#097: Power of An Original Story, Generative Music Optimization, Practical Guide to Growing on Twitter

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

This week, we will take a look at the rise of an incredible indie horror film, the ideal workflow for creating generative music, a practical guide to growing on Twitter, and more.

Let's dive in:

Practical Guide to Growing on Twitter

​@jia_seed recently shared their guide to growing from 0 to 10k followers on Twitter in 8 months. There are a lot of guides out there, but reading through this and starting to personally engage and grow on Twitter more, I can vouch for this working.

Before going into the tweets, why even build on Twitter in the first place? Jia says:

"one thing at face value is that twitter is full of opportunities and other types of serendipity my personal reasoning for growing on here is that i’m young, hungry, and not part of the inner network.

i go to a non-target school so i knew i had go build connections in silicon valley myself so yeah i did that, raised angel here got offers and clients etc"

1) professional serendipity 2) not part of 'inner network' or 'target schools'

If you're looking for a place to start in increasing your surface area for opportunities, here are a few of the main insights pulled from Jia's thread:

The Power of an Original Story

One pop culture phenomena that has taken the internet (and my mind) by storm is the indie film set to release this October 3rd, Good Boy. The premise is as follows:

The original post sharing the film received over 550k likes and was viewed over 35 million times. To say that announcement was a success, is a vast understatement. I have personally never seen any film announcement from Discussing Film receive so much initial traction, but it totally makes sense why: the premise is genius.
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It's a trope that has been played out in many other horror films. The dog is almost always one of the first characters to realize something is wrong, yet there's never been a film solely dedicated to how they perceive the supernatural forces typically haunting their families.

The traction behind this tweet is only part of the incredible story in the making of this film. The director, Ben Leonberg, made short films for nearly 16 years before making Good Boy. Not only that, but Good Boy took three years and over 400 shooting days to capture the entire 72 minute movie, mostly due to him using his own untrained pet, Indy, as the main actor.

Good Boy is already a success. And I'm sure Leonberg's life will never be the same after its theatrical release. His persistence, vision, and dedication to the craft of filmmaking is something I greatly admire, and I hope to channel that in my own life. If there is anything to be learned by the reaction of the public to even the premise of the film, it's that the power of a good story remains undefeated.

If you'd like to learn more about the production process of the film, this excellent Reddit thread contains a sit-down interview with Leonberg where he discusses the film at length.

Generative Music Production Optimization

Inside of me are two wolves: one content simply listening to and enjoying music, and another that pursues a side quest as a reggaetonero. I'll be the first to admit I have limited to no background in music. The only thing I can play is the piano piece 'Sebastian's Theme' from La La Land.

But now, there's a way to pursue this musical itch as a fun outlet for creativity.

​Pietr Levels used to be a Drum & Bass producer before getting into startups, and now he has nearly cracked the code at a generative music production workflow. He began by prompting ChatGPT with the following, "I wanna make a PERC techno style drum and bass song, make ai prompt for it and write the lyrics separate". This was a prompt specifically built for Suno 4.5, and the result was something that blew Pietr away.

Most creative fields have been met with resistance to AI, but music doesn't see the same backlash. In fact, AI covers of pop songs are typically filled with comments supporting the fact they have 'more music' to listen to of their favorite artists.

But with this new tool making music creation so readily accessible to the masses, where does this leave musicians? Levels has a few predictions in that realm I find interesting:

Chris Do's 10 Rules to Personal Branding

​Chris Do is an Emmy award-winning designer, director, and entrepreneur who founded The Futur. He is also the author of one of my favorite books on how to make a living is a creative, called Pocket Full of Do.

Do recently shared a video titled "I Grew From 0 to 5M Followers, My 10 Personal Branding Rules", and @tibo_maker graciously made a graphic that covered the 10 points in a succinct, detailed manner. Here are the rules in a listed format to give you an idea:

You're Not Dumb, You Just Lack the Prerequisites

August 19th was the one year anniversary of one of Justin Skycak's favorite blog posts from 2024, a piece called "You're Not Dumb, You Just Lack the Prerequisites" by @lelouchdaily. It encapsulates the ethos of Math Academy, where progression is dictated by mastery-based learning, and pre reqs are essential for building ultimate subject fluency.

The read time on the article is just a minute, so here it is below in its entirety:

We all have knowledge gaps. Not just in math, but for any subject we are looking to learn. Going alongside what appears to be the emerging theme of this week, I loved the movie analogy. You must start somewhere and build the base before expecting anything substantial to come of it.

​Justin Skycak shared a review from @ijfen that touched upon another great analogy, "You have more ingredients available to you at the grocery store than anyone in history, but you can only cook with what's in your house. You can't be creative, synthesize things, make connections, without the requisite knowledge."

Keeping this in mind along with other learning science principles, Skycak and @ifjen expand on this by calling for more spaced repetition testing. This is more useful than straight notes, and may be the best way to truly deepen neural pathways.

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