If you have a couple of hours in your day to do nothing, aimlessly wandering around, ironically that& #39;s when you can do your best work.

https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🎙" title="Studiomikrofon" aria-label="Emoji: Studiomikrofon"> @david_perell in conversation with @morganhousel

{A thread on writing online, taking walks, and selfish creativity} https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="👇" title="Rückhand Zeigefinger nach unten" aria-label="Emoji: Rückhand Zeigefinger nach unten">
1/ The advantage of being under-employed is that it gives you the space and unstructured time to daydream, in a way that it encourages creative thinking and coming up with new ideas.
1.1/ Most of my "writing" happens when I go for walks. Nothing comes out by just sitting at my desk. I get most of my work done while walking (sometimes 2-3 walks). I usually take notes when I walk (by sending emails to myself).
1.2/ People& #39;s brains work differently (and better) when they& #39;re walking, because your brain is more alert to potential obstacles (vs. sitting at your desk& #39;s safe space).
2/ The rise of intangible assets has changed the valuation techniques we use for companies, but it& #39;s also changed the labour market.
2.1/ Physical assets required physical labour to exploit them. Whereas intangible assets, patents and ideas are different; you exploit them with your head, with things that are much less visible.
2.2/ A much greater portion of jobs these days are people whose job is to use their heads, i.e. come up with ideas and strategies. It& #39;s no longer always sitting at your desk 8 hours/day hitting the keys!
3/ "The more the internet exposes people to new points of views, the angrier people get that different views exist." @benedictevans
3.1/ Now that we& #39;re more exposed to how other people live, we get angry that other people live different than us. And maybe the ignorance that took place in other eras, resulted in a calming effect that existed back then.
3.2/ You just assumed that other people lived the same way you did, but in reality, that might& #39;ve not been the case.
4/ I& #39;m writing for an audience of one: myself. I come up with topics that I find interesting and write about them in a way that I find interesting. I call this selfish writing.
4.1/ That& #39;s when you do your best work. I only write something if I& #39;m personally interested in it. Every sentence that I right, I pause and think, do I like that sentence. And if that sentence doesn& #39;t add any value to me personally, I get rid of that sentence.
4.2/ And then you just take the leap of faith that, if I& #39;m interested in this as a writer, there are readers out there who might think this is interesting too.
4.3/ On that note, I rarely follow the "know your audience and write for them" model.
4.4/ When @tylercowen starts his podcast, he says, "this is the conversation I want to have, not the one you want to have." This is also the essence of writing well online.
4.5/ When it comes to writing online, you just take your interest and you put it out in the world and you become a magnetic attractor for people who have the same interest. @david_perell
4.6/ "Build something that a hundred people love, rather than a million people like." @bchesky
4.7/ This made me think of a recent @whatstheii salon on the responsibility of intellectuals and the conversation I had with @TheAnnaGat on the "joy factor".
4.8/ In @paulg words, "you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter.
... Not all ideas of that type are good startup ideas, but nearly all good startup ideas are of that type."
4.9/ @HowardMarksBook took the same approach for his writing. He was using writing as a way to crystallize his own thinking in a way that was helpful for him.
4.10/ Writing is a way to make sense of the vague gut feelings that you have in your head. It& #39;s not a communication process, it& #39;s a thinking process.
5/ when it comes to my writing, there& #39;s no organization, no note-taking. I have one Google Doc that& #39;s called "New Stuff", and sometimes I copy/paste stuff in there. Other than that, nothing.
5.1/ A quarter of the books I read are on Kindle. The other 75% of the stuff I read, I just underline something that I like. But there& #39;s no way for me to go back and find that. I& #39;m not good at that kind of stuff.
5.2/ A lot of the stories are in a library in my head that I can go back and pull up. I wish I was better at combining the things I read.
5.3/ How I& #39;ve become good at writing is the product of doing it everyday for 14 years. A lot of it is just repetition. If you read the stuff I wrote 10-12 years ago, it& #39;s crap!
5.4/ Readers are impatient. They& #39;re busy. If you don& #39;t catch their attention fast, they& #39;re out. They& #39;re not going to drag through your boring article.
5.5./ Writing is an art. You can& #39;t summarize it in clean strategies and formulas. It& #39;s a feeling. Because of that, what is good writing to one person can be terrible writing to another.
5.6/ Teaching someone to be a good writer is like teaching someone to be a good spouse. Yes, you can guide them in the right direction, but it& #39;s an art and different from person to person.
6/ What are the 3 things you learnt from working at @themotleyfool, @WSJ and now @collabfund?
6.1/ Motely Fool is where I learned how to write by writing 3 articles a day. There& #39;s no better way to learn how to write than by writing 3,000 words a day!
6.2/ WSJ pushed me to think deeper and back up every single argument I was making because the bar was so much higher, than say, publishing a blog post.
6.3/ At Collaborative Fund, I enjoy being the one-man show when it comes to content. The ideas, editing, the writing, the typos are all mine. When an article does well, I can own all of it. And when it does poorly, I can own all of it.
6.4/ Owning the failures and successes is what I like about this experience. Plus a team I enjoy working with.
7/ Two articles you& #39;re most proud of:
7.3/ Because they& #39;re very personal, and I was going through challenging times writing them.
7.4/ When you& #39;re going through challenging times, people appreciate the honesty, because they& #39;re yearning for it. Everything else they see in life is a curated highlights reel!
8/ If you had some kind of dashboard, what piece of data would you choose to see there?

Public trust in institutions, specifically news media and government.
8.1/ As these decline, you can be certain the society is fracturing. Back in the 50s and 60s, the trust in news media and the federal gov was incredibly high.
8.2/ This is a broad metric that encapsulates a lot of what& #39;s going on in the economy, politics, education, and in general a lot of the moods that people have.
9/ No one is crazy!
9.1/ Of course people make very poor decision with their money. But I don& #39;t think anyone is crazy, because everyone is trying to make decisions with their money based off of the mental model of how they think the world works.
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