
The Expertise Incubator is a framework I invented to help folks like you find and adopt orphan problems, and cultivate valuable expertise in service of solving those problems.
There’s a simple definition for daily publication: frequently enough that you’re thinking about it every day. When you’ve created the productive obsession we’re seeking with the first challenge of The Expertise Incubator, you’ve succeeded in part of what that first challenge is meant to accomplish.
There’s an even simpler definition: publish something to an email list every day you work.
But both of these definitions don’t really explain some important stuff:
In this TEI Talk, I share some ways to accomplish both of those goals within the practice of daily publication.
This TEI Talk is half of a circle that you need to complete on your own. In it, I walk through 10 examples of daily emailers, and talk about what we can learn from them. You complete the circle by signing up to their email lists — even for just a few weeks — to see what they’re doing and learn from them.
When you are publishing daily, any kind of excess friction will harm you. In this talk, I suggest a particular tech setup that’s mean to reduce friction so you can get more of the expertise-cultivating benefits of daily publication.
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The Expertise Incubator framework focuses on maximizing the combination of reader/subscriber value and your future expertise value.
At some point, however, you may become interested in converting this significant amount of effort you’re pouring into the publishing into at least some current economic value for your business! This lecture offers a way to think about how to do that, and offers some specific methods you can implement.
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If you really, really… REALLY commit to the “cowpaths-to-roads” idea, then at some point the cowpath you are pursuing will feel like it’s headed straight for a cliff. You’ll wonder if you’re on the cusp of a significant innovation, or on the cusp of complete irrelevance to your market (and a complete loss of reader/subscriber value in what you’re publishing).
During this TEI Talk, I explore this fear and the very real tension that underlies it.