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:

• The more information you upload to ChatGPT’s custom GPTs, the more the quality of returns diminishes.
• Study groups (e.g., Bible study groups or book clubs) are valuable because they bring people together to share ideas about what they read. The varied interpretations and perspectives are helpful.
• Chronology is likely the best framework for a dataset that captures a person’s journey.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!

This week, I was asked several times about my personal project, so I took the opportunity to work on my pitch. A few learnings:

• Starting by describing the problem and the emotion it creates in entrepreneurs got people hooked. Then when I said I’m solving the problem, they wanted to talk more about their experience with it.
• Technically oriented founders dove deep into how to build the solution.
• Communicating the supply-and-demand dynamics around the problem helped people understand the size of the opportunity.
• Expressing the “why now” resonated with people.
• Shorter responses from me were better and led to a conversation about the problem and the solution.
• When I shared my vision, it missed the mark. I need to work on this.

Getting the pitch right is a process. The best time to start was yesterday. The more I pitch and work on my deck, the better it should get.

Last week, I shared my updated thoughts on reading multiple biographies about one entrepreneur. Multiple books provide multiple perspectives on an entrepreneur’s experiences, which gets me closer to a 360-degree view of that person’s journey. From a data perspective, I’ve been thinking about the best way to capture an entrepreneur’s journey so it adds value to others.

Multiple books can be written about a person, so there’s a one-to-many relationship between people and books. Therefore, a data record needs to be created for each entrepreneur, and information from various books enhances that record with details about the entrepreneur’s journey.

So, what’s the best way to structure this record for each person? I talked with a few developer friends with experience working with large data sets. Among other ideas, most strongly suggested that I create a proprietary framework optimized for entrepreneurs and fit details from each person’s journey into it. I didn’t like that idea for various reasons, so I continued to ponder. I asked myself, what biographies are best and worst at communicating an entrepreneur’s journey? And why? I also looked for clues in the digests I’ve created.

I realized a few things. The biographies I gained the most from portrayed an entrepreneur’s life with a clear, chronological story. The hardest to digest were the ones with lots of jumping between different periods throughout the book. The person’s journey wasn’t clear, or I didn’t know where I was in the journey. One of my favorite entrepreneur autobiographies, and a highly regarded bestseller, is Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight. I read parts of it again and concluded that one reason so many entrepreneurs like this book is its concise chronology of the struggles Knight endured in Nike’s early years. The book makes sure the reader knows where they are in Knight’s journey by making the title of each chapter a calendar year in Knight’s life (e.g., 1966). Chronology was a key to communicating Knight’s journey effectively.

I read a few digests that I created about books. In each one, I structured the information with a chronological tilt. It wasn’t intentional, so it must have been the best way for me to make sense of and document an entrepreneur's journey. I was trying to create a timeline of the entrepreneur’s journey.

As I thought about this more, I got comfortable with the idea that time could be my framework. Everyone has a birth date and a death date. Their journey is everything that happens in between. People learn from other people’s journeys and the wisdom they gain along the way. I can enhance every entrepreneur’s record in my data set with events and actions at specific times to chronologically document their journey. Every biography or autobiography helps create a clearer picture.

I still have more thinking to do around this, but chronology as a framework resonates as a logical way to organize a data set of entrepreneurs’ journeys.

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I had a good text exchange with a friend about my book project. It got me thinking. He said that because I’ve read so many biographies about entrepreneurs, in media at least, the wisdom is natively engrained in me and it will be hard for others to compete with me. Here are a few thoughts on this comment and our text conversation:

• I love it when people give me unsolicited feedback and ideas. It usually gets me thinking about things from a different perspective.
• Lots of entrepreneurs have read significantly more biographies about entrepreneurs than I have. True, I’ve done it at a rapid clip this year, but others have been doing it for years or decades and are far ahead of me. Consistent execution is the difference maker in something like this, especially when considering knowledge's compounding nature. If I can maintain this pace for years or decades, then I might have a shot at having an edge over others, but I’ve got a lot of ground to make up and I’m not doing it to get some title or prize. A big positive from this project is habit formation. I can comfortably read at least one book a week, and I think maintaining that pace for years is doable.
• To make something really stick in my brain, I have to do extra work. Reading doesn’t, by itself, ingrain in me the wisdom from an entrepreneur’s story. Creating the digest for a book forces me to understand their journey clearly and make connections (i.e., insights). Writing blog posts and creating a podcast series to share what I’ve learned forces me to get crystal clear on the strategies and ideas that propelled that entrepreneur. This entire process helps ingrain the wisdom and insights from each book. It’s time consuming, but it’s helpful. Doing it all manually isn’t sustainable, though.
• I don’t have a photographic memory. What I’ve learned is pretty fresh in my mind now, but to keep it at the forefront of my mind, I need to begin reviewing my highlights and digests regularly. Developing that habit will be painful—but a game changer, I suspect. Thirty minutes a day reviewing takeaways from biographies will be enough. I just need to cut out something that wastes thirty minutes a day to make room for this new habit.
• I want to lean into helping more entrepreneurs benefit from the valuable lessons in these biographies, but I don’t want to be the product. I want to share the information so others can use it as they see fit. I don’t want people to come to me to help them apply what I’ve read to their situation. I’m only one person, and that isn’t scalable. I want maximum impact; therefore, I can’t be the product. Figuring this out is top of mind.

