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If you have a couple of hours in your day to do nothing, aimlessly wandering around, ironically that's when you can do your best work.
@david_perell in conversation with @morganhousel
{A thread on writing online, taking walks, and selfish creativity}
@david_perell in conversation with @morganhousel{A thread on writing online, taking walks, and selfish creativity}
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's brains work differently (and better) when they're walking, because your brain is more alert to potential obstacles (vs. sitting at your desk's safe space).
2/ The rise of intangible assets has changed the valuation techniques we use for companies, but it'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'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'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've not been the case.
4/ I'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's when you do your best work. I only write something if I'm personally interested in it. Every sentence that I right, I pause and think, do I like that sentence. And if that sentence doesn'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'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's not a communication process, it's a thinking process.
5/ when it comes to my writing, there's no organization, no note-taking. I have one Google Doc that'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's no way for me to go back and find that. I'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'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's crap!
5.4/ Readers are impatient. They're busy. If you don't catch their attention fast, they're out. They're not going to drag through your boring article.
5.5./ Writing is an art. You can't summarize it in clean strategies and formulas. It'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's an art and different from person to person.
6.1/ Motely Fool is where I learned how to write by writing 3 articles a day. There'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're most proud of:
7.1/ The 3 sides of risk: https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/the-three-sides-of-risk/
7.2/ Overcoming Your Demons: https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/overcoming-your-demons/
7.3/ Because they're very personal, and I was going through challenging times writing them.
7.4/ When you're going through challenging times, people appreciate the honesty, because they'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.
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'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'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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