I think that most people assume that their boss has to manage them and they feel a little bit resentful that you know why should I manage my boss like they're getting paid more they are my manager they have more responsibility and you can continue to think that way and your career you know might be fine but if you Embrace that if you manage your boss they're going to appreciate you much more you're going to
get more opportunities you're going to have more trust with them there's all these great things that happen when you decide to manage up Wes cow is the co-founder of Maven a cohort-based learning platform that I Ed to create my own course on product management but even more interestingly she's helped folks like Seth Goden start his alt MBA course which is legendary she's also helped people like David Perell Thiago Forte Scott Galloway and
even moring Brew built their cohort based courses she's one of the smartest people I've ever met on the art of teaching and I've learned ton from her and in our chat we cover a concept I love called the super specific who we talk about the state change method and how using this idea you'll run better meetings we look at a bunch of advice for why you should spend time managing up and how to manage up effectively we
talk about a bunch of ways to write better tips for saying no and a bunch of other really interesting topics I always have such a good time chatting with Wes and I hope that you learn as much from this chat as I did and with that I bring you Wes Cal this episode is brought to you by modern treasury modern treasury is a Next Generation operating system for moving and tracking money they're modernizing the developer tools and
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bx.com slstart to get started that's B rbx.com slstart Wes I've learned so much from you over the years in so many different ways while building my course through your writing through your tweets and generally you're just a super fascinating human that I love this excuse to get to learn more about you and for listeners to learn more about you and so with that what welcome to the podcast hey Lenny great to be here it's
my pleasure so just to set a little context about the West that we know today your career path has been pretty untraditional for many of the guests that we've had on this podcast and so I love to just hear a kind of a brief high level overview of your career and kind of understand what made West the West that she is today I started my career in corporate retail at the Gap headquarters in San Francisco so I did a rotation
training program rotating between Old Navy Banana Republic Gap and it was a great foundation in business fundamentals you know a lot of people talk about should I out of school go to a bigger company or should I go to a startup so I kind of went to a bigger company and gradually have gone to smaller companies since then until finally starting my own in the past 15 years so you know I think that the getting to see inside what a company
that's you know been around for 40 plus years was like was was really really fantastic training and uh set me up for success for for you know jumping into tech and and other roles since then after Gap I went to a beauty company that was acquired by chaso and then was at an adte company that was acquired by snap and then moved cross country from SF to New York to work with bestselling author Seth Goden and that just changed
my trajectory completely it was just such a transformative experience getting to learn and work directly with for 3 years one of the best marketing minds and just most creative minds I think on the planet uh right now and together we co-founded the altmba which I Grew From just an idea between me and Seth to thousands of students 45 countries 500 cities grew our team from just us to to 60 plus people all over the world uh so it's
just an amazing amazing experience and then after that I consulted for a couple years working directly with other course creators who wanted to create their mini versions of the altmba and from doing that really proved out the idea that the format of court-based courses was something that was really special that other experts in other Industries other functions could really leverage um and then that led to starting Maven because
when I was Consulting and when I was doing all 10ba you know during those six seven years I realized how janky the tech stock was that everyone is using and I was shocked that no one had tackled this problem of all of us course graders needing to to uh toggle between half a dozen different tools just to make a live plus async course be able to work and so when when my co-founder Gog and be and I got together we were uh
brainstorming you know what's the future of education and and catching up and we were just shocked that you know hey why hasn't anyone tackled this yet we should do this because we both really believe that core based courses are the future that more people are going to want to teach these courses but it's just too hard from a technical perspective now but it doesn't have to be that way awesome I definitely want to chat a bit
about Seth Goden I've been such a huge fan of his for I don't know a decade I used to subscribe to his newsletter and I don't anymore because it's like an email every day and like it's overwhelming even though he he pointed out in one of his newsletters like okay just ignore it why would you be sad that if have so much content but it it yeah anyway and subscribe but uh but I'm such a fan and so I'm so curious one how did
you actually how did you connect with him and how did that even happen and then two what does he like to work with yeah both very very juicy questions so the way that we connected was Seth had put out a blog post saying that he was looking for a special projects lead to help him figure out what to do next so this was in 2014 when he had just sold off his last company sidoo that he had been working on for I think eight years
or so before that so he's kind of ready for something new at across roads wanted some fresh inspiration and I saw this blog post on a whim and at that time I was I was at that attech company in San Francisco and I thought there are probably thousands of people who are going to be applying to this so I don't want to get my hopes up I did want to move to New York I feel like everyone in SF you know in California at some time
wants to move to New York and so I thought all right I'm gonna toss my hat in the ring and not overthink it and so the application required a video so there's written application and there was a video so Seth said you know take three minutes to talk about what you want to build what you want to contribute and what you want to learn some something along those lines and I did my video in one take normally I would have done multiple takes for sure
but here I just thought you know there's there's a very little chance I'm G to get this and a couple days later to my surprise I get an email from Seth Goden he's in my inbox and I'm just jumping up and down in my living room you know cuz he's asked hey loved your video let's hop on a call for an interview and of course I you know write a very calm professional response and we did a couple rounds of interviews and I get
the role so I pack my life into six suitcases get an apartment site and scene in this little town right outside of New York City where Seth's office is it's called Hastings on Hudson and what initially started off as a six-month role eventually led to to over three years working together and starting the altime B together so that's how we how we got connected very serendipitous but my lesson there is is don't take
yourself out of the running before you get rejected like don't reject yourself basically you know um I think a lot of us have high standards and high expectations of ourselves and it's almost like oh if I can't do the best application then it just shouldn't apply you know if I don't have time to take five takes of this video I just it won't be good enough and so I just shouldn't do it so for me that was a great lesson
in putting your best foot forward but but putting your foot forward I love that um yeah so that was that was how we how we got connected and then in terms of what it was like working with him you know I think I think the the Seth that people know externally can sometimes be different from the behind the scenes Seth and that I think that's true for all of us by the way um and so you know I think externally he can sometimes be a little
bit of a a vague Buddha if you will you know he gives great inspiring advice his insights I think are amazing like if you look at his blog some people try to copy Seth's blog by writing short Daily Posts but that is not the reason why Seth's blog is so good right that that is incidental that they are short and daily they the reason why it works is because they so Insight rich and in person he is even smarter and even sharper than he is
in writing and online which is so amazing I'm just shocked by that because I feel like most people are the opposite you know it's like you have time to curate what goes on your Twitter your website you have time to kind of um manicure this you know what you want people to think of you but when you're live you're just you're there with a person you know like you're talking like normal people and you can really get a
sense of how sharp or insightful or Genuine someone is and I think he's he's even more genuine even sharper even funnier in person so that's what he you know that was kind of high level I think the other thing is that internally we had really high standards for what we would ship which is a little bit different I think than what you might think if you were if you were a Seth reader you know because before I would
read him and just do it essentially right like ship put yourself out there don't overthink it and you might think that that means that there's a trade-off with quality but the thing that I found so surprising about working together was that we often produced work almost always that was high quality fast and what's that third thing of that triangle cheap or like not cheap but like affordable or like economical right like
usually it's like oh you only get two of these or or you know there's a trade-off between quality and speed but we worked fast and we produced really great work and so I think for me it really raised the bar on everything for me and on strategies on tactics on expectations on quality speed um I think the speed that we shipped before I I you know was at a a SEO backed attic start and I thought oh like I know what shipping fast is
like I was at a startup you know and and the speed that we shipped at at they chew was just beyond like it just blew away what I think normal people think of as as you know fast but it was also still so good and so I think that rigor and that that refusal to accept anything but Excellence was just so awesome and it just it really spoke to me because I care a lot about craft I think more people should care about craft and I'm
also kind of an obsessed person like I have an obsessive personality and I just loved how Seth was kind of similarly obsessed and so yeah learned so much from him that I've taken with me obviously in in you know building Maven now and and everything that I do well I have I have 10 more questions I'd love to ask about Seth Cen but I should probably try to get him on the podcast what a what a coup that would be I have a set story actually I just
remembered while you're were talking I saw him mention once that he replies to every email he gets and so I emailed him because I was such a just a check had such a crush yeah just a chest and he replied and he's like why would I say this if I wasn't doing this what benefit would that be for me like oh iiss so funny he hates me it's hilarious oh man okay amazing one last quick question you also worked with Scott Galloway
who's a very polarizing figure on Twitter at least and you helped him create his courses maybe just one quick question on him what's what's he like and why do people dislike him so much on t yeah I don't know about people disliking him he definitely has spiky points of view which I think are amazing um uh yeah so section four Scott Gallow company was one of the first clients I worked with after after leaving altmba
and I didn't work too closely with Scott I worked really closely with with his CEO Greg shove and their exec team to design the Sprint that's now their their go-to course format but yeah I didn't work too closely with him directly okay cool we won't get too deep there okay so what I want to do with most of the time that we have together is to go into five Big Ideas you call five big ideas from wcow Concepts that that you've shared in
other places that you've touched on your writing and tweeting and things like that that have struck and have stuck with me and I suspect many other people and just kind of go deeper on these ideas does that sound good sounds great awesome so the first idea I want to chat about is something you call the super specific how and you wrote a post about this and and it really clarified a lot of my thinking on writing and the
