Maximize surface serendipity

Give me four minutes to show you:

🎨 The formula for luck
🎤 Watch me redesign Khe Hy's podcast cover art
📣 29 hand-picked fonts for YouTube Thumbnails
💻 Learn the essentials of web design

”People who maximize serendipity balance the humility of not knowing where their next big break will come from with the arrogance of knowing that it will come from somewhere.“ —David Perell

Since the beginning of my solo creator journey this quote seeps into my mind weekly.

In the last week I wrapped up 28 (a quick preview in the header image) illustrations for Jesse Anderson's upcoming book on ADHD, Extra Focus.

It’s been an ongoing project for the past few months, taking much longer than I thought.

I met Jesse two years ago during a weekly newsletter group I co-hosted.

We were both pushing on different doors to discover our interests until he ended up pushing a door wide open.

I wasn’t drawing a lot back then, but I was falling in love with exploring the edges of my creativity, and putting it in front of people.

Jason Roberts writes, “When you pour energy into a passion, you develop an expertise and an expertise of any kind is valuable. But quite often that value can actually be magnified by the number people who are made aware of it. The reason is that when people become aware of your expertise, some percentage of them will take action to capture that value, but quite often it will be in a way you would never have predicted. Maybe they’ll want to hire you, or partner with you, or invest in you, or who knows what. But in whatever way it happens, it will be serendipitous.”​

Jason goes on to state the equation for maximizing your Surface Luck Area:

Luck = Doing * Telling

Pursuing my curiosity in drawing led to opening doors I never could have predicated.

First, I started to draw my own illustrations for my blog, which led me to draw for my newsletter, then co-launched Drawing For Writers with my friend Salman, leading to Jesse reaching out a few months ago, along with two other recent oportunities to illustrate covers.

I don’t plan to drop everything I’m doing and become a book illustrator, or let up my focus in other areas. But I could never have imagined this serendipitous opportunity would present itself a couple of years ago, when I was focused on siloing my interests inside of my career.

Keep pushing on those doors, then keep telling people about the doors you’re pushing on.

​And then, get on the waitlist for this book.

🎨 Better Design Decisions

​Learn the design process behind designing podcast covers: Khe Hy (Founder RadReads) and I are redesigning his new podcast cover art on Thursday, Aug 24. LIVE. You'll learn how to approach your own design process, how to choose fonts, colors, and make professional design decisions in your own work. Register here. It's free to join.​

​A visual note-taking tool to learn complex topics: A new visual note taking tool that lets you map out connections between your content.

​Learn the fundamentals of web design in four minutes: A fun step-by-step way to turn text into a simply formatted web page.

📸 Make It Yours Moment

I'm still working on the final piece to my landing page series, so next week I'll show how to design a landing page for a $1,000 product or service offering.

​See you next Sunday!

​

Your friend in design,

Nate