#004 - Attention Is Currency, Perfection Is a Trap

Lessons from Day-Trading Attention and Overcoming Perfectionism

read time ~4 mins

Hey everyone,

This is Dan from ReadWriteDev.com

I’m going to try something new and simplify the format of my newsletter. Every couple of weeks, I’ll break things down into three sections: what I’m reading, what I’m writing, and what I’m developing.

My goal is to keep things concise, actionable, and focused on the latest adventures of my solopreneur journey.

Let’s dive into this week’s edition!

what i’m reading…

I’ve been doing a lot of reading listening lately. Each night I walk about 3 miles around my neighborhood while listening to an audiobook. It’s awesome because I feel 2x productive because I’m not only reading a book a week, but I’m also leaving my desk and getting some exercise in.

This week I finished Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book, “Day Trading Attention”. I’ve been excited to read this one because I used to build a social publishing tool, and have always been interested in the latest social trends. I’m also a big fan of Gary’s audiobooks because he reads them himself an is always interjecting additional details or updates.

Here are some of the notes I jotted down while listening…

  • Attention is Priceless: Growing your social influence and having an engaged audience is one of the most valuable skills in the world today. Once you gain a person’s trust, everything after that becomes significantly easier. This isn’t just relate to your business, but in every aspect of your life.

  • Be Real, Not Perfect: People like honest and authentic content more than super-polished ads. This point was a motivating factor behind my new blog post, “Done Is Better Than Perfect“.

  • Create a Lot of (Good) Content: It’s impossible to predict what content is going to resonate with your audience, so it’s often better to just hit “publish” sooner rather than later. Then iterate on the content that gains traction.

  • Jump on New Platforms Early: Being one of the first people to use new apps or features often gives you a major advantage when it comes to growing your following. We’ve seen this play out over and over again as new social networks emerge and the early adopters quickly gain a ton of traction.

  • Use Data to Grow: Pay attention to numbers like views, clicks, and likes to see what’s working. Then publish more content in related areas or styles.

  • Stay Flexible: Things change quickly, so you need to keep an eye on what works and be willing to change up your strategy when necessary.

  • Build Your Personal Brand: Your personal brand is often more important than your company’s image. There’s a growing trend where people are tired of following a faceless brand pages, but are happy to follow the energetic founder.

what i’m writing…

Last week I published a short blog post on some of the challenges I faced while building my new side project (see next section). As I mentioned above, it was greatly influenced by GaryVee’s “Be Real, Not Perfect” point in the book.

A lot of people struggle with imposter syndrome, myself included, but these days I more frequently find myself wrestling with this obsession with perfectionism. I’ll spend weeks or months building something new, but then I have a hard time publicly sharing it until I’m able to add “just one more feature”.

The irony here is that this typically results in me never “finishing” the product at all, getting bored, and moving on to something new. I’m sure many of you can relate.

If this sounds like you, I’d love for you to read the post and let me know what you think!

what i’m developing…

For Buildspace’s “Nights & Weekends (season 5)”, I’ve decided to reuse a domain that I’ve owned for a few years now: Trendy.so.

With the ever increasing functionality of AI language models, I thought it would be cool to create an app that queried the day’s trending news stories, summarize various source articles, and then rewrite the article from a neutral point-of-view. This could help decrease the political bias from some news outlets, while also delivering the content in a very minimalistic format that isn’t littered with advertisements.

I’ve always been a fan of daily newsletters that provide a high-level overview of the previous day’s top stories (Morning Brew, The Hustle, etc.). I think it would be cool to eventually add a feature where the read can “subscribe” to certain topics and then just have those stories sent to their inbox each morning.

There are a few other AI functions that I think could be implemented in a modern media site like this:

  • Text-to-Audio could read the article summaries to you in a podcast-style format

  • A faceless video template could be used to auto-generate a daily rundown video

  • Each night you could auto-publish these formats to YouTube, TikTok, etc.

tweet of the week…

Thanks for reading! I would love to hear what you think of my new newsletter format, send me a DM on Twitter if you ever want to chat.