newsletter and the podcast and I find myself sharing this post and concept with other writers who are struggling a bit with their content and so can you just explain this idea of the super specific how and generally just how it can make folks better writers and thinkers yeah the idea of the super specific how is that most writers most course instructors spend too much time on the what and the why and not enough time on how so if you think
about people who are reading your writing most of them probably already agree with the general premise of what you're saying unless what you're saying is is truly controversial groundbreaker new to to your audience you don't need to spend too much time elaborating on on the concept itself and why it matters people really want to know how do I do this how do I apply this to my own life how do I think about the nuances when
I'm applying this what are examples that I can look at that help me better internalize how this really works so a good example of this is if you're writing about product management and communication let's say so you don't want to spend too much time saying talking about how communication is important for product managers right like most product managers already know that like that's pretty one1 it's pretty basic instead you want to spend that
time talking about how to get Buy in when you don't have positional Authority as product manager or how to turn chaos into order and be able to communicate effectively across multiple stakeholders or how to communicate ideas where they're kind of assertions and hypotheses that might not work but you need to put something forward to get the team going right these are all elements of communication that are juicier and
more specific than just saying you know here's here's why communication is important yeah so a lot of it is cutting the backstory basically right and just like get right to the m of it I found that exact yeah ever since he wrote that I'm like this is why this is why a lot of my writing seems to work because I don't I don't I try to cut the intro as much as possible and just get right to the beat of it yeah I find that
sometimes in my writing I'll write and then go back and cut a lot of the Preamble so most people need less context setting in Preamble than you might think and I have a framework that I call start right before you get eaten by the bear and the idea is that if you're telling a story about camping don't start talking about going to REI to buy a Patagonia jacket and then booking the campsite and the the website had
difficulties and on the drive over we stopped by the gas station no one cares about all all that right like start right before you know your friend left a cliff bar out in their tent and you all almost got mauled by a bear right like get to the juicy part and start you know a little bit of context right before we get to the juicy part but but that's the idea of start right before you get eaten by the bear is cut out all that
backstory scope creep I like that there's also this element to your thinking that you didn't touch on which is kind of this I think you call it the content hierarchy of can can you speak to that yeah yeah so if you imagine a pyramid triangle at the bottom there's more room for BS and at the very top of the triangle there's less room for BS so what's at the bottom that triangle Twitter podcasts short you know articles
right it's basically situations that are one directional where people can't really challenge what you're saying keynote speeches another great one for you know lots lots of room for BS so those are situations that you know
they're more one directional with Twitter at least it's 280 characters it's something short that you're saying that's a little bit of a mic drop you just say it you leave it there and then you get to walk away without needing to
defend it without needing to share your rationale or think about CN points and so there's more room for BS right the format kind of encourages or allows it let's say it allows it but as you move up the triangle uh the content hierarchy of BS there's less and less room for BS so long form in-depth articles less room for BS right you have to defend the idea you have to convince your Reader Books also less room for BS and at the top of
the triangle courses one directional courses like video courses on udem me LinkedIn learning but especially coort based courses where there is live and async interaction there's very little room for BS so if you think about a webinar a keyote talk or a book it's you know you kind of say the thing and and that's it but in a court-based course where your students are right there with you where they can ask questions when
they can have conversation in the zoom chat box like if you're saying something that doesn't really make sense there could be a whole conversation happening in Zoom chat saying like this doesn't make sense for XYZ reasons right and so you have to be able to defend what is that you're saying and make sure that what you're saying is rigorous and I think that thinking about that content Harps is is great for holding ourselves
to a higher standard to make sure that we are not allowing ourselves to spew BS just because the format might allow it you know a book for example obviously the content of that book the contents matter more than just the format and so there are books that could be 10-page blog posts and there are books where every page earns Its Real Estate so there's still a little bit of you know Nuance in the hierarchy but in general
As you move up that hierarchy there's less and less room for BS I think this framework explains a bit why Twitter is so cringe to a lot of people as these like threads that just sound so wise but yeah there's not a lot of depth to them if you really think about it and it's easy to sound smart so one thing I'll add is people are listening and they may be like oh of course courses are at the top Wes runs a course company uh but
having run a course and created a course I 100% agree that there's just no room for BS in a course because one there's just so much content there's so much time that you have to like cover and so you can't just like here's a wise thought let's move on you have to actually get into it and people hold you accountable to that kind of thing and then to your point people are going to ask questions you're like oh I
