Real Coffee with Scott Adams - May 15, 2020


Episode 975 Scott Adams： Systems Versus Goals for Creators

Hosted by
Scott Adams
Mentioned
Stephen King David Pakman
Episode 973 Scott Adams： Trying Again With Sound...From My Car Episode 977 Scott Adams： Ego Management, SPOX Level Absurd, Talent Stacks and Fun

Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

171.87

Word count

2,554

Sentence count

—

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 hey everybody come on in today is going to be a very special no coffee with Scott Adams because
00:00:14.960 it's the evening who drinks coffee well I just had a cup if I'm being honest I just finished
00:00:21.040 off a cup but I did it for you so that I would be awake to give you this micro lesson on systems
00:00:28.760 versus goals now you've heard me talk about systems versus goals it's topic of my book kind of
00:00:35.080 failed almost everything and still went big and I thought I would run you through a specific example
00:00:40.220 because it's just more fun to look at an example and you'll all imagine that you would like to be
00:00:46.400 let's say famous podcasters or internet celebrities so that's your starting point and then I'll walk
00:00:54.060 you through what it would look like to build systems to get there okay so we'll start with
00:01:01.860 a little background number one if you want to be a creative creative person where are you going to do
00:01:10.200 it so you want to find the place that there's the most energy so the first part of your system is you
00:01:15.740 say I would like to be a creative person and make stuff whatever it is could be music cartoon art
00:01:23.080 writing whatever it is and you want to put it on the internet you want to make money so you want to
00:01:27.760 go where there's the most energy and the most future so take these two examples television I would
00:01:35.660 argue is a dying form because it doesn't take into account people's attention spans these shows are too
00:01:43.600 long they've got commercials that make you wait it's predictable scripted stuff humor as a art form is
00:01:50.660 largely dead on television and I timed how long it would take me simply to turn on my television at
00:01:57.880 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
00:02:06.840 do you know how many tweets I can look at in 18 seconds so people's worldview is compressing and
00:02:13.560 compressing so you got to get the you have to understand the big trend before you can decide where to go
00:02:19.800 then once you're there I'll tell you how to build the systems right so this is just picking the field
00:02:25.580 you want to play in at this point and then of course you can only watch television on certain
00:02:31.700 devices and they have all kinds of limitations but take the internet let's say you're on YouTube or some
00:02:37.600 other place on the internet everything's faster there's shorter content it's free-ish depending on
00:02:44.420 what kind of content you're looking at it's more unpredictable because there's more of it so it's
00:02:49.440 short it's far more variety it's almost infinite you can get a quick hit quick hit and here's here's the
00:02:57.420 other thing it remember I have taught you that if you put any kind of a penalty or friction on anything
00:03:05.380 that eventually eventually the the person will do less of it now if you look at a typical TV show or
00:03:14.340 a movie they all have the following form every one of them which is something bad happens to somebody
00:03:21.000 you care about and then you hope that it gets better right that's every script of every every movie
00:03:29.960 at least fictional movies not biographies necessarily but if every fictional movie something bad happens
00:03:36.660 to people that they tell you to care about and then you just hope it gets better and if it does it's a
00:03:41.840 good movie I guess compare that to spending 10 minutes on YouTube if you're picking your own short
00:03:50.280 themes you might look at a TED talk you might look at a you know a humorist or something but you're never
00:03:56.980 going to pick anything that makes you sad I mean not intentionally so if you go to the internet
00:04:02.320 you're giving yourself one little dope the mean hit after another and they're really quick it's like oh
00:04:07.060 oh oh oh and you get no sadness if you turn on a regular television and watch a regular TV show
00:04:14.480 or a regular movie it's packed with sadness by design and then you're you're influenced by that that
00:04:22.160 gets in your head and even though you say to yourself well I'm just watching I'm not I'm not
00:04:27.780 in that movie you know it's not affecting me but it does because humans are pattern copying machines
00:04:35.940 and if you watch sad things you will get sad so all of this put together tells you that you can be pretty
