Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 33
• Total book digests created: 12
• Total blog posts published: 189
• Total audio recordings published: 103

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Book digests created: 0
• Blog posts published: 7
• Audio recordings published: 0

What I completed this week (link to last week’s commitments):

• Read the autobiography of Bennett Cerf, founder of book publisher Random House

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography or autobiography
• Locate a second commercial-grade book scanner locally
• Finalize talking points for the next podcast series

Asks:

• None

Week two hundred thirty-seven was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• Locating a commercial-grade book scanner took some work, and gaining access to one has been more challenging than I expected. I’ll need to get creative and scrappy.

What I learned:

• Large companies store a lot of data, but often it’s not structured or organized. To reap the full potential of AI, companies are realizing the need to structure and organize their data—a massive undertaking.
• Google’s NotebookLM has become very popular in the last two weeks, even though this tool has been out for months. The new feature that sparked this wave of attention is the ability to “listen to a conversation about your sources.” You upload your own documents and NotebookLM creates a podcast conversation between two people. The conversation is an analysis of the content in your uploaded documents. The AI is doing two things. First, it’s synthesizing the content in your documents. But what people are energized about is listening to the synthesis in a storytelling format. Hearing a story is the way most people learn best. This feature leans into that facet of human nature and makes NotebookLM appealing to a broader audience.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 32
• Total book digests created: 12
• Total blog posts published: 182
• Total audio recordings published: 103

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Book digests created: 0
• Blog posts published: 7
• Audio recordings published: 0

What I completed this week (link to last week’s commitments):

• Read a biography about Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr.
• Created a notebook in NotebookLM using a book digest and got feedback from two people on using it

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography or autobiography
• Digitize one biography or autobiography
• Finalize talking points for the next podcast series

Asks:

• None

Week two hundred thirty-six was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles this week

What I learned:

• Classifying and categorizing people’s journeys is much more complicated than I realized, which is likely why it hasn’t been done for entrepreneurs. I learned about the Library of Congress Classification system this week and realized I have a lot to learn about taxonomy.
• Feedback this week highlighted that to be valuable to current entrepreneurs, my library of entrepreneurs’ journeys needs to be significantly more useful than existing alternatives. Marginally better isn’t enough. It needs to be 10x or even 100x more useful.
• Building an audience, then a community from that audience, and then a product based on community feedback is a company-building approach that I thought about and discussed with others this week.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!

For the last few podcast series I’ve published, I created digests of the books beforehand—a time-consuming process. Combined with recording and editing the podcasts, a significant time commitment was required.

This process left me with an uncomfortable feeling. I was spending a considerable amount of time executing—sharing what I’d learned—and not enough time strategizing the best way to share what I’d learned and how to scale my idea. I felt like I was falling into the founder trap of working in the business and not working on it (even though I technically don’t have a business yet; it’s just a project). This is dangerous because you can end up on a hamster wheel going nowhere fast.

It was unsustainable, so I slowed down and eventually paused publishing more podcasts until I found a way to create the digests more efficiently using technology. I’ve tested some technologies but haven’t found anything that has materially helped with digest creation. Since I haven’t found the solution, I haven’t published new podcasts. In retrospect, that was a mistake.

My goal is to share what I learn with others, and I haven’t been doing that at the level I know I’m capable of. That bothers me. Also, the podcast was an external and internal feedback loop that improved my communication skills.

I’ve decided to restart sharing what I’ve learned via podcast series. Because creating them takes a long time, I can’t get them out as fast as I’d like (weekly), but I shouldn’t let that stop me from doing it at all. I just have to do it at a slower pace for now. As I find new technologies that make the process more efficient, I can increase my publishing frequency.

For my personal project, I’ve been reading biographies about entrepreneurs and documenting and sharing what I learned from each book. My mission for this project is to create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that I and other entrepreneurs can use.