don't that's all I've got I have nothing more nothing more to add that's not going to cut it so I totally agree that and that's why courses I think are so powerful and probably a much better way to learn than just reading a blog post or listening to a podcast if you really want to go deep on something so I love that concept anything else you want to add on that idea before we move on to the next concept let's go next con let
do let do it okay so when I was building my PM course with you you blew my mind number of times on how to actually teach effectively and one of the lessons you taught me was around the importance of creating State change in the talk how to create State change and so without giving it away I'd love to just hear your thoughts on why what is State change why is it important and just how does it help you not only give better
talks but also even better Zoom meetings yeah if you think about most Zoom meetings or presentations it's one person talking at you the entire time and everyone else has to listen silently it's pretty hard to do that on Zoom
where you're your camera's on you're sitting you you have to sit still look straight ahead at the camera control your face and like make sure you look focused and so it's really it's really not surprising that most people find
that very draining you know they want to turn off their cameras they get distracted so the idea behind what I call the state change method is that you should punctuate your monologues with State changes so State changes are anything that shakes your audience awake and adds some variety so it might be asking people to put something in the chat box it might be switching from gallery view where you see everyone kind
of that Brady Bunch grid and switch over to screen share to share something and then switch back it might be having someone else speak it might be asking people to unmute themselves and go ahead and chime in it might be putting people into breakout room so they can discuss amongst themselves and then come back and then do a popcorn where you know someone shares out and they popcorn to the next person to the next person so
all these are examples of State changes that help your audience stay engaged with the material that you're presenting and it's really it's really in reaction to monologues you know like I'm kind of imagining Salesforce with there no software sticker If you think about no monologues right like try to avoid monologues as much as possible because that put your audience to sleep what are examples of different states you
mentioned uh breakouts chat what other what other sorts of things can you do especially on a zoom let's say for running a meeting yeah so we talked about breakouts Zoom chat um switching from gallery view into screen share to
show something and walk through it and then switch back there's polls asking people you know before before you reveal something you can ask what do you all think right go ahead and guess so you know in the M course accelerator the
twoe course that I teach on how to build a core-based course it's very meta you know I will ask people so what do you think the average attention span is for students so I could I could have just told people like it's X right but anytime when you want to when you want to just share a piece of information that's an opportunity for a potential State change have people guess right the more they engage and think about the
problem themselves the more that they are going to to remember and also just interact with your material so I ask people to guess and then the answers range from an hour or 45 minutes to 3 seconds so it's you know it's it's all over the place the answer is 2 to four minutes according to to some research so you know that that's a ripe opportunity for State change and the other way to think about it I was talking to Nathan
Barry from convertkit he was saying that he loves State change method too and that anytime he does a presentation now every three to five slides he'll put in a state change so the idea of every three to five minutes every three to five slides go ahead and put in a say change we really want to turn this from an art into a science as much as possible um audience engagement and if you just kind of force yourself to look
through your own material and say like oh like have I done a state change in the last couple of minutes if not go ahead and throw one in and more likely than not when you look at that material at that you know at those intervals you'll find something that lends itself really well to a state change I'm feeling pressure to create some State change in this podcast hey listeners when was the last time you were in a
meeting where there was some meaningful State change think about that for a moment love it yes okay we're Pros okay try to practice this lesson live there's also this concept that you touch on called I think it's called eyes light up concept or something like that okay cool can you speak to that because I think it relates to this idea of of State change in meetings yeah so the idea behind what I call eyes lighting up is that you know
when you're talking to someone and you're explaining something you're teaching them you're sharing your startup idea or whatever the normal response is people will want to be polite so they'll nod you know and they'll say like oh okay that's interesting but there's usually a moment in the conversation where their eyes light up because they are genuinely actually interested in what you are saying at that moment so you as the
presenter as the you know salesperson whatever that's pitching you want to make note of the Moments When people's eyes light up because their face can't lie right like they can say oh yeah okay that's interesting it's it's easy to kind of say that and be polite but when someone's eyes light up that's a sign that something that you said triggered a reaction in them a visceral reaction and I think so many of us you know we like
to to pretend that oh you know I don't get enough data from people and you know this person said this but what do they really mean and and really I think that we're just being delusional if we just acknowledge reality and like this person's looks bored they look bored that is data okay like don't ignore that data right and then oh wait there I said this this hotkey word or this phrase or I I explained something this way and and
all of a sudden their face changed their demeanor changed they're leaning forward they're wanting to catch what you're saying like that's all data so so really the principle behind eyes light up is don't be delusional in just taking people's you know what they're saying at face value really look at their face look at the you know look for other Clues the the excitement in their voice and watch for these different eyesight
