YouSaid · the spoken record

Sam Corcos

lines on the record: 220
first: 2023-09-20
most recent: 2023-09-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I see. Yeah, just lower your perceived risk. One of the reasons why people often fail to delegate as well is they make a lot of assumptions about how much effort is going to go into it. It's like, oh man, well, I'm going to have to like write a whole process doc and then just reduce your assumptions and just say, all right, what is the simplest thing you can do? Do all of the work that you were going to do anyway exactly the same as you were going to do it and just turn on Lume and record it.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The biggest one is using Loom and just doing workflow recordings. I've worked with a lot of people to help them get better at delegating. And the thing that I really emphasize is figure out how to reduce your perceived risk of doing this thing. Just lower the threshold for how much work you think you need to put into it. That's another one of the things.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of them are very specific to the way that we operate, which is async week is a good example of video and audio only for an entire week because we have to force people into that. So you can get comfortable with it. Other things around just cultural assimilation and setting clear expectations, that might be something that is universally important. I think another one that's probably underinvested in, at least for remote companies, is setting aside real committed time to talking to all the people that you will likely work with. Having a 30-minute interaction with somebody when you're in a remote company early on has a huge impact on your ability to work with that person later on. It just lowers the barrier for, hey, I need your help with something versus I don't know who this person is and I don't know what they're going to think about me. And so we really try to make that a priority within onboarding as well. And that's probably universal for”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The moment that anything is published in the company, you write a memo, it is already rotting. It is already going to be out of date. And so the concept of entropy is it is always increasing. And so the only way to keep entropy at bay is you have to add more energy into the system. So you have to create reinforcement mechanisms for any piece of content that you have. If you have a database of all your memos, you have to check them every once in a while to make sure they're up to date. You need to create more energy always has to go in in order to keep things fresh and functional.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“See if people catch it. There's always something out of date. There are maybe 50 items in this, and sometimes we deprecate an old memo and replace it with a new one. Or there's some new piece of information that came about that people add in. This ties into one of the concepts that I bring up a lot in the company is organizational entropy, which is any artifact that you produce immediately starts rotting the moment that you have created it.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. Probably. That's true. And over time, people get used to it over the course of about a month. I think the biggest thing is The cultural assimilation. In our case, has been the biggest hurdle over the course of onboarding is getting people reading the memos, practicing some of the things. One of the cultural values that we have is everything's written in pencil, but also you can change things here. And one of the things that we do is at the end of onboarding, everybody is required to update the onboarding process for something that was out of date and then post to a channel confirming what they changed and just giving a list of what they changed. And it's pretty weird for people, especially those who come from larger companies. Like when they've had the same onboarding process that the companies had for 20 years, and then they go in the actual files and edit it themselves, I'm a new employee. Who am I?”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really take onboarding seriously. Our onboarding process is a full month, and we don't expect people to start producing for a month. It really does take that long for a lot of people to get fully up to speed. And we help guide them in more slowly. Read these books, read this documentation that we have about how we built our culture, especially for our case, because the way that we operate is very different than a lot of people's previous experiences. And so it's pretty jarring when you see a lot of the transparency of when your first one-on-one gets published to the rest of the company, it's pretty jarring. And so we try to ease people into these things.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a video of me at the start of each week. It's a loom where I specifically say, hey At this point, people usually want to skip onboarding and start jumping into their tasks. Don't do that. It's always a mistake.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They want to jump into it immediately. And we have an onboarding checklist in Notion. We have a template. We copy it for each new person that joins. And they have a set of tasks that they do each day. It's pretty well guided. I can share the template with you if you're curious”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is another one of the tactical things, which is semi-automation, where there are a lot of things that you can do where people are often afraid to give access to somebody like They'll say, I propose you respond with this message, or I propose that you respond with this message. And over time, you get better and better at teaching them. You can just ignore that one. Just delete it. Or you say, oh, yeah, I actually know this person from this other place, which you can find in this other category of information. And I tend to respond with something like this. And over time, they get better to the point where I'm probably at like 95% of the messages. I just say, yes. It's very, very simple. But I don't trust them enough for them to 100% fully automate all responses to things, but their proposed recommendations are generally good enough now to where I just say yes to most things.