I blame you guys for this. You keep encouraging me.
I make a terrifying video on YouTube, and you say, hey Jake. That’s an awesome video. Just don’t say it sucks, ok?. Say it’s awesome and the next video will be even more awesome.
Which truly, I appreciate. The encouragement and feedback really matters when you do all this stuff alone, by yourself, feeling slightly unnerved about being judged by all of the Internet. All you get is scrolling numbers and graphs and charts. Not nearly as confidence inspiring as a comment or e-mail. Thanks for those!
I get e-mails none to infrequently where you tell me to fu&# grammar and spelling, and just write however I want. I feel overwhelmed sometimes, by the positive feedback.
Hard to believe, right?
There. That made me smile.
And truth be told, sooner or later you run into a little unedited Jakeness. I care about presentation and grammar. I don’t want the e-mails to look hacked together by some Nigerian banker who needs your help with his inherited accounts.
But I’m just one guy. Even outsourcing things takes up an inordinate amount of time. Finding quality people. Explaining scope of work. Sending documents, getting documents, reviewing drafts, paying them, giving them feedback. There’s no shortcut to anything.
But anyway. Hippie free-time Jake on Quora. That’s the topic of today’s post.
Here’s the thing. I get a million case specific questions in e-mail, every single day. It’s impossible to answer them all. My rule to deal with this issue is simple:
I will write and explain things if more than one person benefits from my time.
That way it’s most fair to everyone who is waiting for insights (and my limited time). I could be writing a blog post or making a video, or helping out in the forum (which not only has the generous paid support of students, but also serves as alway growing archive of all my comments).
I get mile long e-mails with prescription histories and questions, every single day. Dozens of them. And you know, I can’t blame people.
The other day a smart guy told me to get on Quora. It’s some sort of platform for questions and answers. Popular, he tells me. He used it, some time back, and amassed a following many thousands of followers and an astonishing amount of views on his answers to questions posed there. He says, if I answer questions there, then not only one person will benefit from the answer. It’s an archive, much like the endmyopia forum. It’s worth putting a few minutes in, every day.
So there it is. I’ll be giving Quora a shot, see how well that works out.
I’ll still be limiting my answers to questions that are relevant to others. So still no commentary on “hey what exact normalized do I need, here is my last 10 years of prescription history”. That’s reserved for the endmyopia forum, where those questions happen mostly just if you’re stumped even after the detailed sessions to teach you how to determine those numbers.
Speaking of forum, check this out:
The forum is where it’s at, if you’re super serious about improving your eyesight, and want to find like minded people. It’s like getting a personal trainer at the gym, or a heart rate monitor for your workouts, or an accountant for your taxes. No sales pitch, but what I personally would go do if I was about to sort out my own myopia.
But if you don’t have an invite for the forum and yet want eyesight related answers, feel free to stop over on the endmyopia Quora. That adds to the current list of external sites including @endmyopia Twitter, my personal, semi-secret Instagram (don’t go there and follow unless you’re not offended by ladyboy pictures and general deviance), and also the purposely neglected Facebook page.
Housekeeping: Contemplating a closed Facebook group for students (perhaps separately also one for non-students and anyone who wants to). If you want to be in a Facebook students group, discuss progress, share ideas, friend me on my Facebook and I’ll let you know if/when that happens.
Cheers,
-Jake
