Today we’re sharing David’s recent talk, ‘One Person Powerhouse’ from an event hosted by Fab Giovanetti, the founder of Alt Marketing School.
David shares six powerful ideas that he’s learned from his personal journey as a solo creator.
You will get a glimpse behind the curtain at David’s writing process, and learn principles that will help you become a one-person powerhouse.
To book David Elikwu for speaking engagements, please visit https://theknowledge.pro/.
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📹 Watch on Youtube
📄 Show notes:
0:00 | Intro
02:27 | Start
05:39 | Make it Effortless
14:35 | Nobody Cares
16:52 | Find the others
18:23 | Make your own luck
24:42 | Keep Going
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
Leonardo DiCaprio | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_DiCaprio
Brad Pitt | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Pitt
Fab Giovanetti | https://twitter.com/fabgiovanetti
Alt Marketing School | https://altmarketingschool.com/
Vincent Van Gogh | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
🐣 Twitter: @Delikwu / @itstheknowledge
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The Knowledge is a weekly newsletter for people who want to get more out of life. It's full of insights from psychology, philosophy, productivity, and business, all designed to help you think deeper and work smarter.
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📜Full transcript:
David Elikwu: it goes to this point of consistently honing your craft over time. Not getting stuck on having to create something magical and wonderful upfront, but just continuing to do the work, continuing to iterate, continuing to learn and experiment and eventually making something awesome.
David Elikwu: Hey, I'm David Elikwu. And this is The Knowledge. A podcast for anyone looking to think deeper and work smarter. In every episode I speak with makers, thinkers, and innovators to help you get more out of life.
This week I'm sharing something a little bit different. It's a talk that I did at an event called Marketing Sprint, which is run by my friend Fab Giovanetti, who runs the Alt Marketing School. And I talked about six powerful principles that I've learned in my time as a solo creator.
So you will get a bit of a glimpse behind the curtain and everything that goes into writing my newsletters and everything else that I do at the knowledge as well as some of the important lessons and principles that I've picked up along the way in this journey for the past three years or so.
As a quick note, I occasionally refer to my slides, so if you want the full visual experience, you can find this as a video on YouTube.
I'll leave the link in the description below. You can get the full show notes, the transcript, and read my newsletter at theknowledge.io.
Every week, I share some of the best tools, ideas, and frameworks that I come across from business psychology, philosophy and productivity. So if you want the best that I have to share, you can get that in the newsletter at theknowledge.io.
And you can find me on Twitter @delikwu. If you love this episode, please do share it with a friend, and most importantly, don't forget to leave a review ideally on Apple Podcast because it helps us tremendously to reach other people just like you.
So my name is David Elikwu. I am the founder of The Knowledge and the host of the Knowledge Podcast.
So part of the knowledge, we have three newsletters, so you'll see on the right hand side, Brainwave, Revelations and Wayfinder. Brainwave is mostly about productivity. Revelations is about sharing insights around, self-development. And then Wayfinder is mostly about decision making. So there's also the podcast. Over the last four years, we've built an audience of about 45,000 people in total. That's across all platforms, but the newsletter itself is about almost 20,000 now.
So the other part that I'll talk about later is just this flywheel that happens because it seems like a lot, that sounds like a lot of things that I do, particularly because I do all of that while working full-time, working full-time, and also coaching and consulting for a bunch of different startups and also doing keynotes.
So I usually do a number of keynotes a year. I've spoken at Google, Bloomberg, Unilever lots of different companies and have a lot of fun doing it.
So what I really wanna talk about today is this idea of becoming a prolific creator and being able to use leverage to be able to do all of these things. Partly sharing from my experience of how I've managed to do all of this, but also for you, and I know that a lot of you will be at different stages in your journey as a creator. And I'm gonna share some aspects of my journey you know, it has been hard, it hasn't always been easy, but I think what I really want to share is principles that I've learned across the way.
So you'll see there's six of them here. The first is to start, the second is to make it effortless. The third is that nobody cares. Which sounds harsh, but you'll understand why. The fourth is to find the others. The fifth is making your own luck and the sixth is to keep going.
So all of those are very simple titles and it's a simple presentation. Okay, so I started with point number one, which is to start, and I think this is really important because I coach a lot of people, I speak to a lot of people that are aspiring creators, aspiring people that want to start a brand, they want to create a business, they want to do something, and they will spend 1, 2, 3, 5 years planning the perfect business, the perfect brand, the perfect opportunity, but not actually starting. And I think that very first point I wanted to make is that you get no leverage, no asymmetry, no compounding, none of the benefits that come further down the line if you don't get off the starting line.
So the sooner you start, the sooner you get to enjoy all the benefits that come from starting. And so the first secret, if you call it that to becoming a prolific creator is just to hit publish. So here's a, a little graphic here, which is the difference between thinking and making, and I think this is what people frequently sweat over. People are so worried.
What if I put something out there and people hate it? What if I put something out there You know, It's just embarrassing when I look back on it. But a funny thing that I wrote about this in my newsletter and it's something that I like to quote often, 85% of the global email volume is spam.
And you can take this one of two ways. So on one side you could say, oh, people are getting loads of spam, I don't wanna add to that, but I think the other way to think about it is there's no amount to the amount of digital rubbish that we can produce. And there will always be more rubbish, The bad thing is often better than nothing. So if you make something and it's bad, don't worry. You are in the majority. 85% of emails that people get are gonna suck. They're gonna be rubbish. No one wants to read them. All you have to do is write something good and suddenly you are already in the top 15% of all emails that ever get sent.
So it's a tiny bar to cross and everyone starts small. I know people say that, but I think it's something that's tough to grasp. Leonardo DiCaprio's first film scored 4 out of 10 on IMDB. Brad Pitt's First film was an uncredited extra on a film that's called 5 out of 10 on IMDB. So if Brad Pitt can start from zero, I'm sure you can as well.
So the inverse is also true. Like I said, on one hand you could take it that look, there's unlimited amounts of rubbish. If you write something and it's rubbish, you're in the majority. If you write something, it's good. You are in the minority of really good people.
But the other way to think about it is that there's always a market for great ideas, right? No matter how saturated you think a particular market might be, it just proves that this works. I think, I hear people talking a lot about, oh my gosh, there's so many people on YouTube. So many people are already making the content that I want to make.
And another quote that I frequently remind people of is that almost half of all the humans on the planet use YouTube. At least once a month, right? It's almost 3 billion people that use YouTube every month, 3 billion. If you look just at the US, over 60% of internet users, so 60% of people that have internet in the US are on YouTube every single day.
But where are all the YouTube channels? They're not there because the vast majority of people, over 90% of people are just passive consumers, right? So when you see some of these YouTube channels that have millions of followers, that's even a fraction of the market. That doesn't mean that everyone on YouTube is following them. There are 3 billion people on YouTube.
Whatever your medium is, wherever you want to create something, whatever product you want to bring into the world, trust me when I say there's plenty of room for it. There were plenty of great TV shows before Game of Thrones. There were plenty of great podcasts before Joe Rogan. So the first thing is just to stop.
The second thing is to make it effortless. And this is one thing that I've learned throughout my journey writing this newsletter. I remember, I think it was in 2021, just going through this period of deep anxiety was so hard to keep writing, to keep up this cadence. You put a promise out into the world and say, I'm gonna make this thing.
And you feel like I have to stick by it now. And on one hand it can cause Enlighten you and inspire you to produce. But on the other hand, just being honest from my experience, it can also be crushing. It can feel like people are watching you now suddenly I have a few hundred subscribers and if I don't send something out, people are going to email me. And they did. I took a long break from writing pretty much from June until October in 2021. So more than half the year I wasn't publishing anything and all my growth stopped at first people email and say, are you okay? Is something happened? But then I learned something very important.
Really just this idea of making it effortless. And I think what had happened was I had put so much pressure on myself to produce something of high quality it meant that I just couldn't get over the hump. I was facing what Stephen Presfield caused the resistance and the resistance to write something, the resistance to put something out every week was so high that I couldn't put out anything.
And so there are three parts of this that I think are extremely important if you want to make production effortless for whatever it is that you're building. So the first is to set expectations and over-deliver. The second is to make success. Make success automatic.
And then the third is to leverage automation. So setting expectations. This one is super simple, not complicated at all. I just use automated welcome sequences and tagging, and it is surprisingly it's highly underrated, right? I think before you set up something that is robust, there is a lot of pressure to write every week.
And I think part of that is because you haven't set expectations. You haven't told people what they're going to get from you. And so I think whether you are writing a newsletter or you have a product or you have a brand. Yesterday we had the panel and we were talking about this idea of branding, and I think one of the most important things is to set expectations. That is your brand. That is who you are. If you can communicate, this is what value I'm gonna be bringing to you. Set it at a level that you can actually produce. Another good example is my podcast. I have a podcast, I've been running for a few years. It's going quite well, but it only comes out every two weeks.
Why? Because I do so much other stuff. I could not right now, do a weekly podcast, so I don't. My podcast is only every two weeks. That means I can only ever put out 24 or 25 podcasts in a year. That might be a limiting factor on the amount that it can grow, but for now at least it keeps it sustainable for me, and I can commit to producing something that is very high quality throughout the year.
That leads directly to this idea of making success automatic. So there's two ways I do this. One is the Velocity writing system that I set up for myself. And the second is this idea of starting at 240p. I'm not sure I've mentioned the YouTube analogy before. I'm not sure how many of you were on YouTube back in maybe 2008, 2009.
Right now, you can watch videos in 4K on YouTube or I think 2140 p. There's loads of versions of HD video you can watch on YouTube. Back in the day, you didn't have the bandwidth for all that. I think it went up to 720p, but it went down all the way to 240p. And anytime you got stuck loading a video, normally you might try and watch on 480p.
Anytime you got stuck, you could downscale to 240p. And what I love about this analogy is that you can have a high resolution vision of what you want to produce and what you want people to see, but being able to downscale it and saying, what's the minimum viable product? What is the lowest resolution that I could produce this thing at? That it's still intelligible, right? Even though it's kind of a swimming sea of pixels. If someone looks at this, they can still get a vague idea of what I'm trying to produce. It might not look like the final finished product, but it's an abstracted version.
And so really just being able to strip back all the polish and all the fancy stuff you wanna do, and just figuring out, what is the smallest possible version I can ship consistently, I think has had huge impact for me.
So I'll show you my writing system quickly. It's gonna look a tiny bit complicated. This is probably the simplest or in my view. I think when you add it all up across the different views, it then becomes complicated. But I have a super simple way of writing newsletters. I have a quick capture system, I have one database, technically I have two. One while I'm browsing the internet, I could be on Twitter, I could be on any website. If I find something interesting, it goes in one database, which is just for reference. And the reason I have that it becomes like an anti E-library. So anytime I'm doing research and I'm searching because I've already saved it into my Notion database I can always find interesting stuff that I've come across, but it also means I don't have to read the stuff the first time, right?
So as I'm browsing the internet, I don't have to read every single article. I don't have to watch every single video. But what I can do is save it. And when I save it, I write some seo, I make it discoverable. So I put in all the keywords so that later on, if I'm ever trying to search for something, let's say, related to stress, everything that I've come across before that's related to stress will come up. And I already know it's high quality stuff. I don't have to go to Google. I'm never going to Google. I'm going to my own library of stuff I have curated over the last few years. So that's one database. The second database is just notes. All the notes that I take.
If I read a book notes, if I listen to a podcast notes, if I watch a YouTube video notes, if I think of something random on the train notes, it all goes in the same place. And then I have a system here, which I call velocity, where I rank all of these ideas.
Sometimes, I remember it was my dad's birthday. I was on the train home to go and see my family while I was on the train. I had an idea, I wrote it down. If all I can come up with is a title, the velocity is one, and the rankings are one, three, and five. There's no twos, there's no fours. What that means is it forces me if I'm going beyond a one, I have to get this to a three.
So a one is, it can be a headline, it can be one sentence. A three is I have a few bullet points, maybe I have an entire outline, but it's, it's very loose. A five is okay, now I've got a few paragraphs, I've actually spent a little bit of time polishing this idea. If I want to send a newsletter today, all I have to do is sit down and look at all the fives, because all of them, I've got a few paragraphs worth. I've got the structure of what I'm going to write, it's all there, but it means that there's no pressure to finish anything. I don't finish anything. You can see on all of these databases or all of these views. I have over a hundred waiting newsletters, I think 117. They're not done, they're at varying levels of done, but whenever I need to publish something, I can pick one up.
And then I have another view for the shorts that I write. And I think this goes back to this idea of writing 240p. The newsletters that I used to write were like essays, they were two to 5,000 words and I would sit down, sometimes I would sit down in the morning and I would just write it, right before I publish it. Sometimes I might have been working on it through the week, but that was a big cause of pressure.