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sobriety. So I don't have social apps. I have profiles on a lot of them. I used to have a problem with Twitter. And so I created some buffer, which is I don't have access to my own Twitter account. My EAs have access to my Twitter account. They have my password. If I want to post something, I send it to them and then they post it. And then I don't get that dopamine feedback loop of, oh my God, X number of people liked my post. Because also they don't care. There's no ego attachment from them on how well my post did. And so they will look at my notifications empirically and just say, hey, this might be something that you want to respond to. And they'll screenshot it and they'll send it to me and they'll say, hey, do you want to respond? All of my DMs on Twitter are managed by my EAs. All of my LinkedIn messages are managed by my EAs.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's always you know who's Kim Kardashian dating now? I have no idea and I really don't care. It's like what place in the world had this thing happen? I don't know. If it was important, it'll eventually end up in a book that I will read. But it is exceedingly rare that an event happens that makes any difference to my day-to-day experience.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it is one of the coups of the news industry broadly that they've managed to convince people that watching the news is what responsible citizens do in much the same way that the orange juice lobby convinced people that orange juice is healthy because it has vitamin C. Even though it's really almost indistinguishable from a can of soda, it's just they've convinced us that this is what responsible people do. They read the news. And it's really trash information. I'm usually extremely bad at trivia night, which surprises a lot of people because I read a lot of books. But the reality is that my retort is that I just don't know trivial things. So I'm bad at trivia.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like, wow, I would have been in the same frenzy if I was paying attention. And it really doesn't matter. Almost none of these things are important.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That really frightened me about the state of the media and convinced me this was originally just a one month experiment. I said for a month, I'm going to consume no current events in any form, no news, no television, no articles, no social media. And instead, I'm just going to try a one-to-one replacement of reading books during that time period. I read eight books that month, which was more than I probably read in the previous five years. Everything about my life was better. I physically felt different. I felt less anxious during the day. And it was interesting when you have that separation for long enough. And I have friends who are panicked about something that they heard. And I would find myself asking, but does that matter?”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You feel like you have to compulsively check Slack because it's like, oh, is there a new piece of information that I want to check? And there's a lot of data on this. Rescue time did a study that I think most tech workers can't go more than six minutes without checking their communication tool. And a lot of that is because of Slack. And they're just constantly checking. Like you're trying to write code, but they have this compulsive need to just check. Oh, there's new information.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you do it in threads, but it wouldn't be in loom specifically. You do it in emails, or we ended up building our own internal communications tool because we're really not happy with Slack. Slack, it's a slot machine. It is the opposite of what you want in a workplace communication tool.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And oftentimes when you're just getting started with somebody, they'll propose how they're going to go about it. And it's completely wrong. And that's okay. You say, okay, that's good to know. This is how I want you to do it. And going forward for these kinds of tasks, I want you to do it over here. And then they repeat it back to you and you say, great, that's right.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and specifically, Athena was started by Jonathan from Thumbtack, and his whole thing is 10X delegation. So they have a whole internal training program to try to make them be more proactive as opposed to hiring somebody who's completely fresh and you have to teach them all of these things. So this is the trade-off of time. You can train somebody up and it would be less expensive, but it requires more overhead at the beginning. I think the nature of how you train them and how you set these expectations, one of the best ones, this is another tactic, is the playback, which is you set a task and you say, repeat back to me, and this is almost always done in a loom, repeat back to me how you will do this task.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, however, different companies have different definitions of attach rate. But yeah, it's like the ability to work adequately with an EA. And so I think one of the most important things is setting super clear expectations early, setting good process really helps as well. Something that we look for is proactivity. Somebody who goes out of their way to reduce your workload instead of somebody who creates work for you.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Onboarding is super important. People put a lot of time into recruiting. They'll put 50, $100,000 into hiring somebody. And then as soon as they start, they just throw them into the deep end and hope for the best. And so having really good onboarding is super important to that attack. Able to work effectively.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's I really only play complex strategy games, so they tend to be the Euro style games. It tends to be games that if they come recommended from somebody who I know is a very serious board gamer, then I know it'll be good. I'm playing Twilight Imperium on Sunday, which is like a full day long board game.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I'm just relentlessly novelty seeking. I really struggle to do any task more than just a handful of times. I play a lot of board games. I can usually only play a game maybe five or ten times before I figure out the strategy. And then it's boring. It's just like a mastery thing of, okay, well, I already know how to win most of the time and now it's just how do I get slightly better?”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And they tend to be things that are done consistently over time. You really don't want a chief of staff to be stuck. I would describe it more like a gardening role. Chief of staff should not be the person who's doing a lot of the stuff that you're doing that's just sort of keeping the lights on. They should be somebody that you can trust to take on more meaty projects. In general, they tend not to be happy if they're in the role where they're stuck doing simple things like preparing meeting notes beforehand. That tends to be something that you would have somebody who's able to do that on a more routine basis. This was one of the learnings that I had working with Lori, that old saying different strokes for different folks. And working with Lori for as long as I have, my worst nightmare is being stuck wrapping Christmas presents all day.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's this spectrum of declarative and imperative of what you would expect from somebody. And so declarative being go write a growth strategy. And imperative is here are the tasks that I need you to do consistently over some time period. And there's a spectrum between those two. And a chief of staff is somebody where you say, we have this problem, go solve it. Where an EA tends to be somebody where it's more consistent tasks, like scheduling is a common one, which I actually don't really do. I use calendly. I think that's something that you can just offload to technology. But it's those sorts of things where it's more, I don't necessarily want to say routine, but that might be a better term for it is things that happen consistently”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the biggest challenges that often happens overseas is the time zone difference. The interesting thing about the Philippines specifically is that there's such a large contingent of people who work for U.S. companies that there's effectively a subculture of people who just live like America time zone hours. So that tends to be less of an issue or at a minimum there's significant overlap in lifestyle. I would say that it really depends a lot on what the tasks are that you need. And this actually does, I think, tie into the chief of staff question, which is”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have this concept of an EA pool Where it's just available EA talent for whoever needs a specific task done. Over time, they become more and more dedicated as a specific person needs more consistent resourcing or as context becomes more relevant. We recently shifted one of our EAs to full-time on product support, who was in the EA pool, but we just have enough tasks now in product that it makes sense to have a single person with dedicated context on that. So I don't know the specific numbers. I would guess we probably have 15 dedicated and maybe five in the general pool at this point.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Upwork is a place where people My friend Nick is involved with them. They tend to be more like $5 an hour, but it requires a lot more overhead. So they don't have their own management team. It's really you and them figuring it out as opposed to having more of a structure around it.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are several ways you can go about sourcing. I've always found the best way to do it, so to work with an agency. We work with Athena. They're an agency out of the Philippines. They're really the Higher end of agencies and they cost more. And so it really depends on how much you value that. Other options would be you can source them directly, which tend to be cheaper. I think Athena's $15, $20 an hour typically. And you can find talent for $5 an hour if you source it yourself.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I personally have four right now that just work for me doing my task. I think we have maybe 20 in the whole company.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes not even. It's just doing it, they can just see what you're doing. Okay, well, he went to this place, he went to that place. Almost everybody that does this is surprised at how quickly somebody can match whatever pattern it is that you're doing. There's a lot less secret knowledge than people expect.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's true for most apps. For multimedia, he was saying, well, how are they going to know what five items from this interview are the most interesting? How are they going to know that? And then how are they going to know to edit and cut those in this particular way? And then it turns out you record yourself doing that two or three times and then an EA can replicate that with 90% accuracy.