8 February 2021
This week's additions focus on leadership, mindset, and founder stories, with new digests from Silicon Valley Girl, Cameron Herold, and Joanna Wiebe. Highlights include Batch-producing content months ahead keeps passive income flowing during maternity leave. Delegate 80% of your weekly tasks before Monday starts.
Showing 13 digests for 8 February 2021.
Building four income streams toward $1 million in 2021
Silicon Valley Girl
February 13, 2021
Pricing strategy
7
Business models
6
Batch-producing content months ahead keeps passive income flowing during maternity leave.
Online courses gross $840K/year but cost over 50% to run.
Four streams are designed by active-involvement level, not just revenue size.
Productivity & habits
YouTube
Weekly planning system to delegate 80% of your workload
Cameron Herold
February 12, 2021
Productivity & habits
8
Delegation
7
Delegate 80% of your weekly tasks before Monday starts.
Only schedule 5 hours of true project time per day.
Sunday planning in 30 minutes prevents overwhelm all week.
The switching Venn diagram: a framework for conversion copywriting
Joanna Wiebe
February 12, 2021
Copywriting
9
Pricing psychology
5
Push copy — not just pull — is what actually moves switchers
Map prospect priorities onto a Venn diagram to find your switch messaging
Inertia and anxiety kill conversions; copy must tackle both head-on
How Feeding America scaled crisis response during COVID-19
Masters of Scale
February 11, 2021
Management
8
Processes & SOPs
7
Case studies
6
Demand, volunteers, and food supply all collapsed simultaneously.
A $100M Bezos gift was received and fully dispersed within days.
Dignity in choice: recipients must pick their own food, not just accept boxes.
Deep work & focus
Podcast
Getting things done during a pandemic: habits and productivity
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
February 11, 2021
Deep work & focus
9
Productivity & habits
8
Work-life balance
6
Schedule productive meditation like deep work — not a bonus walk.
Email-checking during work is a depleted social connection, not poor discipline.
Quarterly plan postmortems reveal what to cut and where to refocus.
Business operating systems
YouTube
Scaling Up Coach Panel: Uniqueness, Fanocracy, Culture, and Language
Bill Gallagher
February 10, 2021
Business operating systems
9
Culture building
8
Community building
7
Bureaucracy kills human potential; empowerment and probing questions unlock it.
Authentic fan communities — built on genuine passion — outperform any marketing spend.
Language, written culture norms, and intentional breathing are underrated leadership levers.
Founder interviews
YouTube
How Mark Cuban built a billion-dollar empire from nothing by 41
Noah Kagan
February 10, 2021
Founder interviews
9
Exit strategy
7
Bootstrapping
5
Hedging Yahoo stock with puts and calls saved Cuban from the dot-com crash
Majority ownership without personal capital — a repeatable deal structure
Seven years broke with nothing to lose is a competitive advantage
Identity & self-belief
Podcast
Amelia Boone on excellence, endurance, and the cost of discipline
The Daily Stoic
February 10, 2021
Identity & self-belief
9
Deep work & focus
8
Time management
7
The same drive behind elite performance can quietly fuel self-destruction.
Why holding two careers made Boone better at both, not worse.
Asking for help strengthens relationships — suppressing emotion compounds the cost.
One-page job scorecards make one-on-ones faster and clearer
Bill Gallagher
February 9, 2021
Management
8
Processes & SOPs
5
One-page scorecards eliminate confusion and conflict in one-on-ones
One events company cut one-on-one time to 15 minutes fortnightly
Only two inputs needed: the scorecard and quarterly initiatives
Productivity & habits
Podcast
Cal Newport Q&A: deep leisure, productivity, and digital life
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
February 8, 2021
Productivity & habits
9
Work-life balance
8
Deep work & focus
8
Balance four leisure types to prevent burnout, not just skill-building
Being hard to reach and 'lazy' is a structural deep work strategy
30-day digital declutter resets your values, not just your screen time
Founder interviews
Podcast
Robert Noyce: how the anti-Shockley built Intel and Silicon Valley
Founders
February 8, 2021
Founder interviews
10
Culture building
7
Noyce's radical price-cutting created the entire semiconductor industry's growth model.
Flat hierarchy and genuine curiosity got more from people than any command-and-control boss.
Selling below cost to stimulate volume — Intel's founding insight still holds today.
Hiring & recruitment
YouTube
How startups can win hiring battles against big tech companies
Y Combinator
February 8, 2021
Hiring & recruitment
9
Competitive analysis
5
Your hiring speed exposes big tech's bureaucracy to candidates directly.
Personalised follow-ups from every interviewer signal a culture big companies can't match.
Big-company project cancellations are your best argument for joining a startup.
Customer discovery
YouTube
Why startups fail: the user conversation problem
Y Combinator
February 8, 2021
Customer discovery
9
Identity & self-belief
6
Startups die because founders build what users never wanted
Polishing code instead of talking to users is a fatal trap
Listen to user symptoms, but you prescribe the solution