Welcoem to posts!!
in the future - u will be able to do some more stuff here,,,!! like pat catgirl- i mean um yeah... for now u can only see others's posts :c
The Sam Altman Interview
You know him as the CEO of OpenAI â but he's also an avid writer.
We spoke not once but twice about how Sam captures ideas, clarifies his thinking, edits his writing, decides what to work on, and uses ChatGPT.
Timestamps:
1:47 Will LLMs change how we write?
8:39 How does Sam use ChatGPT?
11:26 How Sam became less anxious
17:24 Sam once dreamed of being a novelist
18:37 Lessons from Peter Thiel
21:35 Lessons from Paul Graham
26:02 The book Sam Altman wants to write
28:37 Advice for startup founders
30:20 How Y Combinator shapes OpenAI
35:55 How Sam chose to work on AGI
37:35 Writing strategy memos at OpenAI
41:34 Why isnât ChatGPT a better storyteller?
44:20 Sam's obsessive note-taking method
47:12 Will AI put writers out of work?
41 - 0
How does Robert Greene consistently write such popular books?
This interview is a tell-all about his process. How does he write books? What makes for a great story?
Some lessons:
1) The rewards of writing will come, but they're never immediate.
2) Don't talk down to your readers.
3) When you're writing about famous and powerful people, look for the things that make them human. The things that everybody can relate to, such as how they brushed their teeth or spoke to their mother.
4) Stories are the most elemental form of seduction. You can take the angriest child, tell them a story, and calm them down immediately.
5) When you're looking for stories to include in your book, look for stories that have drama to them.
6) Research, research, research. Robert basically has the entire book organized by the time he starts writing it.
7) Robert's been taking notes for so long that he now has thousands of notecards saved with information from all the books he's written.
8) Intensity of desire can take us to levels of performance we never thought possible. Get clear on what you intensely desire, and pursue it.
9) Robert spent years as a failed writer. He said: âI was a nobody, I had no money, I had no success, I was very frustrated, I was depressed, even bordering on suicidal.â
10) Don't try to change people's morals with a book. They have to come to the idea on their own. You can give them the information or lead them in a certain direction, but preaching to people doesn't change their thinking.
11) If you're consistently struggling with writer's block, you might be suppressing your anger. But anger is an intoxicating emotion. It manufactures words for you. Learn to listen to it.
12) The anger should be controlled, though. Robert says: "Controlled anger is ten times more powerful than just venting."
18 - 0
How does Robert Greene consistently write such popular books?
This interview is a tell-all about his process. How does he write books? What makes for a great story?
Some lessons:
1) The rewards of writing will come, but they're never immediate.
2) Don't talk down to your readers.
3) When you're writing about famous and powerful people, look for the things that make them human. The things that everybody can relate to, such as how they brushed their teeth or spoke to their mother.
4) Stories are the most elemental form of seduction. You can take the angriest child, tell them a story, and calm them down immediately.
5) When you're looking for stories to include in your book, look for stories that have drama to them.
6) Research, research, research. Robert basically has the entire book organized by the time he starts writing it.
7) Robert's been taking notes for so long that he now has thousands of notecards saved with information from all the books he's written.
8) Intensity of desire can take us to levels of performance we never thought possible. Get clear on what you intensely desire, and pursue it.
9) Robert spent years as a failed writer. He said: âI was a nobody, I had no money, I had no success, I was very frustrated, I was depressed, even bordering on suicidal.â
10) Don't try to change people's morals with a book. They have to come to the idea on their own. You can give them the information or lead them in a certain direction, but preaching to people doesn't change their thinking.
11) If you're consistently struggling with writer's block, you might be suppressing your anger. But anger is an intoxicating emotion. It manufactures words for you. Learn to listen to it.
12) The anger should be controlled, though. Robert says: "Controlled anger is ten times more powerful than just venting."
13) Writing prompt: What's something that's making you angry and pissed off?
14) Don't write about what you think you should write about. Write about what actually excites you because genuine excitement is the only fuel that can sustain you over multiple years while you're working on a book.
15) What's the mission of Robert's work? He says: "My secret ambition is to make things such as reading, studying the classics, and philosophy something hip, so that young people were inspired to step away from the TV and the Internet and challenge their minds."
21 - 0
Okay people, it happened... the interview with Sam Altman goes live in a few weeks
269 - 17
Ben Thompson is the king of subscription newsletters.
He makes millions of dollars per year by writing about the business of technology, and has become a whisperer to Fortune 500 CEOs.
Some lessons below:
1. This is the age of one-person media companies.
2. The fundamental thing to understand about the economics of media and tech is that the marginal costs of distribution are zero. This changes everything.
3. Writing on the Internet rewards people who are a bit arrogant and highly disagreeable. You need arrogance and disagreeableness to speak your mind and handle the armies of critics.
4. On the Internet, power comes from owning the relationship with your audience... from being able to reach them directly.
5. The Internet rewards the hyper-niche and the ultra-scaled, but things in the middle tend to die. Pick a side.
6. Before the Internet, there was no effective way to target individual people with niche products, so the companies that succeeded were more mass-market.
