Five After Hours Habits to Help You Build a Tiny Empire, Quietly
It’s Tim Denning from Medium and LinkedIn. Here is my most shared article this week:
In the tiny hours of darkness you can build something spectacular.
It just won’t feel that incredible when you start. It will feel like nothingness. That’s a good thing. I follow many creators on Twitter. I read their threads every day.
One idea stood out: each of them built their tiny empires after hours. None of them magically quit their job. They didn’t have a flashbang spark of an idea that turned into the next Facebook. They weren’t friends with Elon Musk. Jeff Bezos didn’t give them his best life advice while building evil robots that deliver packages disguised as bombs to your doorstep (for free, apparently).
Khe Hy is a tiny creator like me. He has about 14,000 Twitter followers. Before he quit his job at BlackRock he started writing a newsletter called RadReads. There are now 300 editions of that newsletter with a few thousand subscribers. It may not sound like a lot, but his audience is built on high-profile superfans like hedge fund managers. I often say that big is stupidly overrated. 100 people backing your work can change your life.
Khe doesn’t need to go back to a normal job again because he worked on his project after hours when nobody was watching. His success is the result of focusing on habits rather than goals.
If you fear failure, build silently. Privacy is underrated.
1. Produce overly simple content
A content creation habit isn’t about becoming a successful writer or going big time on Youtube. This habit is often full of confusion.
Content tells you the following:
- What you’re interested in
- What an audience cares about
- Where to focus your time
My ideas are fantasies. Half the time what I think is good, is actually trash talk. An empire is built on ideas. Validate and verify your thinking.
The best place to start with content is Twitter. It takes zero effort. I can write a one-sentence post in about 3 minutes — so can you. One sentence can become a headline. A headline can become the title of a list. A list can grow into a 1300 character LinkedIn post. A 1300 character post can grow into a blog post. A blog post can become a short video. A short video can become a 2-hour documentary. The roads paved by content are endless.
2. Daydream like Archimedes
It blew my mind when I learned that great thinkers, like Greek mathematician Archimedes, credited their key revelations to engaging in mundane activities such as driving, walking or bathing.
Taking a break can sometimes give you that big break.
Mundane tasks allow you to daydream. Daydreaming is a habit where your unrelated thoughts thread together to become an insight. You can’t effectively daydream while stuck in the typical grind. Daydreaming is best after you’ve emptied your mind and put your phone away.
You can daydream in the shower, while doing dishes or while staring out your favorite window. Tiny empires start with an insight.
3. Document a process end to end for fun
The things you know how to do is an underrated approach to build stuff.
I thought for years that writing on a WordPress blog was obvious. I thought LinkedIn was an obvious way to find customers for a product you haven’t built yet. Or a great place to network your way to a better job, or a boss who treats you right. I thought publishing eBooks was obvious.
Guess what? What you think is obvious probably isn’t. The best place to start is your day job. You complete actions/tasks every day at work. Other people want to know end to end how they can do them too.
When you share your process you accidentally teach. Teaching people is the foundation of many tiny empires. I built a school that teaches creators how to use social media. I used Workflowy to document my ideas. Then I dared think it was good enough to publish and offer to those who want to shorten the learning curve of social media.
Lesson: document the entire process. Cut out all the filler.(People don’t have time to learn a simple skill over 100 hours.)
4. Schedule new directions in your calendar
Habits are useless when they don’t appear in your calendar. Read that again.
A habit missing from your schedule is a fantasy. And boy have I had some wild habit fantasies! I think of after hours habits as new directions in life. When you schedule new directions you open yourself up to alternate paths.
I’m in the process of scheduling two new directions: networking and public speaking. My public speaking died when the pandemic struck, and so, my communication skills have gone back to zero. I literally get fearful standing up in front of my colleagues and sharing an idea, or doing a Q&A on writing.
I’m not flustered by the backwards progress. Why? When you get good at a skill and then it disappears, at least you know you can get it back again — you have proven progress from the past.
The second new direction is networking. The pandemic has made me a hermit crab. I rarely come out of my man cave inside my apartment by the train station. My social skills are now as good as Mr Bean. The new direction I’m taking is half a day per week put aside for face-to-face coffee catch-ups.
Insight: you need other people to build a tiny empire. So schedule time to meet new people and build fresh relationships.
5. Find your $20 habit
Money is validation. Money shows you your potential.
My $20 habit was selling an eBook. Your $20 habit might be selling cakes, getting a freelance client, ghostwriting one social media post, publishing a 60 minute course that costs $19.99, or doing a single coaching session.
When you make a few dollars from a new habit it validates in your mind that you’re not stupid — that you can build a tiny empire. A $20 habit gives you accountability, too. Someone in the world needs what you’ve learned and they’re willing to paying money for it.
You can’t *not* feel accountable. Nobody wants to let a stranger down that can go on social media and write about how bad their $20 experience was with your tiny empire. A habit with built-in accountability is easier.
Make this a mantra: People pay for simple.
How to Choose After Hours Habits
The easiest way to find after hours habits is to write out your ideal day. If your current employer offered to pay you for the next five years and didn’t want you to do any work, what would you be doing? Map it out.
On Monday morning you would…
At 5 pm you would…
If you had more time you would…
Then you experiment. Play with this list of habits after hours. Notice how you feel. See which habits produce results you’re proud of. Observe which habits give you energy, and which ones steal your energy.
Once you have your proven after hours habits, work on them. Schedule them in your calendar. Start doing them for less than an hour per day. Work on your after hours habits for long enough that they eventually take over more and more of your schedule.
After hours habits become the “main thing” to build your tiny empire once you have the confidence from having done the work consistently. This is how tiny empires are built that subtly change your life.
– Tim Denning
