Could you be approaching your social media accounts all wrong? Instead of being drowned in all the unnecessary noise on the internet, everyone could really benefit from sharing bite-sized wisdom. Stephen Jaye talks with Chris Huynh, the creator of “The Minute Wisdom,” who does an alternative approach in online content creation. He talks about how he builds a community of like-minded people focused on self-development and embracing a childlike curiosity, one inspiring quote at a time. Chris also emphasizes how social media should be seen as a platform for healthy and meaningful discussion. He explains the right time to block or mute people and why a huge number of followers doesn’t equate to one’s success.
—
Listen to the podcast here
The Minute Wisdom With Chris Huynh
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I’m Stephen Jaye AKA Action. In this show, I plan to share with you a series of stories about people who have taken on initiatives that are inspiring to me and hoping that they are inspiring to you as well. I bring in different guests, different types of people from different backgrounds that have all taken on some kind of initiative to improve their lives and the lives of the community around them. I plan to share with you a series of stories that could range from something along the lines of starting a business to something more like overcoming fear, starting community groups or even just getting into shape. My reason for starting this show is observing a lot of people out there struggling with different areas of their lives, trying different things, wanting something new, different and need the courage to go out and do it.
What I have discovered is that I have observed a lot of people with different challenges and desires. We all want different things but the one commonality to all of it is getting into the right mindset, believing that you are deserving of what you want, that you are capable of getting what you want and that you are going to go out and do it. That’s like, “I can, I should and I will,” type of thing. With that being said, I’m hoping these stories inspire you to take on whatever you want to take on to make your life as good as it possibly can. I have for you my first guest, Chris Huynh, who put together a Twitter account that has somewhat of a similar motivation called Minute Wisdom. Chris, welcome to the show.
Steve, thanks for having me on as your inaugural guest. I appreciate everything that you have done so far in creating this show, seeing it through to fruition and coming together as a guest. I’m glad to be a part of it. Thank you.
I’d rather have 100 followers who that are wanting to use my content and apply it to their daily lives than 500 passive followers.
I’m inspired by Minute Wisdom. What inspired you to start this Twitter account?
@TheMinuteWisdom is the Twitter handle. The biography of the handle is, “Wisdom you can apply in your daily lives in a minute or less.” It comes from modern-day philosophy that we have attention spans as long as microwave popcorn. I thought it was funny in the sense that we are all looking to improve professionally and personally or improve any other avenue of life but we want to do so in quick bite-sized pieces. During March time, when the world had gone down to hell and people were trying to figure out ways to cope with this new normal, the reality of being locked down and working from home, I thought, “What better way to take advantage of all this extra time that I had working from home and also the desire to have a creative outlet in the form of writing?”
I thought, “Twitter would be a great place to start.” Having experience with a personal Twitter account and knowing how that social media platform works, I thought, “Why not create an anonymous Twitter handle called @TheMinuteWisdom, share some of my thoughts that I have been having the last three months of this lockdown and at the beginning of the pandemic, and allow people to learn from my perspective on philosophy and personal development to add to the conversation?” That was the genesis of me starting that account.\
Who is your target audience with @TheMinuteWisdom?
My target audience would be people who are searching for bite-sized pieces of advice that they can apply immediately. Nothing where they have to think about or dwell on for days at a time and reflect on the road and you would have to go out to a cabin in the woods to meditate and reflect on but just things that are easily applicable to your daily life, regardless of what profession you do for a living. That’s the goal.
For my readers that start following Minute Wisdom, what does a typical post look like? What is the message being brought to the audience?
It has evolved since I started this account back in May 2020, when I had finally published and started writing. The message has evolved. You can expect 1 to 2 sentences of either a reflective thought that I have had during the day or during the past couple of days that I wanted to share, a quote from someone that I have respected or a quote that many people have quoted before but I add in my 1 or 2 cents of what I think this person was meaning when they said this quote originally.
What kind of quotes are they? Are they recent, people from a long time ago, distant past?
It’s a mixed bag. I have come to now incorporate more modern philosophers and thinkers. It doesn’t even need to be in the sense of a philosopher. I have recorded innovators, inventors, investors, people that have shared personal thoughts of theirs that I think are meaningful. Not only do I just post those quotes but I try to pepper in my own two cents to spark a conversation, which is the ultimate goal. I don’t want to just have people read something and then think, “That was nice to read.” I want them to get the reaction that, “This is easy that I can apply right now. These are my two cents. I have a question about this I want to add to the conversation.”
If someone is not in alignment with your goals, they will be a complication for you regardless of how good they are.
What kind of conversations are had on your Twitter channel?
Productive ones, at least so far, from my experience. I’ve got inspired by one of the Twitter accounts that I follow on my personal account, @LifeMathMoney. His account is based on the idea that you can improve 1% better every single day. He posts things that I don’t always agree with but in a general sense of personal development, I enjoy following his content. What I have enjoyed was how he has always allowed meaningful discussions on his posts. He will invite people to argue the counterargument to one of his controversial tweets. That’s what I have been inspired to produce for my own audiences is a platform where people can connect with like-minded people, add on to the conversation, challenge someone else or challenge my perceptions or opinions and it will allow me to learn. I try to foster meaningful discussions.
That’s interesting the idea of 1% better every day. Does that mean that if someone wakes up at 9:30 and they are too hungover to do anything that they have missed out on the opportunity to get 1% better on that particular day?
Personal development is not strict in the sense that, if you wasted a day because you spent the morning being hungover, I don’t think that means you are a bad person or you wasted a day to improve. I think you have learned something in that day of being hungover that, “This sucks. Being hungover has cost me 24 hours of productivity. There was a cost to this action that I chose. Was it worth it? Maybe, yes. Sometimes it is worth it.” Maybe you learned something during that night of partying that you wouldn’t have otherwise learned if you didn’t go. I don’t think it’s black and white. I don’t think personal development or self-development of any kind can be that strict.
You would be foolish to think that personal development is a prescription, where if you follow these rules or like baking where if you put 2 ounces of this and an ounce of that or 2 tablespoons of this and you are going to get the perfect cake, no. That’s the journey. That’s why the concept of 1% better every single day appeals to me and I believe my audience. It gives people the grace to be able to figure out what their own journey is in growing because everybody has a different definition of progress.
That’s something I have observed a lot following some of these different channels on different platforms with advice. I have noticed a lot of people give standard advice such as, “If you want to be successful, wake up at 4:30 every morning.” One thing I have realized just observing the people around me, the people who I want to inspire through this show, is that, “Different has no one formula.” As you said, different things work for different people. When you have these discussions, are people discussing your threads on Twitter? With these threads, are people sharing different types of wisdom like, “This worked for me. This didn’t work for me. This might work for this type of person,” or something like that?
Yes, exactly. They are very similar. I try to foster that type of discussion. With Twitter being a free democratized platform, anyone can come on to your tweet thread and pepper in their two cents. Sometimes it’s not productive. That’s when you, the author of that account, have to determine who you want to let into your circle and what types of conversations you want to allow the people to take part in. That’s the idea is people share their perspectives and experiences. Sometimes I will ask people what their favorite book they have read recently or I will retweet a thread that some bigger account has started asking people what their favorite personal development book is.
In that way, I get my audience to contribute to that person’s conversation as well. I can add value in that way. I feel like a lot of times, people feel like they have to come up with some original idea for it to be adopted and for them to be viewed as an influencer. It gets thrown around so much. I don’t think that should be the goal. I think your goal as someone who wants to add value to the world is, “If I can add value just simply by spreading this conversation to my audience and they can share their two cents and that grows, I did my job. I don’t have to be the one writing compelling novel tweets every two hours.”
That’s a good point because there’s a trap we all fall into where we honestly think that to be influential and successful, we have to always have the most original idea. I was listening to Spotify and the song called Sweet Sensation by Flo Rida came on, which pretty much took a lot of an old Marky Mark song. Whenever I hear something like that, I’m always realizing how much people build on ideas and get influenced by ideas from some other people. A lot of people do fall into this trap where they are like, “My idea isn’t 100% original enough. Therefore, I’m not going to pursue that.” What would you say to people feeling like that or even being told because there are a lot of influences in all of our lives, where people are telling you, “Your idea is not original enough. This market is too saturated. This is not going to work. It has already been done type of statement.”
You brought up a great point. This expands not just to a tweet but expensive businesses in general. You are right. People get into that trap where they tell themselves in their head, “I’m not original enough. Why would anyone buy into my idea or my product? Why would anyone be influenced by this when they could be influenced by someone else?” I tell those people, “Will Smith or any influential person that you admire, they are not going to capture the entire world with their views. There is a certain type of person that Tony Robbins can inspire that someone else can’t. Maybe Tony Hawk inspires that person.” I brought up Tony Hawk because he was at this leadership conference that I joined.
That’s the point. There’s space and room for everybody to contribute. If you think your idea is not worth pursuing but you are so passionate about it because you think that you can add some type of niche that builds onto that conversation or platform, you should pursue it. The best chance is when the market is saturated but you feel like you can contribute something new that others haven’t yet. Maybe that’s the route.
Even a great example of a place where people commonly say the market is saturated is gyms. It’s like, “There are so many different gyms. There’s your standard, regular gym, SoulCycle and everything like that. What could something new bring in?” Even if someone is coming into a market where there are already a lot of players, maybe you are reaching someone that wasn’t previously reached. I think of the story of CrossFit. I don’t remember the name of the inventor but the guy who invented CrossFit essentially said, “What if I just turn fitness into one gigantic competition where you are constantly being ranked and quite successful?” Whether you think that that’s the route you want to go with your fitness challenges, it is a quite successful gym and has reached a lot of people.
Gaining a follower is a byproduct of consistent contribution to other people’s writings.
Along with that note, CrossFit is a great example. Think about Peloton, too. Before COVID happened, people thought Peloton was just a stationary bike where people would end up hanging their clothes on. It would be a very expensive clothes rack, a $3,000 clothes rack. Look at where it is now. It’s a $45 billion company and has performed extremely well during the pandemic. We are past the peak of the lockdowns and it’s still doing well. They are exponentially growing. They have grown into different markets not just domestically but internationally now as well.
If you look back at it like, “How could Peloton ever compete with indoor gyms? Why would anyone ever want to ride a stationary bike in the comfort of their own home?” The inventor of that who is still running the company thought that, “I am going to capture an audience, a market, a customer that gyms have neglected,” which are the young Millennials that are working 12, 15, 16, 18 hours a day who don’t have the time or the motivation to leave their home, dress up, go to a gym, commute there and go back home. Whereas once they go back home from their consulting job or banking job and they are tired, they can go sit on this Peloton and ride it for 30 minutes to 1 hour in their home and they can hop into bed. That was the customer that he was designing this for. It ended up spreading like a wildfire. Now here we are.
Back to your Twitter account, a lot of people got a bad impression of Twitter from some of the stuff around the election. It has become the poster child for where people go to have nasty conversations, where people yell at each other for having different opinions. How have you managed to keep your discussion productive and positive? How have you managed to go about keeping it from derailing in that kind of direction?
It’s a combination of two things. First is curating my own content to make sure that I’m only getting content that I believe in and that I think is productive to my perspective. Not meaning that I’m surrounding myself on Twitter with just an echo chamber of people that think and see out the same things I do. It’s that the people that I follow promote healthy discussions, whether their argument or perspective is argumentative to mine or not. That starts there. It’s curating my content. I follow those people. I would hope that their audience is also in agreement with that philosophy as well, is that you can hold two conflicting thoughts and I don’t have to yell at you and say you are wrong. I try to make sure I follow people whose audiences would probably behave like that because there’s a good chance they would follow me as well as being part of that community.
Second is, as an author of a community group, an author of an account on an Instagram page or any type of content creation, you have the right to choose who you want to let into your circle. It’s perfectly acceptable to block people, mute people or do whatever you think is best for your audience to make sure that it promotes and is in alignment with your message because you are a brand. Especially if you are an anonymous account, the only thing you have going for you is your brand. Your brand is a culmination of the conversations, perceptions and opinions that you allowed under this handle. You have the right to block someone if at any point they say anything that is not conducive to the conversation, just flaming, trolling or outright disrespecting someone without any type of adding help to the conversation or adding value.
That’s a good message for anyone out there who wants to create some community, whether it be an in-person community or online community but might feel squirmish or worried about closing the doors to anyone. Whether it be blocking or disinviting someone to an event or something like that, that person is impacting your brand. The person comes on and sends something nasty or it’s an in-person event that you are holding. You’ve got the person that’s always going to throw shade on someone and not contributing something positive. In the end, that person is bringing your brand down with you.