00:04:45.520 sure that television is the past the internet is the future so let's just say we've figured out what our
00:04:51.560 domain is and the domain is going to be the internet and you're going to create something
00:04:57.300 you don't know what it is is it going to be a podcast is it going to be some kind of a show
00:05:02.660 what is it and let me give you one sort of example potential career path now let me say in advance that
00:05:15.040 there would be presumably a million different variations of this but if you get the basic idea
00:05:21.000 then all the variations make sense so let's just stick with the basics all right
00:05:26.420 let's say you want to achieve what I call boss diversification the idea is that you don't want
00:05:33.780 one boss to rule your life but rather you want to have lots of bosses so you want to have lots of
00:05:40.760 clients you want to have lots of customers you want to have an audience because then a lot of your
00:05:47.320 bosses your customers could fire you on any given day and you still have plenty of bosses plenty of
00:05:53.900 customers but if you only have one boss and that boss is a tyrant and sometimes even if they're not
00:06:01.280 it just makes your life that much harder so if you want something like freedom use the the math of
00:06:08.260 diversification to give yourself lots of bosses and that's what being a creative person can do if you
00:06:14.240 get the path right here's what a reasonable looking path would look like you would put together more
00:06:20.220 than one talent so that you have something special I talk about this as the talent stack system basically
00:06:27.340 and if you look at me for example I do the podcasting stuff meaning that I can talk on camera
00:06:35.500 so I have this skill to be able to do what I'm doing exactly now which is talking and you can
00:06:42.040 understand me and I can put sentences together but I also talk about persuasion and I've got some
00:06:47.600 background in humor so I've got a few different things that I can put together that when you listen
00:06:53.640 to me if I do it right you say to yourself I don't think I could get exactly that anywhere else
00:06:59.920 so it's not that my my individual skills that I bring to this are special because none of them are
00:07:08.180 there's there's not one that's really special but the combination you would have to admit you just
00:07:13.860 don't see very often so it's the combination that can make you special and valuable in the market so
00:07:20.380 figure out what your expertise is is you know do you have a good voice is do you have a sense of humor
00:07:25.340 you know you can figure it out just figure out what it is that makes you special that's your talent
00:07:29.900 stack one way to start would be a blog because there's no friction to starting a blog anybody can
00:07:36.280 write a blog so let's say the first thing you want to do is just write a bunch of blog posts that assumes
00:07:41.980 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
00:07:47.480 format once you've got a little body of work then you can start your twitter account
00:07:53.020 i use twitter as the best example of this and then start promoting yourself you might say you
00:08:00.460 might go into conversations in which there you've written something that's relevant you go into that
00:08:06.040 conversation and say yeah i wrote something about that in the comments if it's a tweet that's getting a
00:08:12.040 lot of attention and your your addition of a comment of something to read that's right on point
00:08:17.780 good gets you some new followers so you use twitter wisely by adding value the way that you
00:08:25.340 get followers is by giving them more than they're giving you that's that's the whole thing right if on
00:08:31.700 twitter you're giving your followers more than they're getting they'll follow you that's all it is
00:08:36.920 so if you're wisely retweeting you're a good curator of stuff or you're wisely inserting your own comment
00:08:44.000 and and links to things people will say yeah i want more of that i get smarter when you're when you're interacting
00:08:51.100 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
00:08:57.520 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
00:09:05.660 aim the device at yourself and put it in a title and you're live streaming just what i'm doing now
00:09:11.620 now you can't make much money on periscope some of you are nice enough to to do the super hard thing
00:09:19.000 which is like tipping but periscope is not really designed for creators to get rich it's just easy to
00:09:26.180 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
00:09:34.460 of advantages over youtube but there is one thing that youtube can do better which is monetization
00:09:41.140 monetization so if you get a little audience on periscope and by the way you can see what i'm