up moments because those are great fod for Content that you might want to write about for the angle of your sales pitch for how you might want to explain something in the future and really cut out all the parts that that you know make people go dead in the eyes and just save the parts that make their eyes light up hey listeners what kind kind of is letting up behaviors can you can you think of that show you somebody's really
into your content yeah or when are times when you know in in recent weeks when you've explained something or given a sales pitch and and saw people's eyes light up what were you saying in that moment think about that and jot that down and so the skill here is okay for sales that's interesting so as a salesperson it'll help you understand what part of your pitch resonates I imagine for a presentation prep this is
a useful skill obviously for building courses probably less useful for meetings but I imagine there's also just like oh wow this person got really excited when I Shar this thing maybe spend a little more time on that idea I
think it absolutely works for meetings I think it works for internal meetings for conversations even with your cross functional team members with your boss with your direct reports you know usually as you're explaining something
you can tell when you even your manager is like oh yeah that right or like you can kind of tell like there's there's more energy in in their response for certain parts and when you think about it you can find patterns of oh you usually when I when I share things with this person you know they tend to react well when I share these things so why don't I trim out the other context that they don't really care about and focus
on whatever you know made their eyesight up and it might be talking about numbers or it might be talking about upside or it might be talking about how little effort this is to try or whatever angle it is it really gives you great data that you can kind of lean into and flesh out more you mentioned your manager and that's a really good segue to our next topic which is around managing up if a feature ships but no one knows
about it did it really ship keeping customers and internal teams like sales support and marketing in the loop on what's changing across your product is surprisingly hard first you have to dig through tickets and pull requests just to see what's been done then you have to figure out what's relevant to each person craft updates and then share them across all of your channels multiply this by the number of things that ship
every week and that's basically a full-time job just to keep everyone updated on what's changing that's why High Velocity product teams like Monte Carlo Armory and popsicle use make log make log makes it easy to see what's happening across tools like jira linear Assan and GitHub and then to write bite-sized updates which you can immediately share with your audience wherever they are including within your app on slack over email and even on
Twitter No More long boring blog style change log post that slow you down just quick and easy updates that keep your users informed and happy try make log for free today just visit make log.com Lenny to get started I think your most popular tweet you've ever tweeted is around the skill of managing up and funny enough I had a threat on managing up years ago and it's also my most popular tweet thread ever so there's a
lot of interest in this topic and so I want to ask you why is managing up important why are people not doing it well and how do you manage up effectively great questions I think that most people assume that their boss has to manage them and they feel a little bit resentful that you know why should I manage my boss like they're getting paid more they are my manager they have more responsibility and you can continue to
think that way and your career you know might be fine but if you Embrace that if you manage your boss they're going to app appreciate you much more you're going to get more opportunities you're going to have more trust with them
there's all these great things that happen when you decide to manage up and I think you know more people are realizing that you know hey as an individual contributor even as a manager we all kind of have bosses right so you
know even as someone who leads people you still need to manage up there's no point in seniority where as you climb the career ladder that that it just doesn't matter anymore and I think some some people think that senior people don't need to manage up like oh once I'm once I'm you know a director of VP I don't need to manage up anymore it's only something I need to do when I'm a coordinator or you know you know an
associate PM or something but ironically the most senior people are best at managing up this is why they got promoted in the first place because they were great at managing up to their bosses to understand what was worries worrying their bosses what was keeping them up at night so that they could take that off their plate they were you know they're great at keeping their bosses in the loop on what's Happening so their bosses aren't
constantly having to ask and you know pepper them with questions every day on hey how's this going or what's the status of this or do we take care of this thing right they're proactive in communicating so their boss knows that certain things are taken care of and so there's so many benefits that you can reap when you choose to manage up how do you suggest folks do it I have I actually have a tip but uh is there
something you you have you want to share on that yeah I think one really big way of doing that is keeping your boss in the loop on the kinds of decisions that you're making and what you're working on it feels kind of almost Blas like well duh right but but actually I think I think we all know that we should do that but the way that we execute you know I think sometimes your boss doesn't feel like they're in the loop right and so
proactively giving the right amount of context for your manager to be able to weigh in on on what you're doing and to people to give feedback I think that's that's you know super super important and then you know thinking about the right level of context to give them right does your boss is this a reversible decision or is this one that um that is irreversible or or difficult to reverse or expensive to reverse right
