03 | Synthesizing Synthesizer Skool
The best of Andrew Kirby's synthesizer course - all condensed in one essay.
I noticed that about 95% of the people in the Synthesizer Skool Community hadn’t yet completed the two offered courses. So, I spent my entire Saturday finishing Andrew Kirby’s Synthesizer Course and condensed all the best information I’ve gleaned from it for you. Enjoy!
You should play the best character in the great online game: A Synthesizer
Synthesizers have the greatest potential for growth right now in this age of information overload.
We compress the landscape of wisdom and make it easier for people to access.
Here are links that will convince you to become a synthesizer:
https://www.sloww.co/synthesizers/
Excluding the reading lists, these were the most useful resources from the entire course!
Check if a topic is trending via these underrated websites and use to your advantage:
Ultimate Youtube guides:
https://first-class-creator.webflow.io/youtube/intro (password: YouTubemastery)
https://www.notion.so/MrBeast-YouTube-Growth-628b5c36e87f4f9eaca310f822957f85
Apps/extensions:
Hypothesis helps you highlight articles, and therefore like make each webpage your own.
Instapaper is a “read later” kind of app. Now you have a list of articles you’re excited to read. ”Nothing is better than an unread library”.
Readwise is good for resurfacing ideas and making sure you’re not forgetting anything.
Obsidian and Roam are the best platforms for building a ‘second brain’.
Top 10 Pieces of Wisdom:
10. A goal is a snapshot in the future that you want.
A goal is an EFFECT you want to happen. Therefore, it needs a cause.
Most people don’t focus on the causes that lead to the effect they want to have.
-They dont have a clear understanding of reality, they harbor delusions
-They have a foggy sense of how the world actually works
Because of this law of Cause and Effect, if you were infinitely powerful, all you’d have to do is touch a butterfly’s wing and you’d become a billionaire. Obviously you aren’t infinitely powerful, but the more wisdom you can get, the more powerful you can be. Once you realize this, you’ll be able to achieve things a little bit quicker, a little bit easier than you have before.
9. The best thing you can do is consume the best that humanity has created.
Curate the content that you consume, recall these by creating a Second Brain.
Everyone has a paradigm, to change your paradigm, you need to change the content you consume. The content you consume determines your worldview and how accurate it is.
Creativity comes from what we consume. Great creativity comes consuming the best of what humanity has created, taking the bits that really resonate with you, and repackaging that into your art.
Don’t worry. You’re self centered. Some bit of you will end up in your work and that’s how you become creative and achieve originality.
8. BUILD A SERENDIPITY VEHICLE.
Serendipity births unexpected opportunities which fuel progress and push us in fruitful directions. By maximizing serendipity, you’ll accelerate your progress. Serendipity is a skill, which means you can WORK at getting lucky and improving. Your serendipity vehicle could be your Youtube videos or your writing!
7. Greatest mistake: Wanting to do something but never executing on it.
You should only focus on step one. Take a step, see where you are, then take the next step. Gain momentum. You have to act without knowing all the answers so just start now. Community creates the perfect breeding ground for action so stay in Skool ;)
Andrew, for his first video, all he literally did was pull up his favorite article and READ WORD FOR WORD what that article said, with his unmade bed behind him. Now is simply the time to act. Make the shift from what can I do to start, to how can I make this better? Start then Learn. Don’t Learn then start.
6. FINDING YOUR NICHE
Andrew Kirby in this video recommends to first list down 50 different areas that your niche could be, then rank them according to
How well you know them
How rich the niche is
How much the niche is growing
other metrics he mentions in 33:39 - 39:13
5. Create for an audience of 1. Seriously.
90% of podcasters quit after episode 3. Why? Cause they’re creating for an audience of other people. Create with an audience of one. You’ll be able to create more consistently and when you create consistently, that’s when other people find your stuff.
4. ATTENTION: Social hacking technique.
USE THIS! The Social Hacking Technique is basically getting someone bigger or more popular than you share your content. Super high ROI - find a way to get that someone to do it!! Make sure it happens.
3. From Mr. Beast: Quality > Quantity, make sure your ideas are actually good.
This saves you time. But I think that this is most applicable AFTER you are already in the habit of creating :)
“Most ideas just aren’t that interesting”
“Are you spending an hour a day brainstorming the best Youtube ideas? Because if you understand that, like the idea could get you five times the views for literally like 20% of the effort, like why would you not, I mean, I'll pay people to brainstorm ideas. I'll pay a hundred people to brainstorm ideas and I'll. Take a list of 20,000 and then I'll curate it down to like a hundred with my three, like really smart friends. And then we'll nitpick the hell out of those a hundred over the course of the week till we have 10. And then there's our videos for the next two months. And it's like, because that, doing that process, even though it takes dozens of hours, we'll, you know, I'll pull way more views with hundreds of hours of less work.”
2. Mistake: being afraid to copy.
Solution: you won’t copy directly, you’ll add your spin. It’s impossible to actually copy. You can’t help but add your creative spin.
“But I don’t have anything original to say and I would be just repeating things said elsewhere on the internet!”
Consider a university professor teaching a course. Does she say anything original? Do you think she should cancel her course because somebody else discovered the things she wants to teach? Or does she have to cancel her course simply because there is a similar course at some other university? Unoriginal writing is useful because it helps in the process of discovery and in the process of supporting underappreciated ideas."
“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”
TOP PIECE OF WISDOM. Oldie but goodie:
This video was posted in both the “Freedom Wealth” course and “Synthesizer skool” course so I will end with it because this is clearly a hugely important lesson.
If you’re not wealthy, you’re missing one of these three things:
Leverage
The world isn’t rich vs. poor anymore but leveraged vs. unleveraged. Leverage your unfair advantage. Identify it first, then capitalize on it.
The Internet offers us infinite leverage, permissionless leverage. Take advantage of this.
Specific Knowledge
You gain this by FOLLOWING YOUR PASSION:
“Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.”Give society what it wants but doesn’t yet know how to get
Be IRRATIONALLY passionate to succeed
Accountability
Putting your name on the work that you do
The opposite of this is working for a big corporate company
As soon as Andrew worked a little bit on these three things, things started to click for him. Productize yourself. This is the synthesis of Specific Knowledge, Leverage, and Accountability.Synthesizer Skool is an awesome community with motivated people who build each other up. Courses about how to synthesize and earn from digital content creation are offered FOR FREE on the platform. Join the community now! https://www.skool.com/synthesizers
For me getting off the ground was the hardest, once I have started creating content I didn't want to ever stop
It created a ton of amazing opportunities for me
I think that even creating things out of just self-expression is a good approach
and being obsessed on the processes and not on the goals
Everything was summed up so well.
Great job.