Growth // Codex Newsletter

A Weekly Digest Dedicated To Helping You

Produce // Promote // Profit

Better // Smarter

 

Welcome back Rogue,

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been exploring current events with the lens of  “who benefits from this ignorance?”

Specifically, when it comes to people who love to build, create, and work towards improving our quality of life.

From the Wall Street Bets crowd rallying $GME and $AMC to the hedge funds hitting back with a phony ploy to squeeze Silver, we posed the question, and what we found is that for years, Wall Street has often referred to the retail trader, as dumb money.

Which in a nutshell, takes advantage of the average trader not having immediate access to the same information BUT What many have learned is that the hype behind a stock is as important as the hard facts – with the right momentum even a dud stock can make you money, so long as you have the ability to incite emotions that build confidence.

We then got a funny look at Mark Zuckerberg who logged onto Clubhouse, innocent enough?

Ehhhh we’ve seen that he has a pattern…

Zuck said Fcuk it I’ll just do my own recon

The countdown to the FB copy begins pic.twitter.com/pLZR1SjE8o

— Katriel € Sarfati // 🔮 (@ksarkat_) February 5, 2021

What does this have to do with builders?

Well, the thing is that how we do anything, is how we do everything. And as more and more of us set off on leveraging our skills and magic – we ought to keep in mind that a pound of practice, is worth a ton of theory. The old models that we originally set out to fight against are slowly eroding, leaving you, the creative misfit with growing opportunities to carpe articulum (seize the moment)

But with all this noise happening, there’s one little problem, who gets the credit?

For years, the popular story goes that Samuel Morse was having this heated debate on electromagnetism while having dinner with friends when he was struck with a thought.

If an electrical signal could travel instantly across a wire, why couldn’t information do the same?

BRILLIANT! Yes?

Nope, it’s just a story. A polished lie that has been repeated enough to be accepted as fact.

The truth is, it would be Joseph Henry, not Morse, who discovered that coiling wire would strengthen electromagnetic induction (the production of an electromotive force).

The telegraph came from a collective of findings // advancements by Edward Davy, Carl August von Steinhiel, William Fothergill Cooke, Charles Wheatstone, and Morse. Their findings being so nearly identical that the British Supreme Court refused to issue any of them a patent. So who gets the credit?

As brilliant as the others were, they didn’t take skills such as sales, feedback loops, or even marketing seriously, their hard work would be the shoulders for Morse to stand on So, who benefited from their ignorance?

Why Morse of course

Let’s channel this into improving how // what we

Produce

Pro Tip: “Dreams come in a size too big so that we may grow into them.” — Josie Bisse

As we kick-off this week’s Issue of Growth // Codex exploring improving what // why we produce (create), we’re touching on something that plagues many a creator… the want // need for support in our endeavors. But things don’t always go as planned

https://twitter.com/nerdgonerogue_/status/1357417980720795648?s=21

Which is why running with this kind of energy is beneficial (and necessary)

In law school, RBG’s male classmates nicknamed her “Bitch.”

Decades later when she found out about it, she responded, “Better bitch than mouse.”

For all of us who have been called a bitch, take those words to heart:

“BETTER BITCH THAN MOUSE.” 👏🏼

— Sonia Baschez (@SoniaBaschez) September 19, 2020

Usually, we’d dig into a little bit of product development but this time let’s explore it from a 360-degree scope. Let’s start with you, the builder.

Some of the top things we hear people building complain about include

• Not having enough support
• Those of us with ADHD expressing not fully being to focus
• Goals taking forever to reach
• Struggling with product // market fit

By now, you’ve probably seen countless gewrus tout things like smart goals (a theory from the 1990s) – but look, the reality is, we don’t always hit our to-do lists perfectly.

So let’s approach with reality in mind

Let’s explore how applying a concept known as open goals can benefit you all around (and you can start today)

In a nutshell, with open goals you get to choose what feels right – goals aren’t always exciting – so why not experiment with different approaches and explore what can keep you going

For many years we’ve used and heard the wisdom of being concise with goals, like for example “by this date we have achieved this deliverable“, problem is specific goals are all-or-nothing: you either achieve the goal or you fail. Nothing is truly one size fits all.

So we caught up with Sarah Aviram, author of Remotivation: The Remote Worker’s Ultimate Guide to Life-Changing Fulfillment – where she shares her findings after fourteen years of HR expertise, an MBA, and experience working remotely from twelve different countries.

Here’s a sneak peek into our convo

GH: We’re all looking for ways to improve our everything, how did you know you were onto something with Remotivation?

Sarah Aviram: I would say that this particular review thrilled me (and made me tear up a bit): “I used to be in a full-time job that I didn’t particularly enjoy, but I stayed anyway because the job aligned with an earlier plan I had mapped out for myself and fit the objective standards of “success”. Aviram’s insights gave me the jolt I needed to help me realize that my visions for myself can change. That I can always and forever—AND WITH CREATIVITY—change the roadmap for my life.”

This is exactly what I wanted to achieve with this book. I wanted to help people stop the inertia of their unfulfilling career and life and build one with more freedom, authenticity, and intention. To get the message across that it’s never too late to reassess what you want in your life and take the steps toward making it happen. 

GH: Here at Haxx, we empower the Creative Misfit, the people corporate tends to overlook, and underestimate – while you spent years in corporate surroundings, it seems to speak way more to us, is that on purpose?

Sarah Aviram: I jokingly call myself a corporate HR leader gone rogue. I’m saying everything now to individuals that I couldn’t say in the corporate world when I had to balance being the voice of the company with being the voice of the employee. I have no alternative agenda now and that feels great.

GH: AHHH, free at last! Can’t say we blame you. Now that you’re on the other side of things, what are you seeing? Is there anything you’re excited about in particular?

Sarah Aviram: The trend of remote work and distributed teams was growing quickly even before Covid-19 was on the map. But this global pandemic accelerated us by at least 10 years.

Creative misfits will have an opportunity to create more products and services that balance asynchronous communication and high-touch virtual collaboration. And they will be able to have these opportunities from anywhere in the world without needing to be located in the city of an organization’s main office.

So how do we go about testing out these open goals here?

We’ll share a real-life scenario – when we first started the Growth // Codex, our goals were very focused on timelines and things like links, a certain level of info, and making sure we incorporated as much info on a weekly basis

Problem is, the feedback came back that several subscribers were falling behind, we were packing the weekly issues with too much info – we might be illogically obsessed with empowering you, but we can definitely do better with how it’s delivered. So we thought, ok let’s revisit this.

So this month we’re testing out open goals like this

Our goal for January was:

• Welcome people who match our mission into the newsletter
• Have Codex with 3 sections written out delivered by Wednesday every week
• Incorporate 3 brands // people into the content that helps our audience
• Achieve 50%+ open rate on emails

For February, incorporating open goals has our month looking like this:

• Instead of 3 big sections every week, we break it into something that grows weekly, give it a flow so to speak, this gives our subscriber a chance to not only catch up but not be overwhelmed with too much to do on top of what they’re currently doing
• So this week we dig into improving how // what we produce
• Next week we dig into improving how // where we promote
• And the week after that improving how // what we profit
• Find and elevate those who embody the mantra of create don’t compete 
• Deliver something that the creative misfit can practice within 2-3 days of them reading an issue

Before we forget, here’s your insiders’ access to a talk our founder Katriel C Sarfati did on applying Growth Hacking to how // what you produce 

You can watch at your own pace 

Alright bitchachos, there’s much to do, off we go!

Next week we’ll explore how to improve how we

Promote

Pro Tip:

“Seek connection, not attention. It lasts longer.”
― Wesam Fawzi