kind of using your sense of judgment so that you're not necessarily going to your boss for everything and telling them everything like that's overwhelming for your manager who has a lot going on it's really using your sense of judgement and good common sense to think about okay I want to you know recommend that we do this thing how do I share enough context about my thought process and rationale so that my boss has enough
information to be able to push back if needed or to be able to approve and know that I've gotten it taken care of awesome so to build on that something I did for a long time that was really powerful it's really simple is I sent my manager a state of Lenny email every week just titled the state of Lenny and it had basically three sections my priorities currently blockers that I need their help with and maybe that was
the first thing that I put up just to make sure that they saw that and then just things on my mind currently that week and that I think is such a simple but such a powerful way to do exactly what you're talking about keep people in
the loop on you're doing make sure you're align on priorities make sure things are getting unblocked and also just avoid surprise as much as possible M and so there's a little tip I love that I think the avoiding surprises is
great I think in a work context surprises are generally not great so I always say you know unless you're surprising me by bringing me a snack or something like don't surprise me like actually in my personal life too I just I don't like surprises so I think especially in work not throwing something over at your manager that that just catches them off guard is is good I like that general rule Waid surprises
except for birthday parties and and Milestones yeah that that also touches on just the general rule I have of working is just overc communicate I find nobody's ever like just let me shut up I don't want to know about things like it's always the opposite why didn't I know about this even if they don't pay attention the fact that they have the chance to see it is always always goes a long way yeah I find especially in
remote work too airing on the side of overc communicating is just it ends up being the right level of communication like you think you're overc communicating but to the recipient it's actually just the right amount and you know I've been surprised by how I thought everyone was aligned on a certain strategy or that we've oh we've already talked about this thing three times and then realize that oh we actually weren't as aligned as I thought
so airing on the side of overcommunication is great and I think also structuring your Communication in a way where if someone already agrees with you or they get it they can get the gist but if someone doesn't get it they can continue reading so that kind of helps people spend their time well you know so I'll usually put the most important point at the top the tldr if you will the gist and then I'll say context colon
and then that there might be multiple paragraphs of context below for anyone who wants additional thinking on how did I get to this decision or how did I you know how did I think about this but if they already agree with the decision and kind of know that context and they don't need to keep reading I actually taught that format in my course I think it was rooted in the military where they're just like their emails start with bottom
line here's what you need to know and then context bullet point bullet point bullet point bullet point and so it's a really simple way of just communicating things although one student used that format with a potential customer where started off being bottom blind here's where we're at and they're like man that's that's aggressive and so I had to adjust that to be a little softer okay so I was gonna I had this beautiful segue but
anyway you talked about communication and that's a good segue to talking about writing and you have a lot of great advice on writing and how to write well we touched on a bit of this of cutting out the backstory and being super specific with the how but do you have any other advice for just writing in general because a lot of folks that listen to this are trying to write more and you have some great stuff on this so
yeah what do you what can you share yeah I think a lot of people look learn writing from mimicking other people and kind of learning by analogy especially on Twitter or on social which I think can is useful to a certain point but I also think that there's a lot of benefit in studying the craft of writing you know off of social so one of the books that that I've been recommending and I think I'm jumping ahead to potentially a
lightning round question but uh not allow it it's it's a book called it was best of sentences it was the worst of sentences by June KAS Grande I think is their name so we'll link this the show notes and another one is better business writing by Harvard Business press they have a whole series on you know leadership managing up writing Etc and I recommend those two books usually to to new team members who join because they
cover more of the the craft of creating strong sentences paragraphs arguments and and thinking about the logic of what you're saying a lot of times when we write a sentence there's actually already a point of view or or um there's there's a point of view baked in but you don't want it to be an accidental point of view right I was just talking to this to my team member about this she asked me to give her some feedback on
something that she wrote and the way that she had written her paragraph Was leading for the reader you know it was it was about an offsite that we have coming up and she talked about whether we should change you know we work
locations something like that so this is actually like super useful tactical stuff for slack messages you know if you're dming someone if you're if you're texting someone like you can use these principles basically everywhere and so
she was you know was a slack message about about changing locations and the way that she had phrased it the obvious conclusion was oh well we we should just stick with our current one you know and and so I asked her is that your recommendation because if it is then great because you're kind of leading the reader to that to that conclusion but if it's not you're asking a leading question that is skewing the results of
this question you know and so it turned out that she was she was kind of open like she didn't really have an opinion so we thought like okay how do we adjust this so that it'll get a more objective response and then we talked about it some more and thought you know it's actually better if you do share a recommendation here it's easier for the reader so how do we then adjust it some more so that the recommendation is
