14 December 2020
This week's additions focus on leadership, mindset, and strategy, with new digests from The Daily Stoic, Joanna Wiebe, and Cameron Herold. Highlights include Steve Scott stopped Tiger Woods from losing by cheating himself of a win Service over self-importance: hosts reject pitches that treat their platform as exposure
Showing 19 digests for 14 December 2020.
Resilience & grit
Podcast
Five stoic moments from history that embody the four virtues
The Daily Stoic
December 20, 2020
Resilience & grit
9
Identity & self-belief
8
Case studies
6
Steve Scott stopped Tiger Woods from losing by cheating himself of a win
Epictetus had his leg broken by his master and responded without a sound
Degradation only lands if you consent to it — Douglass refused
How to cold-pitch podcasts and get booked as a guest
Joanna Wiebe
December 19, 2020
PR & media
9
Prospecting & outreach
8
Service over self-importance: hosts reject pitches that treat their platform as exposure
Seven specific elements turn cold outreach into a 1-in-3 booking rate
Podcast-sourced clients arrive pre-sold and rarely question your rates
Productivity & habits
YouTube
Stop being busy and start being productive
Cameron Herold
December 18, 2020
Productivity & habits
9
Vision & mission
6
Busy leaders often produce little — busyness is not productivity
A four-outcome filter cuts projects that don't drive real results
Reverse-engineer from your three-year vision to today's top three tasks
Founder interviews
Podcast
How Cortland Allen built IndieHackers and sold it to Stripe
Acquired
December 17, 2020
Founder interviews
10
Bootstrapping
8
Business models
7
Seven failed startups taught Cortland Allen how not to quit
IndieHackers went from 1,400 users to 100x in three years inside Stripe
Selling to companies with budgets beats convincing broke founders to pay
Productivity & habits
Podcast
Capture tools, time blocking, and planning foundations for new challenges
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
December 17, 2020
Productivity & habits
10
Time management
9
Deep work & focus
6
Why your email inbox is a capture tray, not a storage system
Quarterly, weekly, daily planning is the foundation — everything else follows
Abstract skill-building without a concrete target rarely works
Using Google Ads data to improve organic SEO performance
Ahrefs
December 16, 2020
Google Ads conversion data reveals which keywords actually drive customers.
Broad match campaigns surface queries no keyword tool has ever indexed.
Test title tags as ad copy before committing them to your pages.
How team visibility and shared priorities cure indecision
Bill Gallagher
December 16, 2020
Management
8
Processes & SOPs
6
Fear of worse outcomes keeps leaders stuck in costly inaction
Sharing the 'why' with your team removes space to procrastinate
Dashboards and meeting habits shift accountability to the whole team
Adding people on social media is not networking
Cameron Herold
December 16, 2020
Collecting LinkedIn connections is not the same as networking
Mastermind groups reliably deliver a 10x return on investment
Real networking means helping people before you ever ask for anything
Being fired by your best friend was the right call for everyone
Cameron Herold
December 16, 2020
Management
8
Case studies
7
The leader who gets you to $100M may be wrong for $1B
Herold knew the night before his best friend fired him
Tough people decisions define leadership — even when it's personal
Productivity & habits
Podcast
Adam Grant on productivity, motivation, and managing your time
How I Work
December 16, 2020
Productivity & habits
9
Delegation
8
Deep work & focus
6
Sequencing tasks wrong tanks performance — taper from interesting to boring.
Rapid email responsiveness backfires by generating even more email.
Stack meetings back-to-back; scattered meetings waste 22% of surrounding time.
How Shopify became a platform by solving one problem first
Masters of Scale
December 15, 2020
Origin stories
9
Business models
7
MVP & prototyping
5
Leave economics for developers — that's what makes a real platform.
You are not a platform until builders on you earn more than you do.
Silicon Valley missed a $4 trillion market by ignoring commerce entirely.
How team accountability ends leadership procrastination
Bill Gallagher
December 15, 2020
Management
8
Productivity & habits
5
Fear of a bad outcome keeps leaders from acting on right decisions
Surfacing decisions at team level removes the leader's room to stall
Dashboards and meeting habits keep the whole team accountable together
Customer experience
YouTube
Replacing negative words to improve customer and sales communication
Cameron Herold
December 15, 2020
Customer experience
8
Sales systems & CRM
7
Communication
6
"No problem" contains two negatives — swap it for positive phrases
Script replacements like "absolutely" and train every customer-facing team
Inspect calls regularly — most leaders haven't listened in years
Building SaaS from an Agency, Co-founder Equity, and Bootstrapper Cities
Startups For the Rest of Us
December 15, 2020
Business models
8
Equity & cap tables
7
Bootstrapping
6
Separate your SaaS brand from an existing agency while preserving customer relationships and reputation.
Base co-founder equity on contribution and commitment, not equality—frame it as a collaborative framework.
Start with absurdly small steps in a tiny niche, not full SaaS; build credibility before building products.
Content marketing
YouTube
How Peter McKinnon built 5 million YouTube subscribers in four years
Noah Kagan
December 14, 2020
Content marketing
9
Growth hacking
7
Branding
5
Copy proven video formats before inventing your own
Two videos a week for four years drove 400 million views
Tight niche dominance beats broad content variety every time