INSPIRATION
This is the thirteenth Invisible Letter.
Three months ago I was nervous about sending the first one. I honestly thought nobody was going to read it.
That's the whole lesson right there. You can't sit around worrying about who's going to engage with your work. Just do your 1%, do it again the next week, and the people who like the kool-aid you're putting down will come find you and keep coming back. Thirteen letters later, I'm excited about what this is morphing into.
So let me tell you what's coming up. Next month, as you all know, A Different World premieres the reboot, and I got seven strangers together who were all brought to one HBCU to talk about our experience working at one and the impact we had. Then we get into your financial psychology, not budgeting, not stocks, but what your real relationship with money actually is and where it came from. And I sit down with a principal solution engineer at Salesforce who built me a whole learning path from scratch so I could pass my interview and get into tech, to talk about why we should keep building pathways that open up doors for other people.
If you have not checked out any episodes yet… Well, what are you waiting for big guy? Click here.
COLLABORATION
My granny used to say “sweep that floor like it's the last floor you'll ever sweep”. It didn't matter what the job was. If it was yours, you did it all the way and with excellence.
Cal Newport wrote a whole book underneath that idea. So Good They Can't Ignore You. His argument is that follow your passion is bad advice, and what actually builds a career is what he calls the craftsman mindset. Quit asking what the work is offering you. Get so good at something rare and valuable that the options come find you.
Here's the part I hold onto. You're not always going to get picked. The craft is still yours, and nobody can take back work you already did well.
→ So Good They Can't Ignore You [link]
EXECUTION
Find the one thing on your to do list this week that nobody's going to inspect. The report that gets skimmed, the sermon or the upcoming pitch. The thing you could do at eighty percent and not one person would know the difference.
Do that one at 100% anyway. Before Wednesday.
Then pay attention to whether you go looking for somebody to say something about it. That'll tell you a lot.
Hit reply and tell me what it was.
PASS IT ON
Send this to somebody whose work deserves more credit than it's getting right now.
THE EXTRA
Dolly Parton, 9 to 5. She wrote it on the movie set and kept the rhythm by clacking her acrylic nails together, and those are her actual nails you hear on the record. Woman turned a manicure into an instrument. [link]
— DéRecco
The Invisible Interview · The Invisible Score · The TEF Show