00:09:49.540 doing here is that that each level that you do something well you try to get attention to bring
00:09:54.700 you to the next level and you know bring up your your visibility so you might want to jump from
00:10:00.000 periscope to youtube you could still do both of them you don't abandon any of these things you're
00:10:04.620 still doing them you're just extending your reach now if you have boring content and i'm saying that
00:10:10.000 humorously boring meaning you know kitten videos funny stuff family generic things you know nobody
00:10:18.020 getting in trouble some basic information a ted talk you know those things are not boring so i'm just
00:10:25.200 being humorous here i'm saying things that advertisers are not afraid of so i only mean
00:10:31.240 it boring in the sense that it's not provocative so most people think and i used to think this that
00:10:37.880 google and youtube were suppressing uh conservatives only but it turns out that their advertising model
00:10:45.380 makes them um demonetize pretty much anybody who's provocative whether you're on the left or the right
00:10:52.600 so i have i have confirmed was david pakman for example who's on the left he got demonetized exactly
00:10:59.380 the same time same way i did so it was really just the advertisers saying we don't want to be
00:11:05.840 associated with certain kinds of content because why would we if you were an advertiser and you could
00:11:11.600 be associated with something where there might be cursing or something where there won't be
00:11:17.760 if you had a choice you'll take the one where there's no cursing you know and why why would you
00:11:24.480 take any risk if you don't have to so google and youtube are trying to figure out how to make that
00:11:30.640 work so that provocative stuff also could get sponsors apparently they don't quite have the
00:11:35.420 system to do that yet but i would imagine they'll get there however in the long run provocative people
00:11:40.920 can't really get monetized to any good degree on youtube so that's what the locals platform will do
00:11:48.520 for you and that's why i've moved i've moved my more provocative non-dilber stuff over there so
00:11:55.620 everything that you see and the other platforms which i'll maintain so i'll still be doing you know all
00:12:01.140 the same things but there'll be some extra stuff behind the subscriber wall because it's the only way
00:12:08.320 to get monetized if you're not in the the boring subset and again boring just means not provocative
00:12:15.400 so yeah dave rubin somebody said in the comments dave rubin is the you know the original founder of the
00:12:26.360 locals thing and i just got on it i gotta tell you that it's way better than i thought it would be
00:12:33.000 because it fills in this whole category that didn't exist and i didn't really think there was a
00:12:37.820 category that didn't exist but the category that didn't exist is this um a creator who can control
00:12:44.420 their space and sort of do whatever they want and nobody can tell me not to do it you know i'm not
00:12:51.460 obviously i'm not doing anything that's horrible but i can you know i can be as provocative as i want
00:12:57.080 within the bounds of what i know my subscribers would want to see so it just fills in that whole gap
00:13:03.120 so uh you might be able to hear my dog going crazy which means i'm going to make this kind of short
00:13:11.640 because i have to attend to that um she was at the veterinarian yesterday and she doesn't like to be 1.00
00:13:18.040 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
00:13:23.800 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 0.76
00:13:31.340 like that at all so there's a little bit of work to do there so this is an example of using systems
00:13:39.000 to sort of build a system for each phase of this as you go you can see that each phase had its own
00:13:46.980 system if you were to generalize this to writing there's a book called uh on writing by stephen king
00:13:54.600 it's really hard to do this when your dog is screaming in pain downstairs it's not pain she's
00:13:59.420 just mad because i'm over here um what stephen king suggested is that you find whatever is the lowest
00:14:07.760 level of uh writing that you can do that somebody will read so again you might write a blog might write
00:14:15.140 some blog posts and then take them into the local publication and say hey samples of my writing
00:14:20.140 if they like them they might say oh we'll run you in the local paper and you just keep uh writing
00:14:25.700 and building your resume up one level at a time until you get that big book deal so it's always the
00:14:32.820 same your system is start small build a build a body of work and then try to get attention at the
00:14:39.460 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
00:14:48.500 some of you as internet stars really soon