I’ve been playing with ways to create this library. Each time I’ve finished a biography, I’ve created a digest—my interpretation of the book and its most essential elements. The digests contain ideas and experiences from the entrepreneurs’ journeys. I use them when I’m trying to solve my own entrepreneurial problems. That usually involves reviewing a digest to find relevant experiences of an entrepreneur. It’s better than rereading an entire book, which saves me time. But it’s still not great because leveraging multiple digests simultaneously means reading multiple digests again. For the sake of time, I usually have to pick the one or two that I think are relevant.

Creating a library of digests or entrepreneurial wisdom is helpful but not enough. It’s still too hard to use all that wisdom. I’ve been exploring ways to solve this. I’ve been learning about retrieval augmented generation (RAG). I’m still new to RAG, but my elementary understanding is that it’s a way to improve AI responses. RAG allows you to provide a knowledge base to AI to complement its large-language model (LLM). The result is more-accurate responses—or it’s supposed to be, at least.

If I can complement an LLM with multiple digests and ask AI for suggestions on solving my problem, I can leverage the wisdom of all the entrepreneurs I’ve read about to solve a single problem. Or at least that’s what I hope.

I’ve encountered an issue, though. Implementing RAG appears to require some technical abilities, but I’m not technical. I need to test my thesis and have been looking for ways to use RAG. This week, a friend told me about the latest updates to Google’s NotebookLM. NotebookLM is a productized way for people to leverage proprietary data and AI easily. It’s basically RAG made easy for nontechnical people like me. I’m oversimplifying because it does lots of other stuff, but you get the point. NotebookLM is my best option right now, so I’ll test my thesis using it until I can get some technical help.

NotebookLM has come a long way in the few months since I first heard about it. I’m excited to play with the latest version to test my thesis.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 31
• Total book digests created: 12
• Total blog posts published: 175
• Total audio recordings published: 103

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Book digests created: 0
• Blog posts published: 7
• Audio recordings published: 0

What I completed this week (link to last week’s commitments):

• Read biography about the Newhouse family and Samuel “Si” Newhouse Jr.

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography or autobiography
• Create a notebook in NotebookLM using one of my book digests and get feedback from two people on it

Asks:

• None

Week two hundred thirty-five was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them via blog posts and audio podcasts

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles this week

What I learned:

• ChatGPT’s custom GPTs allow you to upload “knowledge”—documents that ChatGPT will use in responses. After I uploaded several of the book digests that I created, the responses to my questions weren’t great, even after many rounds of adjusting the prompting.
• Some historical books about companies or families don’t provide enough depth about an entrepreneur’s journey. Still, they’re great tools for discovering more entrepreneurs and books about them.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!

A friend read my post about reading multiple biographies and autobiographies to understand an industry. He suggested that I also read books that explain how an industry works. His argument is that information in these books will fill gaps in my understanding of the industry that exist because everything isn’t covered in biographies. Reading both should give me a superior understanding.

I’m always open to trying new things, so I agreed to read a book on the media industry, given the biographies I’ve read recently. I’m going into this with an open mind, but I have some reservations. I learn best by hearing about the experiences of other people. If there’s no story, no personal journey, it may be harder for these books to keep my attention. We’ll see.

I’m excited to see if doing what my friend suggested resonates with me and leads to a better understanding of the media industry, or at least a subset of it.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them via blog posts and audio podcasts

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 30
• Total book digests created: 12
• Total blog posts published: 168
• Total audio recordings published: 103

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Book digests created: 0
• Blog posts published: 7
• Audio recordings published: 0

What I completed this week (link to last week’s commitments):

• Read biography about Roy Thomson and his son Kenneth Thomson
• Created first draft of a pitch deck
• Located commercial-grade book scanner in Atlanta
• Had one additional feedback session

What I’ll do next week:

• Read biography about Samuel “S.I.” Newhouse Jr.
• Continue tweaking the pitch deck
• Continue tweaking custom GPT

Asks:

• None

Week two hundred thirty-four was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!