And then in December, I sat down and I was like, oh, this is very stressful. How can I make this easier? And what I ended up doing is now, if you look on my Revelations newsletter, most of the essays now, or most of the things that I send now are 250 to 500 words. They're very dense.
And if I only have to write 250 to 500 words, I could write that in one sitting. I know I can do that. And if I'm building these ideas up over time, it's super easy to get an idea from start to finish, and I don't have to worry about all of the additional stress of everything else.
So the last part is, what I'm calling the Wizard of Oz effect, and this is another form of leverage and automation in how I produce my newsletters.
Not everything in my newsletter is done live every single week, and it doesn't have to be, but all that matters is for the reader. It feels like it's live. And so here you will see there are some pink sections and some purple sections that's not actually on the newsletter. I've just done that for your sake.
But The pink sections are things that I change live every week. Revelations newsletter is my only weekly one. The other two are fortnightly on alternating cadences, so the ad slots at the top. Obviously I have to get some ads, I have to do some marketing. That changes every week. I will update that every week, the middle slot where I'm sharing updates about, here's what I've written recently, here is a recent podcast that I've done, here is something you should know that's happening right now, that is updated every week. Everything else is already done. I have already written every single newsletter that is going to go out from the Revelations one, the other ones maybe not.
But for the Revelations newsletter, which is weekly, I've done every single newsletter for the rest of this year. It's finished. Every single newsletter that people will receive in 2024 is already drafted. I haven't finished them, but I've got drafts. So there's no stress, there's no pressure. I can wake up on a Thursday like today, which is when the Revelations newsletter went out a few hours ago, and there's no stress. I've already written the main piece of the article. All I have to fill in is here's some stuff I've written recently, and here is the sponsor for today.
Point number three and we'll go very quickly through the rest because there are more just ideas that I think are really important.
So third is the idea that nobody cares.
And that sounds really harsh, but you might have heard of the Wright brothers and people refer to them often. People always say, oh, look at the White brothers they did this and that. And I think there's two important things to remember. One is that. Within 50 or 60 years of the Wright Brothers taking their first flight, the very first flight in human history, people were going to the moon.
So it shows you that once you get the initial burst of energy and you crack the first piece of the code, suddenly you can do exponentially more within such a short frame of time that you would not have imagined previously. However, people like to talk about the Wright Brothers like. What they were doing was immediately obvious the Wright brothers were flying from their first flight before the first reporter actually came and took a look at what they were doing.
It took four and a half years, so as much as we talk about how legendary they are, almost five years passed, people saw them every day and they just didn't even know what to make of it. They thought they were doing magic tricks because they'd never conceptualized humans flying before. So it took four and a half years from their first flight to actual newspaper coverage.
So for all the creators that are wondering, oh my gosh, I'm not hitting the for you page. You know, My posts aren't going viral. I've been putting this stuff out and it's not going anywhere. Don't worry. It happens to everyone. When Alexander Graham Bell first invented the telephone, the very first thing that he tried to do was to sell it.
So he went to a company you might have heard of called Western Union. And at this time some of you may not have heard Western Union now, which would probably give you an indication of where the story is going, but Western Union used to be one of the biggest communications companies in the world. And so he takes this prototype device to them and he tries to pitch it and he tries to sell it to them. And they looked to him and they said,
"The telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a potential form of communication".
And they continued saying, "This device is inherently of no value to us. What use could this company make of an electric toy?" This is what they said about something that almost every person in the developed world has in their pocket. I have a phone, you have a phone, if you're watching this, you are watching this on a very advanced device.
And it's important to remember, like at the time, Western Union used to boast that they had a million miles of telegraph cables. This is a big company. And so I think the point here is that no matter how small you are or how big what you're looking at is, If no one cares, that shows you're probably on the right track, but it doesn't have to stop there, right? You, you keep going.
And one way you can keep going is to find the others. I don't know how many of you love horror stories, I would ask, but I can't see your faces so, I'm assuming lots of you might like horror stories, and you might know of some really iconic characters, but what you might not know is that most of the most iconic characters in modern horror all were born on the same night because four writers were sharing a cabin.
