I Started a Podcast
Articles’ purpose
I hate ‘adding’ things to articles that are not purely content. I believe friction is extremely dangerous when trying to deliver a message. There’s a point in which the message you want to transmit is clearly defined, concise and feels harmonic throughout its components. Anything that would distance the write-up from its desired state can only damage the message.
This the reason for which I try to avoid at all cost including things that are not part of the article, like announcements, personal things or advertisements. Articles need to be as clean as possible so that what you read is the closest possible to what I try to transmit. Not out of vanity I try to make this the case.
I enjoy reading all kinds of things, from literature to papers, but I understand that not everyone has the time nor the desire to engage in multiple hours of daily reading. So my task here is to be able to gather all this meaningless, if isolated, information and try to construct a 700-800 words piece.
Such piece should be about a main idea that tries to ‘summarize’ and inter-relate all interpreted concepts from the reading. Around this main idea, I insert the most alike and closest little ideas, with their own argumentation, to further enhance and facilitate the message transmission. However, I realized something.
Lost value
Only writing each article takes one hour and a half or two, and I say ‘only writing’ because there are dozens of hours read backing each of them. In the process of putting the article together, I have to filter knowledge, concepts and information. More importantly, most articles do not reveal how and why did I end up selecting those sentences.
In conclusion, I write for two hours, which has an input of dozens of hours, and produce an output of a 5-7 minutes read. Then I thought, isn’t there any value in the things I choose to omit?
My answer was immediate, there is.
Solution: Spotify Podcast
I noticed that what filled the gaps between the input and output was my thinking process. This implied there was an incongruency in my method. If the mission of this newsletter is for all of us to learn how to think, to be better suited for making financial decisions, why am I not showing my own thinking process?
To address this, I started a podcast. The objective and ‘desired state’ of the podcast is for it to be a space in which I can think aloud because it is through thinking how I get to ideas discussed in these articles. I believe there is a lot of value that can be created through this. More so given I’m not the most knowledgeable person out there nor have things worked out. This means I’m building my thinking process alongside you.
Spotify link: From 0 to 1 in the Stock Market, Podcast
Apple Podcast link: From 0 to 1 in the Stock Market, Podcast
Warning and roadmap
Thinking is hard, harder than it seems like and, unfortunately, I’m not a natural speaker. It will definitely be a challenge to get to the desired state, but I’ll try my best to do so. The podcast’s roadmap is the following:
Reading articles aloud
Reading articles and commenting on them
Reading articles, commenting and pilot testing
Desired state
I will be going through the articles I wrote in chronological order. At first, I’ll publish daily (or try to) until I catch up with the ones I’m currently writing. After that, the intention is to publish once per week, as this newsletter.
Personal Commentary
Not only I hate add-ons that alter the message, but also articles that damage the essence of the newsletter. Again, difficult but necessary thing to share, as if I didn’t, you wouldn’t magically get to the podcast and may be losing value in the process. I know not all of you will read this through, so I’ll occasionally remind you of the podcast’s existence. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the article, it was very interesting to think all of this through.
One more thing, earnings season has started. I’ll be trying to write single articles on the ERs of Tesla, Asml, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Google, Visa, Mercado Libre and Zoetis. That’s the aim at least, difficult but will try to get it done.