intentional within within that paragraph so it's a little bit I know it's not quite a sound B but I see this a lot in in people's writing is that there's there's these either send instructors that add more cognitive load to the
reader or have a little bit of confusion and it's it's a technical issue actually it's like the the which or some Clause explains something directly before it but they actually meant to you know meant for that Clause to describe
something you know 10 words before at the beginning of the sentence right it's kind of hard without a visual but anyway both of those books talk about the mechanics and the the technical aspects of writing and the craft of writing really well and I guess my spiky point of view is that more people should should learn the craft of writing and the technical aspects of writing not just you know look at what
other people are doing to try to get audience engagement but to actually improve your ability to precisely say what you mean and convey the level of conviction that you have and not accidentally mislead people with your words because you didn't know that the way you wrote something could potentially mislead them got it I actually got that same feedback that you gave this person once when I I like clearly had an opinion on what we should
do as a team and I I gave pros and cons and it was like very biased and clear what I thought we should do and my manager is like don't do that just try to be as unbiased as you can or just tell me here's what you think we should do and here's why yeah so I I love that and I think I think going you know pulling on the thread a little bit it's because pros and cons lists the the structure of a pro and con list implies
that you are giving equal weight to pros and cons that you are accurately talking about pros and cons right or objectively talking about them so when you do pros and cons list but they're skewed and you're leaving some things out of the cons list it makes the reader suspicious and they can't trust you anymore right whereas if you do a pros and cons list but at the top you say my recommendation is X here's pros and cons of that or
here are some risks associated with it Whatever You're Building trust with your reader because you were direct and saying here's my recommendation here's what I'm advocating for and also here are some downsides to that right this also reminds me of the MTO pyramid which I won't get too deep into but the concept there is in business you often want to start with here's my conclusion and then here's here's why versus here's
all the things I've done here's all my thinking here's all my all my kind of data points and then now here's my conclusion the end of that in business people are like just I'm bored just tell me what you think we should do and then and then help me understand why you got there the worst which happens a lot is mixing all of those things with the action item or decision so the action items and decisions are kind of
interspersed randomly throughout a bunch of context thought process factors that you looked at downside it's like it's all just interwoven and so your reader doesn't know which parts are F Yi or which parts are kind of background versus what is the thing that you want their response on like what are you asking them to chime in on and what is the decision that that we we're actually trying to make so if you do add you know
all the thought process I splitting it up and making it clear that you're splitting it up makes it so much more helpful for your reader awesome and we'll link to all this stuff in the show notes so don't feel like you have to
remember all this okay so this is a a good time to get to our fifth section and our fifth topic which is on the skill of saying no I feel like this is such an under toau skill I heard that Tim Ferris was working on a book called
The no book where he was going to share all the ways he's learned to say no but I think he shelved it for whatever reason and I I need advice on this because I'm often asked for favors of all kinds and I am not amazing at saying no without being uh I try to be really nice about it and it takes time and so I could use advice here so I'm curious to hear your advice on saying no yeah saying no does not come naturally for me
either as kind of a a recovering people pleaser so I thought a lot about how to say no in ways that feel warm and respectful and you know respect the other person so I think there's there's a there's different ways to say no depending on the situation and your relationship with that person so within work for example you know saying no to to your cross functional team member or to your manager right like that's very
different than saying no to someone who doesn't know you on the internet who is damning you asking you to to help them with something and so you know with saying no with people that you have let's say long-term Dynamics with continuing Dynamics like a manager a friend Etc I usually like talking about the trade-offs of something so this is something that I learned from Alex peek my cooworker at at altmba who's now CEO
of altmba he was always great at this so when we worked together he was my design counterpart and I would ask him like Hey can you you know can you design this for me can you design that and oh you know here's another thing I'm going to throw over the wall to you and he was always so good at saying no in a way that like felt good for me the person who just asked him to do something and I just thought like that's pretty different
because usually when people say no I'm a little irked or you know a little mythed so I thought like what is Alex doing that that I can borrow from and it turns out that that Alex would always talk about trade-offs and he'd say know Wes yes I can design this PDF for you that means that the thing that was going to work on today which was redesigning you know this page on the site we'll have to wait until later this week or this means
that you know I'm going to be de prioritizing this other thing does that sound good to you or like do you want me to you know prioritize the original design project you wanted me to work on you know and so for me hearing that it it felt like I was in control and and able to to help help and prioritize basically so it kind of it went from being a conversation about yes or no are you a helpful person or are you not are
