I connected with Visa on twitter, where he’s made many friends over the past several years. I wanted to interview Visa to talk about his leap to self-employment over the past couple of years, but we talked about so much more. We talk about:

  • What the word “nourish” means to him
  • His evolution on procrastination and getting started
  • How to find like-hearted humans on twitter
  • The “asshole problem”
  • The curious humans of twitter
  • How he creates his own work

Thinking On Twitter

Visa has gained a reputation on twitter for being someone that’s building a transparent “second brain” (h/t Tiago Forte), sharing whatever he finds with his followers.  

He says he does this mostly to keep track of what he’s learning and finding, but it also seems to be something that many people find value from.

I asked him for his most overrated thread:

…and his most underrated thread:

His tips for getting started on Twitter

Many people worry about attracting attention of influential people. Instead, he suggests you just focus on building genuine connection. Here are the five steps he recommends for anyone that wants to dive in:

  1. Don’t follow institutions – if its interesting, people will retweet it
  2. Don’t follow people that won’t reply (+3,000 followers): 
  3. Follow people with max of 1,000-ish followers
  4. Have conversations with people
  5. Make friends with their friends

Taking the leap to self-employment

I love his own tips on self-employment. The following tweet summarizes how he’s thought about his own leap (he say’s he us currently on step 4!)

He thinks people should be bolder in creating their own work and using your curiosity as a guide

you can do unpaid work for yourself. I suggest do anything you find interesting

He gives the example of a mean girls essay he wrote that (Power & Social Dynamics In Mean Girls) got a lot of attention from people that were “above his pay grade:

The trap some people fall into is they think they need to do what they think other people will be interested in…that;s like guesswork…and your guesswork is probably off by some degree that you don’t realize.

I love that model. Check out the episode and let me know what you think!

33k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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