So imagine this, it's a darkened stormy night in Villa Diodati, which is a mansion on Lake Geneva. It's 1816. So Lord Byron is there, his doctor was there, John William Polidori. Mary Shelly was there, and her lover, Percy Shelley and so is her sister Claire Clairmont, who is pregnant with Lord Byron's child, so it's, it's a nice circular affair. But they're miserable, cause they're locked inside. And so they coped by writing horror stories and they're sharing these stories to each other. So they come out of this mansion. John Polidori writes The Vampire, which is the very first work of fiction to feature a Bloodsucking Hebrew.
And ironically, it was actually based on his friend Lord Byron and Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein and Lord Byron wrote a bunch of poems and stuff that came out that, so all of this creative work. Frankenstein monster, Vampires. All of these things came from a bunch of writers, a bunch of creators together in Hot Box, working together, collaborating with each other, bouncing ideas of each other.
And I think a really important idea is that you don't have to go through this journey alone. It's not just you writing and creating and, and bringing into the world by yourself. You can find contemporaries, you can find peers that can help you to grow and develop.
So the fifth point. Make your own luck.
Now, I'm not sure if you believe in miracles or luck or serendipity, but all three of them struck one Sunday in a tiny Nebraska church in 1950. So imagine it's a cold Sunday morning. We're at the West Side Baptist Church. Choir practice starts at 7:15, the reverend comes in a few hours early to put on the furnace so that it's not cold when the choir arrives, he sets everything up and then he goes home for dinner. Just remember, choir practice starts at 7:15. At 7:25 a gas leak causes an explosion, and the blast demolishes the church. It destroys the windows of nearby buildings. It takes a nearby radio station completely off the air.
It was a hugely destructive event, and every single member of the choir survived. How? That sounds insane, it sounds crazy. The funny thing is they were all late. Every single one of them was late for a completely different reason. I think one of them took a nap. One was in the car waiting for another one of them had to change their child's diapers. Every single person was late for a very different reason and no one was killed in this massive destructive event. That is how most people think luck looks like. When you say a lucky event, some luck happened. That is what people typically imagine. But I think there's another model that we can use for luck.
So there was a study in the 1960s by Stanley Milgrim. He asks people from around the country to pass on a letter that's intended for a named stockbroker in Boston. So these people have no idea who the person is, they've never been to Boston, but all they have to do is pass on this letter to the person they know who might be most likely to know this person in Boston. And so he sends the letters out to random priests poor in Nebraska and Kansas, all the way on the other side of the country, and he asks them to pass the letter on.
From this 30% of the parcels eventually reached the stockbroker, and this is where the idea of the six degrees of separation comes from because it usually only took six forwards to reach the destination. And what I love about this analogy is this idea that you could have no idea. Who someone is on the other side of the world, but you could pass on a letter six times and eventually reach them.
And I think it's this idea that luck is not just a random lightning strike. It's not a random church blowing up. Luck very often can be like oil, lying underground waiting to be discovered. But there's another version of this study that they did in the UK actually. They asked people to separate into a lucky group of people and an unlucky group of people, and they did the exact same experiment. Everyone sent off these parcels to a woman that lives in Chitham. And you go back and you see how many of these parcels reached the person. And you say, okay, did this parcel come from someone that self-described themselves as lucky or unlucky?
And the funny thing is, the vast majority of people that thought they were unlucky, Didn't even send the parcel. They just didn't even bother. It never left their house, 60% of all the other people reached the destination. Someone that they didn't know, but they were able to find. And this idea is that luck is waiting for you to find it, and you can create it intentionally through serendipity.
And so here are a few different images of part of my journey. The one in the top left corner is from when I first started my newsletter on substack. And you can see, I think that goes from maybe October or March it's pretty much all the same, like zeros, ones, twos, threes, maybe up to 20. And then on the right you can see, I think in March of 2021, my first day reaching a thousand people, which was crazy at the time. But then you look on the right and this other picture, you now see these are my current, the current numbers on my bug. First of all, you see it going up every month. It's pretty much been like that for the last two years, and now you see that in a normal month I can reach, over 10,000 people quite easily.
And this is also the newsletter growth. And what's funny about this, if you look in the bottom right corner, is that it looks like a long straight line and then it suddenly goes dramatically upward. What's funny about that picture is that long straight line hides 700 people joining my newsletter in retrospect, it now looks like a straight line, but that's actually growth of 700 people. So it is growing, but very slowly and once you start hitting real growth, so then it grows from, I think about two and a half thousand to 16,000.
