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There are 8 billion humans out there.
Search this video
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And so if you think you're going to differentiate by talking about the same things in the same ways that everyone else is, it's impossible.
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A surprising number of people who were literally just going to Google typing, how do I become great?
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What Google is revealing is a giant data set of what people actually think.
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Make one decision that'll save you a thousand decisions in the future.
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Even if you think about someone like MrBeast, he has the silliest videos early on, maybe he was trying to gamify an algorithm, that's also very inherent to his personality of just like, let me take something to an extreme, even if no one's listening. It's hard.
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If we're going to say there's any secret sauce out there, it's...
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You feel like your writing is good, but people just aren't reading it like they should.
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You're proud of it, but then you publish it on the internet and there's crickets. What do you actually do?
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Well, let's break down the problem.
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There's two things that I would focus on.
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The first is distribution, and the second is distinctiveness.
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Distribution, what does that mean?
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What do you tactically do to get your ideas out there?
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How do you use social media? How do you use email?
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How do you use viral platforms?
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How do you use those things to spread your message out into the world?
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And then second, how do you think about differentiation?
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You don't want to be like everybody else.
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You want to have a vibe or a way of writing or something that you do that's different, that makes people say, "You know what?
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There's no other writer like you."
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So distribution and distinctiveness.
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And our guest today, Steph Smith, she's the person to talk about this.
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She runs the podcast at a16z.
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She was part of the early team at The Hustle.
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And she wrote a book called Doing Content Right where she walks through what it's like to be a full-stack creator.
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Every single step of online writing, getting ideas out in the world, building a brand, all that.
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And that's what we explore in this episode of How I Write. Let's roll.
1:52
Steph, we promoted your work in the first ever Write of Passage cohort going back half a decade ago.
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And I remember seeing your website because that's what we focused on, and I was like, "I really like what's going on here."
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I immediately sensed that there was, really that you were going to do something special, and you have.
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But I want to start off with differentiation because I think that that's a really nice wedge to talk about how you've grown, how you've evolved, what you've learned about writing on the internet, and it's also something that people struggle with.
2:25
So when you talk to writers about, hey, how do I stand out, how do I distinguish myself as a writer, what do you say to them?
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Yeah, it's a great question because there's a lot of advice out there.
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A lot of people who say, just be consistent, or pick your wedge, just talk about business or talk about startups or talk about travel.
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Just do it over and over and over and become the It guy or girl.
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I think some of that makes sense.
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But if we actually come back to first principles and acknowledge how much content there is online, which is exciting, we're in probably the second decade, third decade moving into, where content is available, where you can become this writer online.
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But in acknowledging that, you also have to recognize that everyone else is doing the same thing.
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And so differentiation doesn't actually come from just pedal to the metal every single day, that this just doesn't work in any other industry.
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I think it can help you develop your voice.
3:23
However, if you actually think about what makes a voice important or distinguished, there's a few things, but often it's how someone actually writes.
3:27
And so again, if you were to go to a friend and tell them, "There's this really good newsletter that I think you should subscribe to," or, "There's this podcast that you have to listen to," it's never because it's talking about a specific topic.
3:42
There's enough, again, business newsletters, there's enough true crime podcasts.
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It's often, it's how it's done.
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And sometimes it's just as simple as this thing is hilarious.
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But sometimes, if you think about what you're doing here, there's some elegance, there's some depth that you're not seeing elsewhere.
3:57
And that's, again, if you were to tell someone about this podcast or Write of Passage, that's what you'd say.
4:01
You wouldn't say, "Oh, there's this course about writing, you have to do it," right?
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Or because it's David Perell.
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And if they did say it's because of you, it's because of all of these very nuanced things that you're incorporating, like the sets that you do, the guests that you choose, the way you prepare and the way you engage.
4:20
And so I know that's not the answer a lot of people want because they're like, "I really just want a recipe of, okay, I show up here and I do this and then it's done."
4:31
But I think developing that voice of differentiation is ultimately the only way forward.
4:37
And so I would encourage people to think like that.
4:37
How do I show up differently in how I'm writing, not just what I'm writing about?
4:42
It's funny that you're talking about voice, and I want to follow this thread because it's not something that we learn how to do in school at all.
4:51
And it's not something that we learn to lean into.
4:51
There's a line from Miles Davis that I just love so much.
4:57
He says, "Sometimes it takes a long time to be able to play like yourself."
4:57
And I think about this all the time, that you have this voice of individuality and distinctiveness inside of you.
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But what happens is when you start writing, you're stunted, you're stultified, you're sort of rigid in the way that you type.
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It is only through consistency and putting words onto the page, and then some semblance of feedback from other people saying, "Hey, Steph, I really like when you do this," "Hey David, I like when you do that," that then you learn what it is that you want to lean into.
5:27
Yeah, it's taken me years.
5:27
And if we were to apply an adjective, which often I encourage people to do, to just say, what is the one adjective that someone might use to tell someone about what you do well?
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And for me, what I've heard over and over and over, which to your point, I didn't pick up on originally, is people constantly tell me the things I do are approachable.
5:46
And so there's this dynamic where I pursue things, but I do them in a way where all of a sudden, for some reason, every-day Joe or Jill thinks like, "Oh, actually, I could learn to code, couldn't I?"
5:59
But there's some dynamic there which is inherent in I guess who I am and just how I present myself and what I choose to pursue.
6:08
But there's something important there, which is that a lot of people, especially today, because they've seen the success stories out there, they start from the premise of, "Let me go write.
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Let me go be a writer, be a creator, be a YouTuber," which is fine, but that completely wipes away the slate of your excitement, your, as silly as it sounds, your true self.
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And if I think about a lot of the people who are really successful in bringing out that true voice of their own, it's because they showed up from a different premise of not, "Let me go do this thing to make money."
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Or even, I think a lot of people, myself included, didn't even think about the fact that this was an endeavor.
6:43
When I first started writing, it was because I had something to say.
6:48
And in that case, it was about remote work mostly.
6:48
But that's why I think it did come across as more so just like, "Oh, I'm friendly and I'm exploring and I'm approachable," because I just have something to say about this thing that I chose to do, this experiment in my life, which is a much different premise than me showing up and being like, "Let me go make this article viral.
7:08
Let me go make sure I have a certain number of newsletter subscribers each month."
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So I think that's important.
7:12
Tell me more about who you've looked at who have developed a really distinct voice and how you've cultivated a voice yourself and describe that voice to me, because what I said just now is friendliness.
7:23
That is one of the things that I've always liked about your work, your site, the way that you come across online is, I'm like, "You know what?
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I like what Steph says, and I also like how she says it.
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I feel like she's my friend."
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And it's funny, because we met this morning, we're like, "What, is this the first time we've met?" I had to think about it. Exactly.
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I felt the same way because I feel like I get to know you through your writing, and there isn't this barrier between you and the reader.
7:52
There's actually a connection that's formed.
7:52
And I think about the people, ignore just the idea of being, let's say, a long-form writer or a newsletter writer.
7:57
I think about the people who others are attracted to and who also respect, which I think is something missing for a lot of creators.
8:08
I think about people like Pieter Levels.
8:08
People respect him because he does everything in the method that he would do if no one was paying attention. And you can tell.
8:14
It's actually amazing when you think about it.
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We as humans are perceptive enough to smell insincerity.
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You can smell it through a tweet, even just the slightest thing.
8:25
And that's why people who like Pieter, I think, if you met him, you're like, "Oh, you tweet just the way you talk."
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And even the things that I see you wear or the people that you hang around or the places I might find you, it all checks out.
8:44
And so I think about him in terms of just sharing his numbers, but also the fact that he doesn't try to narrow or pigeonhole the things he talks about just to his projects.
8:49
He'll talk about the fact that people need to go to the gym or the fact that he can't use Git.
8:54
I think about also a newsletter I like called Numlock, and this guy named Walter Hickey, he's just so clever.
9:01
And again, I think the best writers I can attribute an adjective to.
9:08
He's clever, he's quirky.
9:08
There's something to the fact that I feel like, as you said, I know him even though I've never met him.
9:15
I actually don't even think I know what he looks like.
9:20
But I feel like I know him.
9:20
And that's special because a lot of people use this parasocial idea with audio, video.
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But I think it exists with writing too.
9:30
I mean, I would say it in some ways particularly exists with writing.
9:30
There's a line from David Foster Wallace where he talks about the benefit of fiction, and he saw fiction as a cure for loneliness.
9:42
And I think that even when I read his writing, I almost feel like I'm stepping inside of his brain.
9:51
And it's funny because I can't actually read David Foster Wallace for too long.
9:51
I love his work, but I can't read it for more than 30 minutes because the resolution of his thinking is so high that it actually makes me go insane.
10:04
I think it's both magical, but I'm like, I can't do it too much.
10:10
It's like a crazy roller coaster or something.
10:10
You're like, "That was wild."
10:13
But also you just need to take a break.
10:13
And I think that that's what writing allows you to do is step into the brain of somebody else to see how they see, hear how they hear, and think how they think.
10:30
When I think of somebody like David Foster Wallace or somebody like you're saying who's just funny and quirky, I'm like, you see the world so differently from me, and so I can put on new lenses or new goggles for a second.
10:40
And if you think about it, a lot of these mechanics, whether it's writing or audio or video, I think you could kind of analogize to friends.
10:46
If you think about your friends, there are friends who you truly only, you can't spend five hours with them because they're so intensely focused on certain things, and you love seeing them, and they absolutely are part of your friend group.
11:04
But there's different friend dynamics, and I think that's why all of this really mass advice that goes towards like, "Oh, just do these things in this precise way," doesn't fit the way our brains work.
11:15
And again, it doesn't really fit the way that we connect as humans together.
11:19
You can have a friend that you want to see daily, you just want to shoot the shit, and you just want to have fun.
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And then you have another quirky friend who's just exposing you to things that you've never heard of before.
