Business Lessons from Jake Paul and Dave Chappelle

Avthar's Weekly Wisdom #53 (05/09/2021)

May 09, 2021

Welcome to edition #53 of Avthar's Weekly Wisdom!

🔥 This newsletter is where I share practical wisdom about self-mastery, entrepreneurship, health and happiness, all to help you live better. My guarantee is that you’ll discover one thing that will help you change your life every week.

It’s the first edition of year 2 of my newsletter. I’m excited for another year of sharing and learning together. Last week I shared 52+ lessons from writing for 52 weeks straight. It’s the article I’m most proud of writing to date, so give it a read if you haven’t already.

Here's what I want to share with you this week:

🏆 How to build a Leadership Map
🚀 Entrepreneurial Lessons from Jake Paul and Dave Chappelle
💪 A Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting
🙏 Relaxing in the midst of chaos

To your growth and success,

Avthar

🏆 On Self-Mastery —

Building a Leadership Map: I learned the concept of a Leadership Map from my recent podcast with someone who’s influenced my life since I was 18: leadership and education expert Veda Sunassee (IG, Twitter).

The Leadership Map is all about getting curious about what makes life fulfilling to you, identifying your core values and designing your next step based on which passions, interests, causes and skills are speaking to you most.

It’s an iterative process and this video will help you implement it to level up your personal and professional life today:

🚀 On Entrepreneurship —

Entrepreneurial Lessons from Dave Chappelle and Jake Paul

The internet has effectively eliminated marginal distribution and transaction costs. For example, it costs the same amount to send this newsletter to 1 person, as it does to 100 people as it does to 10,000 people. (Learn more about distribution costs.)

A consequence of zero marginal distribution costs is that having an audience is more valuable than ever before. I found these two videos, about comedian Dave Chappelle’s new paid podcast and social media celebrity Jake Paul’s new incarnation as a boxer, a great insight into the power of audience in the modern age and how different creators go about leveraging their platform:

SCHULZ REACTS: Jake Paul KNOCKS OUT Ben Askren

My key takeaways:

It’s not about boxing, it’s about buying pay-per-views.
In an attention economy, it helps to make noise and to do things worth talking about (good or bad). Jake Paul does this superbly.
Jake Paul has done a brilliant job leveraging his social media following and his villain persona to fuel his lucrative boxing career.
It’s a prime example of how you can translate a following in one area (Youtube) to a pay-day in an unrelated arena (boxing).
Ultimately everything is about attention. If you own attention, you decide where the money goes.

Are Charla and Schulz excited for Chappelle’s new podcast?

My key takeaways:

Creatives face an explore-exploit trade-off: Do they do things that gain attention, get them discovered and broaden their audience (explore) or do they exploit and aim to monetize an existing audience at the expense of possible growth.
One way to solve the explore-exploit trade-off is to grow on open platforms (Youtube, free podcasts, social media platforms), but monetize on closed platforms (e.g private podcasts, Patreon, membership clubs etc).
Where you are in your growth phase will help you judge if a move is right. For example, Joe Rogan and Dave Chappelle already have the maximum amount of attention and audience that a creative could wish for, for them its about leveraging that attention into something that rewards their effort. This is best done by going to closed platforms (e.g Rogan on Spotify, Chappelle on Luminary).
Comedians who are earlier in their growth phase, like Charlamagne and Andrew Schulz, haven’t yet grown to their potential. They still want people to discover them and moving to closed platforms would hinder their long term ability to reward themselves monetarily.
This gives rise to what I call the “Creator Growth Curve”: In the beginning it’s all about being as easy to discover as possible. In the middle you want to balance new growth with starting to monetize. At the end, you don’t need any new growth, it’s all about catering to an existing audience and maximizing opportunities to monetize (within reason - not at the expense of losing trust with your loyal fans).

💪 On Health —

A Beginner’s Guide to Intermittent Fasting: After some unwanted lockdown-related weight gain, I’m excited to get my health back in check over the coming months. One of my key tools for doing this is intermittent fasting, where you restrict your eating time to only a certain portion of the day vs the traditional model of eating 3 square meals plus snacks. For those of you who are interested in learning about intermittent fasting (or IF as its known), this video by Dr. Jason Fung is a great place to start.

🙏 On Happiness —

After a crazy week at work (, I found myself returning to this quote from buddhist teacher Pema Chodron quote to remind me that uncertainty is okay and that we can relax in the midst of chaos:

“The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs.
To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.”
-- Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart

🙏 Thank you again for reading and for your support! I wish you a week of happiness, success and peace!

With gratitude,

Avthar

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