It’s Thursday, which in my week is the conclusion of the Deep Work sprint for the week, and time to sum up how things went.

The main goal this week was to vomitout a part of my book proposal on “Why I’m the Right Person to Write ‘7 Hard Problems'”.

Good news:

1. I did vomitout the “Right Person” section.  It’s just a vomitout so far ( and therefore not ready for prime time), so I’m going to hold it back for the moment, but I did do it.
2. I got a lot of good ideas about more general platform stuff, like how to work with an online group of followers that’s small.  The basic scheme is to always add value to the crewe even you can’t deliver much value from having a big network.  I think I can add value to people who follow me by doing some of the things I’ve done in the past that have invited engagement: talking about what I’m thinking about, talking deeply about PIM issues and PIM technologies, and generally trying to be interesting to my virtual committee here on line.

Things didn’t go as well in a couple of other areas:

1. TED Talks.  I’m still not sure I understand how to use them as part of my work.  I think it’d be a kick to do a TED talk, and it might make a big difference to me, but it’s also a lot of effort and maybe that effort should just be poured into the book.
2. Finish Althusser.  I made progress, but didn’t read much this week and didn’t finish “Lenin and Philosophy”.  I got bogged down in a sub-dither about whether or not I had to read Hegel, and progress forward ground to a halt.
3. Finishing the Jungian shrink book “Finding Meaning…”.    I did finish it, but there was something very unsatisfying about this book.  Partly has to do with what I’ll call the repetitive vagueness of his prose.  Jung is a bit vague from time to time, but never repetitive and always interesting.  Serves me right for accepting a stand-in for the man himself.  I’m going to move forward by reading a couple of things of Jung’s: “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”, and a Modern Library collection, “The Basic Writings of CG Jung.”  I’ve read them before, so I may bag it if it seems like I’m not getting anything new out of the exercise.

So, a good week for the Work, a good first outing for the “blog every day” scheme.

Tomorrow’s blog is “Hack of the Week”, another (I hope!) regular feature of some cool tech- or Life- hack I think might be newsworthy and interesting.

Let me know what you liked or didn’t like, want more of or less of.

I started on this problem by reading:

1. Books and articles on how to give a TED talk (and a tiny bit about why)
2. Books and articles about building an online platform, particularly for a writer or “thought leader” (not my favorite phrase although it is exact).
3. Articles about measuring my online platform

It was easy to come up with a fair amount of reading on both topics, but it was pretty low-grade ore.

I was looking for things that were thoughtful and told me stuff I didn’t already know.

One article stood out:

“How to Launch Your Digital Platform”, by Harvard Business Review.  An older article (2015?) but good advice, particularly further along in the article.  My online platform has seen better days (like when I was an investor), so I was quite interested in suggestions about how to manage small numbers of users.  The trick there, it seems, is to give them something of value even though they don’t experience the grand Network Effect.

Here’s a little schematic from the article which summarizes some of the interesting points.

Let me know if you’ve seen anything good on platforms, measurement, or TED.