Another Excuse Newsletter

Welcome back to the Another Excuse Newsletter. It isn’t just another excuse, but a reason to start that thing you’ve been putting off.

What to expect this week:
👓Perspective - Beliefs vs Values
🔨 Tool - Smallbets.com
🍿Consume - Sora
📖Concept - Hippo Effect

Latest Podcast Episode

Today’s guest is Mack Grenfell.

Mack is the founder of Byword. Byword enables you to generate high-quality, AI-written articles at scale. You can upload 1,000s of keywords or titles, and create SEO-optimised articles in just a few clicks. We discuss all things AI and how the idea for Byword came about.

In the episode, we discuss:

• How Byword works
• Building in the AI boom
• Differentiating your product
• Acquiring users and validating your idea
• Trusted your gut and biases
• Bootstrapping as an alternative
And so much more...

You can check out the episode here.

Perspective

Beliefs vs Values

Making the distinction between beliefs and values is important.

We sometimes confuse the two which can make for some heated discussions.

A great distinction I heard recently is, “Beliefs are what you think is true, values are what you think is important.”

The important part of that definition is “what you think” which means it doesn’t have to be an objective truth.

Is the truth ever really objective?

Our beliefs and values are completely subjective, but the problem lies in how tied we are to these beliefs and values.

Values, I think, are less disputable, because we mostly agree that they’re subjective.

Meaning we’re more entitled to accept someone’s opposing values as long as they don’t have a direct impact or effect on us.

Beliefs on the other hand are trickier.

It’s a truth that we believe to be true and yet others may believe the complete opposite to be true.

How do we determine who is right and who to believe?

With the access to echo chambers we now have, I think everyone’s personal truth is becoming more polarising than the next.

I’m not sure if there is a solution other than productive discourse to understand others who share different beliefs to you.

The value I got from this quote was that it’s important to make the distinction and it’s important to take the time to figure out what yours are.

Tool

Smallbets.com

Do you know how to validate an idea?

This community helps you do just that.

It’s a community for people interested in entrepreneurship.

Their focus is to get you acting on an idea, proving the concept and making your first $1000.

They have 5k members and they provide members with a whole lot of resources to get that idea off the ground.

They host events and share all of the recordings with members, they have a community for discussion, a directory, meetups, deals and a newsletter.

I think it’s communities like this that can really help you take action and hold you accountable.

You can use a community to start anything that you’ve been putting off and I’ve heard great things about this one.

I recently joined Small Bets and it costs $99 for the year and $185 for a lifetime subscription.

Remember that it’s important to invest in yourself. No one else is going to do it for you.

P.S. This seems like an ad, but it’s not. I just want to share the most interesting resources with you guys.

Consume (Read / Watch / Listen)

Sora

OpenAI just released their text-to-video tool and it’s mind-blowing.

The fact that this is the first iteration is scary and makes you contemplate where exactly the future is heading.

Just by watching the video above you can tell that this will completely change the way we create and consume content.

At the moment, they can’t give anyone and everyone access because this could be a dangerous tool in the wrong hands.

I’m honestly not sure how they’ll ensure that this is safe to use for the public and how we will prove whether a video is real or fake.

That’s for the big brains.

Let me know what you think!

Did you spot the mistakes?

Concept

HiPPO Effect

What is the HiPPO Effect?

The HiPPO Effect stands for Highest Paid Persons Opinion.

It’s pretty self-explanatory, but it’s a problem that many businesses run into. Most of the time the opinion of the highest-paid person in the room is given more consideration because they’re seen as the person who has the most valuable opinion.

As I’m sure many people have experienced, this isn’t always the case.

Most of the time these senior leaders aren’t on the ground with the rest of the employees. Which can lead to biased and uninformed decision-making if listened to.

Companies need to take a data-driven approach to make progress rather than listening to these people while knowing it’s the wrong decision.

This dynamic is very common.

The issue at most of these companies is that the leaders aren’t self-aware enough to understand that this is even happening.

Which means it’s more difficult to make a change.

The best leaders are the ones aware of it and they put communicative structures in place to make sure they are led by the data and hear the opinions of the people who actually know what’s going on.

For example, Jeff Bezos made it a rule that in meetings everyone would get a chance to speak and they would speak in order of backwards seniority.

This means the least experienced employee would speak first and he would speak last.

This helps get rid of the HiPPO effect because the ones with less experience aren’t influenced by the people above them and so they can’t base their opinions on previous statements made by management.

There are many approaches to eradicate this, but the first step is simply being aware of it.

Thanks for Reading

Now start something!

P.S. Feedback is welcome and needed! If you’d prefer to send me an email and not respond, you can do so here: [email protected]

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