We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
Marshall McLuhan
If you're reading this, I'm pretty sure that you at least have heard of Kevin Kelly's essay/theory: "1000 True Fans".
It states that to be a successful creator you don't need millions of customers, clients or fans.
To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.
Kevin Kelly
What is a true fan?
Someone who pitches your work to the people around them while also buying everything you create.
You've had this experience, right?
Like that time you recommended your favorite band, book or service? You went all in!
You talked about how the band dealt with their struggles, or how the book will change anyone's take on X! You were willing to spend hours showing everyone the reasons why that specific band/book/project is amazing.
Well, I'm about to share with you a story.
A story about the change I'm seeking to bring, and the tool that is allowing me to do it.
Questions are, indeed, the answer.
When I co-founded my first company, we had a training program designed to teach coaching basics to leaders and managers. From all of the different modules, the one on questions always had a great impact, both on students and on us.
I love questions because I've experienced firsthand the power they have.
The wrong question can break you.
The right question can change your life.
Have you noticed how many things are the byproduct of these questions?
What if...?
Why not...?
Can I...?
They lead to answers.
Answers lead to actions.
Actions lead to results.
The results end up creating more questions and the cycle keeps going.
Well, in mid 2018, I had a question.
I was invited to do some public speaking in schools. The teachers wanted me to talk about decision making and motivation, so I did. I gave talks in a lot of high schools, talking to hundreds of students. While doing it, I started noticing a pattern.
I would start my talk with a request.
I ask you to raise your arm if you have no idea what course you want to follow in college.
I would ask this and just stand there, in these auditoriums with dozens, sometimes hundreds of students with their arms raised. Some of them giggling, some of them panicking.
This happened a lot, in different schools, different ages and different locations.
As a result, a question started to develop in my mind:
If our young students have no idea what they want to do and who they want to become, what will the future look like?
I didn't like the answer.
In 2019 I started to think seriously about how could I solve this problem. However, my "main gig" was the corporate training, so I kept doing it. That was, of course, until Portugal went on its first lockdown due to Covid-19.
Suddenly, while adjusting everything to this new reality, I had a lot of free time. And with that I could dedicate more brainpower to my question. Finally, after a couple of weeks on lockdown, I decided to wake up really early and just write every single thought I had about this.
I woke up at 6am that day, opened a Notion Page on my computer and started writing.
3 hours later I had a 30+ page document and, most importantly, a decision:
I was going to make change happen.
This was almost a year ago.
Since then I've started to build What Drives Youth, a developing startup that aims to be a digital school helping high school students to develop soft and meta skills through online and skill-based learning.
Eventually, I left my first company to dedicate myself full time to WDY and we were able to get some funding from a portuguese program.
We started social media, created some content and even released our first mini-course on YouTube.
However, we always had a problem.
A problem regarding knowledge.
Systematizing Knowledge and Approach
The first time I started to think about systems was after seeing this talk by Patrick Bet-David.
I'm a fan of his work and I remember that this one idea got stuck in my mind for a long time.
The less a company needs you, the more valuable it is.
That was a problem.
At WDY, I was the only one who had experience creating courses and learning activities. And even though I might be young and healthy, I'm not a fan of taking for granted my own results.
I started to research systems in education and online learning.
Eventually, I stumbled upon this podcast by David Perell and Tiago Forte (2 knowledge workers) talking about the future of education, where they discussed a lot of things, systems included. However, there was a quote by Tiago that really struck a chord in me.
I only start a project when I'm already 80% done.
This was brilliant.
Basically Tiago spends time collecting different pieces of content and information. That way, when he starts a new project, he already has a lot of research done, allowing him to focus on creating the missing 20%.
Immediately I saw 2 personal takeaway points from this idea:
I don't need to rely on inspiration to create new content [something I already knew while building seminars but never thought about when it came to writing].
If I can coach my team to think this way, then they'll have the approach they need to create courses as well.
Most people think you must be an expert in order to teach something, but here's the thing: I don't buy it (and neither does Austin Kleon: in his book "Show Your Work" he dedicates the first chapter addressing this issue, naming it: "You don't have to be a genius").
We associate the word "expert" to a PhD. And, in a way, we're correct. However, most people don't want complex knowledge, with specific terms and papers. They want the change that learning can create. And to give them that, you don't need a PhD, you need to be a good researcher, a great communicator and a passionate learner.
I've attended a sheer amount of courses in soft and meta skills. However, in my 1st training in Emotional Intelligence, back in 2017, I was just a kid trying to figure things out.
I just read everything I could get my hands on. Lots and lots of research and digesting.
I compiled everything and built upon that. I was doing a course on Neuro-linguistic Programming, but that was it. However not one single person asked me about my credentials! They didn't care about them because they understood that the strategies I was sharing could bring change.
All of this made clear one key action that I needed to do in order to increase our own value: sharing my process on researching and building content [videos, workshops and full courses].
So I tried to built a system that could do this.
And I kept trying, and trying, and trying...
And I got nowhere.