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are so many good examples. So, one of the specific tactical things that I always recommend for people for getting better at delegating is just workflow recording. And this is really as simple as when you sit at your computer, turn on a loom. And then that's it. Just do your normal work. And a specific example was Tony, who runs multimedia for us. He was doing a lot of video editing. Josh, who does our Friday forums as well, they do this whole process of video editing, of creating the slides. And almost everybody in their own role says nobody else could do this. It's way too complicated. You have to pull from here. You got to pull from there. And I think almost everybody overestimates the complexity of these tasks. It's really just pattern matching. And if you record your workflow doing that”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of work, did that get sent last week? You can go there, you can see that it is, and it's just reassuring to not have to reach out to them and make sure. The other is whenever there's a bug in the process where this happens often, somebody gets a message like, that's weird, because why would they get that? You can look at the process and you can say, oh, because they pulled the information from here and they didn't know that it was actually communicating with them over here. So they thought it was one of these kinds. And so you can just say, hey, I saw that you did this. Not a big deal. But next time, check both of these sources and see which one's most recent. And then they update the process and you don't have those issues as opposed to just ambiguously having it fail and not knowing why.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Somebody did this task. You can go to that specific task page and you can see, oh, they did it April 26th. They did it March 3rd. And you can see each time they did it and you can click on the recording, you can just watch them do it. And this is most useful for one, it's just knowing that it's there. If you say, hey, did that get sent?”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But I will say on the other side, which is the searchability for the recording of tasks, this is what we use Notion databases for. So our EAs, every process that they do for somebody on our team has its own dedicated page in Notion. And that page has a linked database to a much larger database, which is all tasks that any EA has done for us. You can connect those two together. There's something called a relation, and you can relate those together, and you can create a subview within that. So imagine you have a task that's a recurring task, task A. At the bottom, you can create a linked database that filters only for tasks that are related to that. And so in each of those entries, the EA will include a link to the Loom of the date that they did the thing. And so if you want to see when's the last time?”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Transcript, exactly. Yeah, and so there will be a point in the future where you can say, hey, can you find me that video that I did with this specific person where we talked about this? And it'll definitely be able to find it. So I think some of that will just be solved.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the things I would say is that I probably record, in fact, I know this to say, I probably averaged about 10 to 20 looms per day, I record. And to be perfectly honest, I maybe share half of them. A lot of them, I just turn it on because maybe I'll want to use that information. It is costless to record a loom. And so if nothing happens, then nothing happens. It costs nothing. It costs me nothing to record it. It costs me nothing to not share it. The searchability, it has not been an issue for at least the looms that I record because they tend not to be things that I would share. This tend not to be things that I would come back to. They're more in the moment things. I would be willing to bet, though, that over the course of the next maybe six to 12 months, that as these AI tools continue to get better, search is the most obvious use case for this.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that's definitely the case. There is no perfect medium. The medium matters depending on the message that you're trying to communicate. Long form memos should be in writing because you're going to skip over, you're going to find the parts that are relevant. Writing is a tool for thought. And doing these audio notes is a different tool to convey different types of information. And so I think the short answer is you should use the right tool for the job. A lot of people find that what they use Loom for would be instead of sitting down at a blank piece of paper, they just record themselves with whatever thoughts they have for what will go into it, they send that to their EA, which maybe today would be chat GPT, but they send it to their EA who outline.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it might only be on mobile, but you can do an audio note on Loom Mobile. And yeah, it's really, really uncomfortable for people. This is why the forcing function was we had to make this part of onboarding because it was so strange for almost everybody.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So just relax, it's fine. A lot of my looms, I have multiple minutes in a row of pausing of just thinking, what would I do here? And then in people's mind, it's like, oh my God, this is so uncomfortable. I'm on a recording. And there's this empty space. What are they going to be thinking? But if you're in a meeting, that would be totally normal. And so one of the things that we do during our onboarding, I believe it's now week three of our one month onboarding for new employees is the entire week, third week, is async week, where you are only allowed to do verbal and video recordings for communication. You're not allowed to write anything. You're not allowed to type anything. If you want to say, hey, great job. You have to record an audio note and you have to send that or you have to do a loom of yourself saying, hey, that was good work. Thank you. And then that's it. And just get used to that.