Do You Want To Get Ahead?
Consume Great Content Before The Masses
Seeking Great Content
If you want to be great, you need to consume great content.
Why?
Because great content can educate and inspire us to become our highest selves.
But consuming the same great content as everyone else doesn’t give you a unique advantage. It’s simply not enough…
If you want a unique advantage from the content you consume, you need to be ahead of the curve.
Just like when building a startup and developing a cutting edge approach, you yourself need to consume the cutting edge content before anyone else does.
There is new content dropping faster than ever before. You can’t sit back and wait until the top-tier new podcast or blog comes to you. You need to seek out the best content on your own.
I’m going to share with you two of my favorite up and coming content producers before they become too mainstream and you lose your edge.
Here’s your content consumption alpha for you to get ahead.
How to Take Over the World
Overview: HTTOTW tells the stories and analyzes the lives of the greatest men and women to ever live. By examining their strategies, tactics, mindset, and work habits, How to Take Over the World helps you understand the great ones, so that you can follow in their footsteps.
Medium: Podcast, ~40 minute episodes
Favorite Episode: The Wealthiest Family of All Time - The Rothschilds Family
My Take: I have listened to roughly 12 of the 25 episodes from this podcast. I learn so much about history and leadership in the span of 40 minutes that some of the sound bites I find myself regurgitating for weeks to friends and family. The host, Ben Wilson, does so much research on every character he examines that you feel like your transported to that time period. The depth of the details are so vivid that you can truly visualize what Julius Caeser or Philip of Macedon looked, and acted like.
What Ben does so eloquently is tie together the common traits of great leaders across time. From Putin to Mansa Musa to Edison, Ben covers a wide range of great leaders. The more you listen to all the other episodes, the more benefit you gain from the show. Ben will be talking about Steve Jobs, only to go on a slight tangent about how some of his characteristics remind him of Thomas Edison and Napoleon. One example he called out that I found interesting was the odd eating habits of all these successful people.
The amount of little interesting facts you learn on this podcast is second to none. In fact, I would argue you may learn more from this than reading a full biography on any of these people because Ben pulls out just the most important facts for the listener. The content is much more digestible and user friendly, so you actually walk away with being able to point to a few things you learned.
Here’s a link to Ben’s podcast on Spotify.
Jeff’s Newsletter
Overview: Each month, Jeff write’s a deep-dive on a startup that he believes could change the way we live and operate. His goal with each write up is to distill all of the information and business complexities into a clear and thorough understanding of the company.
By subscribing, you join the many others that receive a monthly breakdown of tomorrow’s next big company!
Medium: Newsletter, 10-12 minute reads
Favorite Episode: Pipe.com: The Traditional Venture Capital Disruptor
My Take: I remember when Jeff first popped up on my Twitter feed after seeing some of the top people in the startup and venture space including Pomp, Delian, and Seth, like his content. I immediately began to dig in deeper when I saw that while he only had about 1.5K followers on Twitter, he was getting engagement from some of the best in the world.
I started to read through his content and saw that he highlights all of the most innovative emerging companies in the world. Many of these companies I also fanboy over myself. But Jeff takes a different approach than your typical TechCrunch reporter. His background from BCG shows up in his writing when he produces a thorough analysis of each company in a due diligence like report. He puts together custom graphics that support his thinking and help bring his ideas to life.
I had the opportunity to speak with Jeff yesterday and learned a lot about his creative process. Jeff is providing a solution to a much needed void in the startup and venture capital sector. He’s conducting thorough research, speaking with founders, and putting together public diligence reports that anyone can access. In fact, I can’t think of anyone else publicly publishing an analysis of early stage companies quite like this.
While Jeff only started writing this year, and has a small but mighty follower base, I am extremely bullish on Jeff’s content growing and becoming a vital resource to early stage investors and startup companies.
Here’s a link to Jeff’s Newsletter.
I find that consuming great content helps inspire me to publish my own content. When I was speaking with Jeff yesterday, he mentioned how critical it was to his process to listen to all the podcasts conducted by a founder of a company before speaking with the founder and drafting his work.
I will end with one of my favorite concepts that I think brings together the importance of the bidirectional relationship between consuming content and publishing your own.
At TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley showed how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas — basically "ideas having sex with each other." The sophistication of the modern world lies not in individual intelligence or imagination, he says, instead it's a collective enterprise. That means it's not important how clever individuals are; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is.