This week we sit with Swizec Teller and learn how to get more done in every day.
Swizec has an incredible work ethic — regularly blogging, vlogging, live streaming, and writing books on your favorite web technologies React and D3.
How does he do all that and keep a full-time job at a startup?
Today, we try to find out what his secret is and how to mimic that focus.
Talking Points
- How to get more done in every day
- Pitching workshops and talks to comferences
- Using livecoding to help focus
- Building an audience when building a startup
- Testing ideas with blog posts
- Consisentcy is key when managing many moving parts
- Protecting your time
- How to manage your full time job and a side hustle
- Talking openly about salaries and money
- How to manage burnout
Quotable Quotes
"With live coding it feels like you're kind of building your audience while you're discovering what the product is" - Michael Chan
"The best way to build a startup is to first build an audience. Whatever way you enjoy building an audience. Then you ask the audience: 'Hey, what can I do to provide value to you?'" - Swizec Teller
"So instead of making something up, find an audience first, then work on building an audience or a community or whatever, and then build what they need" - Swizec Teller
"I have just enough followers on Twitter to make it useful. I don't have as many as any of the actually famous people, but I have just enough that if I shout into the void, sometimes the void shouts back" - Swizec Teller
"I often test ideas with blog posts. So I write a blog about some idea I have or just a concept, and then send it to my email newsletter, Twitter and so on. And I see what the response is and if it has good response, I follow up and double down and work on it more" - Swizec Teller
"Having a sort of cadence, where everything always happens at the same time and in the same sequence, kind of helps you fit everything into the same day" - Swizec Teller
"If you make time for the important things first, you will find time for the less important things as well." - Swizec Teller
"If somebody wants to do something. While I'm supposed to be at the gym. The answer is no, we're gonna either have to move it or it's not happening. That's just the way it is. I need my gym time. I'm not gonna be able to live with myself if I don't go" - Swizec Teller
"At the end of the day you need some variety in your life. You can't just focus a hundred percent on one thing." - Swizec Teller
"It's more about making sure that your site hustle doesn't impact your work and then finding those points where you can use your side hustle to be useful at work" - Swizec Teller
"If you wanna look at a take from a class warfare perspective, the biggest victory of capital has been convincing us peasants that talking about money is taboo. Think about it, who benefits from not talking to each other about salaries? It's not the employees. It's the employer." - Swizec Teller
"If you think you make somebody feel bad because you make so much more money than they do when you're in a similar position. They should use that as encouragement to go and try to make more money." - Swizec Teller
"I think it's important to encourage others to talk about money and salaries because if everyone hides how much they're making, it's not people can't compare, people don't know. So then somebody can be super happy at whatever level they are, but the person sitting right next to them at the same job could be making twice as much" - Swizec Teller
"When you're selling products, you can sell those when you're asleep" - Swizec Teller
"In theory, if everything works well, your revenue per hour grows the longer that your product is out there" - Swizec Teller
"The way I think about it is if you are most likely a thought worker, you work with your mind. So if you teach other people how to work with their mind, you can essentially have a higher leverage on your time" - Swizec Teller
"If you put an hour of coding, you get out an hour of coding result. But if you put in an hour of teaching and you teach for one hour, a hundred people, you get a hundred hours of coding out." - Swizec Teller