A little February experimentation
Back when I was in the classroom, I tried to do something different every single day. To mix things up, push my teaching skills. That approach is an attitude: a way of approaching life that is creative, experimental, and full of curiosity. “What if I rearranged the classroom this way?” or “What if we re-enacted this bit of History?”
Although my working life is very different these days, this month I’m going to try and rekindle that spirit by committing to 20 experiments. Over the course of February, I’m planning to do something each working day which based on a prompt from Dave Gray from School of the Possible back in mid-December last year:
“Here’s your exercise for the week: Make a button. Create a possibility that wasn’t there before. Make it possible for buyers to choose you. Create a new choice, an option that wasn’t available before.
What should you offer? For this exercise, it doesn’t really matter that much. A promise you can keep. Something you can deliver. It can be as simple as an hour of your time on a Zoom call.
How much should you charge? Again, for this exercise, that doesn’t really matter either. When you are learning to draw you’re going to make a lot of bad drawings at first. Learning to be a writer means writing a lot, and first drafts are often terrible. But doing bad work is a necessary step on the journey to doing good work.
The point of this exercise is to practice the art of creating an offer. If you haven’t done it before, it might be a bad offer. Keep it simple. Start small. An offer is a promise, made in advance, that if someone pays you X, you will deliver Y. So if you’re just starting on this journey, make promises that you are confident that you can keep.
The button puts your promise out in the world. It gives your family, friends, fans and followers a way to show that they like you, that they appreciate your work. When somebody clicks that button you won’t just get a payment. You will get a feeling that you are appreciated, a confidence boost, a signal that you are valued, that you matter, that your work matters.”
So I’m not going to paywall or gatekeep anything that currently exists. The idea is to add value, not get people to pay to receive existing value. That being said, allowing people to support my work is a good idea, and probably where I’ll start today.
I’ve got a bunch of ideas of things I could focus on, but if you’ve got any ideas, I’m all ears!
Experiment 1 (3rd Feb) — configuring Stripe, creating holographic stickers, and re-enabling subscribers to become supporters of Thought Shrapnel.
Experiment 2 (4th Feb) — redesigning the Dynamic Skillset website (still a bit of work to do on colours) and integrating Stripe with Google Calendar to allow clients to book paid consultations.
Experiment 3 (5th Feb) — inspired by a comment from Doug Walters, I added a ‘Buy me a coffee’ option powered by Ko-fi on my menu page.
Experiment 4 (6th Feb) — worked with Laura to create a WAO merch store featuring five images created by Visual Thinkery for us over the years.
Experiment 5 (7th Feb) — created a LeanPub page for an e-book I’d like to write entitled The Essential Elements of Digital Credentials. Potential readers can indicate how much they would pay.
Experiment 6 (11th Feb) — used Open Collective to create the option for organisations to sponsor WAO’s AI Literacies work via ailiteracy.fyi.
Experiment 7 (11th Feb) — set up the ability to request and pay for a Critical Friend sessions on my Ko-fi page.
Experiment 8 (12th Feb) — published a concise ebook about Systems Thinking based on the blog posts I wrote during the first year of my MSc.
Experiment 9 (13th Feb) — added a distinct membership tier called the Holographic Sticker Crew on my Ko-fi page.
Experiment 10 (14th Feb) — acted on feedback from first Critical Friend client to increase price and provide ‘add-ons’ for price differentiation.
Experiment 11 (17th Feb) — published an ebook with 52 weekly prompts about living according to the tenets of Stoicism.
Experiment 12 (18th Feb) — created Feedback Fellowship, a private Signal group for direct, thoughtful feedback on subscribers’ work and ideas.
Experiment 13 (19th Feb) — recorded a how-to video on how to configure LLMs locally and made it pay-what-you-want via my Ko-fi page.
Experiment 14 (20th Feb) — created a downloadable print of a quotation from Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord.
Experiment 15 (21st Feb) — inspired by Jim Groom’s video conference background, I used lovable.dev to create Album Shelf.
Image: Nikolett Emmert