I mean, nowhere is an exaggeration. The team was starting to understand how they could do this, but it was not systematic, organized... It was messy and I couldn't handle it.
But serendipity happened.
I saw that Tiago Forte liked a tweet by this guy called Serj Hunt.
In this tweet Serj described part of the approach to his new product, Edu Creator OS. I read Serj's thread on Twitter and realized I might have found a solution to my problem.
Edu Creator OS
Based on Notion, Edu Creator is a Business Operating System and guidebook for content creators. It was developed by Serj and Theo and it is a gold mine.
Notion differentiates itself from other note-taking apps by promoting full integration on their platform. There's not much that you can't do in a Notion page. I've been a fan for years and everyone on my team uses it now, precisely because it allows you to get anything you need in one spot.
Serj doubled down on this idea and created an Operating System that allows you to produce content and run your business using Notion!
By itself, this is an amazing hook for anyone trying to build a knowledge-based business. But I think its merits go way beyond that. As I mentioned, my hardest challenge was to create a framework that allowed anyone in the team to produce content as I did.
Edu Creator solved this problem using 2 features:
The Content Journey
Amazing Customizable Templates
The Content Journey
Every piece of content that you consume online that is integrated in EduCreator undergoes a journey.
Integration of content divides it into 4 areas: Intake, Digest, Resources and Projects.
I'm going to share with you how we use it at WDY.
It all starts with Intake, capturing content.
Every time you read a book, watch a video/podcast, and recognize some piece of information that you think will be valuable, you collect it to Notion.
Before Edu Creator, each of us consumed and organized content in different ways/places. Now things have changed.
Everyone has access to every single piece of information that's being captured by the team. Now, if I'm building a course, not only do I have access to all the content I'm digesting and consuming, but also to the pieces of information that both Marta and Kevin are capturing and processing!
This means that we have increased by a lot the amount of information and possible content that we can use as inspiration for our projects! All this by using just one product.
The second part in the content journey is Digesting/Processing this information.
Only when you're able to digest the content and turn it into something personal can you actually create something unique that can be used.
You start by taking some personal notes, then create something with them: How does that quote apply to your audience? In what context does that strategy can be used? These are some questions that we ask ourselves in WDY in order to create something rather than just copying it.
Once you've done it, you have a collection of original WDY thoughts, strategies and ideas that can be used by anyone to create better content. These can serve as articles/newsletters or as foundations to bigger projects such as workshops or modules in online courses.
By the way, since all content can be accessed by everyone, different people watching the same piece of content will result in different notes, strategies or ideas!
Now, to some pieces of content that's the end of the journey. They'll be used, as I mentioned, as foundations to projects. But how about those pieces of information that culminate in a specific strategy or framework that can be used by our customers?
Those continue to the third phase: Teaching Resources.
This is where you transform your content into something actionable and shareable. These are the PDFs, presentations or designs that will either be part of your workbook or used as a resource in a course.
The final phase of the Content Journey is Projects, all the pieces of content that we share at WDY. This means our weekly Instagram posts, daily stories, podcasts, videos, workshops, e-books, freebies and, of course, our future courses.
But the thing that makes me weep tears of joy is that you can create connections between every single piece of content using Notion. A giant network of content and ideas, all tied together.
And with that huge bank of knowledge, the only thing you need to create a course is a framework.
And that's exactly what you find in the Templates area.
Templates
Always look for structures. Don't look at the idea itself, look for the foundations that allowed it to grow.
That's a quote from a notebook I used while doing some mentorship with a great trainer. It's also an idea that started to shape my life a long time ago: Don't look at the content but at the structure that supports it.
It took me a while to connect the dots but finding a structure is the same as finding a System. That's why having things like templates can increase your productivity by 10-fold. A template is a system to create something. And Edu Creator has a lot of them.
Creating a video? Template.
Creating a workshop? Template.
Creating a course? Template.
Creating a newsletter? Template.
Creating a blog post? Template.
Creating a persona? Template.
I mean, everywhere you look you have a template for what you need to build!
And the best part of all is that they're customizable!
There are some of them we found "too complete". There were others where we needed to add some things, but that's the beauty of it. You can!
With that working as a base, all I had to do was to create this small wiki with some principles that I've learned in years of corporate training and education and then, the team was all set.
With the templates and the principles, they are ready to start creating some more in-depth content at WDY. That allows us to duplicate the speed in which we build courses, consolidating our position in this market.
And that's a clear win for us.
Stick around to see change happening.
It's only been a couple of days since we started to implement Edu Creator at What Drives Youth. Normally, I would be very skeptical if I saw someone being this enthusiastic about any product at all. But looking at the speed at which Edu Creator became part of our routine at WDY, the amount of information that we were able to produce, the possibilities that I see as a Leader to my team… I can’t help to be really optimistic about what we're building and what Edu Creator is allowing us to do.
If you want to know more about the product, you can check this link. They even give you a free template!
As to What Drives Youth, if you are into portuguese, you can follow us here and here. If not, the best way to keep track of what we are doing is to follow this newsletter. Besides my writings, I'll drop some info on how things are going.
See you soon,
João