Thanks to my buddy for initiating the text conversation that got me thinking!

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: 29
• Total book digests created: 12
• Total blog posts published: 161
• Total audio recordings published: 103
• Average digest length: 5.69% of the book’s length
• Average recording length: TBD

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Book digests created: 0
• Blog posts published: 7
• Audio recordings published: 0
• This week’s digest length: no digest this week
• This week’s recording length: no recording this week

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

• Read Claude Hopkins’s autobiography
• Had one additional feedback session
• Created first version of custom GPT in ChatGPT

Content changes:

• No changes this week

What I’ll do next week:

• Read biography about Roy Thomson and his son Kenneth Thomson
• Create draft of a pitch deck
• Continue tweaking custom GPT
• Find a commercial-grade book scanner in Atlanta

Asks:

• Introductions to developers with deep experience in AI large-language models or working with big, unstructured data sets

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:

• I’m trying to enhance a large language model (LLM) with specific information using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). I’m not technical, so I’ve struggled with this.

What I learned:

• I probably can use a combination of a book scanner and an LLM to create a large percentage of a book digest.
• Creating a record (e.g., digest, profile, or something else) for each entrepreneur and enriching it with information from various books is likely the best approach to creating the best data set about entrepreneurs. But there’s a step beyond this I need to figure out.
• ChatGPT’s custom GPTs are helpful, but they have many limitations, and getting the prompting right requires extensive testing.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!

For the last few months, I’ve been creating a digest for each book I finish reading. Doing this has many pros, but the significant time it takes has been too big of a con. I started searching for ways to do it more efficiently. Many of the books I read don’t have digital or e‑book versions, and I decided to start with this, the most difficult use case.

I discovered that digitization of printed material is a known problem, and various solutions are available. The solution I’m most impressed with is scanners designed specifically for books. A few companies, such as ScanSnap and Czur, have products that do a great job. Some people have reviewed these products and publicly posted the digital books they created with them (see here, for example). Some people have even gone to the trouble of building homemade book scanners (see here).

I’m going to try to find one of these scanners to test locally. I want to see for myself how good a job they do and whether the digital files they create are searchable. If they pass that test, I’ll move to the next step in creating book digests more efficiently.

Last week, I finished reading Roy Thomson’s autobiography, the second book I’ve read about him in the last month. I found another biography about him, and I’m considering reading that, too. Last month, I read a biography about Felix Dennis, the second book I’d read about him.

I initially resisted reading more than one book about an entrepreneur, but I don’t feel that way anymore. Some material may be repetitive, but subsequent books usually contain new information too. Multiple books provide multiple perspectives on an entrepreneur’s life and get closer to a 360-degree view of that person’s journey. Reading too many books about a person would yield diminishing returns, but right now, my gut tells me that two or three books about a person is likely a good number.

I’ve also changed my thinking about how I record information about entrepreneurs I’m studying. Before, I thought in terms of books. Each book was an individual record, and I created a digest for each book. This meant I could have multiple digests about a single person. But now I’m thinking in terms of people. I need to consider how I want to capture the information. Ultimately, I want to do more than create blog posts and podcasts with these digests. Do I create one digest per person and add information from multiple books? Do I keep creating one digest per book? Or do I do something completely different?

I’ll be thinking about this question more and getting perspectives from people with relevant data management experience. In the meantime, I might experiment with my digest and blog post formats a bit.

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: 28
• Total book digests created: 12
• Total blog posts published: 154
• Total audio recordings published: 103
• Average digest length: 5.69% of the book’s length
• Average recording length: TBD

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Book digests created: 1
• Blog posts published: 7
• Audio recordings published: 6
• This week’s digest length: 7.28% of the book’s length
• This week’s recording length: 17 minutes

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

• Read Roy Thomson's autobiography
• Finished creating a digest of the biography of Jack Kent Cooke
• Had one additional feedback session
• Edited and published an audio podcast series about Ted Turner’s autobiography

Content changes:

• Tweaked the introduction to the podcast a bit

What I’ll do next week:

• Read Claude Hopkins’s autobiography
• Write and publish blog posts about Roy Thomson’s autobiography
• Create a GPT using one of my book digests

Asks:

• Introductions to developers with deep experience in AI large-language models or working with big, unstructured data sets

Week two hundred thirty-two 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 notable struggles this past week

What I learned:

• “What would they do in my situation?” is a question entrepreneurs always ask themselves when they’re learning about or speaking with other entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are constantly trying to determine what actions they should take to solve business problems.
• The blog posts and podcasts were helpful in the early part of this project. My energy shifted as I realized they’re ways to share the information I’ve compiled on entrepreneurs. I’m more excited about compiling information on entrepreneurs and figuring out how to make it easy for others to use it.
• I’ve been conducting feedback sessions on the podcasts I’ve created. They’ve been really helpful, but because of my shift in focus, I don’t need to do them as frequently.
• If you want to build an app, you can verbally describe what you want and AI can write the code for you.
• ChatGPT has a privacy setting that prevents it from training its models on content you upload to ChatGPT. You can make this and other privacy requests here.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!