And the growth I'm experiencing now makes the previous growth look like almost nothing. It's almost like it never happened. And so one of the ideas as I'm coming towards the end here is this idea of a flywheel and the idea that all of these various things that I mentioned that I don't have to happen independently of each other and they can be connected.
But I think there's two different ways you can see this going. And what I'm asking you to do is to make the machine that's on the right and not the machine on the left. The machine that you see here on the left is highly complicated. I have no idea where this thing starts or where it finishes. There's lots of moving parts.
There's lots of things. This is what I was doing before. I was trying to create this big, shiny thing, I was writing these newsletters that were almost 4, 5,000 words long. I was pouring my heart and soul into it, and it was becoming frustrating. It was filling me with anguish, it was so hard to write consistently, and now it's So simple that I can write a whole year's worth in advance because it's only 500 words or so. And now I've gone from struggling to write one newsletter to writing three newsletters highly regularly. I've grown probably about seven or eight x in the last four or five months, and everything is hunky dory.
So here's how the little flywheel looks for me. You can see I go from the newsletter. I will share things in my newsletter. Ideas that I share in the newsletter very often end up in keynotes. A lot of the stories I've told today have been in my keynotes in the past. So if you read my newsletter, you'll have come across some of these stories before. They don't have to be new, that's the fantastic thing. So now when I go and I do a keynote, I did a keynote at Unilever, some of the points that I made in my keynote in Unilever came from a newsletter and after I do a keynote, I have a course and I will take some of the ideas that I've refined so I'm not copy pasting. I've refined the ideas each time, but when I refine an idea for a keynote, suddenly it's teachable, and I know it's teachable cause I just taught it, and then I can put it into my course. And once I've taught it in my course, I've now spent a lot of time thinking about this same idea. And suddenly maybe I have some new thoughts, maybe I have some new ideas and then that goes into coaching. As I work with lots of entrepreneurs, lots of startup founders, and then from coaching, it ends up going back into the newsletter because eventually I've learned something new. And so I'm thinking about these ideas deeply over time. I'm not putting the onus on myself to have to do one huge lift right at the beginning. This is a flywheel so all of these different aspects come together.
The last thing I wanna say is to keep going. And this is the idea that, you know, the journey's really hard and one thing that I would encourage you to do is to experiment wildly. And I think you've heard me reiterate this point that the end products doesn't have to be what you make at the beginning.
So Van Gogh or Van Hawk. Van Gogh van Gogh, people pronounce his name differently in different places. I think the proper pronunciation is Van Hawk, as they say where he's from, and it's important to remember, this is a hugely famous artist, but he had no plans of becoming an artist, right?
He trained to become a pastor and he was bad at it, and he got sacked, and then he trained to become a teacher. And he was bad at it and he got sacked and then he started to draw and people laughed at him, but you can't fire someone from playing with pencils. And so he kept going and he kept experimenting and he would try lots of different styles, he would steal from lots of different people, and he was only painting for 10 years.
In those 10 years he did over 900 paintings and only a handful of them are famous. You have no idea what his 457th painting was, but he produced this massive volume of work. By continuing to experiment, continuing to try things, and now he's known as one of the greatest painters of all time.
Vangogh isn't alone in becoming prolific through creation, you've probably heard of only a handful of great composers, and actually there's a pretty simple reason why. The point that I would make is that I think, You might know some of the best composers in the world because they are the best, but actually, maybe you know them because they produced the most work.
So imagine you have a library and you take all of the compiled works of the 250 greatest composers, and you put it all together in this library. 60% of all the work that you will have came from just 16 people. And in fact, 20% of all the work, so this whole library of the 250 greatest composers, all of their combined work, 20% of that came from only three people Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. And if I'd asked you at the beginning to name some composers that you know, those would probably be the ones that you named. And maybe they're the best, but maybe they're just the ones that did the most work.
The very last thing this is from the N B A. On the left, I have a picture of the 14 biggest misses of all time people that have taken the most shots, the most missed shots in the history of the N B A and on the right, I have a picture of the highest scorers of all time, and you'll notice on the list of the highest scores of all time, Eight of them are on the list of the people that have missed the most shots in all of history.
So the people that have made more misses than anyone are also the highest scorers in the history of the N B A, and that is incredible to think about. But I think it goes to this point of consistently and consistently honing your craft over time. Not getting stuck on having to create something magical and wonderful upfront, but just continuing to do the work, continuing to iterate, continuing to learn and experiment and eventually making something awesome.
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