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And you're like, "Where did you go in the three weeks that I haven't seen you?"
11:34
We have all types of other friends, and I think that's why trying to copy and paste what you see someone else does online rarely works unless you happen to be that rare case where you are actually, as a human, very similar to that person.
11:49
Yeah, I promise this is going somewhere, but there's a very funny thing that has happened with golf swings and they've really homogenized.
11:59
So if you look at golf swings from the seventies and the eighties, they were kooky and weird.
12:02
It's like, how did you swing like that and win major championships? It makes no sense.
12:08
And what has happened is with technology and really high-end instruction, the swings have become more homogenized.
12:12
And I think that something similar has happened in writing where as we've become so over-socialized and constantly consuming, there's been this homogenization and you don't have these sort of kooky and weird characters like you used to have.
12:31
They've even done studies on the American accent of the South and the Northeast, like a Neworker, there's homogenization amongst voices and the way that Americans are speaking and a lot of the local dialects are actually disappearing.
12:44
And I wonder if the same thing is happening to writing, that because we're all swimming in the same milieu, people aren't as distinctive as they used to be. Yeah.
12:57
And you can see it in other industries.
12:57
Think about music, right?
12:57
It's because we have a formula, which we didn't have before.
13:01
Because of the sharing of information online, you can see the case studies, you can see the examples.
13:07
But to your point about golf swings, there's a very big difference between trying to be great and trying to be the absolute best in the world.
13:12
And so all of a sudden when you have a formula and you're trying to become the best golfer in the world, of course you're going to go toward the precise swing that you know can get you there, right?
13:27
Because there is a level to... I'm terrible at golf.
13:27
Truly, you would laugh at me at the range.
13:34
But there's a difference between having a kooky swing that'll get you pretty far, which if you apply to writing is wonderful.
13:40
You can live a very good, exciting life that is also really fulfilling, by the way, that doesn't incorporate you trying to completely reshape yourself, versus that's different than trying to, again, be the absolute best.
13:52
In which case, maybe your kooky golf swing can only take you so far.
13:57
I think that there's something here that we're orbiting around of I'm going to take something serious and I'm going to apply some sort of politically correct goofiness to the whole thing.
14:07
This is sort of what Barstool did with ESPN.
14:07
ESPN was sort of this very suit-and-tie, buttoned-up way of thinking about sports.
14:12
And Barstool came in and they're like, "You know what?
14:17
We're going to talk about sports like the boys do on Saturday." And they've crushed it.
14:22
That has done really well.
14:22
The Skim sort of did this with their voice.
14:22
They said, "There's NBC News," same sort of thing, very serious and all that, "Hey, welcome to NBC Nightly News."
14:34
And the Skim was like, "You know what?
14:34
We're going to just chat about it in a very casual sort of funny way."
14:38
And you can get a lot of mileage around taking something that is very serious and basically arbitraging the way that the serious thing doesn't talk about it like normal people do, and just talking about it like people who are normal do, which then really makes what we're talking about super simple and concrete. Yeah.
14:55
And I think another way you could put it is you take something that already exists that's popular, what would they not do?
14:59
And it doesn't just have to be non-seriousness.
15:04
For example, you take something that at surface level may seem not very interesting, and you say, "What would they not do?"
15:09
Well, I don't think most people would go write a 10,000 word report on this thing, but sometimes that works.
15:14
People who go, before she was super, super famous, they would go super deep on Taylor Swift's music.
15:21
They're like, "Let me figure out all of the different musings in her life and figure out all of Easter eggs and things that she's hiding," in theory, that she probably isn't.
15:36
But the point is, you can just ask yourself that question, what are most people doing?
15:42
And what are most people not willing to do?
15:42
Sometimes it's they're not willing to make sports funny in the ways that most people every day like to talk about it.
15:46
Sometimes it's just going way deeper.
15:51
Sometimes it's just spending way more time making a beautiful infographic that no one else is willing to do.
15:56
But to me, the answer is not just show up.
16:02
You know what writers do not think seriously enough about is graphics. Totally.
16:06
You talk about infographics, so underrated, especially because one of the things that I've been studying is I like collecting first tweets in viral threads, and there's a lot of attention given to thumbnails and not nearly enough given to a great graphic or a great statistic.
16:23
For example, Derek Thompson at The Atlantic, guest on the show, recently came out with an article about loneliness, and he didn't say, "Hey, I just wrote this piece about loneliness. Go check it out."
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He didn't share even the thumbnail in his top tweet.
16:42
He said, "Americans have never spent more time alone than they do right now.
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And here's the statistic to prove it," with a screenshot from his essay, and then the link right below.
16:54
And now what you've done is you've taught me something.
16:54
You have actually brought me into your piece.
17:00
And I don't think writers take this seriously enough from a distribution perspective. No.
17:06
If we think about the different types of media out there, the right data point is actually not just a 3000-word essay baked into one sentence.
17:14
In some ways, for the right data points, it's like a multi-year, multi-decade history.
17:20
Imagine watching a movie about this data point early on where Jeff Bezos saw the Internet's growing, I think it was, what, 1300% a year, or some crazy number, where he's like, "Wait a minute."
17:33
And I think there's so many other data points where you're like, "Oh, the cost to sequence DNA has gone down actually faster than Moore's law. What does that mean?"
17:37
And if you get the right data point, again, it's not just a paragraph that you're ingesting.
17:43
It's not just an article.
17:50
It's like a multi-decade history.
17:50
And I think, to your point about infographics, people say a picture's worth a thousand words.
17:56
I think the right infographic is worth much more. A trillion words. Right.
18:01
Well, have you also seen these moving infographics?
18:03
If you think about the fact that memes, for example, memes are some subset of JPEGs, but they're not the same.
18:09
A meme is not just an image.
18:09
I think the same thing is true with infographics.
18:16
Infographics are not just images and moving infographics are not just infographics.
18:22
They are these dynamic media that, used properly, are truly, they're net new.
18:22
We actually could not articulate what you're saying with some others what you see in these moving infographics in an article.
18:34
It would take a long time.
18:34
It would take many words.
18:34
So again, this compression of not just a paragraph, but something much longer, much more dynamic, into something really tight, that's amazing.
18:45
And I think that's, I don't want to extrapolate too much, but it's a form of tech to be able to storytell in this new way.
18:48
Yeah, we're really onto something interesting here.
18:54
And if I'm a beginner writer and I'm thinking about how do I distinguish my work, maybe one answer is I'm going to get really good at using Canva or really good at using Photoshop or Figma.
19:03
I don't know what people use these days.
19:03
And I'm going to get really good at having a distinct style and some unique way of telling stories through visuals, and then I'm going to share through the prism of those visuals, and that's what people are going to know me for.
19:18
And there have been a few people I've seen, I think there's this guy, James Eagle, and this guy called Pie Chart Pirate, where if you go find them, we can share the links, but they've just created these moving infographics.
19:28
But they did it at a time where they had to create it themselves.
19:32
They had to use Python or R to actually code the movement.
19:32
However, there's tools now like Flourish, where you can actually do this in seconds.
19:37
And when I say it's easy, I'm not just like, "Oh, it's so easy," and it's not.
19:41
You literally can within a few minutes, go create these moving infographics, as long as you've got a data set.
19:50
And that's, by the way, also easier than ever.
19:50
Google has a specific search engine just for data sets now.
19:55
And so all this stuff is becoming, the same way that two decades ago became easy to write online, all of these other forms of creation are becoming easier.
20:00
However, we've seen it is important or helpful to be early to writing or podcasting.
20:06
I think spotting these other forms of storytelling, as you're saying, can really give someone who's just starting out that momentum to stand out and then find their voice.
20:18
Because ultimately, as we talked about, I think that's really the secret sauce.
20:23
There's a line that I really like from Tim Ferriss and he says, "Make one decision that'll save you a thousand decisions in the future."
20:27
And when it comes to your visuals, the way that that shows up is how are the lines going to be?
20:40
Are you going to have squiggly lines?
20:40
Are you going to have straight lines?
20:40
What are the colors going to be? Get your hex code.
20:44
Just use that hex code and maybe one other color, and then white or black. That's it.
20:48
And you think of somebody like Jack Butcher. You can see- So true. ...
20:53
a Jack Butcher image, and you're like, "I know who made that."
20:55
Think of someone like Tim Urban, same thing.
20:55
And Jack Butcher is very polished and refined.
20:59
And then you have Tim Urban who's just like a total goofball.
21:07
And yet both of them have such a distinct style that they've leaned into, and you would never see a stick figure drawing on Visualize Value, and you would never see a perfect refined image on Wait But Why, but it just works for both of them.
21:18
And I think that branding, that packaging, is what a lot of people miss, where again, they focus on what they're writing about, what they're talking about, the fact that they're doing images or not, versus these very specific ways that you're resonating with people.
21:31
Jack's brand, when you think of Visualize Value, you think of something very different than Tim Urban's Wait But Why.
21:36
Just inherently different.
21:41
And you think of them as people differently because of that.
21:41
And I think that's because they've kind of brought their personality through these really simple decisions, like you said. Is it black or white?
21:51
Is it stick figure or not?
21:51
But I do think that's important, and these are the nuances that people don't think about.
21:56
But also, if you're doing things, I think, you could say aligned with the way that your interest drives you, these things will emerge.
22:02
Tim Urban didn't think about stick figures. He just drew them.
22:08
Want to hear something crazy?
22:08
So when we were doing the prep for the Tim Urban episode, I didn't realize this, but he had a blog before Wait But Why.
22:21
And on that blog, he wrote 300 posts. Amazing.
22:27
He didn't have his first stick figure drawing till something like post 250.
22:27
So the thing that he's known for, that everyone's like, "Oh, you do this so distinctively," took him 250 posts to even find in the first place.
22:38
I mean, it's so incredible.
22:38
And it just shows you, again, there is some weight to this idea of just get started because you will just meander until you one day come up with these amazing stick figure drawings.
22:49
And then Tim Urban, I think, is just another case where a lot of people are like, "Overnight success."
22:54
This is an example where him being early to writing, because a lot of people think that's an important ingredient, didn't help him that much.
23:05
He had to go still through that full arc that many of us have to go through of just creation, creation, creation before something, your voice or your affiliation to people really starts to make sense.
23:17
You used a word a few minutes ago that I want to move into, which was personality.
23:20
And every now and then I meet somebody who has a distinct personality that they've totally leaned into.
23:26
Kevin Kelly, we were driving, it was family trip, and it was Thanksgiving, and I texted him.
23:30
I was like, "Hey, happy Thanksgiving.
23:35
I'm driving right by your place."
23:35
And he's like, "You have to come visit." I love that.
23:40
I'm like, "I'm with my family and we are a motley crew.
23:44
You do not want us to come visit."
23:44
He goes, "You have to come visit."
23:49
He's like, "Now you have..." I know Kevin.
23:49
"You absolutely have to."
23:49
So like, "Okay, okay, okay."
23:53
So we drive and we go to his studio at his house, and he basically has this separate wing of his house that's sort of his office, and you walk in- Separate wing of his house, that's his office.
24:04
And you walk in and it's like a sixty-foot-high bookshelf, and then all of these anatomy things that he's collected.
24:06
It's basically a playground of his interests.
24:12
And you wouldn't believe the diversity of things in this room.
24:12
It is basically this museum of his obsessions.
24:20
And you're in this room, and I don't know, he's maybe in his sixties, seventies, something like that, and you're like, "This guy has fully leaned into his own uniqueness."
24:33
There is no distinction between the person he is on the page, the things he does in real life, the person who he makes himself out to be.
24:39
It is all aligned, and it is so weird and idiosyncratic.
24:45
And I'm in this place and I'm like, "Isn't that the goal?
24:50
Isn't the goal of life in so many ways, to just find those things that are distinct, and then to waddle your way into it, so that you end up with such an N=1 life, based on your own weird blend of interests?"
25:03
And then that can't help but it infuse its way into your writing.
25:08
Yeah, and I think Kevin has lived that his whole life.
25:08
He went backpacking when he was a lot younger all through Asia.
25:13
That ended up resulting in his very popular book series where he has all of these pictures of, what does he call it? Vanishing Asia.
25:23
Vanishing Asia, of things that are just not going to be true even a decade.
25:23
And so, I think what's interesting about Kevin and others who have been able to achieve that, is that they have achieved financial success now.
25:34
However, that was not crucial in their decision-making along the way.
25:40
And so in Kevin's case, having gotten to know him a little bit, it seems like he was just okay having no money for a while, while he's backpacking and exploring these passions.
25:51
In my case, I just decided I'm going to have a full-time job so that everything I create on the side is purely creative-driven, things that I just not just want to create, but have to create, even though I have no time to do it.
26:02
And so, I think there's something there where as we're talking about people like Tim Urban meandering until they find their way, I think that it's really difficult to almost hold that integrity towards yourself and your creative side, if it's your job.
26:21
And that's not to say you can't do it, so I'm not wishing people out of their creative paths, but it's more so just if you can find a way to divorce your creative pursuits from your financial freedom, then I think that's how you create this long-term vision, or long-term pursuit, where eventually something does click.
26:41
And I think the finances do find their way to you, but you have to give it that time.
26:47
And sometimes that time is many, many, many, many years.
26:47
And so, there's no formula necessarily, but it's how do you actually give it that space?
26:53
How do you think about that?
26:59
You started as a writer, you loved writing and that was a passion for you, but now it's also your business.
27:07
And so how do you think about that dynamic?
27:11
Well, I think about it through the prism of time and time horizons.
27:11
When you go to Florence and you go to the Duomo right across, there's a door and it's like 20 feet high, and there's 18 different sections.
27:22
And Steph, this door took 40 years to build. Amazing.
27:30
And it looks like it took 40 years to build. It's just magnificent.
27:35
I think that what gets hard is, once it becomes your livelihood, and then you have people who are working for you, you don't have that sense of patience of just letting things germinate.
27:48
And I think one of the things that's hard about the natural world is, it's also fast, and it's also rushed.
27:54
And there isn't the natural cycle of growth.
27:54
We're in San Francisco right now.
28:03
You go to Muir Woods, and you look at those redwood trees, you couldn't rush that.
28:08
They're 200, 300, 400 years old. I don't know.
28:08
But every year, you just get one little ring, one little ring, one little ring.
28:14
But, I think part of the reason that we go to a place like Muir Woods and look up at those redwoods and just feel something so majestic, is we know that that is a growth that can't be rushed.
28:25
When creative work becomes your job, you sometimes don't have the space to let ideas germinate, and evolve in a naturalistic way.
28:42
I think also, you talked about this, the Muir Woods, these redwoods, when you see them, and you see really exquisite art, there's a level of admiration.
28:48
So, if you think about the creators that people end up following, and when I say following, they try to, in some way, replicate their path.
28:58
They're doing that because they see certain number of followers, subscribers, they're invited to talk places, which also by the way, is based on these mass numbers.
29:09
However, if you think about the few creators that I respect, I admire, those numbers are typically lower.
29:16
However, I expect those people to eventually succeed far past some of these people who are, as you're saying, optimizing more for this short-term, impatient path.
29:21
And there's nothing wrong with that.
29:27
And I do think it's a function of this comparison to specific metrics.
29:33
It's what we can measure.
29:33
But I do think about these creators the same way that this door that you're talking about, took 40 years.
29:41
And when people show up, they're mesmerized. Mesmerized.
29:44
I think about certain creators who are far and few between, who disappear for periods of time, but as soon as they emerge, people are so excited to hear from them.
29:54
They don't even know what they've been doing.
29:54
They have no pulse on what they're about to share, but they are so ready to engage with it.
30:00
And I think that is something where again, you can only do, as we were talking about, if you have some sort of financial freedom, or some sort of financial decision, where you're accepting that there's that trade-off.
30:18
But, I wish that that was captured more online, if that makes sense.
30:18
Because, if you're in a room and you see people reacting to this exquisite door, you feel that.
30:24
You don't feel that as much online, because these creators who just disappear and show up, when they show up, they might get some likes, some comments.
30:36
You don't feel the weight of that.
30:36
You don't feel people staring at them in awe like, "Oh my gosh, what a work of art, what a creator."
30:42
And so, there's something there that I think is a trade-off that we get.
30:47
I guess the call here, would just to be get clear on what game you're playing.
30:53
No game is better, worse- Totally. Yeah.
30:58
You can play whatever game you want, but are you playing the Frank Ocean?
31:00
"I'm going to drop something big, and then I'm just going to disappear and you won't even think about me, and then I'm going to come back, and I'm going to come back with something that I've really, really thought through."
31:10
Or, are you doing something that's like Casey Neistat, where "I'm going to try to blow up quickly.
31:17
I'm going to make a vlog every single day, or I'm going to build an audience super fast."
31:21
And it's when what you're doing, and what you want, are incongruent, that's when you run into problems.
31:35
Yeah, I think that's totally true.
31:35
And I think it's also worth mentioning that there's value in the fact that today when you put something out there, you can get a lot of signal, you can get a lot of data points around what does make you special, which parts of the projects that you're shipping do people like? There is value in that.
31:51
So it's trying to square that inner creator in you, that voice that says, "I just want to go hide away in a cabin," and just the things that are kind of boiling up in my brain I need to get out there.
32:01
Versus, the also very valuable thing of getting feedback about what the world wants, and tying that together.
32:13
And then to your point, tying that together with the game you're trying to play.
32:13
Are you just trying to get financial stability for your family? That's wonderful.
32:18
But figuring that out is something that I think a lot of creators don't think about, and I think most creators, if they were to really boil down what they want, it would be a longer term game than the game that they're playing.
32:33
How does craft and technique and study show up in your work?
32:36
I think that is somewhere where if we're talking about writing, that it hasn't shown up as much as, let's say, the other writers out there that are very thoughtful about how they craft sentences, their tone and their style.
32:53
So with writing it hasn't, but certainly with things like podcasting, I study the heck out of everything around me, in terms of the way that they incorporate intro music, the way that they ask questions, the way they pause, the way that they're editing.
33:03
I think that that's come from it being a job for me.
33:08
I think it's important again to, if we're talking about the game that you're playing, for me, something like writing and the written word.
33:12
To me, I just want that to be my voice, and certainly that can be refined with time, versus something that I think is more of a commercial asset, I'm doing it for work.
33:22
In that case, I'm like, "Let me learn all the tricks of the trade."
33:28
And there's probably some balance to that as well.
33:28
If we bring up, again, someone who's doing incredibly well in the creative sphere, someone like Taylor Swift, incorporates her voice, but then also certainly knows all of the fundamentals of what makes a bridge good, what chords work well together.
33:43
And so, I'd say actually that's an area for me with writing, that I probably would benefit from incorporating more.
33:55
Well, it's funny because I'm thinking about doing content writing, which a book that you wrote about how to do this.
34:00
So, I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit for, how you have studied this, but I think that most of your study has been distribution, positioning, stuff like that, and you haven't written as much about the actual words on the page, and how those flow.
34:18
And what I hear you saying is that I want to be a more natural and uninhibited expression. Yeah.
34:24
It's funny because this might be to my detriment, but my husband, he reads my stuff, and he's like, "You are so wordy. You are so..."
34:29
Because, there is this mechanic, if we're talking purely what the average person might say is "good writing".
34:37
I think I'm above average, but I am not concise in the way that I could be.
34:44
And he reads it and I love him, and I think he's right, where he's like, "You could really boil this down more."
34:51
But in a way, that's not my voice.
34:55
I don't think that that's the Steph approach.
34:55
I think that what's fun about your piece, so take something to be great, just be good, consistently.
35:01
The thing about your writing is, it is an environment that you step into.
35:08
You go on your site, you live in it, and then you got the little scroll bar at the top, and it goes and goes and goes.
35:12
There's a very distinct vibe, and you flesh out ideas. And that's fine. I think it's important.
35:19
So I have the benefit of getting to hear from my husband who also is a creator online, and you reflect that vibe, or that way you show up online, in the responses you get.
35:31
And so, he's much more vulnerable online.
35:37
He writes about losing his mom and things like that.
35:37
And so the types of messages he gets, by the way, are truly multi-thousand-word emails, of people divulging their life to him, and really confiding in him, and trying to figure out what to do with family members in their life. So that's one version.
35:56
I don't get that at all.
35:56
But what I do get to your point, is people who seem to have entered my world in some way, who are like, "I just went down the Steph Smith rabbit hole.
36:05
I just listened to your podcasts.
36:05
I just went to your website, I read your articles.
36:10
I'm going to learn to code.
36:10
I'm going to go now do this thing.
36:10
I feel like I understand your worldview."
36:13
So, that's the way I show up and that's the response I get.
36:19
And I think it's interesting because, your inbox probably looks very different, as well.
36:23
What's interesting about my inbox is it's two very separate things.
36:23
So the first is, super tactical questions about writing, and then the other one that has been newer, has been people who reach out to me to talk about faith, and that is the best.
36:36
People say, "Wow, you've given me courage to talk about my own faith," or, "I wasn't really interested in Christianity, but now because you've been writing about it, I'm now exploring it."
36:51
That is like the KPI for me with writing online is how many emails I get like that, of people talking about their faith.
36:56
Because, the heartfulness of those emails is so deep, and it is so beyond the stuff to me about writing.
37:10
Well, I think that's actually a really interesting, this is dawning on me as we're talking, an interesting data point to pay attention to. I get a lot of emails.
37:13
You get a lot of emails, and in some ways, sometimes you can feel it in the email, where they're like, "I had to tell you this.
37:25
I don't normally do this, but I had to tell you this."
37:25
And if you can analyze, I think a lot of the time it's obvious what projects, or what articles, generate that from your audience, or from people in the world, really.
37:37
Sometimes, these often are just random people who happen to enter your universe and feel something.
37:42
I'm not religious, but I do feel like there's something special in the way you talk about religion- Thank you. ...
37:54
that speaks to people in ways that is different from your other work.
37:57
And so it doesn't mean you have to go all in on that, but that is a really important data point. I agree.
38:01
And it's funny because I have found no metric that comes close to the number of interesting emails I get, in terms of how my work is resonating, not page views, not likes, not bookmarks, not email subscribers.
38:21
I can see it correlate perfectly with the growth of rite of passage.
38:29
If I'm getting more interesting emails, that's how it goes up.
38:29
And I know that that's strange, but I think that it is the right combination of quality and quantity and connection.
38:41
The other thing that I've come to appreciate is to go back to Kevin Kelly, he has a line where he says, "Just tell your story with uncommon honesty."
38:45
And I think that I had spent so much of my early writing time, trying to be smart, or trying to look impressive, or seem knowledgeable, "Oh, I need to learn all these things. I'm not enough.
38:59
I have to learn, learn, learn, learn, learn.
39:02
And then the residue of that learning will turn into my writing," all that sort of stuff.
39:06
But a lot of the things that people resonate the most with is, "Here's what I struggle with.
39:06
Here are the stupid mistakes I made.
39:10
I was an idiot in this way, in that way, and I grew through this, and let me just tell that story."
39:15
And it's actually fairly easy for me to express that, and I don't even feel like it's very insightful.
39:21
And yet, people seem to really resonate with that, and that is truly astounding to me. It is.
39:26
But I also think that's why people, including myself, had things go viral in their very earliest of days, because that's when they don't care who's reading, listening, because no one, in theory, is.
39:38
And so, I think that true honesty, rawness where you're just like, "I have something to say," and it could be about your life or something happening in the world, and you're saying there's no intention to rile people up, because there's this expectation that no one is listening.
39:56
This is more an exercise for yourself, when you do that.
40:02
I think that's why those early pieces are really important.
40:08
Even if you think about someone like Mr.
40:08
Beast, he has the silliest videos early on of him just counting to a million, or whatever it might be.
40:13
But, there's something to that.
40:13
There's something very human about that where it's like, yes, maybe he was trying to gamify an algorithm, but that's also very inherent to his personality of just like, "Let me take something to an extreme, even if no one's listening."
40:28
And I think that's where this...
40:28
Again, what do you really want to say?
40:34
And for the exercise for the creators who have become successful, is can you keep doing that with the same rawness and humility that you originally did, now that people are listening?
40:40
Can you still get up on the same stage with all these people staring at you, and still say the same things? Yeah, it's hard.
40:50
Sometimes it's helpful when you're in a room like this, where you don't have the eyeballs directly on you, so you can almost trick yourself to thinking, "It's just me and David talking, no one's listening to this."
41:00
So there's tricks, but I think it is hard.
41:04
One of the reasons that I haven't written on my blog for honestly years, is because there's just this dynamic of expectation that probably doesn't exist.
41:10
Well, it probably exists to an extent, but I've enlarged it, enhanced it, in my own brain.
41:16
But, just some of my early work on my blog did so well, so quickly, that I now feel the expectation to show up in a certain way, when really I kind of want to toss everything to the side.
41:30
It's been several years and just say, "I feel in some ways like a new person, I want to write in a new way," but it's hard to divorce that.
41:38
I did a documentary, I did the entire documentary, and I never released it, on an artist named Porter Robinson, and he's an electronic music artist who I got very inspired by.
41:52
And he released an album called Worlds in 2014.
42:00
And it was a real breakthrough album in the electronic music space.
42:00
He came out with it, it became a huge hit.
42:05
He toured with the live set with the visuals from 2014 to 2016, and people, including myself, just saw it.
42:14
They're like, "This one of the greatest works of art I've ever seen."
42:22
But then he got totally trapped, and this is the conflict in the documentary is, he goes through this moment when he is like, "Do I double down on Worlds?
42:32
But hold on, that's not me anymore.
42:32
So, do I double down on the thing that I created, or the person that I was in order to create that thing?"
42:46
And those are different things. They are.
42:49
Because you change, you evolve as a person.
42:49
And he basically goes into this horribly depressive state.
42:57
He has people in his life who are like, "You should maybe quit music."
42:57
He totally loses his sense of self-worth, becomes detached from his identity, and goes, "What do I do?"
43:05
And this exists over half a decade period.
43:11
And he comes out with this next album called Nurture, which is completely different.
43:19
And it's interesting to be a fan of that album, because I don't like it nearly as much as I like Worlds.
43:28
But I also respect him way more, because he didn't just do Worlds Part 2.
43:38
He did a new album with a new style, because he was a new human being.
43:46
And also you could argue, history has not fully played out, that new album, even though you don't like it as much, has paved the way where maybe even 3, 4, 5 albums from now, he will create the best album of his life.
43:56
And that hasn't happened yet, but it's allowing yourself to exit that local maxima, and be okay with it. And it's hard.
44:02
I said I haven't written recently because every time...
44:08
I have so many drafts, so many drafts, that are waiting to expose themselves to the world, but every time I sit down, I think, "Oh, wow.
44:14
Something people really liked about my early articles was including all these quotes, and all these offshoots within the articles, about the subject matter, but just again, layering in these different tidbits that people could take away."
44:31
And I was like, "Maybe I should do that, but what if I don't want to?"
44:36
I used to write really long form, at least 3000 words an article, most of the time.
44:36
What if I just want to say something in 400 words?
44:41
And so, it is really hard to just exit that expectation.
44:41
And I think what's important is to realize that most of the time that expectation is mostly self-imposed.
44:55
Even though you didn't like his next album as much, you weren't like, "To hell with him."
45:02
I think the same thing goes for, we've talked a lot about Tim Urban.
45:02
I personally have not read his book, and I could see how he's had such a blow away success with his articles in the past, that I think his book did relatively well.
45:13
But, I could see how as a creator, him expecting it to be the best book of all time, because he put infinitely more effort into that.
45:18
However, I do think it's important to absorb the whole thing, and realize that even if I have not read his book, I still think the world of Tim Urban as a creator.
45:35
And so, I think to your point, there's this respect dynamic that is divorced from if a single album, a single article, a single way that a creator shows up does not hit as much as maybe something from their past.
45:53
It's interesting to see how much letters from 17th, 18th, 19th century have stood the test of time.
46:00
People love reading letters, because there's none of that performativeness.
46:07
It's just one person to another.
46:07
Is there some sort of dynamic that you think people can incorporate into their writing today?
46:11
Is it just realizing that we shouldn't perform?
46:18
Or is there some sort of mechanic?
46:18
I want to follow this route. I want to challenge you.
46:25
I think that for your next piece, you should just write me an email and just write that, get it done.
46:33
And then you can think about if you want to publish it or not.
46:33
But, it might be worth changing the frame of who you're writing for, and what the intent is, because I know so many people who are fired up and alive in their letters, but very suppressed in their public stuff. Yeah, it's so true. Yeah. Maybe we should do that.
46:57
If I'm a writer, I've just published something, and I'm like, "Steph, I want to get this out in the world.
47:04
" And let's assume it's really good, where would you point me?
47:09
Well, it depends what kind of content you're writing.
47:13
I always like to just quickly mention that I think things like SEO are hugely underrated, but it depends what kind of content you're creating.
47:23
If we're talking about the purely passion-driven content that no one's searching for, they don't even know that they want, then ignore that.
47:28
But in just throwing that out there, because I think a lot of that is underutilized, because if you think about what Google is, it's this huge, huge data set around what people actually want.
47:38
But ignore that if you're, again, the passion-driven creator.
47:44
I think while you are creating things, it's important to be seeding this audience as you go.
47:44
A lot of people are like, "Let me write the article and then ship it to zero people."
47:50
And so if you are fully focused on distribution, you should be investing equal time, I'd say 50/50 time, in distributing your content as writing it.
48:03
So back in the day when I was writing more so blog posts, I had that.
48:09
I had a distribution marketing plan for every article, and it was similar, but it's like, let me post this on Hacker News, let me talk about this in the communities that I'm part of, let me post it on Twitter, let me seed one article at the end of another article.
48:18
So just really creating the pathways for people to discover this, which by the way, is why I think when we were talking about emails and people reaching out, people end up down this Steph Smith rabbit hole because I've connected everything.
48:37
So there's so many platforms out there, whether it's social or creating your own newsletter or a podcast, but the point is, spend time actually distributing your content.
48:49
A lot of people think that distributing your content is just putting out a tweet at the end of the day.
48:54
This is what we're trying to figure out at Write of Passage, is really moving into helping people write one piece that's the best that they can do about the thing that they know best.
49:06
We call it the core idea.
49:06
I would love to chat about some of the different things that you did.
49:10
You spoke about these viral platforms, Hacker News, and then you spoke about communities. You spoke about...
49:14
we can dive into Twitter specifically, and then maybe some of the cold emails that maybe you sent.
49:19
I don't know, I'd love to hear how you think through that.
49:23
Yeah, I did all of the above.
49:23
So let's go through them.
49:26
Yeah, so I would, not for every article, but to your point, things that I thought were excellent that had this potential for escape velocity, I would post it on Hacker News, I would post it in other places.
49:35
There's a similar platform called Lobsters. Lobsters? What's that?
49:41
Yeah, it's just similar to Hacker News, it's kind of like this dev environment, but similar, it's an up-voting board.
49:44
I occasionally would post on Reddit, but I would obviously be careful about that because a lot of the communities are pretty anti-promotion.
49:53
I would cross-promote it on places like Medium, Dev. to.
50:02
I really would cross-post it in many places.
50:02
Then I would also, early on, my first venture into even being a creator was teaching myself to code and creating these little projects on product hunt and things.
50:15
That was actually part of all these other communities.
50:15
There was a community called Women Make, there was this telegram group called Work in Progress.
50:21
So I would seed it in there, and again, not so much as promotion, but just like, I'm really trying to figure this out. I was just beginning.
50:33
Again, no one had heard of me or cared about what I had to say.
50:33
So I was just sharing and more so talking about my journey.
50:37
The same thing is true with Twitter.
50:42
It wasn't so much, hey, here's my article because you're all waiting.
50:42
It was more like, I've been really thinking about this thing about having a full-time job and doing projects on the side. What do you think?
50:52
Or, let me create these tutorials for these things that I'm figuring out in real time.
50:59
Let me build in public, let me share my revenue.
50:59
So all that was part of it as well.
51:05
Then I would do outreach.
51:05
So there's a few different newsletter operators now that I'm actually friends with.
51:10
There's this guy named Hung Lee, who does this newsletter called Recruiting Brain Food, and I just became subscribers of these newsletters, got to know them, did outreach.
51:14
I did an article that was talking about the relationship between givers and takers from Adam Grant's book and the relationship of that in remote work and how the different dynamics construe that or change behavior.
51:32
So I reached out to Adam Grant, I did another article that incorporated some things from Gretchen Rubin.
51:36
I reached out to her, she retweeted.
51:36
So I think that's what's underrated is- Talk about that one, because that was from the Four Tendencies, right? Yes.
51:45
So you wrote an article based on her book.
51:47
So talk to me about, what did you say to her?
51:47
What then did she do to promote?
51:47
Because I saw that she promoted in all of these sorts of places.
51:52
The article did not stem from, let me go get Gretchen Rubin to share this because I was surprised that she did anyway, but it was, I think this is interesting, I did read her book.
52:02
Then I think it was actually in the same article where it was just talking about how I'm a huge fan of remote work, but in doing it for several years, I've noticed how people act differently.
52:13
Let me think through why that is, and using some of these dynamics from books I've read.
52:20
So I incorporated both Give and Take and the Four Tendencies.
52:26
Then in that marketing plan after, which by the way, I say 50/50, I wasn't even doing 50/50.
52:26
All of this was probably, let's say it took 10 hours to write an article.
52:32
You can still spend three, four hours doing all this outreach.
52:39
So yeah, I think I would just reach out to these people, this is years ago, but I would just say like, hey, I read your book. I loved it.
52:44
I'm thinking about different ways that this might apply elsewhere.
52:50
Have you thought about this?
52:50
So less so about, can you share this, but have you thought about this angle?
52:55
Are you doing research on this?
52:55
My hit rate back then was 100% with these people, I'm not exaggerating.
53:00
I mean I didn't do it a ton, but when it was relevant, people want to hear that you're engaging with their work.
53:07
So we talked about what we respond to, what we get excited about when we receive an email.
53:13
I think that same question can be turned on its head, in terms of if you're reaching out to someone and hopefully you have engaged with their work, you have read their book, for example, the little that you know about them, what would get them excited to respond to you or engage with you or sit down with you?
53:34
I think it's not rocket science.
53:34
It is telling that there's a famous Silicon Valley saying that first time founders focus on the product and second time founders focus on distribution, take it with a grain of salt, but there's something to it.
53:51
Yeah, and I think there's a balance.
53:51
So there's also a well-known saying of just like, you can't sell shit. So there's a balance. It's got to be good.
54:01
Yeah, it's got to be good, but if you think about the...
54:01
We've talked a lot about musicians.
54:09
The "best musicians" today are some of the best marketers.
54:09
I guarantee there are better musicians who are in their basement creating music, who have convinced themselves that all that matters is the quality of the sound bites, the waves that they're producing.
54:23
But the world doesn't work like that.
54:31
Maybe in some future universe, we are able to effectively sift through all of the information that people are creating and some algorithm is truly servicing what's best.
54:37
However, today that's not the case.
54:45
So you do need to spend, I say, you don't want to go either way 100%.
54:50
You don't want to create an amazing product that no one hears about.
54:50
Then you also don't want to create a shit product where you've just mastered all the marketing techniques.
54:55
That's why I jokingly hate on some of the people who just post a bunch of threads or who have just again, mastered the marketing.
55:05
There's got to be some in-between where there's some humanity but you are focused on marketing, you are focused on getting your ideas out there because again, the best actors, the best musicians, even the best founders out there, they're great marketers.
55:24
There's a reason you know some and not others.
55:24
On the distribution front, there is so much low-hanging fruit for people who are very good at their craft or have a lot of knowledge in a subject to really study copywriting.
55:37
I am a patron for a guy named the Cultural Tutor, and he has- He's so good. ... crushed it online.
55:48
When I first met him, he had just hit 100,000 Twitter followers, and I was like, I need to get in touch with this guy.
55:53
He was working, he calls it, McDonald's, and he was basically cleaning the McFlurry machines and washing the windows. It's the best story.
56:01
I mean, how did you find this guy?
56:04
I was like, dude, who are you?
56:06
He's basically like, yeah, I'm living at home with my parents, I'm 25 years old, and I have no money.
56:13
I'm like, how much do you need?
56:13
He asked for a very, very low amount of money, basically minimum wage.
56:21
I'm like, I will give you a little bit more than that, but you're...
56:26
Just go write every day, just go write every day.
56:26
I asked him, what do you think that distinguishes your work?
56:34
He said, I go and I would read what other people who were talking about culture, how they would write about it, or history, how they would write about it.
56:43
It was so boring, it was dry, it was stale.
56:46
All I did was I went, and then I studied the copywriters and I said, what are they doing and how can I apply those to writing about 13th century Italy or Napoleonic France?
57:01
Then he's like, there's these hooks. There's engagement.
57:01
I think that there's so much low hanging fruit in really studying what makes a good Twitter thread, especially a good first tweet, and using that for distribution, because now Twitter's becoming a lot like TikTok, where the number of followers that you have is becoming less important.
57:17
The innate virality of the content itself is becoming more important.
57:24
Never in the history of Twitter have so many people with small audiences who produce great content, never before have they been so easily able to get hundreds of thousands or sometimes millions of views. Absolutely.
57:36
I think there's also just a dynamic there of most of the time, people who are in the marketing spheres, they don't do the work to dig up these really interesting passages from the past or read all the books that would be required to create something like the Cultural Tutor does.
57:53
Then simultaneously, the people again, who are in that sphere, they think they're too good to learn some of these marketing tactics.
58:04
I think it's there's so many areas where that can be applied.
58:04
I think business podcasts, for example, we're lazy.
58:08
I think a lot of the time we could learn a lot from let's say, true crime podcasts.
58:13
You think about the production, the storytelling, the effort, quite frankly, that goes into a podcast like that, that applied to business, we just haven't had to do it because often the guests on business podcasts will carry the weight, they'll bring the distribution.
58:26
So I think there's all these different places.
58:32
In businesses, the classic example is a lot of the time, if you really want to learn what is on the edge of innovation, you go to porn, because those people have had to, they don't have the option to use Facebook ads.
58:42
They don't have the option to do things like a traditional organization.
58:48
So there's all these opportunities to look across the field.
58:55
They say that, so CES is the big tech conference, and it happens the week after, I think the- Oh, does it? ...
59:02
The major porn conference in Vegas.
59:03
They say that if you really want to see where the tech is going, don't go to CES, go to the porn conference the week before.
59:09
I also think that the music industry is a leading indicator for how almost all of media is going.
59:13
What I've taken from it is that the value of content itself is dropping, but where the money is made is in the things that you sell beyond that merch, live events, and stuff like that. Oh, definitely.
59:26
I mean, I'm actually curious to hear your take on this because you seem to be pretty immersed in music.
59:30
I was just thinking about this the other day, how if you think about the most culturally relevant people, the people who have weight, who can even swing elections, who really can move the masses, who can get, we're talking tens of thousands of people to show up and just watch them sing on stage.
59:48
There's something very fascinating about that.
59:53
Of all the things, yes, people care about actors, people care about athletes, but there's something to music as a medium that is different than writing on the page, it's different to podcasting.
1:00:06
Again, all of those industries have their heavyweights.
1:00:10
Music bypasses the rational mind.
1:00:10
That's why it really hits your heart and deeper part of the human spirit.
1:00:20
Shaan Puri has a line where he says that if you want to get people to remember something, there's two ways to do it, music and a story.
1:00:25
I think that that's true.
1:00:25
It's as if it can seep down into who you are.
1:00:31
Also, there's something about the repetition of music.
1:00:31
I spent so much time listening to music. That's so true.
1:00:44
You say the same thing over and over and over again, and that, it actually becomes a part of you. A song can...
1:00:54
I think part of the reason that we resonate with music so much is that if you love a song, it's actually inseparable from you.
1:01:03
I think a song can become part of you.
1:01:10
You can't rid it from your brain, yeah.
1:01:10
Which is different from an idea.
1:01:10
Sometimes an idea can do that.
1:01:13
I love the line that says people don't have ideas, ideas have people. Sometimes that happens.
1:01:18
A lot of the inspiration for my career came out of a series of pieces from a site called Media REDEF, and there were two writers.
1:01:25
There was Tal Shahar and Matthew Ball, and they wrote about how, it wasn't even a word at the time, but how the creator economy was going to evolve.
1:01:38
I just read these pieces over and over and over again.
1:01:38
They were super long form pieces, very in depth, and I said, all right, that's the playbook for my career.
1:01:46
It's been 10 years and I've basically just been taking the stuff that I learned in those pieces and following through on the thesis. Wow.
1:01:55
I do think it's interesting what you said though about how ideas can change, they evolve.
1:02:01
Sometimes you'll actually over time grow to take an idea that you once liked and dislike it.
1:02:08
But there is something interesting about music, if you've liked a song for several decades, I can't think of an example where two decades in, you're like, I hate this song.
1:02:19
If anything, your affinity just grows over time, there's that nostalgia.
1:02:25
There's something really interesting about music, which I know we're diverging from writing, but there's something there that's fascinating.
1:02:30
Well, I think all these things are interconnected, and one of the major lessons from music is that there's a lot of craft in the way that you encode a message.
1:02:45
In music, having things the way that things are structured, the way that things are written, almost having a lyricism about it, and the flow, the pacing.
1:02:53
So you listen to Lose Yourself by Eminem, this is the lamest thing that I'm about to do, but whatever.
1:03:05
His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy.
1:03:05
There's vomit on his sweater already, right? There we go.
1:03:09
You just remember these things.
1:03:11
To go back to what we were saying, I think music and poetry, there are a lot of lessons in terms of how you encode ideas.
1:03:18
Don't ask what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.
1:03:24
Speech writing, Hamlet, to be or not to be, that is the question.
1:03:24
Whether 'tis nobler to suffer slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or by opposing end them, to die, to sleep, to sleep per chance to dream.
1:03:33
These things are, when you memorize them, you get a sense for rhythm.
1:03:39
It is so easy when you're writing to only focus on substance and forget about style, but poetry and music and speech writing is more about the style than the substance.
1:03:47
What does it say that I first read these pieces of poetry or listened to these songs sometimes 20 years ago, 15 years ago, and I still remember them?
1:04:00
It makes me reconsider what my priorities are as a writer.
1:04:06
It makes me, as we're talking about this, think through, because I am a creator that cares about a long-term horizon.
1:04:13
I'm a terrible singer, so that's not a path for me but to your point, incorporating musicality, and that doesn't mean turning it into a beat, but how do I create something, these taglines that stick? These ideas that stick?
1:04:23
Even that line, that's sticky.
1:04:29
How do I create something that actually isn't just a moment in time that happens to trend on Hacker News that not just I'm proud of, but has this rhythm, has this thing that people intuit and internalize for longer than the few minutes that they spend with you.
1:04:48
What are the benefits and drawbacks of posting on Hacker News?
1:04:53
Well, I think it's worth acknowledging that Hacker News and any really viral platform that's out there can bring you a lot of traffic.
1:05:00
Hacker News, I don't know if this is still true, but a few years ago, if you trended to the top, top spot of Hacker News, you get around 30,000 page views. It's a lot of people.
1:05:10
The benefit of something like Hacker News is also that that's a pretty high quality community.
1:05:16
Now, they can be pretty- Nasty.
1:05:19
Pretty nasty, that's the way to put it, but there is also benefit in that, because there are communities that you post in and you get a bunch of amazing ideas like what a genius, great to hear from you, Steph. That's not helpful.
1:05:32
So there is a helpfulness to maybe not nastiness, but to actual feedback around why something might not be good or might not make sense.
1:05:38
So I think Hacker News has that audience, but generally it is, you could liken it to parts of Reddit, you could liken it to, again, some of these other platforms like Lobsters, where you trend to the top and then you disappear.
1:05:56
So it's helpful for getting your ideas out there, I don't think it's that helpful for creating a true audience.
1:06:01
If we're talking about even like you said, a song partially sticks with you because you hear it over and over and over.
1:06:06
If you trend to the top of Hacker News once or even twice, you're not going to be reaching the same people.
1:06:12
Also, I think it's worth acknowledging the different forms of content out there and how long people spend with you.
1:06:25
So a tweet, even though it's nice to get thousands of likes on a tweet, they're spending what, 10 seconds with you?
1:06:30
You just gave me a big epiphany when you said building an audience.
1:06:38
I was like, what does that mean? What does that mean?
1:06:38
One way that I like to define it is building a relationship at scale.
1:06:44
That's what an audience is.
1:06:44
The reason that I like that definition is it's correlated with numbers, but it's not perfectly correlated with numbers.
1:06:51
It means that what you're trying to do is have people have a connection with you as a human being/your work, and that there is a lasting stickiness to that connection.
1:07:10
I think that that's what a lot of what I'm trying to do, it's not just...
1:07:20
Cool, if we have a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, great, whatever.
1:07:27
But what I really care about is that somebody listens to how I write, that somebody comes to Write of Passage and it made a meaningful difference in their life where there's an indispensability about it.
1:07:37
That's what I care about.
1:07:37
So we talk about building an audience, for me, it's really about building a relationship at scale.
1:07:48
Yeah, and I think that's important.
1:07:48
I think when people think about building an audience, as we talked about, there's only certain metrics that they align to, but some of these more fluffy ideas are critical.
1:07:57
This idea that someone is going to stick with you enough to go participate in your course, but also there's a level of just these qualitative things where it's not just, is someone going to show up to your course or are they going to show up every session?
1:08:11
Are they going to show up prepared?
1:08:16
Are they going to then go implement the things that they've seen in it because they trust you and they trust this dynamic of you sharing the things that you vetted over and over and over?
1:08:28
I just think a lot of this, again, it's a little bit immeasurable, but if you think about this true idea of an audience of people who want to hear from you, who want to engage with you, truly engage with you, there are very few creators that I think about online in our sphere where is that weight.
1:08:45
There's that true relationship.
1:08:45
It may be parasocial, or maybe you need directional in a sense, but people are not just there to scroll your tweets every so often.
1:08:58
There's something fundamentally deeper.
1:08:58
I spend a lot of time talking to people about what they should do next, what they should write about next.
1:09:04
The best word I've found for when somebody's on the right path, is strange.
1:09:11
There's something strange- I wasn't expecting that. ... about the situation.
1:09:22
They're working on a company and you're like, that's really weird that that's how you're going about it.
1:09:29
Or you're writing a piece, you're like, I've never thought about that.
1:09:29
I'm just coming up with something right now.
1:09:38
I would really like to write a piece on the maybe 1,000 square foot section of Disneyland based on New Orleans.
1:09:46
I think I could write an incredible piece about Walt Disney and how the distinctiveness of that little neighborhood, and then how it's similar and different from New Orleans and how the restroom signs there and the trash cans have a different vibe and how it's all very cohesive.
1:10:04
Then that is the section where they sell the jewelry, and then they have the very narrow areas and then you have the Cajun and the Creole food in that area, and then how it's next to the Haunted Mansion.
1:10:14
Oh, and then it's right next to the big Mark Twain boat, and how the section of New Orleans is very much like the Mark Twain boat.
1:10:18
You feel like you're in this sort of late-19th century, early-20th century America, and it's all right there.
1:10:25
I'm just saying it right now.
1:10:29
I'm like, I should totally write that, that is so freaking weird. You have to.
1:10:34
But I have so much to say about that.
1:10:35
Every time I go to that section of Disneyland, I just come alive.
1:10:35
I always eat there, and I just walk around and I just walk around a crazy person over and over and over and over and over again because it's this mix of France and America, it's coming together in this fusion. That's what I mean.
1:10:49
It's like that you're really onto something when it's strange.
1:10:54
I think that so much of the reason why we need good friends in our lives, and we need people who encourage us, is to say, Steph, David, I understand that that's what you want to do because it's what you think that you should do.
1:11:05
It's what your idea of being successful is, but I want to push you a little bit more towards those strange things and I want to encourage you in that direction.
1:11:15
Then, hey, let's work together to figure out how we can get fruits out of your strangeness so that you can persist in doing that.
1:11:23
Can you please write this article?
1:11:30
I'll make a promise too, now.
1:11:30
Okay, yeah, no, I completely agree.
1:11:30
That is strange, what you just explained as in, not that you're fascinated with it, but that you, I guess, your unique brain and your multi-decade experience of what you like and what you're fascinated by, and all the things that you've brought as you show up to, Disney World? Disney Land? Land. Disney Land. The original one. Okay, okay. The original one, okay.
1:11:56
That's why I had to check.
1:11:56
I think you're talking- This was Walt's real brainchild, the first one, the big risk.
1:12:02
But most people would be there and not bat an eye.
1:12:02
They're like, "Where's the bathroom?
1:12:02
How do I get to the next thing?"
1:12:09
And all of us have these moments where they're just like, "Oh my God."
1:12:15
For example, a lot of people, because they think of me in my creative pursuits, my favorite place to spend time is a spreadsheet.
1:12:21
And I'm not exaggerating, my eyes light up in a spreadsheet. Mine don't.
1:12:27
In fact, as part of this project I recently launched called Internet Pipes, we talked about moving infographics, and to create them.
1:12:33
So I have this demo, and the first comment on the demo was someone being like, "The infographic thing was cool, but holy moly, I was way more impressed by your navigation of the shortcuts and the ability to navigate a spreadsheet."
1:12:52
And I think there's all these little things that most people don't know about us, but they truly light us up.
1:12:56
I am lit up when I can create just an immaculate, automated spreadsheet, that's my favorite thing to do.
1:13:03
And so I think the same thing for you in Disneyland, we have to be taking those as signals, even though they're strange.
1:13:15
I think that we're very, very bad at knowing who we actually are and what we're actually drawn towards.
1:13:20
So I have a little riff.
1:13:20
Can you participate with me? Okay, yeah. Okay.
1:13:24
And if you're listening or watching, put your index finger to the center of your forehead, like right in between your eyebrows, right above your eyes.
1:13:35
Okay, so you put your fingers touching your head.
1:13:35
Now, you can't actually see the end of your index finger, and this is how a lot of ideas are.
1:13:40
I can look at you and I'm like, "You have your finger right on your forehead, but you can't actually see the end.
1:13:56
So you either need somebody else..."
1:13:56
I think this is where your ideas live.
1:13:56
They're so close to you that you need somebody else to say, "Hey, you have something right there."
1:14:02
Or, "You need to move your head.
1:14:08
Get a change in perspective."
1:14:08
That is where the things that people should write about live.
1:14:14
People love to look over there and over there and over there for their ideas.
1:14:14
Our best ideas actually live right in the center of our foreheads, but we can't see them.
1:14:20
So we either need somebody else, a friend, to say, just what you just did for me, "You have to write about that.
1:14:29
That's really interesting.
1:14:29
David, you're so passionate about that."
1:14:32
"You have to write about that."
1:14:32
Or you need some change in perspective to then get inspired.
1:14:35
And I think that what just happened is a really nice description of how ideas and epiphanies happen, at least for me as a writer, is I say something that is totally natural to me, totally just what I'm enthusiastic about.
1:14:49
But until I have somebody like you who I admire and I respect to say, "David, you should write about that."
1:14:56
It is only then that I realize, Wait, actually, that has been in the center of my forehead the entire time, and I would've never known. I think it's incredible.
1:15:07
I think it's truly one of those things where we talked about there's the top line metrics that everyone has access to, everyone pays attention to.
1:15:17
We talked about one other data point where it's like what are the kind of emails that light you up when you receive them related to your work?
1:15:21
I think this is another, where you are just doing life, you're just talking to friends.
1:15:26
You're working, and other people are like, "What?"
1:15:33
In an intriguing, curious way.
1:15:33
They're like, "You do what?" What was that about?
1:15:43
Obviously sometimes you wouldn't be as animated as you just were, but there still would be enough of that, I think, seed where people would be a little curious and surprised.
1:15:49
And when you can get those passing behaviors, those passing interactions, I think those are worth paying attention to.
1:16:00
I think those are some of the...
1:16:00
By the way, I talked about spreadsheets.
1:16:00
One of my top articles, a lot of people talk about how to be great, is my love letter to Excel, which is talking about the history of it and why it's this incredible software that has stood the test of time.
1:16:14
It's still the biggest competitor to many companies out there.
1:16:19
And so that's just an example of where you can actually, like you're saying, it was right here, took me a while to take this fascination with spreadsheets and turn it into something else.
1:16:32
And here's so good about that definition of, I love the word that you just said, fascination.
1:16:36
The learning, the thoughts that you have, those came without you trying.
1:16:36
They just happened through the course of your life, Steph doing Steph.
1:16:44
And then you realized one day, "Oh my goodness, I have so much to say."
1:16:51
And I think that this is very important to emphasize in the writing process, because when we think of writing in school, you're in US history class and you know that you have a big paper due at the end of the semester.
1:17:05
So what do you have to do?
1:17:05
You spend the entire semester building up the knowledge that then you need to go publish a paper at the end of the semester about a topic that before the semester you've probably never thought of before.
1:17:21
And it's fine that we do that in school.
1:17:21
What's not fine is that we assume that all writing has to work that way.
1:17:26
Because what you're saying here is exactly the opposite.
1:17:26
It is how do we find the things that we already have the knowledge about, that we've had the curiosity about for a long time, we're deeply passionate about expressing, and get to a place where we can recognize that we've built up enough ammunition that now we're ready to just share it?
1:17:44
And the ideas just pour out of you when that's the case.
1:17:51
And I'm not saying that writing is easy when you do that, but I am saying that it's a heck of a lot easier than people realize if you can really lean into those fascinations that you're talking about.
1:18:01
And it's easy not just on the front of, "Okay, I'm excited." So words get on paper.
1:18:06
It's easier to make it good.
1:18:06
It is like your writing is much better when you're excited and you have something to say, and you recognize the nuances instead of just trying to push paper.
1:18:18
I got to ask you, one of the things that really distinguishes your writing process is the way that you differentiate between active and passive.
1:18:24
So let's take the example of the Disneyland idea.
1:18:30
When you have an epiphany like that, now what?
1:18:37
Just get your thoughts on paper when you're excited, because they are fleeting.
1:18:37
That even though you think you've thought about Disneyland and all of the nuances of what you just shared, I can guarantee that at least for me, for many ideas, that I just think this is gold.
1:18:53
If I don't get it down on paper, even hours later, I'm like, "What was that?"
1:18:53
It's almost like I can't even remember the idea, let alone catch it and capture it effectively.
1:19:05
It's like I truly can't even remember what was interesting. So get it down on paper.
1:19:05
However, there is value I talked about earlier about giving yourself time to see what sticks around in your interests.
1:19:17
I think there's also value in giving yourself time in the writing process, not to change an idea, but to massage it, to evolve it.
1:19:22
So my writing process, almost always when it's my own work, not for a job, when I have the time to get something on paper.
1:19:34
And then spend anywhere from days to weeks to months, sometimes even years at this point, there's articles that I've been ruminating.
1:19:39
And when I see something, a conversation, I just slot it in.
1:19:43
And I do it in a pretty haphazard way.
1:19:43
You can create an outline, and I would encourage that in a way just so that it saves you time.
1:19:48
But I'm just literally throwing something into a Google Doc as it encounters me and it's related to an idea.
1:19:53
And then at some later point, there's enough activation energy where I'm like, "Okay, there's a lot here."
1:20:00
And I have enough to say, I now understand almost the way I want to say it as well, that then I sit down and I refine it.
1:20:12
The how to be great article's an example of that, it took weeks, maybe even months, I can't remember, but it certainly took weeks of, "I have this idea."
1:20:23
And then by the way, I mentioned SEO earlier.
1:20:23
That can be helpful where I did not start there.
1:20:28
I don't think I optimized it at all, but I was trying to figure out, "What am I really trying to say here?"
1:20:32
And I actually did some keyword research as well mid that process to be like, "What's something people want to know?"
1:20:37
And that's where this idea of how to be great came from.
1:20:42
I didn't start with that title.
1:20:42
Do you know how you got to that one liner?
1:20:46
There's this tool, I don't know if it's still active, called Draftback, and it's a Chrome plugin where you can actually see.
1:20:52
And you can apply it to any Word Doc, it doesn't need to be a new one once you've installed Draftback because Google Docs has version history embedded in it.
1:20:57
And what it'll do is it'll just play back your article.
1:21:02
And that's really helpful, and so very helpful to learn about how you engage in the process.
1:21:10
But the point is, for most of my articles because I have played them back during this period is again, it's just putting the idea on paper.
1:21:17
There's no title at this point.
1:21:21
Sometimes it does start with a title.
1:21:21
I'm working with this article about this idea of unstoppable people, so that's a title and that's something that begins the process, but rarely is that the case for me.
1:21:34
So I came up with this outline of stuff, and then eventually I had enough there where I'd say I was 80%, but I was missing the hook.
1:21:45
I was trying to articulate this idea of the long game and how everyone tries to be as wonderful as they can in life.
1:21:49
And I can't remember exactly how I did the keyword research, but I ultimately found just a surprising number of people who were literally just going to Google typing how to be great or how do I become great?
1:22:00
Which in itself is a fascinating, psychological discovery, that there's enough people out there who are just toying with this idea, this question.
1:22:13
And to me, that's how I came to the end hook, which ended up being the title.
1:22:20
I want to take this from the clouds to the streets, that what you just said about Google is not that you're going in to strategically look at where there's keyword optimization and stuff like that.
1:22:30
Sure, there's an aspect of that, but really what Google is revealing is what are the problems that people struggle with, the questions that they're asking, and how do they articulate those questions?
1:22:40
And when you're looking at keywords, you are seeing a giant data set of what people actually think. Yes.
1:22:48
And so I think this is why a lot of people, again, there's often such a binary view of things.
1:22:56
And SEO, I think this is true.
1:22:56
And there's this really healthy middle ground that people miss out on, where some people ignore it entirely.
1:23:06
Because all they hear about is the black hat tactics and the fact that there's SEO farms, content farms.
1:23:09
And that stuff is true, by the way.
1:23:09
And I don't encourage that at all.
1:23:09
But then on the other hand, there are the people who just purely optimize and they miss out on the craft.
1:23:21
And again, they just purely gamify things.
1:23:21
But there is this middle ground where you can start with your interests and go almost fully there with that in mind.
1:23:26
However, along the way, why not get the data?
1:23:35
Why not bring in the information about billions of people?
1:23:41
And by the way, not just the fact that they're searching for something, but when you do SEO research effectively, you discover what people are searching for, so a seed keyword, how many people are searching for that?
1:23:51
You can see if that's increasing or decreasing with time, so becoming more or less important.
1:23:56
You can see all of the secondary keywords which tells you all the other questions that they have.
1:24:01
And of course, if you're being truly tactical, you can choose to then go create a section on that if you're trying to rank.
1:24:05
But if you're not trying to rank, at the very least, it tells you what they care about.
1:24:15
And so I think that it's almost failing yourself in a way to not incorporate or look at keyword research for articles.
1:24:23
You don't have to incorporate it, but at least learn what this, by the way, is one of the biggest data sets in the world, is available to you for free.
1:24:29
And I think pairing that with your intuition is powerful.
1:24:36
There's a gardening metaphor from a lot of the incubation period, the rumination period.
1:24:43
I love that word, ruminating.
1:24:43
You're letting an idea just cycle in your head, and what you're doing is you're just planting seeds all over the place.
1:24:53
But then some seeds over time, they go into the ground and they really begin to bear fruit, and they last through seasons of your life.
1:24:59
And I think that that's what the rumination period is.
1:25:05
You're building a structure that allows you to get excited about every epiphany, write it down, without worrying about what is the staying power of this epiphany. You actually never know.
1:25:15
You need the time to see what it is.
1:25:15
And then what an article is is it's the residue of what has stood the test of time.
1:25:23
And so by doing this, you are actually creating the conditions for all of the ideas in your piece to be worthy, not just now, but over time, so that things get read and reread, because there's a real substance that has been born out through time.
1:25:43
No, it's such a good point.
1:25:43
In a way, you are testing that this is going to be relevant in years by making sure it's relevant to you in weeks, months, and then also giving yourself the possibility of introducing new ideas along that period.
1:25:53
I think that's really underrated.
1:25:58
And another reason why, again, I think consistency is helpful, but there's certain things in life where imagine if you just said this has to be ready by this date.
1:26:04
Like the 40-year door, imagine if someone was like, "This has to be ready in a month."
1:26:11
It just would not happen.
1:26:16
And so each of our articles, the same way, I don't think you should put some sort of limit on every article of mine should be 1500 words.
1:26:21
Some of them should be 400, some of them should be 4,000, some of them should take a week, some of them should take a year.
1:26:31
And giving them each, like you said, plants is actually a good analogy, their own cycle to become what they can be, and also getting rid of the ones that just don't make it there, I think is important.
1:26:40
Yeah, this is going to be very self-indulgent, but Disneyland was built in 366 days.
1:26:45
And on the opening day, they had to choose between, it was working bathrooms or water fountains.
1:26:57
And they chose working bathrooms, so there was no water, and it was a super hot day in Orange County.
1:27:03
And the opening day of Disneyland was a famous mess, a famous mess really.
1:27:09
But they built Disneyland in 366 days, and there really is something to a deadline.
1:27:16
The thing is, you can sprint, but you can't always sprint.
1:27:16
And a deadline only has integrity if it's something that's rare, but what a lot of people do is they do really well on a deadline and then they always have a deadline, and that is a recipe for burnout.
1:27:36
Yeah, I'm trying to figure this out in my own life, because as we've talked about, I haven't written in a while.
1:27:40
And so there is the issue, to your point, of having no deadlines, having no regulation around yourself and your ability to put things out there.
1:27:46
And so figuring out that right dynamic of is it every article that has a deadline?
1:27:53
Is it something really arbitrary where I have to publish every Wednesday?
1:27:58
I think that doesn't work.
1:27:58
But equally to your point, having no deadline can also turn projects into things that never come to be.
1:28:10
In fact, one thing I think I've actually been good at is not so much on the article front, but on the project front, I know this about myself.
1:28:14
The fact that I can turn something that I'm excited about into something that never emerges with enough time and a lack of a deadline, that with my book, with the recent project I launched and another course I did, all of them were done within the span of two months.
1:28:30
And these are things where the book was 70,000 words.
1:28:30
The thing more recently was over 50, plus videos plus all of the other things that come from a launch.
1:28:42
But I knew if I let it go much longer, it just would not be.
1:28:42
And I know that about my psychology, and so there is a bit of calculus just around, am I the type of person that needs the monthly deadline or not?
1:28:55
Some people do, some people don't.
1:29:01
If you were to teach a class on writing, we plop you into some university and you say, "These are my students, here we go."
1:29:06
And just assume they're good writers.
1:29:06
They want to be like you.
1:29:13
How do you structure the syllabus of that class?
1:29:13
Well, what I can tell you from my Trends days is I think there's a facet of writing effectively that is not in any of the syllabi, syllabuses? Who knows?
1:29:27
My husband went to Princeton, and all of his friends have really strong vocabularies.
1:29:27
I never took any of the LSAT and all these things that are required to have a good fundamental writing capability.
1:29:42
But I think what I've learned that is missing from some of those English classes, for example, writing classes, is the ability to spot what's interesting.
1:29:49
And so there would be a whole section upfront on that, so I think that's another thing that you pointed out that's missing in a lot of writing education, is that something is fed to you.
1:30:00
"Hey, go write about this topic."
1:30:05
Or I remember an English class where they give you no instruction, and that's bad for other reasons, where they're just like, "Just write. Send in an essay." And you're like, "What? On what? How?
1:30:16
Should it be interesting in this way or this way or this way? How are you grading me?"
1:30:21
There would be something, we used to do this at Trends where we would hire analysts, and the first thing we did was just, "Hey, you know what we do here at Trends?
1:30:26
We're trying to show things before they're interesting.
1:30:30
Just send me three trends.
1:30:30
You don't need to write about them.
1:30:30
You don't need to create some elaborate article or infographic, just send me three things that you find interesting."
1:30:41
And the level of differentiation from that simple prompt was incredible. It was so easy to tell.
1:30:49
It didn't mean that everyone who sent in something good was going to be successful, but people who had really thought about what makes something interesting, what makes something unique that would be good enough to send to thousands of people that are paying for something for the service of surfacing interesting things?
1:31:05
And so there would be something, since I'm thinking on the spot, I'm not sure exactly what it would look like, but there would be a whole section upfront about just like, let's refine your attunement to what other people find interesting via what you are interested in, what you're paying attention to.
1:31:28
This is a really nice bookend to our conversation, because we started off by talking about distinctiveness, and I think that the theme that's flowed through this entire conversation is that there is an intrinsic interestingness inside of you.
1:31:40
What do you feel drawn towards?
1:31:40
What are the magnets that are pulling you?
1:31:45
And then the work that needs to be done, I think begin with that intrinsic compass.
1:31:51
But then the work that needs to be done around SEO, around how do you frame something, talking to people, having conversations, like what I said to you about Disneyland, "Hey, that's really interesting. Go follow that."
1:32:00
And then you repeated back to me, "What about it was interesting?"
1:32:04
Maybe have a few more conversations about it.
1:32:08
And then you take your intrinsic interestingness and then you develop an intuition for extrinsic interestingness, and it is in the packaging of both of those that you end up getting reach and distribution and the differentiation that I think a lot of people are looking for.
1:32:19
And I think that this is the thesis that both of us have is you have that inside of you, but you're probably suppressing it, because you're doing what you think that you should do, what you think you should write about instead of what you actually feel called to be doing.
1:32:37
Yeah, I actually got an email from someone who read Doing Content Right recently, and she said exactly that.
1:32:42
She was like, "I was trying to do all of the things with her newsletter," and she's like, "And I just read it, and I just thought about what am I uniquely capable of doing, saying and how?"
1:32:54
As we talked about, like, "What is my voice?"
1:32:54
And it sounds so simplistic, but it's just like there are 8 billion humans out there, and so if you think you're going to differentiate by talking about the same things in the same ways that everyone else is, it's impossible, truly.
1:33:12
And so what is unique to you is what you are drawn to, what you spend an abnormal amount of time with.
1:33:18
And even if that sounds silly, which it probably will to most people, because inherently that is something you're doing differently, strangely, as you said.
1:33:27
But that I think is if we're going to say there's any secret sauce out there, it's those arenas.
1:33:33
And we're lucky, because actually 50 years ago, that probably wouldn't get you very far, because we weren't in the internet age where you could find enough people who would align in that strange fashion, but that's not true today.
1:33:46
How has learning to code influenced how you write?
1:33:54
In terms of how I write and my voice, I don't think it influenced it very much.
1:33:54
However, being able to deploy things in my way I think is underrated.
1:33:58
My blog is created by me.
1:33:58
It uses a template on Ghost, but I customized it.
1:34:09
I've chosen exactly how it's delivered.
1:34:09
Same thing with all my projects.
1:34:15
I think that's very underrated.
1:34:15
As you talked about with Jack Butcher and Tim Urban, there is some level of the creator that is being deployed through their projects that is not invisible.
1:34:28
In fact, it's extremely critical.
1:34:28
And all of a sudden when you start to do things, you start to venture into spaces where, again, this is something I'm toying with, is bringing in these other contractors or bringing in these other employees who aren't you, who don't see the world as you.
1:34:42
And I'm very specific on what I want to see, because it feels like me.
1:34:48
These projects are some appendage.
1:34:48
It literally feels like they have to be done in the way that I'm proud of, that I feel represent my voice, my brain.
1:34:55
And so coding in a way was I think actually a really critical element in that, I never planned to become a developer as a full-time job, but it did enable me to create the projects precisely how I wanted them to be.
1:35:17
Yeah, the word that's coming to mind is vertically integrated, full stacked.
1:35:20
All right, Steph, that was so much fun. That was so much fun. We geeked out.
1:35:26
Yeah, that was really fun.
1:35:26
We totally geeked out, and it was so fun to finally meet you. I know, finally.