In 10h, how I learned this digital skill which I can make money with now and how you can too.
Adaptivity is a magical mindset and skillset. It is the magic of hacking any situations. Applied to learning this is a magical weapon that can help you hack a skill & quickly make things and give you high output. I like to share with you in this article what I know and what I experienced with a simple example of skill I learned recently.
Welcome to the world of challenging yourself to hack a problem, a situation, or a skill just for the fun of hacking and being adaptive.
Welcome to the world of “Adaptivity”.
The hard work behind a book
Recently I have been releasing my first book.
A 200 pages thingy that literally took me 2 years of laziness to finish. I have been writing on my blog for more than 2 years, however, I usually never released the posts as I didn’t like to proofread myself. Technically I only had to convert my non-released blog posts into a book. Not that hard, right?
In theory. In December I decided to grip my courage and started waking up at 5 am 4 times per week to finish it up.
This lasted until the end of February where I had to go for 4 days to a Buddhist monastery with no phone and no internet to keep myself going.
March 1, the book almost completed. COVID19 lockdown happens: God giving me more time to proofread 200 pages.
I release my book for pre-order; hire a freelancer to proofread me; put my book online on a website and announce it on a post on Facebook.
From reading to watching
Then I realized, actually nowadays, most of the time, people are not really reading books anymore. Maybe the top 1% of intellectuals. But even they are stuck searching on the internet and Youtube all day long.
Even myself I’m usually reading only 10 books per year, however spending more than 100h per year on Youtube watching cool videos.
To me, my book was only a medium, a tool to achieve one goal: share a message. So I considered maybe I should use a few other channels to spread that message, reading the book should be one of them, but Youtube and Podcasts should be distributing the message to a wider audience.
What if I could distribute the message of my book through videos?
The hack: Re-learn how to learn:
To publish my book’s message on Youtube; A new chapter of my author's life was starting: I needed to learn video editing!
I thought video editing seems super complicated, hard and time-wasting. This sounded like a good challenge to take on.
So I went to an online course website (Udemy), bought a course for 10$ and started to watch the course. I started to see all these videos and detailed things I could learn in these tutorials and then I thought, do I really need to know all that?
The Pareto law:
Something I always like to do is what I call “hacking”. Meaning skipping the normal way typical people do to find a shortcut. In learning’s when I apply this to my life this is similar to Pareto law: 20% of efforts make 80% of the output. So when I’m making something I always like to quickly build a minimum viable product that will be having 80% of the expectations I have, while taking me 20% of the time, cost or efforts. Applied to learning this is a magical weapon that I like to share with you in this article.
You only need to learn the 20% competencies that will enable you to cover 80% of the practical use you need to apply it to.
Here is how…
The DSSS:
In my case, using what I call the DSSS method helped me to leverage on Pareto law to learn the key competencies blocks I needed to be able to publish a professional-quality Youtube video in few hours with no specific investment aside of my computer and a cost of 10$.
(D)Deconstruction:
What are the lego blocks competencies that you need to learn to create a product that will look like a pro? In my case, I needed to produce a video where I’m talking (my voice) while some visuals related to what I was talking about were rolling (video).
(S)Selection:
So I needed 2 lego blocks competencies:
- Voice recording
- 2. Visuals Video
I then had to only look through the sections in the Udemy course that were talking about these 2 competencies blocks.
(S)Sequencing:
Voice recording was the easiest thing I could start. So I took my phone and started recording myself reading the introduction of my book.
Once this was done I needed to find some nice visuals videos related to what I was talking about from Youtube and others so I spent time doing this. This part took a few hours honestly. I was kind of lazy to source these cuts, then edit the video seconds after seconds. This started to annoy me so I stopped and went to play video games.
(S)Stakes:
The next day I was asking, myself why was I doing this? I did not have enough incentives to motivate myself to learn this skill. No one would watch this video anyway. I was starting to be lazy of doing this.
I then slapped myself on the face and realized my motivation was leaving, I needed to do something about it.
I decided to post on FB in front of all my friends that I will be releasing an amazing video on Friday. So then I was stuck I really had to do it.
2h later I was done.
Setting up stakes will always guarantee you follow up. Higher the task is, the higher the stakes should be to wake up your motivation (& the fear of your ego to loose).
After 6h of work, I published my first video on Youtube where I could now reach people not interested enough to read my book but curious enough to watch the message of my book in the video!
YOU CAN WATCH THE FIRST VIDEO: Introduction, the adaptive economy
However, after a day, I realized I felt quite accomplished to be able to publish such video in a few hours and I felt like I should do it even more! I started to work on another video, and this time, because I knew most of the tricks already, I could do this new video on the space of 3h of actual work!
Multiply incomes with “Skills hacking”:
The result: decent sellable skills within 10H.
Thanks to this exercise, today, a new revenue stream I have is selling my book online, through these videos. I’m not sure how much $$$ this will bring, but this shows practically how this skills hacking exercise is viable.
However, this could be a decent income if I was ever in need AND this could save me tons of money from hiring an expensive agency.
For anyone looking to make a side income during the lockdown, people are paying 100$ or more per hour for video editing.
This is a simple example of online skills easy to be learned using the adaptivity learning method (Pareto, DSSS) or what I call “skills hacking”.
And you, what is the skill you want to hack? Try the method & tell me how was your experience!
