A few days ago I posted "What Happens if You Have Open Hours to Talk to Your Site Visitors?" Over the holidays, I took open hours to have chats with any reader of the site who wanted to. But at the end I asked,

Final thought – everyone who signed on are pretty expansive and ambitious people with lots going on and lots of dreams, but I’d like to find a way to touch base with more people… I mean, I had 23 interesting and fascinating calls, but I’ve got 500+ people visting the site daily, and another 400+ people subscribed by RSS.

Who are you other people? There’s 900 of you… what are you doing? You – yes YOU – what are you doing? C’mon, c’mon, stop just being a consumer and come play and have adventures and talk and connect and communicate. Yes, YOU, I’m sure you’ve got some fascinating stuff going on, right? Or at least a fainter idea that more is possible?

Please feel very welcome to reach out, drop a line, and let me know how it’s going. I’ve got a variety of contact info all over the site.

I got a number of very cool emails in response to that. This one is from Miguel Hernandez from Grumo Media.

Miguel shares a brilliant insight here - taking shots at projects with minimal downside that could have really high upside. Miguel did that - he made a video for the travel startup Hipmunk over a couple weeks, and it got him exposure with all kinds of really cool people in the startup community.

Here's Miguel -

Sebastian, I am one of the 900 readers.

I am a mechanical designer, animator, coder, turned entrepreneur and recent Founder of Grumo Media (a small animation studio in Vancouver, Canada)

I am obsessed with time and how to learn to hack it to make the most out of it.

We are all given 24 hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe everyday (thanks Arnold Bennett), it is a continuous free stream of opportunity.

After wasting a daunting 1.5 years developing a productivity web application that went nowhere (http://pointkit.com), I decided to challenge myself to just spend time on projects that could return the maximum reward with the minimum effort. I created a place for people to unload their worries in 5 days (http://worrypad.com), a site to allow people to DJ youtube videos (http://ibizaah.com) in a week.

Worrypad went nowhere, Ibizaah has about 150 loyal visitors a day and got reviews in dozens of blogs.

Lesson learned, 2 weeks of hard passionate work yielded more success and satisfaction than 1.5 years of 10 hour days coding.

I was on to something, could I increase the yield of my given time?

I spent 2 weeks (while vacationing in Hawaii) creating a free video for a hot Sillicon Vallley startup (http://www.hipmunk.com/)

Those two weeks I had a blast with my family, discovering Hawaii, and having fun working on a cool project.

I gave my video for free to Hipmunk, they loved it! the following week I had 40 startups knocking on my door. I got to talk to some of the greatest Sillicon Valley entrepreneurs, made some great connections, and landed enough work to keep me busy for the next 6 months.

My experiment worked, I risked my time, but only small amount of it. If nothing would have happened, I would still have had a great time in Hawaii.

So my take on this is that, you can learn to be extremely productive with your time, get many things accomplished in one day, but get nowhere at the end.

It is as important to learn to spend time on things that can yield the maximum possible success with the minimum possible risk.

Of course, the hardest thing is to discover what are those things. The only way is trial an error.

I think it can be explained better but I came up with this analogy for what I am trying to express:

Life is like a seesaw with a continuously moving fulcrum. We must probe it continuously (through experimentation) to discover where it is, so we can ensure we apply our time where it will yield the most leverage.

Keep inspiring us with your great posts!

--
Miguel Hernandez
Founder/Creative Director
grumomedia.com

Okay, Sebastian here again.

Wow, that was awesome.

My favorite parts -

"I am obsessed with time and how to learn to hack it to make the most out of it. ... I was on to something, could I increase the yield of my given time?

My experiment worked, I risked my time, but only small amount of it. If nothing would have happened, I would still have had a great time in Hawaii.

So my take on this is that, you can learn to be extremely productive with your time, get many things accomplished in one day, but get nowhere at the end.

It is as important to learn to spend time on things that can yield the maximum possible success with the minimum possible risk.

Of course, the hardest thing is to discover what are those things. The only way is trial an error."

I'll look to bring everyone here some more insights from Miguel in the next week. He's a really talented, cool guy. The philosophy of building something out creatively that takes a fixed amount of time and limited resources that might do something is fantastic. If you keep doing that, eventually you'll have a winner.

Here's Miguel's video - it's awesome and hilarious and I encourage you to watch it. It's only two minutes:

Finally, here's Miguel's site - http://grumomedia.com/ - he's got other videos on there, some good blog insights, and more. It's a must-checkout if you're an entrepreneur or doing some kind of creative work. But even if not, there's more videos that are cool and his insights are fun and awesome.

Cheers Miguel!