#60: desire to make something beautiful
👋 Welcome to the 60th issue of Out of Curiosity, a weekly newsletter promoting ideas to help get 1% better everyday.
My name is Reza, and every week, I go through nearly 100 pieces of content (from books and podcasts to newsletters and tweets), and bring you the best in this newsletter.
In this issue:
🎨 The space between careers and hobbies
🎤 5 C’s of storytelling
👓 The future of marketing is people
🔗 etc. etc.
🎨 The space between careers and hobbies
I’m all for spending more time with your friends, of course. But what these proposals ignore—and what the most dedicated workists, even if they wouldn’t describe themselves as such, understand—is that, for many people, work construed broadly is a highly effective vessel for meaning and life satisfaction. It’s just that the work you find the most meaningful may not always overlap fully with the work you can get paid to do.
The obvious synthesis, therefore, is not to abandon the idea of finding your life’s meaning in work, but rather to expand your definition of work to include projects you take on outside of your job—projects that might not be your career, but that you treat with a seriousness and commitment that make them far more than mere hobbies.
Where the artist of yesteryear had a meaningless day job to support their meaningful creative work, today’s multi-hyphenate has a job and one or more side projects, all of which add meaning to their life. Freed from the impossible burden of having to provide all of their meaning (or at least, all of their work-related meaning), each piece of the portfolio can provide the right amount of meaning at the right time.
🎤 5 C’s of storytelling
Context → the background info necessary to understand the story
Character → the protagonist of the story (usually you!) and any other important people
Conflict → your main objective in the story and what keeps you from getting it
Choices → the choices you make and how they get you closer or further from your goal
Change → the external outcomes and internal growth that emerges in the aftermath of the story
👓 The future of marketing is people
It is about understanding people as people and not just as consumers, customers, members, and users.
It is about getting people to advocate for a brand to other people.
It is about upgrading the status of marketing people and upgrading marketing people.
🔗 etc. etc.
📈 If you’re exploring starting something soon, have taken the leap to start, or are an early-stage founder looking to accelerate with the support of a community, check out On Deck Founders.
🗣️ South Park’s storytelling advice: Less “and…then…”. More “but…Therefore…”
📝 I recently discovered Osmosis.dev — a weekly newsletter on human behavior, storytelling and marketing. Colin reads 2-3 books every month and shares his best insights.
🏛️ Dive down the Web Design Museum rabbit hole of over 2,000 carefully selected websites that showcase web design trends between 1991 and 2006.
🎵 The first-ever iPod ad from 2001 is such a throwback.
📱 The Light Phone is a minimalist phone designed to be used as little as possible.
✨ One last thing…
👋 Until next week,
