Justyna Dorsz

David Perell

Do people laugh at us?

I was watching a presentation by David Perell, a writer, and Jack Butcher, a designer. They talked about how they started their careers, what lead them to the work they do now, what were the setbacks and failures. It was a very motivating talk. But one thing that David said surprised me. Around minute 40, he said that when he was starting his business, his friends mocked him. He even got an email from a friend who told him that some people that they both knew were making fun of David’s efforts.

I’ve never really thought about it. Maybe some of my friends were making fun of me too? My first designs were awful. My first game had a lot of problems. Did my friends think I was ridiculous? Not that it would have mattered.

Anyway, the whole video is worth watching (but I time stamped when David talked about people making fun of him):

Idea Factory

An Idea Factory is a system for generating ideas. Those ideas might be, for example:

  • ideas for blog posts
  • ideas for new videos
  • ideas for podcast episodes

Basically, if you create things, you need ideas. And sometimes you might feel like you don’t have anything to write or talk about. But there are ways to deal with this problem.

I’ve just watched “Building an Idea Factory” where Ali Abdaal and David Perell explain how they find ideas:

The most useful part is around the 50th minute when Ali shows his method. But the whole video is worth watching.

It’s funny when David mentions that it’s rare to find an artist who is also a software engineer because that is such a natural combination of skills to me.