🌲 NFT Survival Tip #16: Experiment A Lot

you ain't experimenting, you ain't trying.

gm.

today, I’m launching the NFT Survival Guide. it’ll eventually be a website and hopefully one day soon…a book.

for now, it’ll be the Friday edition of the newsletter.

so far, I’ve compiled #16 survival tips for NFTs…you’ll be reading my work in progress for #16 today. I hope you like it.

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as I’m sure you know, the intro to NFTs can be daunting. everyone wants to make money from them, but that’s far from a slam dunk proposition.

if you want to do that, my advice would be to go literally trade *anything* else.

but if you think long-term, staying in the NFT space will undoubtedly pay dividends…whether it’s professionally, socially, or yes, even financially. NFTs and Web3 are the future, and it’s a war of attrition.

you don’t *have* to make money right now…you just want to survive and outlast everyone else. and I’ll be teaching you how to do that (to the best of my abilities).

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I’m currently reading James Altucher’s Skip The Line.

skipping the line is something that people in the NFT are familiar with at this point (even if you don’t know it).

basically, it means you bypass the day-to-day grind. instead of starting low on the totem pole and working your way up…you jump ahead…you “skip the line”.

this implies that you work *less*…that much is true. but it actually follows the “work smarter, not harder” ethos that you hear a lot in Web2. it’s not a new concept, and in fact, it’s a superior one.

Web3 has shown us that skipping the line is a whole lot easier than we thought.

since the space is still so *new* (relatively), there are numerous paths that allow you to skip the line. just ask ‘director of vibes’ who tweeted their way to a job. or someone who started a lot of Twitter spaces and now has a Web3 media company. or someone who taught themselves Solidity before everyone else. NFTs are *full* of line-skippers.

so how do you do it?

James Altucher says it’s rather simple…instead of putting in 10K hours, try 10K experiments.

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let’s be honest.

no one really knows what they’re doing around these parts. founders to holders topdown seem to be in over their heads, at this point. the communities are arguing amongst each other and everyone thinks they are right. founders are floundering to keep up with the ever-changing landscape while constantly adjusting their roadmaps.

so who is doing it correctly? right now? no one.

and that’s fine.

that’s because if you haven’t noticed, the NFT market isn’t so hot right now. so in actuality, it’s the *best* time to experiment and try things that don’t work. you have very little to lose but everything to gain.

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000 hour rule. in his book Outliers, he used the Beatles as one of the many examples of people who nearly perfected their craft through working at it - over and over again.

and 10K seems to be the magic number.

but what Skip The Lines supposes is that maybe you don’t need 10K *hours* to become a master of your craft…what if you instead just need 10K *experiments*?

by taking as many bites of the apple as possible, you learn what works, what doesn’t, and what can be improved on. to mix analogies, if go up to bat swinging enough times, eventually, you’ll knock it out of the park.

for my newsletter, experimenting would be trying new formats, trying different times of day to send it out, trying new platforms, and trying to write in different styles.

(unbeknownst to you, I’ve experimented with a lot of different ways to grow this newsletter. unfortunately, I still have a lot of experiments to *still* try out.)

skipping the line doens’t mean the sucesss will come overnight. but *trying* something different everyday is the best route to that quick comeup.

there is no excuse not to try everything, at this point. do you have a thesis about NFTs? start throwing stuff at a wall and see what sticks.

like Thomas Edison, you’ll find hundreds of ways to *not* make a lightbulb. if you find that *one* way though? it could change everything for you.

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