Jargogled Impressions.

Turn your work and yourself into a product because products create leverage and generate creative freedom for growth. We seldom think of ourselves as products and reserve the term for either physical (consumer goods) or abstract (software) things that help solve a problem for us. As workers, we are products too. If we can figure out the problem we are to solve in this world during our lifetime. We know products create leverage and generate wealth. The shining examples of modern-day entrepreneurs, artists, businessmen are testament to the power of leverage that written code, media, and arbitrage. A product solves a specific problem and goes on a journey to locate this fit with the market. Likewise, our learning and experiences create specific knowledge to solve specific problems.

Focus on compounding your learning while creating leverage. Together, they can act as powerful arsenal you build around you to put in motion your very own flywheel of personal growth. A number of successful businesses have surfaced from channeling the internal organizational learning into products (AWS, Stripe, Slack, Twilio). So the ability to learn constantly is a vital prerequisite towards turning your work into a product.

The right approach for compounding your learning in the professional world is through internalizing it in the form of a tangible output that you can go back to. It could be a blog post, a video, a tweet thread, or a recorded audio. If you think minutely about your day to day efforts, you can uncover insights and themes that build up as your days progress.

Building the product of your work takes time but is subject to laws of compounding. Turning yourself into a product requires three things: the ability to document the details behind your life in a disciplined way, the capability to find a medium that works for you and spending dedicated time to exploit it, and a belief in the notion that your thoughts and experiences have value, to someone, in this vast planet.

Document

Find time to document what you see around you and find interesting. Do it daily without regard to the completeness, novelty, and likability. At the end of your day, pick the pieces that you think people will resonate with, and publish it. Day in and day out. You would be surprised how quickly a habit builds upon itself.

The most dangerous of habits are those that you don’t realize you are developing. Over a period of a few years, this practice of documentation and sharing can reap enormous benefits and help shape your thinking before you realize it. Socrates said, an unexamined life isn’t worth living. There’s a ring of truth in that because if we power through our days without consideration towards learning from it, or dwelling on the moments, then those days become a deathbed of thoughts and perspectives.

Share it

Share what you are working on. Be open and vulnerable about your thoughts and your actions – it’s what makes you relatable and honest. Don’t worry about the medium, focus on the message. Your audience will find you if you stay true to the intent of sharing your learning journey. Remember, you are writing for yourself and deceiving yourself with abstraction and obfuscation will really be detrimental to your own goals.

Why is it important for you to share your thoughts? In addition to making yourself accountable, sharing your perspectives helps clarify it for yourself. Often, we learn more when we describe something to a friend in a language she can understand. This requires a careful evaluation of the building blocks of your thoughts, a first-principles approach to creating a narrative around it, and then using your best explainer-mode, describing it so it makes sense. That’s basically how you build a product that you hope to sell to your customers.

Believe in it

It’s important to believe in the importance of your ideas and thoughts. No idea is new. In a world with billions of people, every idea will have a precedent and an antecedent. So it’s not really novelty or a radical new hypothesis that you must be uncovering. It’s the applicability of these ideas in your life, in the work that you do, in the ways in which you have interpreted it, are the ones that you should be interested in.

The ‘lone genius’ theory of creativity is fallacious. Creativity is, effectively, a social construct and often involves a sort of scenius, or an active community of thinkers and creative sorts who feed on each other’s ideas and create a flourishing ecosystem of artists and artisans.

Know that every one of us is an amateur. Life is too short for anything else as Charlie Chaplin said. So go out there and share your thoughts and your perspectives.

Stay real

But exposing the workings of your inner mind makes it an aquarium of your stray thoughts and limitations. If you start pretending you lose the focus and the goals of your effort. It’s easy to slip through the good parts of social media and descend rapidly into the gaping hole that these platforms often keep handy.

Turning yourself into a product is a journey. It’s a subtle process through which you grow while learning constantly and leveraging your journey to build a portfolio that stands true to your ambitions. It’s easy to get lost in the race for popularity and second-hand success. And that’s why most people end up either shirking with sharing their journeys or channel their efforts dishonestly. The best strategy is to constantly evaluate what you produce through parameters you have set for yourself.

Paul Graham puts it perfectly in ‘How to write usefully’: “Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn’t already know and tells them as unequivocally as possible. Become useful in your quest to turning your work into a product.

The fun part is, that if you enjoy the process you will stay for the long haul. And true fun begins when the output of your efforts build up over the years to morph into a persona you can really look up to.