AJULU

The average carpenter’s workshop is filled with tools, wood and piles of sawdust here and there.

if you enter a Carpenter’s workshop before he starts work on a particular piece of furniture, there is nothing really remarkable there to see.

Of course, you would see the usuals.

Wood, leather, and other materials used in building furniture.

But at the beginning stage, there is nothing there to really buy or admire, just a bunch of work materials.

When work starts, depending on what the Carpenter is building, it may take days or weeks to complete whatever he has set out to do.

However, despite the fact that there is nothing really there to catch your fancy, every evening, certain individuals would come to shed to pack something of value to them.

Sawdust.

To the carpenter, the sawdust may not really be of any significance, just a byproduct of his work, but the people coming to cart it away from his workshop needs it.

Some use it as fuel, some as a form of carpet on their poultry farm and so on.

To the carpenter, the most important thing to him is the furniture.

And as he builds, he is confident in the fact that the world would value what he is creating.

I chose to write about this because there are a lot of people who are hoarding their Sawdust.

They refuse to share it with the world and believe that people should only concern themselves with what they are building.

But that would always limit your opportunities.

You need to let people in on your process.

And as you open the door to them to pack your sawdust, they would have access to your shed to see what you are working on.

That would do more for you than waiting for when you are done building.

I talk with a lot of creatives and business people every day and most believe that they need to show the world their work only when the perfect part is ready.

They hide their sawdust and refuse to give people access to it.

But the key to growth and Opportunities lies in your sawdust, if people can’t come and pack it, then they would have no chance to see what you are good at.

You would get more opportunities from giving people access to come into your workshop than trying to open it only when you have attained perfection.

How then would people be sure that you are truly good and not just copying someone else?

And despite the fact that I used the word “Sell”.

I am not necessarily implying a monetary exchange.

Let me share my story with you.

Of then, I had zero design skills, nothing I designed in those early days was worthy of being developed.

I still stumble now and then on my old designs and I smile because everything that made a design great was missing in them.

However, in those early days, I didn’t care about how people saw my work.

My major desire was to let them know what I was working on.

I was learning product design and everyone had to know about it.

So from my very first design that I did on April 3rd, I opened up my work to the world.

I posted it on my WhatsApp Status daily, got some reviews here and there and people who were good at design were quick to point out my mistakes.

However, unlike most creatives, I used that criticism as fuel.

I took up the task to create one design concept a day and as I went through the process of learning, I shared every single output with my Audience.

I started and completed a 100-Day Design Challenge.

And by the end of the challenge, my progress was clear, people who were following my journey every day, saw me get better and better at design.

They were impressed with my work ethic and expressed it.

Then the jobs started coming. People in my network wanted me to design their websites and applications.

By selling my Sawdust I was able to conquer a hurdle that faced many creatives.

Getting Clients.

In my mind, I knew that the output from my early days was never going to make it to the development stage, but by sharing that sawdust with the public, their confidence in what I could offer grew.

They knew that I would be able to deliver whatever I was tasked with.

My sawdust which seemed worthless brought me opportunities.

This approach works no matter what you do or what skill you are trying to learn.

My goal for this guide is to shed more light on how you can adapt this process to match your goals.

And this can be achieved by Five Rules that I have been following for years now.

The Rule Of Five

There are five things that you need to do Every Day if you aim to build something significantly

They are:

1) Read

2) Think

3) Build

4) Ask Questions

5) Document

I am going to be taking a deep dive into these five things and I urge you to follow them and create a Framework that would see you become better at building and monetization.

Also, everyone already knows that they have to do these things, but struggle with them due to one reason or the other.

That is the focus of this guide to teach you how to get past the popular challenges that you are facing with these five things.

Read

Learning is the foundation of everything.

Schooling ends, but education is meant to be a lifelong endeavour.

But there are two major issues that you are probably facing here.

a) Choosing a Teacher
b) Form of Content

Building a business requires that you become skilled in different things.

For every skill that you want to learn, there are hundreds if not thousands of people out there that you can learn from.

So how do you pick a teacher?

How do you know whose content you need to focus on and the ones to ignore?

Let me just break it down for you with a simple quote.

The Map is Not the Territory – Alfred Korzybski

This quote means that content is way different from the learning process.

A 2-hour video that teaches you how to build something cannot be finished in two hours.

You would need to constantly pause it to take notes or practice what you are learning.

On a much bigger scale, this quote means that you actually need to put in the work and stop seeking shortcuts.

You are probably jumping from Mentor to Mentor because you are seeking someone that can teach you how to accomplish your goals overnight.

Well, I am here to tell you that it is not possible.

Achieving those big goals that you have written takes time and the sooner you accept that, the faster you focus and start building instead of seeking shortcuts.

So how do you pick a mentor?

I tell people to pick a mentor that can both teach them the skill and also how to make money from the skill.

