Riding the Writing Wave - David Perell
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"Writing is its own reward." – Henry Miller
Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates new ones.
Writing forces you to think. It’s nature’s way of telling you how sloppy your thinking is. The ultimate test of how well you understand something is how clearly you can explain it in writing — clear writers are clear thinkers. As a wise" man once said: “everything is vague to a degree you do not realize until you have tried to make it precise.”
The Writing Habit
When you sit down to write, your mind will rebel. Expect this to happen. That way, it won’t bother you when it does. Keep going. Fight through the resistance. Once you get in the groove, don’t try to sound smart or impressive. Pursue truth and let that speak for itself.
Aim to finish once you’ve produced a deliverable or reached a definite milestone. If you stop at a logical stopping point, you’ll have something to think about between work sessions. Other people can give you feedback while you’re not working since it’s easier to edit a draft or a paragraph than a jumbled work in progress.
Focus on the process, not the outcome. It’s impossible to play the long-game when you’re checking the score every five minutes. If you want to sustain your writing practice over a long time, don’t write for more than three hours per day. It’s best to stop when you still have some juice and know what you’re going to write next. That way, you’ll be excited to write again the next day.
Make writing a daily habit. A day where you don’t write anything is the enemy of productivity. Days when you don’t write anything are the enemy of productivity. The most important thing: write something every day — no matter what.
Why Write?
Never underestimate the power of words.
When you become a regular writer, you change how you live. Writing forces you to pay attention and helps you understand what you believe.
Writing makes the world pop. It motivates you to become more curious about the world. It takes you to a higher level of perception and deeper levels of analysis.
Writing has infinite leverage. It creates luck and serendipity, which makes it the most efficient way to network. Conferences and networking events are good for the short term, but writing is the best long-term strategy. Write at a regular cadence and don’t give up. When you have free time, have a bias towards writing.
For knowledge to become wisdom, it must be carefully, tenderly analyzed from many angles, through many means. Many people don’t write because they’d rather consume more information. Consumption is fun, but it can get out of hand.
The problem with consumption is that it feels so good – too good. It gives you a thin, superficial perspective on the world. Even if you get an accurate picture, it’ll only be two-dimensions. But if you don’t write about an idea, you’ll never have a three-dimensional perspective on it. This is why you should expect 80% of the ideas in the essay to happen after you start writing it and 50% of the ideas you start with to be wrong.
If you’re not careful, consuming all day can become another form of procrastination. This is a dangerous trap. When you consume all the time without producing anything, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you’re more productive than you really are.
Growth is maximized when production and consumption are well balanced. Summarize what you’ve learned and use that knowledge to solidify your own ideas.
The 10-Step Writing Process
Step 1: Create a Mega Outline
Step 2: Build an Archipelago of Ideas
Step 3: Outline
Step 4: Write a 2nd Rough Draft
Step 5: Re-Write Every Sentence
Step 6: 10-15 Sentence Article Summary
Step 7: Send to Friends and Ask for Feedback
Step 8: Write a 3rd Rough Draft
Step 9: Turn Outline into a Full Post
Step 10: Publish
Mega-Brainstorm: Before you begin, piece together ideas, facts and stories into a single document. Don’t bother organizing it. Put information in there whenever you read, hear, or experience something that’s relevant to the general idea of the essay. Doing this is trivial because your smartphone is always with you.
Collect, collect, and then select. Keep adding ideas to your mega-brainstorm until it becomes painful not to write the essay. Goodbye writer’s block!
Archipelago of Ideas: Organize ideas from the mega-brainstorm and build the archipelago of ideas. Think of the ideas in the mega-brainstorm as islands in the ocean. The archipelago of ideas is about building bridges between all the ideas. These bridges give the piece unity and cohesion.
Source: Tiago Forte
Outline: Make the outline as simple as possible. That way, you can focus more on ideas and less on structure. The outline is the most challenging part of writing an essay, and it’s not optional. The first draft is always terrible, but good writing has to start somewhere.
The outline of an essay is like the skeleton of a body. It provides its fundamental form...