A more productive way of doing that is setting boundaries right from the get-go, especially if you are doing an in-person event. If you are running a company and you are trying to hire someone to either be an engineer or any role, you would be hurting them, the candidate. If you didn’t tell them upfront what your company’s values are or what your mission statement is, if they are not in alignment with it, it doesn’t matter how good of an employee or their skills are. They are going to be a huge conflict in your company’s vision.
That applies to everything else. You have to set the boundaries for what you want to accept into your circle. If the person isn’t adding value or moving your brand in the direction that you want it to, you get to say, “Don’t step on the train,” at any point in time. They can do the same thing. As a consumer of content, you can choose who you want to follow. No one is telling you who to follow. That’s why I love Twitter so much. When you first create a blank account, you have zero people that are following you. That’s a blank canvas for you to paint over.
If you don’t like what someone is posting, you have every right to unfollow them. It’s like the whole idea of taking control over your life and the content that you are consuming. Another huge thing for mindset is, “What content are you consuming on a day-to-day basis? Are you watching the people that are constantly complaining about things? Are you hearing things on the men of wisdom, where it’s telling you like, ‘Here’s something you can do right here, right now to improve yourself?'” Have you had to block a lot of people on your account?
Off the top of my head, maybe a handful. I don’t think any more than a dozen. Fortunately, my audience is polite. They are too busy in their own lives to have time to spew out things that are hateful or not productive. I haven’t had the opportunity. My audience isn’t quite large enough to where I will have that issue quite yet. Maybe once I get to 5,000, 10,000 or 20,000 followers, I will have more of that issue frequently due to large numbers so far, I have not had an issue yet.
Tell us about your journey to getting your followers, where your following is at and the whole process of getting that community put together.
Long story short, I’m at around almost 1,500 followers. It was an interesting journey, to say the least, because when you first create an account, you are at zero followers and zero people that you are following. How do you go from 0 to 1? That first follower is always the strangest one to me because I’m wondering, “Why would anyone choose to follow an account that has zero followers?” That’s how it all starts. I don’t know if Twitter is planting people to follow new accounts. I believe in the concept of social proof in the sense that if you see someone else that has a following, you are more likely to follow that account. I don’t remember how I gained my first follower but after that first follower, I just kept on being consistent with what I was doing.
If you’re truly curious about something, and that curiosity is being filled by passion, you’re going to win 9 times out of 10.
From the get-go, when you are at zero followers, you don’t have a voice in your head that’s telling you to like, “This is what you should be posting. This is not what you should post,” because you have no concept of what’s good, what’s bad or what’s going to attract. You just write what you think is good. If you keep doing that over time, that’s the best and most genuine way of getting the followers that you want. It’s possible to earn lots of followers but out of those followers, you are going to get a lot of people that aren’t in alignment with your values like I said earlier.
Quality over quantity has been my mantra. I would rather have 100 followers that are wanting to use my content and apply it to their daily lives rather than 500 passive followers because that’s not how ideas get spread. Ideas don’t get spread by people that are passively following or doing things. It’s people that are reading but applying what they learned or going to conferences and listening and then applying it. You don’t want an audience of 30,000 listeners. You want an audience of maybe 100 people but out of 100, at least half of that room is willing to do something or at applying things.
That’s a whole different way of looking at social media because a lot of people measure any kind of social media based on how many followers they have, how many subscribers, whichever, just by pure number. As you said, not every follower is equal. There are the disruptors that you have to seem to minimize to only 6 or 12, although there are a lot of accounts that have plenty of those. There’s this middle ground of passive followers. They are there. Maybe they just scroll through and don’t even do anything, comment or buy. They just see it and move on. It looks like what you are looking for is a bit less of wanting to start a following and more of like wanting to put together a community of people that are committed to a cause.
Maybe even in a broader sense and it’s self-serving. It’s me being honest with my own thoughts, translating that into words and then translating that into 100 characters or less, which is what the Twitter character limit is. It’s broader than that. By being consistent with what I wanted to write and writing content that I thought was valuable to followers happened naturally. Gaining a follower is a byproduct of consistent contribution to other people’s writings. I want to highlight that part because again as I said, you don’t always have to tweet every single hour or post every single hour on Instagram or Facebook to gain acceptance or acknowledgment that your account exists. You can simply do so just by adding on and commenting on other people’s threads or retweeting.