7. The Internet rewards one-person companies because distribution has been commoditized. No longer do writers need printing presses or distribution trucks to distribute their ideas.
8. If you want to build an audience quickly, get specific with what you write about and write about it well. For Ben, it was the business of technology.
9. Benâs strategy was to write about the business of technology while the rest of tech media focused on gadgets and hot new releases.
This episode is a masterclass in how the business of writing, and how it's been changed by the Internet. Ben has taught me more about the economics of our modern world than anybody else. How I Write wouldnât exist without him.
18 - 0
Okay, it's time to get a little personal.
I have an update to share about my company, Write of Passage. We're going to shut down at the end of the year, and the next cohort will be our last.
This has not been an easy decision, but itâs necessary. And I want to explain what happened, especially for our alumni.
Our company, course, and community are alive and radiant. We have alumni whoâve poured their hearts into this community and built intimate friendships, we have a team who treats their work as soulcraft, and we have a culture of craftsmanship that is rare. Thatâs why this decision is so devastating.
I started Write of Passage to take the loneliness out of writing. The vision was to bring life to writing education. That meant building a community of people to support each other and a curriculum that feels nothing like your 5th-grade English class. Those things I envisioned, but I never expected to attract so many people who are off the charts in curiosity and enthusiasm. Theyâre the ones whoâve given Write of Passage so much life.
At the level of our mission, Write of Passage has been an astounding success. Weâve pushed the limits on what an online course can be with hyper-energetic Zoom sessions and a talented fleet of mentors and editors. We attracted 2,000+ students from 72 countries, reached a Net Promoter Score of 75 (higher than Apple), and we have alumni who went from publishing their first article in the course to publishing books or growing to 100,000+ subscribers. After a recent cohort, when we asked students about their experience, the phrase âlife-changingâ showed up 39 times.
If you had told me all that without showing me the finances, I would have assumed that Write of Passage was growing fast and swimming in revenue, but that hasn't happened.
Weâve built something worth celebrating in every way, except for the economics of the business. The first three years were roaring, but the past two have been grueling. Growth has been particularly difficult and Iâve been feeling constrained by the bi-annual cohort model itself. You need more than a great product to make a business work, and the main thing we were missing was a dependable flow of new students.
Iâm eager to prioritize creative work again too. I originally started Write of Passage to subsidize my creative work but the demands of running the company took me away from that. There are people who can do high-quality writing while running a company, but Iâm not one of them. I think I can have a bigger impact doing something else, and so, the company has run its course. Specifically, Iâm eager to double-down on How I Write and prioritize my own writing again. And who knows? Maybe itâs time to write a book.
But like I said, weâre not done yet! Write of Passage will have its grand finale. The final Write of Passage cohort will run from October 7th â November 13th, and enrollment is now open.
Weâre pulling out the stops to make this cohort the biggest and best yet. For one, weâre making it more accessible by lowering the price for people who enroll early, and weâre expanding the scholarship pool. So, if youâve ever wanted to experience the magic of Write of Passage, this is your last chance.
To the Write of Passage community: Thank you for the heart youâve brought to every cohort. From Feedback Gyms to Live Sessions, the one thing I can always count on is that youâll show up with passion and dedication (even if yâall go a little crazy in the Zoom chat).
Happy writing,
â David Perell
144 - 16
Harry Dry is the best copywriter I know.
He's built a 130,000-person newsletter teaching people how to do it, and by the end of this interview, you'll be at least a Green Belt in copywriting.
Some of his rules for writing:
1) A great sentence is a good sentence made shorter.
2) Writing great copy begins with having something to say in the first place.
3) Copy is like food. How it looks matters.
4) Since the look of copy matters so much, don't write copy in Google Docs. Write it in Figma (so you can write and design at the same time).
5) Kaplan's Law of Words: Any word that isn't working for you is working against you.
6) You know a paragraph is ready to ship when there's nothing left to remove. It's like a Jenga tower. The entire thing should collapse if you remove something.
7) Make a promise in the title so the reader knows exactly what they're going to get if they click. Then, deliver on the promise.
8) The three laws of copywriting: (1) Make it concrete, (2) make it visual, and (3) make it falsifiable.
9) Make it concrete: Don't be abstract. For an example, say you're writing about habits. Don't talk about "productive routines." That's abstract. Write about "waking up at 6am to write" instead. It's concrete â and much more vibrant.
10) Make it visual: People see in pictures. This is why instead of memorizing card numbers directly, world memory champions memorize cards by turning them into pictures and then back to cards.
11) Make it falsifiable: When you write a sentence that's true or false, you put your head on the chopping block, which makes people sit up in their seat.
12) When has a falsifiable statement resonated? Galileo got sentenced to a decade of house arrest for saying that the earth spins around the sun. That's a falsifiable sentence. But nobody would've done anything if he'd said that the earth has a harmonious connection with a celestial object.
13) Write with the delete key. Using fewer words lets you be more impactful with the words you keep.
14) The job of a sales page is to make a bold claim at the top. Then spend the rest of the page backing up what you've said... with a ridiculous amount of proof.
15) If your competitor could've written the sentence, cut it.
16) