Episode 975 Scott Adams： Systems Versus Goals for Creators
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
171.86694
Summary
In this episode of the No Coffee with Scott Adams podcast, I give you a mini lesson on systems versus goals, and how to build systems to get to where you want to go in your career. You ve all heard me talk about systems vs goals before, but this is a micro lesson that I ve taken a step further and covered in my new book, "Systems vs goals" and used a specific example to explain the difference between the two.
Transcript
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hey everybody come on in today is going to be a very special no coffee with Scott Adams because
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it's the evening who drinks coffee well I just had a cup if I'm being honest I just finished
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off a cup but I did it for you so that I would be awake to give you this micro lesson on systems
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versus goals now you've heard me talk about systems versus goals it's topic of my book kind of
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failed almost everything and still went big and I thought I would run you through a specific example
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because it's just more fun to look at an example and you'll all imagine that you would like to be
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let's say famous podcasters or internet celebrities so that's your starting point and then I'll walk
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you through what it would look like to build systems to get there okay so we'll start with
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a little background number one if you want to be a creative creative person where are you going to do
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it so you want to find the place that there's the most energy so the first part of your system is you
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say I would like to be a creative person and make stuff whatever it is could be music cartoon art
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writing whatever it is and you want to put it on the internet you want to make money so you want to
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go where there's the most energy and the most future so take these two examples television I would
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argue is a dying form because it doesn't take into account people's attention spans these shows are too
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long they've got commercials that make you wait it's predictable scripted stuff humor as a art form is
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largely dead on television and I timed how long it would take me simply to turn on my television at
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home and actually get to a show it took 18 seconds to go to a show I know I knew I wanted to go to
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do you know how many tweets I can look at in 18 seconds so people's worldview is compressing and
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compressing so you got to get the you have to understand the big trend before you can decide where to go
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then once you're there I'll tell you how to build the systems right so this is just picking the field
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you want to play in at this point and then of course you can only watch television on certain
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devices and they have all kinds of limitations but take the internet let's say you're on YouTube or some
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other place on the internet everything's faster there's shorter content it's free-ish depending on
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what kind of content you're looking at it's more unpredictable because there's more of it so it's
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short it's far more variety it's almost infinite you can get a quick hit quick hit and here's here's the
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other thing it remember I have taught you that if you put any kind of a penalty or friction on anything
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that eventually eventually the the person will do less of it now if you look at a typical TV show or
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a movie they all have the following form every one of them which is something bad happens to somebody
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you care about and then you hope that it gets better right that's every script of every every movie
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at least fictional movies not biographies necessarily but if every fictional movie something bad happens
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to people that they tell you to care about and then you just hope it gets better and if it does it's a
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good movie I guess compare that to spending 10 minutes on YouTube if you're picking your own short
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themes you might look at a TED talk you might look at a you know a humorist or something but you're never
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going to pick anything that makes you sad I mean not intentionally so if you go to the internet
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you're giving yourself one little dope the mean hit after another and they're really quick it's like oh
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oh oh oh and you get no sadness if you turn on a regular television and watch a regular TV show
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or a regular movie it's packed with sadness by design and then you're you're influenced by that that
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gets in your head and even though you say to yourself well I'm just watching I'm not I'm not
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in that movie you know it's not affecting me but it does because humans are pattern copying machines
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and if you watch sad things you will get sad so all of this put together tells you that you can be pretty
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sure that television is the past the internet is the future so let's just say we've figured out what our
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domain is and the domain is going to be the internet and you're going to create something
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you don't know what it is is it going to be a podcast is it going to be some kind of a show
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what is it and let me give you one sort of example potential career path now let me say in advance that
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there would be presumably a million different variations of this but if you get the basic idea
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then all the variations make sense so let's just stick with the basics all right
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let's say you want to achieve what I call boss diversification the idea is that you don't want
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one boss to rule your life but rather you want to have lots of bosses so you want to have lots of
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clients you want to have lots of customers you want to have an audience because then a lot of your
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bosses your customers could fire you on any given day and you still have plenty of bosses plenty of
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customers but if you only have one boss and that boss is a tyrant and sometimes even if they're not
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it just makes your life that much harder so if you want something like freedom use the the math of
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diversification to give yourself lots of bosses and that's what being a creative person can do if you
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get the path right here's what a reasonable looking path would look like you would put together more
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than one talent so that you have something special I talk about this as the talent stack system basically
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and if you look at me for example I do the podcasting stuff meaning that I can talk on camera
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so I have this skill to be able to do what I'm doing exactly now which is talking and you can
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understand me and I can put sentences together but I also talk about persuasion and I've got some
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background in humor so I've got a few different things that I can put together that when you listen
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to me if I do it right you say to yourself I don't think I could get exactly that anywhere else
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so it's not that my my individual skills that I bring to this are special because none of them are
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there's there's not one that's really special but the combination you would have to admit you just
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don't see very often so it's the combination that can make you special and valuable in the market so
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figure out what your expertise is is you know do you have a good voice is do you have a sense of humor
