Stoa Digest #124: ➕ Do More ➕
Surpass your limits, bit by bit, every day.
Hello Stoans, it’s another Tuesday, and this is hitting your inbox at 7.30 pm. I trust you had a lovely Diwali, and some of you are likely still recovering from your celebrations before you prop open your Slack and mark yourself active again. I know I only did until 10 AM this morning.
A few times I get asked questions by fellows, mostly early on in the program. The questions range from, “What should I focus on to clear the Stoa Charter?” or “Can I still clear the program despite X? (Where X is some limitation) or “What do I need to focus on to clear the program?”
Usually, I have a placated & optimised cookie-cutter answer for questions like these, but the truth is, the answers lie with the person asking the question.
I was reading about optimisation and Goodhart’s Law today, and how they can sometimes disillusion and prevent us from making actual progress towards our goals, small or big.
A good measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure.
Why? Because we’re target optimised monkies. We need to measure the milliliter to determine the value. And eventually, we gamify all of it. (Take a shot if you’ve tried to optimise your bunking in college so you’d still meet the cut-off attendance mark)
Metrics work against you. Showing up just isn’t enough.
Spend hours at a gym, but how much time are you working out?
Spend hours in the office, but how much have you really gotten done?
Spend hours sitting in a class, but how much have you really learned?
You can mark your trackers, and you can show up every day, but without intentional effort, achievements can feel farcical.
Can you, for yourself, say you have become better at something than you were before?
Eventually, you have to live with yourself.
Constraints are perpetual. Variables exist.
Will you still do the thing, and do it right for yourself?
Read:
~ Shelton, Team Stoa
Back in 2020 when the first lockdown was imposed, this 17-year-old from Kolkata bagged his first gig through a cold outreach of building a website for a housing startup and started his journey of becoming a diligent and curious marketer.
Meet Sanskar Jaiswal from C9, currently a Marketing Manager at Plum and a digital marketing coach at Digital Scholar.
(check out his very first interview as a trainer and talking about his early career start)
Sanskar made the most out of lockdown and invested a lot in learning digital marketing and exploring various automation tools. To test out his proficiency and to help people understand tools, he started teaching people in his hometown.
99 rupees is what he used to charge for a session of Optimising your LinkedIn profile. With this 99 rupees fee, he taught more than 1500 people when he was just in his second year of college.
When I asked him why 99, he said “Delivery cost including ads and email campaigns was 89 and I used to take 10 rupees just for myself.”
Damn, right?
Not only then, throughout his Stoa journey and after becoming a Charter holder, Sanskar has helped so many Stoans understand productivity tools, knowing the right tools for their work automation, and so on.
2 things that I personally takeaway from every conversation with him are-
Create Impact; it is what he has always wanted to create and what he chases (clearly).
Keep Learning. Reinvest in yourself.
He recently transitioned from a B2C to a B2B role through pure dedication towards learning and exploring and of course, knowing when to seek help from this large network that he has built here at Stoa.
If you are struggling to know what to use Notion for or what more can you do with Google Sheets and so many other tools to make your life and work simpler, Sanskar is your go-to Stoan. Hit him up and geek out about tools all day long!
🔥 Community Sneak Peak 🔥
A super interesting Fireside Chat is incoming with Gaurav Jain, Head of Content at RedBull and ex-Disney Hotstar. Tune in on the 22nd of November, Wednesday from 9 PM onwards to join the discussion! 🔥
⏯ For Stoans by Stoans ⏯
The little things matter more.
Hasta la vista, fam!