How Much Should I Care About Promoting My Work?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC]

00:00:05.900 | All right, so we'll start with questions about deep work.

00:00:09.460 | Our first such question comes from Tyler.

00:00:13.140 | Tyler says, I'm a subscriber to Top Performer Executive Edition,

00:00:19.380 | as well as a few other professional optimizing services.

00:00:23.420 | All right, so just as an aside, Top Performer is one of two online courses

00:00:28.100 | that I offer with my longtime friend Scott Young.

00:00:32.140 | So Top Performer is a course about applying deliberate practice to get better

00:00:36.340 | at your career.

00:00:37.500 | All right, back to Tyler's question.

00:00:38.660 | My understanding is that there is a lot of focus on building skills that move

00:00:43.780 | the needle in terms of hard skills.

00:00:45.980 | But I wanted to see if you could touch on developing projects around increasing your

00:00:49.340 | exposure and image alongside your deep work projects to build their impact and

00:00:52.900 | grow your CV.

00:00:55.020 | Tyler, be very wary here.

00:00:58.740 | This is a trap.

00:01:00.780 | There is a clear trap here that I'm talking to you about from personal

00:01:07.620 | experience.

00:01:08.120 | The trap of focusing on exposure, marketing, presentation.

00:01:15.580 | How do I get the word out about this?

00:01:17.100 | How do I get the message just right?

00:01:18.660 | It is a trap because those efforts are seductive.

00:01:24.940 | They're kind of hard, but not too hard.

00:01:27.580 | And it's something your mind would much rather do than the actual deep work to

00:01:30.820 | produce the stuff that you're producing, trying to promote in the first place.

00:01:33.740 | You look at things like what's my email funnel or my social media promotion plan.

00:01:39.780 | And what you see is what I used to call checklist productivity.

00:01:42.740 | This is something you can get better at by learning the right checklist.

00:01:45.580 | I went and I learned how to do online marketing.

00:01:51.700 | And other people don't know this, that are just off the street.

00:01:54.860 | Now I have this insider knowledge and I follow this checklist and I have this

00:01:57.900 | funnel here and I have this social media strategy there and I'm spending some money

00:02:02.620 | on this graphic design here and it's all immensely fulfilling and it's not really

00:02:06.580 | challenging and it begins to take up all your time.

00:02:09.740 | But in the end, what matters?

00:02:13.540 | Producing something so good it can't be ignored.

00:02:16.300 | So it is a trap.

00:02:16.940 | Now I said this is from personal experience.

00:02:18.460 | It's because this is where I was when I first began to develop my concept of

00:02:23.820 | deep work, I was relatively early in my graduate student experience at MIT.

00:02:29.820 | I was doing research and was thinking too much about what's the topic of my research?

00:02:36.220 | Like can I find a sexier topic?

00:02:38.220 | And if I promote it just right and talk about it right, you know, I was thinking

00:02:41.220 | too much about this.

00:02:43.100 | Like an idea for the research that would catch attention and get coverage.

00:02:46.780 | And it was then that I came across Steve Martin's professional autobiography,

00:02:51.620 | Born Standing Up, and it was then when I watched the Charlie Rose interview of

00:02:57.100 | Steve Martin where he said to Charlie, "My advice to people is be so good they

00:03:01.420 | can't ignore you."

00:03:02.900 | This was a huge turning point.

00:03:05.140 | Because what I learned was, no, write papers to get cited.

00:03:08.860 | Do really good work.

00:03:09.780 | It's really, really hard and the rest will work itself out.

00:03:14.020 | That notion got ingrained in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You.

00:03:17.020 | That notion got developed into my book, Deep Work, as well.

00:03:21.620 | Be so good they can't ignore you.

00:03:24.020 | Don't worry so much about how you let people know.

00:03:26.380 | Now, it's not to say that other stuff is not important, but you should just get some

00:03:29.900 | reasonable evidence-based practices for how you present stuff or how the promotion

00:03:35.820 | works.

00:03:36.140 | Set that on autopilot so you're not making unforced errors.

00:03:41.100 | You're not handing out flyers at the mall.

00:03:43.980 | Like, yeah, okay, figure out some reasonable stuff to do.

00:03:45.820 | Set it on autopilot and then get your attention back to producing stuff that's too good to

00:03:49.300 | be ignored.

00:03:50.580 | If you look at these two scenarios, I've produced something excellent and I have a reasonable

00:03:54.420 | autopilot promotion machinery in progress.

00:03:58.820 | Compare that to another scenario where I produce something pretty good but have a cutting-edge

00:04:03.780 | promotional apparatus.

00:04:04.380 | I think all about it.

00:04:05.540 | That first scenario is going to dominate the latter.

00:04:08.820 | People find good things.

00:04:09.820 | You can help them a little bit, but don't think too much about that step of actually

00:04:15.220 | making an impact.

00:04:16.820 | [Music]

How Much Should I Care About Promoting My Work?

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