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you know you can figure it out just figure out what it is that makes you special that's your talent
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stack one way to start would be a blog because there's no friction to starting a blog anybody can
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write a blog so let's say the first thing you want to do is just write a bunch of blog posts that assumes
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you want to be a writer but if you want to be any other kind of an artist you could put it on a blog
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format once you've got a little body of work then you can start your twitter account
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i use twitter as the best example of this and then start promoting yourself you might say you
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might go into conversations in which there you've written something that's relevant you go into that
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conversation and say yeah i wrote something about that in the comments if it's a tweet that's getting a
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lot of attention and your your addition of a comment of something to read that's right on point
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good gets you some new followers so you use twitter wisely by adding value the way that you
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get followers is by giving them more than they're giving you that's that's the whole thing right if on
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twitter you're giving your followers more than they're getting they'll follow you that's all it is
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so if you're wisely retweeting you're a good curator of stuff or you're wisely inserting your own comment
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and and links to things people will say yeah i want more of that i get smarter when you're when you're interacting
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so you build up a little audience here and then maybe you say let me let me try it on video so you take it to
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periscope and you say it's a real easy technology literally all you have to do is sort of turn it on and aim the
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aim the device at yourself and put it in a title and you're live streaming just what i'm doing now
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now you can't make much money on periscope some of you are nice enough to to do the super hard thing
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which is like tipping but periscope is not really designed for creators to get rich it's just easy to
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get in it's you know it's got some special i'd say more personal quality to it it's simpler has a lot
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of advantages over youtube but there is one thing that youtube can do better which is monetization
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monetization so if you get a little audience on periscope and by the way you can see what i'm
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doing here is that that each level that you do something well you try to get attention to bring
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you to the next level and you know bring up your your visibility so you might want to jump from
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periscope to youtube you could still do both of them you don't abandon any of these things you're
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still doing them you're just extending your reach now if you have boring content and i'm saying that
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humorously boring meaning you know kitten videos funny stuff family generic things you know nobody
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getting in trouble some basic information a ted talk you know those things are not boring so i'm just
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being humorous here i'm saying things that advertisers are not afraid of so i only mean
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it boring in the sense that it's not provocative so most people think and i used to think this that
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google and youtube were suppressing uh conservatives only but it turns out that their advertising model
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makes them um demonetize pretty much anybody who's provocative whether you're on the left or the right
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so i have i have confirmed was david pakman for example who's on the left he got demonetized exactly
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the same time same way i did so it was really just the advertisers saying we don't want to be
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associated with certain kinds of content because why would we if you were an advertiser and you could
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be associated with something where there might be cursing or something where there won't be
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if you had a choice you'll take the one where there's no cursing you know and why why would you
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take any risk if you don't have to so google and youtube are trying to figure out how to make that
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work so that provocative stuff also could get sponsors apparently they don't quite have the
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system to do that yet but i would imagine they'll get there however in the long run provocative people
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can't really get monetized to any good degree on youtube so that's what the locals platform will do
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for you and that's why i've moved i've moved my more provocative non-dilber stuff over there so
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everything that you see and the other platforms which i'll maintain so i'll still be doing you know all
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the same things but there'll be some extra stuff behind the subscriber wall because it's the only way
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to get monetized if you're not in the the boring subset and again boring just means not provocative
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so yeah dave rubin somebody said in the comments dave rubin is the you know the original founder of the
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locals thing and i just got on it i gotta tell you that it's way better than i thought it would be
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because it fills in this whole category that didn't exist and i didn't really think there was a
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category that didn't exist but the category that didn't exist is this um a creator who can control
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their space and sort of do whatever they want and nobody can tell me not to do it you know i'm not
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obviously i'm not doing anything that's horrible but i can you know i can be as provocative as i want
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within the bounds of what i know my subscribers would want to see so it just fills in that whole gap
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so uh you might be able to hear my dog going crazy which means i'm going to make this kind of short
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because i have to attend to that um she was at the veterinarian yesterday and she doesn't like to be
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in not the same room with me and i can't let her upstairs it's a long story uh but she'll be fine
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so yeah she'll be fine she's i'm just i just have to keep her um not running around and she doesn't
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like that at all so there's a little bit of work to do there so this is an example of using systems
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to sort of build a system for each phase of this as you go you can see that each phase had its own
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system if you were to generalize this to writing there's a book called uh on writing by stephen king
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it's really hard to do this when your dog is screaming in pain downstairs it's not pain she's
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just mad because i'm over here um what stephen king suggested is that you find whatever is the lowest
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level of uh writing that you can do that somebody will read so again you might write a blog might write
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some blog posts and then take them into the local publication and say hey samples of my writing
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if they like them they might say oh we'll run you in the local paper and you just keep uh writing
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and building your resume up one level at a time until you get that big book deal so it's always the
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same your system is start small build a build a body of work and then try to get attention at the
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next level etc all right i'm gonna go uh take care of my dog i hope that was useful and uh expect to see