you a team player or you not into hey like how do we make sure that the important right things get done you know and so it was it's great for the person who you're saying no to and it's also great for Alex because whenever he we had those conversations I always thought that he was really thoughtful about making sure that the most important projects that we wanted to work on stayed prioritized so it's kind it's a
little bit of a workaround so you're not exactly saying no but you're talking about trade-offs which gets the the result of the no right you're getting the the the reason why we want to say no is we don't have bandwidth to take everything on um but we feel weird about saying no to people because we're afraid that people are going to you know think we're not we're not Cooperative or whatever so so by talking about
trade-offs you really get the outcome which is you protect your bandwidth you protect your bandwidth you protect your mental health you protect your you know ability to do great work without feeling overly stretched without actually even having to say the word no which I just think is amazing this is a a concept or related concept that a manager once taught me which is essentially the same idea and she called it prioritize and
communicate and the idea here is someone gives you something to do that's that's not already in your plate there's kind of there's kind of a two by two you can imagine in your head there's you can just prioritize it amongst your priorities and not communicate what you did and where it sits or you could just communicate and not prioritize and that just means like sorry I don't have time for this right now what you should do is
prioritize it here it's going to sit in number three in my priority list and communicate this is going to be third in my priority list does this seem reasonable to you would you agree should I do this sooner or not and that's a really good way of dealing with exactly what you're talking about and so it's the little framework I love that I love a good 2 by2 Matrix and that is a fantastic one there we go sweet anything
else you want to touch on that topic before we move to our very exciting lightning round let's do the lightning round okay here we go I need some sound effects I think but anyway until then okay so I'm gonna ask you five questions
and just tell me whatever comes to mind and we'll go through it pretty quick sound good okay yes okay you already knew this was coming what's the book that you recommend most you've recommended most in the past few months
the two craft writing books that I had mentioned can you just remind us real quick while we're on there yes it was the best of sentences it was the worst of sentences a great Kasa Grande yeah so good and then Better Business writing by Harvard Business review or Harvard Business press awesome I gotta read these okay number two what's a movie or show that you've recently watched and loved that maybe people haven't heard of
there's a show called Dr Foster on Netflix that's I think it's on Netflix might be on Prime it's a British kind of drama crime Thriller that's super good I love kind of M three Thrillers so I've pretty much watched every single one out there but I feel like many people haven't heard of this one so if you're into that check it out let me know let me know what you think okay amazing I have not heard of that great great
choice okay so I know you've taken a lot of courses I forget how many I I know that's you're a course addict so I'm curious what's been your favorite course that you've taken I really love Susie bz's course called live OS Susie is the the founder and former CEO of poopery she's now chairman of she grew her business I think she started poopery in her late 30s or 40s after after multiple bankruptcies and she created this
amazing course that it's hard to describe it's kind of it's kind of about mindset and overcoming internal blockers so it's a little bit you know on the software side but I feel like it it was just amazing Community amazing exercises that you go through with your small pod it led to some really big breakthroughs including starting Maven as a company so at the end of of at the end of that 8we course I was kind of debating you know
should I should I do this or should I not and with my small group I worked through it talked a lot about you know just subconsciously how he was feeling about it and stuff and it was really good so a live OS by Susie pz and it's still going yeah yeah she was one of my clients when I was Consulting and yeah she's amazing okay we're gonna link to that while we're on this topic how many courses would you say you've taken taken
and built a lot dozens dozens that have had hundreds of cohorts within you know you know each course so yeah um yeah lot of courses I love you said addict so yeah okay what's your favorite Maven course right now to give a little plug to Maven oh probably Amanda nad's course on content marketing it's called content marketing 2011 or uh I haven't taken this but I've heard really good things about merily Nika's course on breaking
into technical product management she's a technical PM with a PhD at meta right now she was at Google before her course is fantastic awesome okay final question what's your least favorite fruit probably grapes but when they're frozen W they're kind of like little popsicles so they're they're not too bad when they're frozen but probably grapes wow and a surprising answer very contrarian oh okay I love that that's my most
contrarian spiky point of view is is that I justlike grapes might just be it's just like a explosion of flavor and sugar okay well we've reached the end of our chat Wes if wasn't obvious this was incredibly fun I had so much so much fun chatting and learning from you two final questions where can folks find you online learn more about you and or Maven and then how can listeners be useful to you you can find me at Maven HQ on
Twitter or maven.com or at westore Ko and West ko.com and in terms of listeners if any of you are interested in creating your own course and sharing your expertise and your knowledge online definitely check out our Maven course accelerator it's a free twoe course that teaches you everything that you need to know about building a course what a Founder pitching the uh company uh Twitter handle versus her own Wes thank you so much for being here
at a blast and I'm excited for people to listen to this thanks Lenny thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny podcast.com see you in the next episode