The retweet button is the most powerful button on Twitter because you are spreading an idea with the hopes that it could go viral. The best ratio when you are looking to start a Twitter account or an Instagram account is retweeting other people’s content. Especially when you don’t have a huge following yet, people aren’t going to heed advice from a 30-follower account but they will if you start retweeting content from a million-follower account because they are like, “I like Tony Robbins and this guy is retweeting Tony Robbins. I want more condensed Tony Robbins’ thoughts,” so you will follow this guy. That’s how it starts. That’s how you build the following that way. You never want to recreate the wheel. You don’t want to be that guy. You are always trying to improve existing dialogue. I’m forgetting the scientific word. It’s not mitosis. Do you know what word I’m trying to say? It’s the idea that if you are around something enough, the environment absorbs you. That’s what I’m trying to say.
Osmosis, that’s it.
If you create your following correctly through osmosis, those followers will end up following you. I can’t explain the science or the exact mechanics of how it happens. It just does. At the heart of it, be authentic in what you are writing, be consistent and the right people will follow you.
It’s interesting. It’s such a different way of approaching it because a lot of people do approach social media. When you are trying to get as many followers as possible, I feel like you end up in this trap of trying to produce content just to get followers. I read something like, “Do what you want to do and the people join you.” That’s the way you find the people that are for you as opposed to the people that are jumping on to whatever the latest thing is.
I want to speak on that, too. Coming out of COVID lockdowns has sparked this revolution where people are now considering that their main source of income might not always be there for them or like, “One source of income might not cut it in 2021 and 2022 and going forward,” because 2020 has brought to light weaknesses in people’s either community or their own finances. 2020 was a very revealing year in good ways, too. If you are truly curious about something and that curiosity is being filled by passion, you are going to win 9 times out of 10. Even if everyone else thinks that the credit market or people are telling, “You can’t do it. You don’t have the skills to,” I don’t think those are prerequisites for success.
You and I both read a ton. I have never read an account of someone who had it all, had the ingredients, came from a supportive family, had the money to start their business, had the ideas, the skillset, the career before, and the prior experience. They launched into this business and everything went perfectly. Every single account that I have read of people’s entrepreneurial story was, “I was a Lawyer for twenty years, dropped out and became a Chef. Now, I run a Michelin Star restaurant.” It’s intellectual curiosity and passion. You look at Tony Robbins’ story, how he was being homeless on the street to running a multibillion-dollar motivational speaking and personal development company, a brand. He had no prior experience with that. He was homeless on the streets like, “Why would you listen to a homeless person?” He had the curiosity to be better about self-improvement and the passion for it. That’s the ingredient.
That’s something I tell people all the time. Almost every top-selling author has stories of being rejected by 10 to 100, to even thousands of publishers, literary agents or whatever. Almost every successful business owner or people that started businesses talked about whatever they did first that failed in some way. I used the analogy of learning to ski that’s because I went skiing. The first time you ski, you fall. You acknowledge you fell and your failure. You get back up. You do some form of recalibration or some adjustment. As long as you keep doing those three things, you are going to eventually get there.
Skiing is like babies walking. Have you ever seen a baby walk, fall down and then it decides, “I don’t want to walk? I don’t want to do this walking thing anymore.” No. I’m fascinated by children, toddlers and babies because they have this voice in their head that says, “Keep going. You have to do this. There’s no back door.” When kids are learning how to walk or use utensils to eat, there’s no inner machination in their head or device that’s saying, “Stop it. It’s not worth the effort. There’s no other way. I have to do this and see it through iteration.” This is why if adults adopted that childlike curiosity, persistence and not giving a damn about what the world thinks of them, adults would be so much more successful. You have never seen toddlers care about all the butternut squash on their faces they are eating. It’s like, “How can I get that piece of food that’s on the table from point A to point B, which is my mouth? I don’t care about what other adults think.” They just do whatever they want.
The only failure in life is not pursuing what you want and quit.
I love how everyone has a picture of themselves as a toddler. Someone’s parents would be like, “Here’s a picture of you in 1992 with spaghetti sauce covering your face.” Their facial expressions are always like an IDGAF type of facial expression like he had to move this onion from the spaghetti sauce out of my eyelid to peek at you. Everything is goofy. They don’t feel ostracized or like, “I’m so embarrassed.” It’s funny the same way they go up and dance like that. Every toddler is going to get up, dance and not care if their dancing is not all that good.
It’s because they live in the moment, which I can’t remember who said this, “Kids live in the moment. They have no concept of yesterday or tomorrow. Their concept is today.” That is especially true for toddlers. They have zero. I don’t think they even have the mental capacity to think about, “How is my next year going to be? Will I get a better birthday present than I did this year from Uncle Steve?” That is not what’s going on in a three-year-old’s head. It’s, “Food is good. I like playtime. I like playing with Lucy. Can I keep playing with Lucy? Now I’m going to cry because I’m upset. I’m going to tell her what’s happening with me right now.” That’s amazing.
That would be hilarious to see a skit with a four-year-old putting together their Q1 plan. “I want to learn the rest of the alphabet and then I want to watch whatever the current kid show is. I will watch every episode of Daniel Tiger.”
“Mom, this isn’t fitting into my schedule. We can’t do this. Can we push this meeting back?”
It’s weird because some constraints in the adult world prevent us from completely doing that. Did that factor into when you were putting together this Twitter account?
Yes, it did. That childlike curiosity took off after I graduated college. It was even before COVID happened. When I graduated college with a Finance and Accounting degree, I thought I had my life set. I thought I was going to follow this path of being a Big Four consultant, and then being a partner and retiring on the beaches somewhere. After the first busy season I worked, I realized that this is not what I want to do, not even for the rest of my life but the next 5 to 10 years. It was after that first busy season of working in the adult professional world where I realized like, “I don’t like this idea of letting my destiny being controlled by factors outside of my own purview.”
It was after that moment where I realized like, “Maybe I need to adopt that childlike curiosity again, live right now and appreciate the moment that I’m in now but also be curious and apply curiosity to my future life. What do I want to do? What do I want to pursue that I’m passionate about that I’m willing to devote time to learning about?” Fast forward, a year and a half later, I left public accounting because it was a drain on the time aspect that has allowed me to be curious and passionate. I’m in a better place now where I decided to start that Twitter account. I want to write a book. The Twitter account was able to help me with that. I started trading and about all these other products that I have been working on. The account was the result of that year and a half spent developing that curiosity.
That’s another important part of everyone’s journey is that moment. It’s not always an exact moment. I mean, moment kind of loosely. I often refer to it as the script, that the script is not what you want, that you want to do something else and you have your own thoughts and desires. Any other comments you have about your journey as a whole?
One thing that I want to leave for your readers, which I know you and I have talked about many times when we had our coffee chats, is the idea that, “The only failure in life is not pursuing what you want and quitting.” Everybody can truly achieve a better life if they mute the voice that’s in their own head and then mute people’s voices that aren’t in support of that goal. What you dream, think and daydream about constantly, you have to shed light on it because that’s what is speaking to that childlike curiosity of saying, “Get me out. I want to do this. You are not letting me do this.” Whereas the adult voice is saying, “It’s too risky and dangerous. Other people are telling us it’s too dangerous. They probably are smarter than us. Therefore, we shouldn’t do it. We are not smarter.” The kid is like, “Let me out. Let me do this. I know what I’m doing,” but we give more credence to this adult voice because it’s thinking about the least risky choice. I hope people can mute that adult voice a little bit and then turn up the volume on that childlike voice, listen to that for a second and see where it takes them.
I love that, turn up the volume on your childlike curiosity and mute that voice in your head, the inner cynic, as well as your outer cynic, the cynics that are around. Hopefully, that message gets to you all. Once again, that account is @TheMinuteWisdom and you can find it on Twitter. Thank you very much for reading. Chris, thank you very much for joining me.
Thanks, Steve. I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Important Links:
- @TheMinuteWisdom – Twitter
- @LifeMathMoney – Twitter
About Chris Huynh
Chris is the founder of @TheMinuteWisdom. He is also co-founder of a long-short fund that trades mean reversion and sentiment analysis signals through proprietary machine learning models. He also holds a day job as a data strategy consultant and enjoys cooking, reading, and chess in his spare time.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:11 — 31.3MB) | Embed