By now, you should know that the fact that you are good at something does not mean that you know how to earn from it.

And no, the solution is not learning another skill to add to the one you have.

If you don’t figure out how to earn from one skill, three won’t help.

So it is important that you find someone that teaches you both how to get good at something and also how to get paid for it.

For example, if you are learning Design, Chris Do is an excellent and well-rounded Mentor.

With this said, if you find a Mentor who can teach you both skills and sales, I will advise you to focus exclusively on their content.

You can choose more than one Mentor if the person you prefer in terms of learning the skill doesn’t teach sales and you go out to look for another person to learn sales from.

Now to Forms of Content

If you are someone that struggles. with reading books and using it as an excuse to not build a learning habit.

I am here to remind you that there are three forms of content.

Video – Text – Audio

At least one of these content formats should work for you.

So if reading books makes you sleep, then you may need to resort to learning with videos or Audio.

There. are Youtube videos and podcast episodes on literally almost every topic on Earth.

Find the format that works for you and run with it.

Think

Thinking is one of the hardest things to add to your daily schedule.

For me, my thinking is scattered in the sense that, I thrive more be meditating on what I have read over a period of days.

But this applied only to content I study specifically to formulate a strategy or determine a course of action for something.

I brood on the principles learn over time and then slowly create and refine a course of action.

However, not all learning should be for the sake of instant application.

You would understand more of this when you get to the documentation section.

At Chasing Jeff Bezos one of the daily rituals we have built is coming together every morning by 8 AM to watch this Earl Nightingale Video.

It is a 19-minute video that would change your life if you watch it daily and follow through with the actions that it maps out.

One of the things that you would learn if you watch the video is the importance of making out time to write down five ideas daily.

The ideas are to revolve around ways that you can improve your work and earn more.

I have been doing the Rituals daily and believe me there have been significant improvements to my work process.

So thinking every day is important.

You need to meditate on the things that you are learning daily.

And as you apply them you need to measure feedback and find out what it means.

 

Build

Another thing that you need to do is to build daily.

At the beginning of this guide, I used the carpenter analogy to explain the importance of your process.

But you also need a process to share.

I say this because many people start learning a skill and they stick to just mostly watching Tutorials with few applications.

A writer is someone who writes

A designer is someone who designs

A baker is someone who bakes

All these things involve taking action, and it is impossible to become very good at these things overnight, so be comfortable with your journey.

And even after they apply what they are learning, they find it hard to share their process.

You need to learn how to build in public.

It does not matter if you are building a personal brand (writer, designer, developer etc)

Or a business brand (founder).

You need to get comfortable with sharing your work publicly, it has many benefits.

a) You get help and advice from people doing that same thing. ( eg Instant Feedback and Premium resources)

b) People around you know that you are building something and they can recommend you for opportunities related to those things

Social media is your friend when it comes to things like this.

Everyone following you needs to know what you do.

Are you a writer, blog consistently and don’t just drop links to your content on social media, share some of your insights directly on social media platforms.

Not every one that would click on your link (how many times do you do this for others?).

Ask Questions

It is very important that you know how to ask questions.

Many people rather ask questions on social media and wait for a response than Google the question.

Also, curiosity is your best friend.

Every time you come in contact with anything related to your field even general important information that you are not familiar with, your next instinct should be to google it.

I can’t begin to count the amount of insightful things I have learnt because I paused a movie or a song to google something the actor/singer said.

Some of the best gems are hidden in things that you didn’t expect.

I am not saying that you shouldn’t ask people in your field questions.

Sometimes it is more helpful if you google those things first (of course not everything can be Googled), and then share the insights you got with them and ask their opinion on what the best answer/option is.

You do your homework will signal to them that you are serious and they are more likely to invest more of their time in you.

 

Document

This is the last but not the least thing that you need to do every day.

As you ask questions and build, you would gain access to certain resources.

It is important that you learn how to document because there are some things that you would only be able to use in some months or years’ time.

Don’t ignore saving them because you feel that you don’t need them, document them for easy access when the time comes.

There are things that I documented five to seven years ago that I am only getting to use now.

I recommend that you use Notion for this (don’t use WhatsApp).

Telegram is another great option because it is cloud-based so you always have access to the documents no matter what happens to your device.

However, Notion is great because it allows you to categorize the resources for easy retrieval.

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Chasing Jeff Bezos Membership

This post is a Chasing Jeff Bezos Guide.

Chasing Jeff Bezos (CJB) is a membership program where I have closer contact with my community members.

They get much closer mentorship from me on the things that I write about.

For example, for this particular guide. Chasing Jeff Bezos members would get the following:

a) A Framework for Building in Public for a personal brand.

b) A Framework for Building in Public as a Founder.

c) The best places to find resources online.

 

Chasing Jeff Bezos members also have access to :

Guild Groups:  To share goals, progress and solve problems together.

Admission for Chasing Jeff Bezos is currently closed.