Digital Commute No. 21
Your Tuesday dose of knowledge, wisdom, and inspiration.
Welcome to Tuesday. It’s a great week to read and reflect.
Knowledge
Multi-SKU Creators: Yesterday’s knowledge section talked about scalable professions, which are abundant if you’re a creator on the internet. Today, Hunter Walk published a essay about diversified scaling for online professionals. He calls this persona the “Multi-SKU creator” — a digital renaissance man with eggs in many baskets (SKU = stock keeping unit; slang for ‘unique product’). This comes in response to a lot of buzz around Substack, Gumroad, and other creator verticals as legitimate income streams. The argument is that yes, they’re extremely legitimate, but those who succeed in scaling their profession virtually will have a variety of unique products, not just one. The product isn’t the newsletter or the online course, it’s the creator — and he can have many SKUs:
There could be a podcast SKU. A speaking fee SKU. A book deal SKU. A consulting SKU. A guest columnist SKU. And so on. And if he does several of these over the next few years, it won’t be about the success or failure of Substack (for him) but a mix of creative, economic and lifestyle goals.
Wisdom
Colliding Catastrophes: No civilization is immune to catastrophe. The Roman Empire’s fall wasn’t cause by a single event, or even series of events, but by colliding catastrophes. When the tectonic plates of history shift, there are two arenas of causation: underlying causes and immediate causes. During the Crisis of the Third Century, an empire was brought to its knees by the convergence of foreign border wars, domestic rebellions, political instability, military decay, plague, currency losing value, and a generally poor economy. These are underlying causes. The immediate cause, or trigger, was the assassination of the emperor by mutiny in 235 BCE. When unifying forces like government suddenly unravel in the face of structural instability, catastrophes can collide and empires can fall.
Inspiration
Tour de France: Some of the greatest traditions begin in unexpected ways. The Tour de France was the byproduct of a feud between two rival sports papers in France. In order to recover from a looming cash crunch, one paper, L’Auto, came up with a scheme to create additional revenue: a three-week bike race across the entire country. Despite running on the front page as “the greatest cycling trial in the entire world,” only a handful of participants entered. In a last-ditch effort to increase participation, they raised the prize and offered to cover expenses of the first 50 riders to enter. It worked. By taking that risk, the first Tour de France happened, inspiring the nation and eventually the whole world. Meanwhile, L’Auto 32x’d its circulation over the following three decades, crushing its rival. Lesson? Your side project may have more value than you think.
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Notes
There’s a lot of disagreement about what causes the Roman empire to ‘fall,’ and if and when it really did. One interesting (and timely) perspective comes from Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. It shows that pandemic viruses aren’t anything new.
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