#142 – Anxiety & Coffee Shops

Good morning everyone,

Hope you’re having a great week!

Here are 5 things I found interesting over the past few days.

Let’s jump in.

read online on my website

read time 3 minutes

#142 – The Rundown:

• Quote: Starve anxiety through action.

• Podcast: How to speak clearly & with confidence.

• Framework: The Coffee Shop Test.

• Hack: Clear your inbox(es).

• Tweet: The ultimate goal.

Quote:

Podcast:

Huberman Lab | How to Speak Clearly & With Confidence: Matt Abrahams

Matt Abrahams is a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a renowned expert in communication and public speaking.

An extremely practical episode focused on an area I am actively trying to improve within myself.

These were my biggest takeaways:

• Communication isn’t about “what I want”, it’s about what the other person needs.

• 3 steps for better communication: 1) Reflection; 2) Repetition; and 3) Practice.

• Good storytelling is like being a tour guide. You ned to give people directionality to keep them at ease but allow room for surprises and a degree of spontaneity.

• The easiest way to avoid “ums” when speaking is to land the sentence. Finish on an exhale.

• Memorising speeches makes you vulnerable and takes up too much cognitive space – space that would be better utilised to connect with your audience in the moment. Know your content inside and out, work with bullet points, but don’t memorise.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

[Duration: 2 hours 26 minutes]

(P.S. I made a Spotify playlist with every podcast I’ve ever recommended. Hope they bring you as much value as they’ve brought me.)

Framework:

The Coffee Shop Test

One of the hardest things in the content game is to distinguish between reach and impact.

By typical standards, one’s success on social media is measured by the continual growth of standard metrics:

Views, likes, followers.

But this is a vastly simplistic lens which fails to appreciate the (important) nuance between memorable versus forgettable content.

If people can’t recall you or your ideas, the numbers really don’t mean much.

So my incredibly talented friend (and Ex-Production Lead for Mark Bouris), Jess Smalley, shared in her newsletter this week a very useful framework for testing your content’s memorability:

The Coffee Shop Test ☕

“Before you hit publish, does it hit the memorable benchmark:

• Would someone bring this up in a conversation offline?

• Would my ideal audience send this to a friend?

• Could they quote a line or idea from it a week from now?

If your content doesn't pass at least two of these, it's not memorable enough to build a business on.”

Actively implementing this threshold across all of Sweat Capital’s content moving forward.

P.S. I highly recommend subscribing to Jess’ newsletter! It’s the only way I’m able to keep my finger on the pulse when it comes to building a content-led business online. Seriously good.

Hack:

Clear Your Inbox

Following on from Sahil Bloom’s quote earlier, there is another incredibly powerful life hack one can employ to reduce anxiety:

Clearing your inbox(es).

Don’t underestimate the mental bandwidth lost to the nagging thought of emails unopened and messages left hanging.

One of the most freeing feelings (for me at least) is opening my phone or laptop and not seeing any red dots hanging over my email apps.

Underrated.

Tweet:

The Ultimate Goal

Thanks for reading! Grateful for your support.

Stay hungry, stay humble, stay curious. ⚡

If you enjoyed this newsletter, it would mean the world if you could forward it to a friend or send them my website.

This goes a long way to helping me reach more people :)

See you in the next one,

Dimi

(P.S. the best ways to get in touch with me are via email or LinkedIn).