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think one of the things with Loom, part of the assumption is that one of the rules that we really try to push people for is only ever do one take. Just do one take because so many people, when they start using it as a tool, they stumble and say, oh man, I have to re-record it. And they'll do eight takes for something that really did not need to be. And so we really try to push people towards if you are in a meeting and you stumbled over your words, nobody would care. And they also don't care that you did it in a loop.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every meeting obviously has some intent. And I think it's important where a lot of people fail is they lose the intent of the meeting. We even explicitly state this at the beginning of our Friday forums, which is this is the place where we celebrate the wins of that week. The first few minutes are highlights of the week. Then we have usually a special guest, which is oftentimes one of our members from the company who's had some really positive experience using our product. Then we do highlights from maybe the growth team, maybe highlights from the product team. So the goal is to have people feeling really good about the things that were accomplished during that week.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so many people show up live so they don't watch the recording. So that's fine. And then some people watch it after the fact. We also have a number of all of our memos. We also use notion pretty religiously. Once you learn how to use the Notion database features, they're actually extremely powerful in the amount of leverage you can get from it. All of our memos have a summary loom at the top. Any sort of meaningful memo. And so somebody will do a five minute walkthrough of something that they wrote and many people just watch those looms. So that's another thing where people can share”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The loom that was shared was one of our Friday forums. It was a Friday forum. Oh, sorry, that's our team All Hands. We do it every week on Fridays.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who's just doing his normal workflow recording on a loom, and he's just narrating what he's thinking while he's doing it. And then the other person can watch it at 2.5x. They can pause it. They can rewind. They can take notes. You don't have to do this live. It's a piece of content. And then every engineer at your company forever into the future can see the same piece of content. And so there was a really interesting example recently where I shared something with somebody externally and they were commenting on like, this is a failure because only 40 people watch this. And I said, this was an internal meeting. Could you imagine like if we had an internal meeting with 40 people in it, you would say like that was a lot of information being transmitted. But there's this cognitive thing of like, well, if it's a piece of content, it needs to get like a million views or it's a failure.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally. And what's interesting about using the sort of tool is that anything that is in the form of content scales effectively infinitely in a way that in-person time or phone calls do not, content scales, time does not. It's pretty simple calculation. But what's interesting is there's a mental shift that needs to happen for people where it reminds me of in the early days of radio, you maybe know some of the history of this, the first radio programs were just theater plays read out loud on the radio because they didn't know what to do with this new medium. It made no sense. And then eventually they figured out instead of copying our old ways, we can create new patterns that amplify this even more. And I think this is where we are with a lot of these remote work tools. Whereas in the past, pair programming was two people sit behind each other and you watch each other code and you talk and you're doing it at the same time or you have a really good programmer.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Loom is probably The most important business enablement tool of the last five years, certainly in my experience, it's a very simple tool, which is a low friction way to record your screen and in some sort of an async message. You have a picture of yourself. You can record your screen. And it is really easy to record a loom.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly Exactly. And like those things can become like chronic problems for months, even years in some cases. And recording them at a minimum. If you end up getting to the end of the conversation and you say, hey, can we not share this conversation? Because I feel like I need to talk to person X about some of the things that I said here before they see this. At a minimum, it's a forcing function for that. So it's really helpful to just create those reinforcement mechanisms.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you don't get a good answer, that's a problem. And they have enough from at least what I've read in the book, enough antibodies in their organization to prevent that from becoming commonplace. The nice thing about recordings is that it is the forcing function. That one-on-one, unless you say otherwise, is going to be shared with the team. And many times the EAs will tag people who are related in the conversation. And you'll get to see gossip is what I would maybe describe as chronic inflammation of an organization. And it turns chronic inflammation into acute inflammation, which is, hey, what the hell? I heard what you said in this meeting. What was that about? And you say, wow, you're right. I'm sorry.”
2023-09-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #694: Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT