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I'm going to talk about what I've learned in I don't know, like 20 episodes of how I write.
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What stuck out, what I've learned, how it's changed my writing process.
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I want to share all of that with you.
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I want to recap some lessons from the show and both talk about some of the things that you've heard on the podcast, things that have been recorded and on the record and then some of the things that have happened behind the scenes, funny stories, things that you would never know about that things that we could just chuckle and say, "Whoa, what a ride it's been so far."
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I got to say, before I start, this is about as fun as I've ever had working on a project.
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I did something earlier this year with a coach that I work with where we work through my core values.
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And it was funny because we're going to start with five and we worked on the first one for like 3 months or something.
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And we finished and he said, "Nope.
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We're not going to do any more core values for you because we have one and the one that we found is the one that everything in your life orbits around.
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And it's the pursuit of excellence.
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That is the thing that I value more than anything.
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That pursuit of excellence.
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And in this podcast, I've gotten to see what that looks like both with the writers who I've interviewed and then also myself in terms of trying to build the best podcast, run the best podcast that I possibly can.
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So, what I'm going to do in the next hour or so is I'm going to share a few lessons that I've learned from different guests and we're going to talk through them together and we'll see where we end up.
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And the first comes from Tim Ferriss who says that you should have a lower quality bar for inputs, but a higher quality bar for outputs. And what does that mean?
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Do less than you think you can do. Mhm. Is the takeaway.
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If you want to forge a new behavior, do less than you think you can do.
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The most important thing is building positive momentum of {quote} success.
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If you don't have an exercise habit and your New Year's resolution is to work out 6 days a week and you've for the last year have not worked out even twice a week, don't do that. Mhm. Hour workout? No. 10 minutes a workout.
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Do less than you think you can do.
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Two things I've taken from you is complexity fails. Yeah.
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And two crappy pages per day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
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When Tim's writing process and this goes back to his very first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, where he clearly struggled through that book.
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And what happened was he would struggle and he would struggle and he eventually said, "I'm just going to write two crappy pages per day.
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That's all I'm going to do. Two crappy pages." And it's just two.
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Everyone can write two pages per day.
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But even more, he said they're going to be two pages and they're going to be crappy. That's it.
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That is all I need to focus on, but I'm going to do it every single day.
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Then by doing it day in and day out, day in and day out, a book, hopefully, will come out of him. So, he focused on that.
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Day by day shipping, day by day shipping.
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And I got to say, I noticed the same thing.
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My writing output, in a way that has been frustrating, but ever since I've started really taking right of passage seriously, I'm just not writing as much as I did in 2018, 2020, those sorts of years.
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And it's been frustrating and the biggest thing that has changed is my daily writing habit isn't nearly as habitual as it once was.
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I might I used to go to Starbucks in New York City.
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I'd sit down and I couldn't do anything on a day-to-day basis until I got my 90 minutes of writing done and I would really like to get back to that.
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But that's what Tim was doing when he was writing The 4-Hour Workweek.
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That was the key for him to get ideas out of his head and they didn't even need to be good.
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But at the same time, he has such a high quality bar.
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I got to say, Tim has already changed how I think about writing, how I think about teaching my students and what it is that I want to focus on and I'm going to end the podcast there.
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So, I'll get there in like an hour or so.
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But his bar for output, what excellence looks like and how you refine and you refine and you refine to get to a place where you end up with something really good, something you're really proud of because a book isn't something that you just ship.
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It is something that lives with you for a decade, two decades.
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He made very clear to me.
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He said, "If you publish a book, the worst thing you can do is write a mediocre book because then that book is still with you week in and week out, month in and month out, year in and year out, but you're known for being somebody who published a mediocre book and the man is five for five."
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4-Hour Workweek, 4-Hour Body, 4-Hour Chef and then Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors. This was crazy.
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I was researching for the episode.
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Out of the four top Kindle books of all time, you know what they are?
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They're the ESV Bible, The One Year Bible, 4-Hour Body and 4-Hour Chef. Those are the top four.
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He has two of them and the other two are the Bible.
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So, when I talk about outputs and what he does, I think it's worth listening up.
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The quality level has to be incredibly high, which is a constraint I'm happy to always embrace. Course. Right?
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I don't volume I don't care about volume.
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I just do not care because there's no competitive advantage there.
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You're going to lose to the robots.
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You're going to lose to the people using robots.
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If you think you're going to win on a volume game, long-term you're not going to win.
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At the very least, if you're doing it manually, you're going to burn out.
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So, for me at least, the quality by my standards needs to be incredibly high.
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But there's a few things that you can take from his writing and instantly implement.
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The first is he asked friends for feedback all the time.
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Because he wanted to write things that the normal average reader would understand and resonate with.
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So, what he would do when he would ask is the problem is that when you ask friends for feedback, you know what ends up happening?
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Your friends, they don't want to hurt your feelings, so they don't tell you the honest truth.
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Actually, sometimes they don't even let themselves think the honest truth because they like you.
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But what he does is he says, "Hey, tell me this.
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What's the 20% that I should keep no matter what?
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What is the 20% that should stay in, that is worthy of being in there?"
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And then that gives them a chance to compliment you, right? Make you feel good.
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And then on the other side, he says, "If I cut 20%, had to cut it, what 20% should that be?"
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And what is he doing here?
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Psychologically, he is giving his editor an easy way for an editor friend to give you harsh feedback if they're scared of offending you because they have to say, "Hey, what are the 20% of things that just shouldn't be in there?" I think that's genius.
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I instantly started doing that.
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And then the other thing that I haven't tried, but I want to try is say that you're working on something and you're a little bit skeptical of some of the arguments.
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You're like, "I think that these arguments are good, but either I haven't made the arguments strong enough or there might be some wiggle room in my arguments, you know?"
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What he would say is, "Hey, you can hire a lawyer or maybe even a smart law student and they can proofread your work."
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The thing that I like about the the student strategy is my bet is wherever you live, if especially if you're in a city, there's probably a law school nearby and some student who's top of their class who you could hire to edit your writing and they'd be fairly affordable.
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And the key insight here is that lawyers are trained to notice and take out anything that's ambiguous that could then be used against you because that's what they're doing for their clients and it's what they can do for you when whenever you're writing. I think that's genius.
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And what you can do is you can tighten up your arguments.
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So, that's the first lesson from Tim Ferriss.
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Have a low bar for the inputs, but then a high bar for the outputs.
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The next is number two, Kevin Kelly, who wrote Excellent Advice for Living, which is a book of maxims and my favorite one is don't aim to be the best, be the only.
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If at all possible, try to work on something or somewhere where there's no name for what it is that you're doing.
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Where you might have difficulty explaining to your mother what it is.
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Because that is the spot where the breakthroughs happen when there's no name.
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So, it's like it's like 10 years ago, you're kind of like you're doing podcasting.
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It's like, "What I mean, it's kind of like radio, but it's not quite radio.
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It's sort of" And so, you're at you're at the you're at the good spot.
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And part of that is about not being the best, not aiming for the best, but to be the only.
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And that is an incredibly high bar.
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That takes most of us, including me, most of my life to arrive there, to figure out what that is.
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figure out what that is. There may be some prodigies who are born who very early on have some notion of what it is that they can do better than other people, but most of us is going to take a long journey and that's why most successful
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people's lives are kind of like they're like detours, backtracking, hard rights, uh dead ends um because they're on this journey of kind of figuring out this really good thing and they might arrive finally at the place where they're doing something that only they can do. There's a few ways to think about this.
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There's a few ways to think about this.
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The first is you could be thinking in your writing where are there opportunities?
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There's niches, there's ways of writing, ways of thinking that could be really useful to readers that nobody else is exploiting or trying to capitalize on.
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I think that that's fairly interesting, but it's not really what I took from Kevin.
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What I took from him was what it looks like in practice to truly follow your curiosity, your passion, and your enthusiasm.
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And I know that we hear this a lot.
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But when you meet somebody like Kevin who's actually doing it, you get a textured sense of what this looks like.
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And there's a moment on the interview where I ask him, "Hey Kevin, what trade-offs did you have to make to be Kevin Kelly?"
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And I was expecting him to say, "Well, I gave up family.
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I wasn't able to do this or that."
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And his answer surprised me.
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He goes he goes, "I wasn't able to be great." I was like, "What? What what what?"
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And he goes, "I wasn't able to build a really big company.
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I wasn't able to maybe even write a really successful book.
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And yeah, I have notoriety, but I don't feel like I was able to achieve that peak level of success because of the choices that I made."
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And to the extent that that's true, I think it's revealing because he is the kind of person who is surrendered to his nature.
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It was funny because I had him in this studio in Austin.
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Basically right now I'm recording in the studio that I teach my boot camps in, but I have another room where we do the the interviews.
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And it's all decorated with my favorite things.
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I got this bookshelf of all my favorite books, and it's really modeled after basically Paris and Disneyland.
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So this is my physical expression of basically what happens in my brain.
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And he looks at me and he goes, "You have to come to my studio."
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So I was driving along the California coast over Thanksgiving, and I was driving through his hometown, and I was with my family, and I was said, "Hey Kevin, driving through your hometown. Hope you're doing great. Happy Thanksgiving."
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And he goes, "You have to come to my studio."
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And I just very politely declined.
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I said, "No, it's it's all right.
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I'm with I'm with my family, but thank you for the invitation."
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Because I didn't think that he wanted my family to go to the studio.
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There's like six of us, right?
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And he goes, "No, you have to come to my studio." I go, "Yes, sir. Yes, sir."
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So we're driving back up, and I say, "Hey mom, sister, aunt, why don't we all go to Kevin Kelly's studio?
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This is who he is, and I think you'll really enjoy it."
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You walk in, and he basically has built this separate house next to his house, and it is just a multi-story celebration of his passions.
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Obviously, there's things around technology, computers, and books.
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Oh my goodness, the the the bookshelf is like eight bookshelf stories high, and it's probably 50 ft from floor to ceiling, and there are thousands and thousands of books that he's been collecting for years, and it's all categorized by different Kevin Kelly interests, but then there's all these other things.
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Like I didn't realize he was so into biology.
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I knew that he was really interested in Asia.
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He spent a bunch of time showing us his photos cuz he's basically been everywhere in Asia.
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All these things that he's building by hand, all these things that he collects like this this this like taxidermy bird, and then these bones that he collected from from this animal that was outside.
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It was like, "What is going on?"
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And you can just see this guy gets really obsessed with things.
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Things that sort of the synthesis of the natural world and technology, they fuse, and he's very much into the sort of cosmic scale of blending past and especially future.
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And you can see it in physical space.
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And it's the kind of space that only Kevin Kelly could have built, which got me thinking to he's the kind of writer that's trying to write the kinds of pieces that only he can write.
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He said to me on the podcast, "Every sentence that you write should be something that's never written down before."
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And obviously, if you take that too far, it's just going to get you stuck.
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But the point there is so profound that rather than try to be somebody else, you just try to ask, "What is it? What is my nature?
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What am I innately drawn to?"
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And this sounds really easy to do, but it's very hard to do in practice because so much of our dreams and our expectations are inspired by models that we have in the world, and people who we admire and respect who say, "Hey, you should be that person.
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You should be that person."
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But somebody like Kevin says, "No, I'm not going to do that.
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I'm actually going to give up a real modicum of success so that I can be one of a kind and driven by the obsessive pursuit of my own curiosities."
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Actually, when you're around Kevin, you just get the sense that he's always sort of fooling around.
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He's not really doing much that's productive, but he's somehow so aligned with his work.
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The alignment of his heart, his mind, and wallet, he's so aligned that productive outputs just end up seeping out of him almost in spite of him just trying to mess around.
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But it doesn't feel like he's really forcing the output.
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He actually says, "Productivity is often a distraction.
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Don't aim for better ways to get through your tasks as quickly as possible.
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Instead, look for writing projects that you never want to stop doing.
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Look for writing projects that you never want to stop doing."
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And in this idea of surrender to your nature was one of my big themes that has been top of mind since I started the the podcast because I've noticed that everything that you do as a writer works really well. You can do anything. You can take notes. You can not take notes. You can write long form.
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You can write short form. You can write articles. You can write books. You can write magazines. You can write every day.
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You can only write when you're inspired.
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It actually doesn't matter that much.
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You can be anybody, do anything, but but but but but but, whatever it is that you choose, you have to be really really really good at what you do.
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And when I think of what do I mean by good, I mean a mix of quality and distinctiveness.
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If you end up with distinctiveness but no quality, you end up with a lot of what modern artists try to do, which is just shock value.
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If you end up with quality without distinctiveness, you end up with a lot of old paintings where people are just trying to model the people who came before them, and it doesn't feel like there's that much of a shift or a sense of novelty in the painting.
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I like the blend of quality and distinctiveness.
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And the only way to do that is by surrendering to your nature.
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And somehow, when it comes to mental cognitive tasks, I think we underestimate how much you can surrender to your nature.
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Whereas we don't do this with physical tasks.
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We look at somebody like Michael Phelps, and we say, "Wow, that guy was made to be a swimmer.
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Long arms, long legs, giant torso."
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You look at somebody like LeBron James.
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That guy was made to be a basketball player.
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His speed, his size, all that, the way he dunks.
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We say, "That man is made to be an athlete." We do this all the time.
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But somehow, when it comes to cognitive tasks, we don't realize that the mind can be a well-oiled machine for a certain way of thinking.
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And Kevin Kelly taught me that through that mantra of don't aim to be the best, be the only.
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And then there's the Cultural Tutor. So I love this guy. I love this guy.
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I feel like I'm a big part of his story because when I found him, he had just stopped working at McDonald's where he was sweeping the floors, cleaning out the McFlurry machines.
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So he would sometimes go to the bathroom and clean that as well.
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He was like a few months out.
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I think he'd been writing online for 6 weeks, and he'd just hit 100,000 Twitter followers.
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And I I looked at his account, and I said, "I've never seen somebody grow like this. Who is this guy?"
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And he was a statue account.
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Somehow I got in touch with him, and we'd get on the phone, and I say, "Who are you?"
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And he says, "Well, I'm like 25 years old.
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I have been working at Mickey D's.
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I'm actually training to join the British military.
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I basically make no money, still living with my parents." And I say, "Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on here. Hold on. Dude, you got game. You got game.
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How much How much money are you going to need to publish a Twitter thread every day and grow your email newsletter?
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I don't care what you write about.
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But how much money do you need to do those two things?" And he gave me a number.
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I gave him a little bit more than that.
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I said, "Great, we got a deal.
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I'll basically be a patron for you. You write every day.
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Promise me that you're going to do that.
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Keep the quality bar really high, and I'll just support you."
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And it's been now a year and a half. I think he has 1.
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6 million Twitter followers, and it's been one of the fastest growing intellectual Twitter accounts in the world in that time.
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His mantra, the thing that I learned from him, is if it was published in the last 50 years, don't read it.
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The simplest reason not to read something published in the last 50 years is because that's what everyone else is reading.
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The only books that people read, the most people read, are books published in the last half Not even 50 in the last 6 years, in the last in the last 2 years, right?
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You know, I I'm not disparaging these authors.
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They've done incredibly well for themselves, and and and you know, I have no doubt their books are filled with marvels and wonderful wonderful things.
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But the rest of the world is reading them.
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And it And it's a simple fact of life that that if you consume you read what everyone else is reading then the likelihood that you will write what they are writing and and worse still think what they are thinking is let's say increased. It's not certain.
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But if all if we all read the same books, we all think the same things, right?
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So it if all you do is read something different if rather than reading Atomic Habits, you know, it's the first one that comes to mind as one of these books which is everywhere you know, if rather than reading Atomic Habits, you go and read I don't know Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy. Just one example.
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Um then your output is going to be different.
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And if you want to I mean it it all sounds a little bit calculated and it's it's it's not really calculated on my part, but but it's it's it's just a fact.
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You want to stand out as a writer.
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If you want to find your voice, have a voice, be distinctive, all the things that we say writers should have and should want.
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Um then just by reading something different you will achieve that.
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If a book, let's say I mentioned Boethius.
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That was basically a best seller um for about 1,200 years.
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And if a book has been held in such high regard for over a thousand years um it's it's not unreasonable to assume that it has something of real value in it.
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And at the very least even if the book itself is god awful, the fact it's been read for so long means it has had an immense amount of influence.
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And by reading that book, you will then understand so much more about the world regardless of the quality of that book itself.
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So so you have a choice really.
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Whose recommendation do you take?
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The recommendation of of the readers of the New York Times or whatever the New York I don't have a calculator New York Times best sellers. Or Father Time. Right right. Yeah, exactly.
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Father Time is the best Sure sure sure. recommendation you.
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Or a thousand years, 50 generations of the greatest minds in in the world.
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The thing that he understands is that the problem with new books isn't that they're bad.
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The problem is that everybody else is reading them, which then doesn't give you an edge as a writer.
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Because as a writer, what when you choose a book to read, you are choosing the soil that then you're going to take fruits from over time and grow and grow your ideas in.
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And the best way to have distinctive ideas as a writer is to read things that other people aren't seeing.
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It was funny because we spent a week together. Where were we?
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We're in the Bahamas during the summer.
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And I forget why, but I went down to his room.
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I think I needed to get something like a book that I had given him and he had this stack of books next to his bed.
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And I didn't recognize any of them.
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And there were people like John Ruskin and Plutarch and all these old books that were many hundreds of years old.
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And it was funny even one night at dinner we were saying grace and he just pulled out this poem from memory.
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Probably took him two, three minutes to recite and it was like, "Oh yeah, that's from like 1874."
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What I like about him is there's such congruence between what he writes about and who he is.
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They're the they're they're the same person. They're the same person.
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He just doesn't read much new stuff at all.
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You ask him about pop culture, he has no idea what you're talking about.
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You ask him about the latest book, he has no idea what you're talking about.
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But you ask him about history, you ask him about ancient architecture, you ask him about the Greeks and the Romans and poetry that's 400 years years old, Shakespeare he'll have a heck of a lot to say.
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And that then fuses into his writing.
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So it's not necessarily that he's consuming better, but he's consuming different and that's what makes his writing so distinct.
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There's a real opportunity here because we are trapped as a society in the never ending now.
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If I could change anything about the internet, I would change the information architecture so that we can get away from this recent see bias that just plagues our information sphere.
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You go on Google, you go on social media, the things that are shown are the things that were published most recently and I don't think that this is good.
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So we're all consuming the same stuff, thinking the same thoughts, reading, consuming, watching videos that were made and published and shared shared in the last 24 hours.
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Instead, we can do what Cultural Tutor does and we can say, "Hey, the heck with that.
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I'm not going to do that.
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I'm going to go revisit the great books that have shaped our worldview because that's going to have a way better ROI, not just because hey, those ideas have stood the test of time but also because I'm going to end up reading things that are different from from what other people are reading and that's going to give me an edge as a writer.
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So the takeaway for me has been if I want to just think differently, what I can do is I can go read old things and it requires extreme intentionality because the internet so quickly pulls us to contemporary information.
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But the thing is that strategy doesn't work for for everybody.
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The next person who I want to talk about is Marc Andreessen and he does something completely different.
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He has a barbell approach to information.
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My my general method is to try to barbell my information intake.
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So it's either stuff that is super current or stuff that's timeless.
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And so what I'm trying to do is not read I basically I'm trying I'm trying to not read anything that's from yesterday through to like 10 years ago.
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I'm trying to like screen all that stuff out and it's I'm trying to be super current and the form of being super current is talking to people who are currently experts or it's or it's specifically Twitter. Right?
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It's sort of sort of the you know, sort of the fire the fire hose on Twitter.
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Um and then for timeless it's you know, at that point that's almost all books.
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But I I kind of go back and forth between these modes, right?
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So yeah, I'm either listening to like a book on usually history or biography or something like that or something you demand that I'm trying to learn or I'm like up to the minute, here's what's happening in AI today.
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He says it's going to either be the timely or it's going to be the timeless and there's not much that's going to be in between.
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It was funny because I showed up early for that interview.
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It was one of the first ones that we did on the road.
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And I wanted the sets no matter where we were for a How I Write interview.
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I wanted you to be able to look at the set and instantly be able to say, "Ha, I know what show that is.
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I know what show that is."
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So we got the specs of this room that we were going to record in at A16Z, Andreessen Horowitz headquarters on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park.
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What I did was I went to my parents' house and I just ransacked the place.
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I got carpets, I got lights, I got real plants, I got fake plants and then I got this vase.
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The very first thing that you see when you walk into my parents' house.
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So I get the vase, I put it in the back of my parents' car for I say, "Great, we'll have this in the background of the shot."
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And I pull over for breakfast.
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I pull over, I forget why, but I opened up the the back seat and the vase just falls out, just shatters.
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My mom's vase and I go, "Oh no, is this going to be an omen for the day?
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You've got to be kidding me." I call my mom.
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Thankfully, she wasn't upset.
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She just sort of laughed it off.
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And the interview ended up going well, but we showed up like three and a half hours early.
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We then decorated the place, designed it all. I had a blast doing it.
27:24
It's like Extreme Makeover How I Write edition. Move that bus. Move that bus.
27:32
And that interview for the very first time, we tried this new thing which is honestly something I'm still trying to figure out how to work with where when you first meet these people everyone has their own energy, their own frequency, their own way of talking and engaging with other people, right?
27:49
And the challenge is how do you start the interview with high energy, with a vibe?
27:57
So what we've tried to do and we've kept this up is before you listen to the interview as a listener, we've spoken a bit and that's like a calibration period where we can get to know each other and kind of get a vibe for each other.
28:08
And in that time, I noticed how much of a precise dictionary or Wikipedia quality memory for history that guy has.
28:22
He gave me a whole history lesson on CIA and the similarities between Hollywood and Silicon Valley and how that inspired his company. It was wild. It was wild.
28:38
And what I learned from him is that his way of consuming of reading a bunch of the new stuff.
28:45
He's also in so many group chats.
28:45
He's in so many group chats and he's just constantly has that consumption of what's happening right now, he says doing that and then reading these old books.
28:54
He has that barbell approach, works for him, whereas Cultural Tutor just says, "Hey, I'm basically going to ignore things that are less than 50 years old." Then there's Riva Tez.
29:04
And I have so many things that I took away from this episode.
29:08
I really admire Riva in terms of the way that she thinks.
29:12
I feel like there's a freedom in her thought a creativity.
29:16
She just lets herself go. She's unchained.
29:21
She's untethered to precedent.
29:24
One of the things that we spoke about is that for her she makes a trade-off that I didn't even realize existed until our conversation.
29:32
Where when we think about writing in school, we think of very logical arguments, right?
29:39
That's what academic writing is.
29:39
You're going to prove your arguments.
29:41
It's going to be a little bit more dry.
29:45
There's going to be a very clear structure.
29:46
You're going be very literal in terms of your interpretation of what's being said. Riva doesn't do that.
29:51
She thinks of her writing much more like a word painting.
29:56
I mentioned oil painting course last year and I can't paint.
29:58
I'm a writer not a painter.
29:59
But I thought if I learned to paint, it might make me think in a different medium that might affect my writing. Did it?
30:06
You know, I well, the thing is is I'm a really terrible painter.
30:08
So it really didn't do great for my confidence.
30:12
But it reminded me of something that you and I had spoken about before about like writing me like word painting. It's right.
30:17
And like you are your painter. We both are pointillism.
30:19
Pointillism is in the art of many dots and there's many different colored dots.
30:23
When you go up close, look like nonsense.
30:25
When you come away, it's like a beautiful scene.
30:26
And there's an analogy there in writing, right?
30:28
Which is that the kind of writing that I, you know, resonate with and other people resonate with is a little less, you know, logical and rational. It's a bit more poetic. Yeah.
30:38
In that writing, you know, you you um you are creating a pre-ordered mood.
30:46
It's much more like a word painting than it is like a argument.
30:48
And that this is straight to the heart of everybody.
30:51
But uh yeah, no, it's the it's the the the I think doing all the mediums of communication, expressing yourselves is like obviously valid.
31:00
You never just sit there and just look at something for an hour unless you're painting it.
31:05
You almost need to paint it.
31:06
Like the motion allows you it gives you enough movement to see things differently, but focusing on one object gives you enough stillness to like have the depth. Yeah.
31:16
And I think it's the same thing in writing.
31:17
What the brain likes to do is it sort of likes to skip, right?
31:19
Like when you're meditating, you go from this thing to this thing to this thing.
31:22
But when you're writing, you're forced to stay in one topic and you're perpetually frustrated in both activities, but then you look back at it after some time, you're like I can't believe how deeply I just dissected that.
31:35
That was so well said and I think is an argument for people to read Rilke.
31:38
Cuz what Rilke does is he finds in little pieces that like he will talk about a flower or about something very simple and he really notices fine details.
31:48
And they all like he is to me is like the perfect all he captured the art of, you know, word paintings.
31:55
Um but yeah, that kind of like can you focus and notice like increase your sensitivity to something so simple?
32:02
What Riva is able to do is feel deeply.
32:06
She's able to feel deeply.
32:08
And by leaning into her passion, she then becomes a poet.
32:12
She is very she's very sensitive and has very strong beliefs and she leans into those.
32:20
Then by being so passionate, she then doesn't need a thesaurus because the the strong language, the vibrancy, it comes out in her writing.
32:29
You can hear in the way she talks and you can see it in the way she writes because she writes and speaks with so much heart that the words are just distinctive.
32:37
The vibe is just it's just a Riva vibe.
32:40
We're talking about don't be the best, be the be the only. Riva is one of a kind. She's one of a kind.
32:46
She cares so much about what she's saying and she has that uninhibited way of writing that the language just comes out fresh.
32:55
I admire that because I don't feel like I'm there yet as as a writer for myself.
33:00
I feel like I've gotten a lot closer by really studying Riva's writing.
33:05
And actually what I've done is I've taken sentences and paragraphs that I really liked from Riva and I have this in this Evernote document.
33:12
And if I'm trying to go for that, what I'll do is I'll just look at that document and I'll say then I'll look at my writing and I'll say, how can I make my writing more like hers?
33:23
And then I got to say there was something I learned from her in terms of method, how she writes as well.
33:30
She recommends this book called Against Method by I think it's got a name Feyerabend.
33:36
That recommendation shows up in the way that she writes.
33:38
There's so much out there about do something every day, show up consistently. She's like, no way.
33:42
No way am I going to do that.
33:46
I'm going to choose fanatical obsession over moderation.
33:49
I'm not even going to try to force my creativity.
33:55
I'm not going to try to force my writing, not going to try to force my research.
33:58
What I'm just going to do is I'm just going to wait.
34:03
Just going to wait until I feel a strong desire to really write.
34:08
And then once I feel that desire, I am not going to hold back.
34:11
I'm just going to let it rip.
34:13
I'm going to cancel my plans for 3 days.
34:14
I'm going to drive to Joshua Tree, Yosemite, rent a cabin if I need to, and I'm going to write and write and write and I'm not going to leave that place until the project that I'm working on is done. Not going to hold back.
34:27
I'm going to free my calendar and I'm just going to let my curiosity rip. That's what she's doing.
34:33
She has this quote and I think it's from Rilke.
34:37
And it says let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror.
34:47
[laughter] [clears throat] You can see it in her writing.
34:49
You can see it in her writing.
34:51
Then there's Steven Pressfield.
34:53
What I got from him was an immense care for the craft.
34:56
So with the Riva, it's with the ideas, the things that she's feeling that she just needs to express.
35:03
With Steven Pressfield, it was an immense care for the craft of writing and what it means to be a writer.
35:10
This guy is like a I noticed it before we even started recording.
35:20
I noticed it before we even met in our email exchanges.
35:23
So we were recording in downtown Los Angeles and we accidentally booked the proper hotel where I like to record cuz I like the aesthetics of the proper.
35:31
We accidentally booked a place the proper in downtown LA instead of Santa Monica.
35:36
I didn't even realize that there was a proper in downtown LA. Now I know.
35:37
So we booked that one which meant a bunch of extra driving time for the guests that we recorded with in LA.
35:44
Mark Manson, Riva, Pressfield.
35:46
And oh my goodness, we showed up to the hotel and there were these super loud protesters on the streets and we thought, hey, maybe we're not even going to be able to record.
35:57
And what had happened was before the episode, Pressfield was like, yo, you got to read my new book, The Daily Pressfield.
36:04
So he sent it to this office where I am and for whatever reason, hodgepodge of reasons, I never received it.
36:11
So he sent it here and then he sent it to my parents' home in San Francisco where I was staying the week before.
36:17
Didn't get it there, just didn't arrive in time.
36:18
And he was like, I need you to read the book before we record.
36:22
So he said, here's what I'm going to do.
36:24
I am going to drive 1 hour on Friday.
36:28
We're going to record on Saturday.
36:29
I'm going to drive 1 hour.
36:29
I'm going to hand you the book and then you're going to read it that night.
36:34
I'm going to drive home and then I'll drive back the next day. I was like, wow.
36:37
Well, actually, you know, you can just do the Uber carrier. He goes, too important.
36:40
I'm not doing an Uber delivery. So that's what he does.
36:42
He wakes up on Friday morning, beats the LA traffic, hands me the book 20 seconds. The nicest guy. The warmest guy.
36:51
Nice firm, but very warm handshake.
36:54
Just looks you in the eye.
36:56
You just get this this sense of warmth and camaraderie from him instantly.
37:01
Says, hey, I'll see you tomorrow. And then drives off. That was cool.
37:09
Because that showed dedication.
37:15
The kind of dedication that you get with a lifetime of writing.
37:20
I think he's been writing seriously for like 50 years, 5-0.
37:25
I mean, this guy I think tried to publish his first novel when he was like 22 or 23 and then didn't actually get it published till he was in his 50s.
37:33
30 years he was struggling.
37:35
But he just loves the craft. He lives for it.
37:41
You see it in the writing.
37:44
Oh my goodness, then there's that moment in the podcast when he's talking about the female carries the mystery.
37:50
If you haven't listened to that episode, you just got to listen to that section.
37:54
I have a principle that I call the female carries the mystery. Mhm.
37:57
And if if you think of uh classic example like let's say Chinatown, the movie with the Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson, Yeah.
38:10
And or any detective story, there's always it's a male detective always there's always a kind of a vamp, a femme fatale and the femme fatale always carries the mystery.
38:20
Or for instance in it doesn't always have to be a woman.
38:24
In Moby Dick, the sea is the female.
38:31
And the sea carries the mystery, right?
38:33
That's the the whale dives down into the sea.
38:36
Uh in Lawrence of Arabia, the desert is the female.
38:39
And the movie is is shot to make the desert absolutely gorgeous, right?
38:45
And Lawrence himself falls in love with and that it's a theme.
38:50
If you watch that movie, it's hit again and again and again, you know, um the Anthony Quinn character Auda Abu Tayy says to Lawrence, for you there is only the desert, you know?
39:02
[laughter] And um even in a a story like um uh Seven Samurai, the movie, the which is like uh I don't know.
39:10
I dare Do I dare ask that you haven't seen it? Yeah.
39:15
It's it's the Magnificent Seven in Japan by Akira Kurosawa.
39:20
And it's the same story of a village that hires gunslinger samurai to defend it from and the female in that story are the rice fields that produce the rice that the bandits want and that and and at the very end of Seven Samurai, the final thing when the samurai have won and the bandits have been killed is the villagers planting rice.
39:42
So, I that's a principle that I will have the female carries the mystery and I'll ask myself of any idea that I have, what's the female in the story? And is there a mystery?
39:55
And why what is it what is what is the mystery?
39:58
And the mystery is almost always something that cannot be solved. It's like, what is life? Mhm.
40:05
What is that's the miss you know, it get what is the sea, the ocean you know, the what what is it, you know? And it gets back to God.
40:14
It gets back to creation. It gets back to life.
40:16
These are some of my favorite moments of the podcast when somebody reveals a level of depth and expertise that I'd never heard and I hear them say that and I go, yes, that is why you're great.
40:31
It's like hearing Tiger Woods talk about the the golf swing.
40:33
It's like hearing Stockton Malone talk about the pick and roll.
40:39
It's like hearing Reagan talk about giving a great speech. Or Martin Luther King.
40:44
That was my favorite part of the podcast and once again, it goes back to the thing that I learned from Stephen. Steven Pressfield.
40:51
The immense care for the craft of writing and what that can look like.
40:53
To get to the next one, there's Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok.
40:58
For them, the thing that stuck out was the joy that they bring to their work. The joy.
41:04
They have so much fun around each other. They're laughing.
41:09
They're relaxed, but they're doing serious intellectual work and usually what do you think of when you think of a professor?
41:14
You think of someone who's a little more stuck up, very serious about everything. Not them.
41:20
Bunch of laughter for them.
41:23
Like the level of joy that they have in their work both individually, but more specifically together, that is something I aspire to.
41:29
This is one thing I noticed about you, Tyler, is you're driven by what's fun, what's joyful for for me as like your core thing.
41:38
If I keep on doing it, I figure I'll get somewhere with my writing.
41:40
And most other people don't find it that fun.
41:42
So, it's a competitive advantage just to be choosing things you're intrinsically interested in.
41:48
Does it feel like work to you working on MR or Sometimes I feel I I spend a lot of time to try and craft my pieces.
41:55
You know, I sort of think, well, if we've got 50,000, 100,000 readers, if I, you know, reduce the time it takes them to read this by, you know, a second or two, well, that's [laughter] socially very beneficial, so I should spend a few minutes to to do that.
42:09
And they're high opportunity cost readers. A lot of them. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
42:13
They're high opportunity cost readers.
42:14
So, I do feel that it's worthwhile putting some effort in to craft something which is short and tight.
42:23
You know, we we think about MR as dim sum for the mind, right?
42:26
Little bites for the mind.
42:28
And we've kept at that for a long time.
42:31
After 20 years of doing work together, to have that level of joy is something I've been thinking a lot about because I see it in Kevin Kelly, too. Is that alignment.
42:41
Look, I know Tyler Tyler Cowen a lot better than I know Alex Tabarrok because Tyler and I go back now like 5 years when he first funded my work.
42:50
He funded me in 2018 through his Emergent Ventures program.
42:57
And I see I've got four grads from Tyler and I've spent a bunch of time with him in person.
43:01
The thing that I admire the most about Tyler and I think that this is the most underrated thing about Tyler and Tyler should be more admired for this in particular is I can't think of anybody who has built a life with more congruence around who they are, what they enjoy doing, what makes them money, and what's going to serve the world.
43:20
He's so earnestly pursuing his curiosities and his unique gifts, just doing the things that he wants to be doing, whether it's travel or we'll go to New York and go to jazz concerts.
43:33
We came in Austin and I took him to get my favorite beef cheek at this food truck called Leroy and Lewis and he was so happy doing that.
43:41
Everything is downstream of that alignment between what is your head want you to write about?
43:45
What is that what is your heart want you to write about?
43:47
What is your wallet want you to write about? Head, heart, wallet.
43:50
It also applies to a career.
43:54
How do you get total alignment from those things instead of having them be in tension?
43:58
It's when you get that, you get motion without force and when you get that, you're pulling from this deep source within you because you're pulling from a place that's like this infinite well.
44:09
And you can just keep pulling from it.
44:11
That's how he's been able to write every single day for at least a decade and a half.
44:17
Tyler's just writing and writing and writing and yes, he's a machine in terms of his output, just constantly producing things, but it's motion without force.
44:24
You're not getting the sense even when I spend time with him and his wife, you're not getting the sense that there's a stress that's involved in that because he's just so him. He's so him. It's really cool.
44:37
I I aspire to that quite a bit.
44:40
And then finally, I want to talk about Ava Flong. She goes by N Bombsky.
44:43
She was one of our earlier interviews.
44:45
She talks about this idea of reaching beyond consensus.
44:52
Never write anything that you know is a cliche and I feel like I just try to really internalize that where whenever I feel myself putting down a sentence, I know it's like kind of wrote, I just try to like find another way to say it.
45:04
And so, I feel like for me, that's a starting point of like just avoiding the things I know or kind of like jargon or like common phrases. How do you get deeper?
45:13
Is it time, effort, conversation, reading, walking?
45:18
I think reading is a lot of it.
45:18
Um I have a friend who's also a writer who says that she always listens to music when she writes and then she gets kind of inspiration from that like whatever is being discussed in the song and just like rephrase it in her own writing like kind of almost subconsciously.
45:34
I feel like it's things like that where like you're getting influences from other people and just kind of re-wording it in your own way and that's a way of kind of like getting that emotional resonance, but also like by rephrasing and rewriting, you kind of bring your own essence to it as well.
45:51
The way I think about it is that when people write, when people think, what they're usually doing is copying and pasting ideas from other people or words from other people.
46:03
So, what ends up happening is the words feel recycled, repackaged and it's the same thing with the ideas.
46:10
But to write really well is to say something in a fresh and novel way that's both surprising and memorable or to just distill something that other people thought about in a to a level of clarity that you've never seen before.
46:25
But it's fresh and novel that I want to focus on here because I think of writing as a process of excavation.
46:30
You're excavating your own mind.
46:36
And when you start writing, the first ideas that come to mind for you, they're usually not that interesting.
46:41
They're usually not that unique.
46:41
They're usually that kind of recycled writing.
46:48
There's this line from this interview with Ed Sheeran and Zane Lowe. I think it's Ed Sheeran.
46:52
He talks about the creativity faucet.
46:57
What happens is you turn on this tap in your mind.
47:02
And then the water, the creative juice, starts flowing.
47:05
And at the beginning, the water's sort of dirty. It's murky.
47:08
It's not that interesting point of this analogy sort of recycled, but then you keep it you keep it going. You keep it going. You keep it going.
47:14
And then what it ends up coming out is a kind of clean water because you've gotten all that murky stuff out and then later in that creative setting, the good, unique, reaching beyond consensus music for Sheeran, writing for Ava, then it begins to come out.
47:31
What you're doing is you're digging and you're digging and you're digging through draft after draft, typing and typing until you find things that surprise yourself and then in turn surprise others because they're unique and they're distinctive ways of thinking.
47:43
And people say that writing is thinking, rewriting is rethinking and what writing is is that writing is vertical, whereas thinking is horizontal.
47:54
So, this is what came from this and I'll tell you what I mean by that.
47:58
I'll start with thinking as horizontal and then I'll go into why writing is vertical.
48:01
So, I notice this when I meditate. Close my eyes.
48:08
I sit there and what does my mind do?
48:08
It hops from one idea to the next idea to the next idea to the next idea and it's sort of skipping along the lily pads.
48:18
Because the mind likes to wander.
48:20
It'll constantly skip around.
48:20
It'll change topics, but it'll never really go that deep into a specific topic.
48:27
It kind of stays surface level.
48:31
Whereas writing is much more vertical.
48:33
What I think that you're doing when you commit to writing about something, when you commit to focusing on a single topic is you're basically chaining yourself to the pillar of that idea.
48:43
And because you can't go sideways and horizontally, you have to go down vertically.
48:49
You focus on a single topic minute after minute, hour after hour, day by day.
48:54
And it's arduous because your brain doesn't want to do that.
48:59
It's actually not natural and that's why writing is so good for you.
49:02
But what it does is it forces you to resist the brain's natural impulse to skip between topics.
49:07
And what I've discovered through this reaching beyond consensus idea is that the writing mind is able to go deep because it keeps your focus constant.
49:15
You're constantly focused on one thing and for me, I experience this as a a frustration because I'm like, why am I not going faster?
49:23
faster? And it's only when I step away from the computer and actually start talking to other people about what I discovered through this vertical excavation, tethering myself to an idea for a significant amount of time, that's when
49:36
I realize, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, writing actually improved my thinking, that I was able to explore an idea with a level of logic and rigor that the thinking mind my brain could have never achieved on its own if I just sat there and worked through ideas. So, the lesson is that whenever my
49:58
So, the lesson is that whenever my thinking feels superficial, my default response is I probably just haven't written enough about it.
50:09
I need that anchor for my thinking.
50:11
Otherwise, I'm just going to be stuck with shallow and superficial thoughts.
50:15
So, those are the eight lessons.
50:15
We'll see if I can remember them.
50:17
The first is from Tim Ferriss having a lower bar for inputs, but a higher bar for outputs.
50:23
The second is from Kevin Kelly, and he says, "Don't be the best, be the only."
50:30
The next is from the Cultural Tutor, who says, "Don't consume ideas from the last 50 years."
50:34
But then contradicting that is Marc Andreessen, who consumes a bunch of ideas about right now, and then has a barbell approach where he also basically only reads books that are older than 10 years old. Then there's Reva Tezz.
50:46
She thinks of writing as painting with words, really infusing her heart, her feelings, her emotions onto the page, letting herself feel deeply.
50:56
The next is Steven Pressfield and his immense care for the craft of writing.
51:00
Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, the joy that they bring to their work and their intellectual partnership.
51:06
And finally from Eva, from Noam Chomsky, reaching beyond consensus.
51:12
Now, moving on from that, I'll talk about a few things.
51:14
The first is my show strategy, and the second is how the show has changed me.
51:20
The podcast that inspired me the most in building how I write is Invest Like the Best.
51:28
What I admire from Patrick is how he has continued to hold the quality bar so high for that show, has built an unbelievable network and reputation from the podcast that he has run.
51:41
He clearly loves it, loves asking questions, gets to meet such cool people, but also he's been able to use that platform to launch the careers of a lot of other investors.
51:54
I think of the interview that he did with Jeremy Giffon this summer.
51:59
It is so good, and Jeremy's one of my best friends in the world. I I love that guy.
52:06
And Patrick was able to show Jeremy's brilliance, and I've watched Jeremy's career take off since then.
52:16
And I want to do the same thing with how I write.
52:21
But you'll notice I haven't interviewed that many people who have smaller audiences for now.
52:28
And the reason is when I thought about the strategy of how I wanted to do the show, I wanted to start off by building instant credibility.
52:34
I wanted this show to be like the Paris Review interview series, where if you haven't read it, you've got to read them.
52:41
They're these long interviews with writers.
52:43
People like Ezra Pound, Hemingway, Marshall McLuhan, Aldous Huxley.
52:48
The one with Robert Caro was so good, The Art of Biography with David McCullough.
52:52
Those are the six that I would recommend.
52:53
Tony Morrison's really good.
52:55
I wanted basically the equivalent of Stephen King's On Writing in interview form.
53:01
In order to do that, in order to build the credibility, the reputation for the show, I needed to go after really high-level writers, and I'm going to continue to do that.
53:09
I've now been running Write of Passage for 5 years, and in that time, the mission of the company, the mission of my work has been to help people publish consistently and start writing online.
53:18
But this podcast has inspired me to switch that up, to change the mission of the company.
53:24
Because the people that I've interviewed on How I Write, they're so often pulling at this core idea, some story that they need to share, some message that they need to spread, some idea that they see so vividly, and they need to get that idea out into the world.
53:40
Take some off-the-cuff examples.
53:43
People like Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, they want to teach more people economics than anyone in human history because they believe that the world is a much better place when people know economics and use the principles of economics to think better.
53:57
Talked about Steven Pressfield, he could write something about the female carries the mystery, where in Moby Dick, the sea is the female, the sea carries the mystery, it's the whale that dives into the sea.
54:07
So, what I'm going to do, based on all this, is I am changing the mission of my work at Write of Passage, where I want to help people find, publish, and share their core idea, and I want to make it the best thing they've ever written.
54:20
And I have to credit my conversation with Tim Ferriss for basically quality pilling me.
54:25
It was a real red pill when he started talking about how the volume game, if you try to play that, you're toast now, cuz we have the AI.
54:34
And I've also seen the proliferation of people who are writing weekly newsletters with Substack, with Beehiiv, with ConvertKit. What would it look like? This is my dream.
54:43
What would it look like if I can work with you to write one piece that is core to who you are, that is really true, something that you know well, and in one piece, you can get 10,000 people to read that piece and have your life changed?
54:58
What would it look like if rather than focusing on hundreds of pieces and building a writing habit, I work with people to write one excellent piece.
55:06
So, that's the pivot that I'm making.
55:11
And it's because of Tim that I saw that the returns to publishing consistently are going down, while the returns to publishing something of quality, real quality, are as high as they've ever been.
55:22
Then this podcast also helped me get clear on who I want to serve with my teaching, with my work, and maybe even the kinds of people who I want listening to How I Write.
55:30
What I realized is that I always thought of authorship and doing things in the world as being separate, where I can either be a writer or I can do things. But I have a choice.
55:41
I can either build companies, products, organizations, or I can write books and articles.
55:49
But the Greeks saw things differently.
55:51
I was doing my Bible study one night when I came across this word archigos.
55:54
I think it's in the book of Acts chapter 3.
55:57
It's in the book of Acts twice, and then it's also in the book of Hebrews twice.
56:02
And archigos has multiple meanings.
56:02
It means author, founder, pioneer, leader.
56:07
Author, founder, pioneer, leader, same word. So, I took a step back.
56:10
I said, "How could that be?
56:12
How could all that be the same word?"
56:14
Because I don't think of an author and a leader or a founder being the same people.
56:19
But then I realized, actually, this is a process.
56:21
You start off with an by being an author, then you found something from the thing that you write, then you pioneer a new way of thinking, a new way of being, a new way of doing things, and then by being the author, the founder, the pioneer, you necessarily become a leader.
56:35
Marc Andreessen is an example of an archigos, where he recruits people on Twitter, he writes things like his literal manifesto that he talked about on our podcast.
56:46
Then by writing, he is building this new firm, and is the leader, writing is how he gets his ideas out there.
56:55
Another example, and this is one more historically.
56:57
This is my favorite example of an archigos, is think of America's founding fathers.
57:00
They write the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence really early on.
57:07
They're this group of hyper-literate scholars, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, they go on to found this new country, they pioneer new ways of thinking about governance and democracy, then Jefferson, George Washington, they become the leaders of the United States.
57:24
And I believe that all of that begins with this concept of a core idea.
57:26
So, this year for me is going to be about developing that concept of a core idea, talking to different guests on the show, and then try to work with people to say, "How do we make that core idea very clear, write it in one essay, distill it then into one sentence or a one-pager, and then get it out into the world?"
57:47
I want 10,000 people to read every piece that comes out of Write of Passage, and it's going to take me a while to get to a place where we're doing that systematically, but that's what I want.
57:57
Rather than people writing for years and years in order to realize the fruits of writing on the internet, to just do it with one piece.
58:05
And thanks to Tim Ferriss to really go all out on quality, and help people who join the boot camp, give them editors and give them coaching, and then bump up the intensity that I had when I was playing golf at a really high level, and the same intensity that I write with, and the same intensity that I try to work on this podcast with.
58:21
Actually infuse that into the community, and just push people to say, "You can do better.
58:28
You can get this idea out there."
58:28
And I got to say, I'm still working on this concept of a core idea.
58:31
It's really come to life for me recently, but that is the big change in my work that has come out of How I Write.
58:39
So, have a bunch of podcasts coming up where I'm going to be talking to people about their core ideas and how it is that they write, but that's the joy of this show, that anything works.
58:54
I kind of expected there to be one way to write.
58:57
Actually, I think when I started teaching, I was like, "Oh, this is how you have to write."
59:00
And I do notice that there are certain similarities, but by and large, great writers have different ways of doing things.
59:09
And they're just really, really, really good at what they've discovered, whether it's a way of writing, their topic selection, their style, the anecdotes, the life that they live, whatever it is, there's some element of distinctiveness with every good writer.
59:25
And if I could say something to you as a listener, you don't need to at all implement every piece of advice that you hear.
59:32
Actually, don't do that at all.
59:33
Just listen to what people are saying and ask, "Do I resonate with that?
59:37
Do I not resonate with that?"
59:37
Oh my goodness, I People say to me, "Oh, this person said that I could not disagree more."
59:43
And I think that's great. I think that's great. I have the same thing. I'll do interviews. I'm like, "What?
59:47
That's how you do things?" They're like, "Yeah."
59:51
[laughter] But that's fine.
59:52
Just pick and choose things.
59:58
It's like going thrift shopping for ideas that then you can add to how you write, how you think about the craft.
1:00:04
So, hey, thanks for listening to this episode.
1:00:05
Thanks for listening to the show.
1:00:08
I appreciate you recommending it in particular.
1:00:09
I have no idea how podcasts spread. I have no idea.
1:00:13
The more I learn about it, the less I know.
1:00:16
It seems like it happens through word of mouth.
1:00:18
So, when you tell people at dinner or lunch or you text someone the link, I really appreciate that.
1:00:24
Thank you for doing that.
1:00:25
And as this podcast grows, we're going to be able to get cooler and cooler guests, invest more into production, and over time try to interview as hundreds, maybe thousands of writers about about their craft.
1:00:39
There's anyone that you really want me to interview, just let me know on Twitter.
1:00:43
You can send me an email hello@perell. com.
1:00:47
But I just want to thank you for listening and for being a supporter of the show.
1:00:51
It's it's way more fun to do this for an audience, for other people.
1:00:55
And actually, that's the only That's the only way it's possible.
1:00:57
So, hey, thanks for listening and we'll do this again soon.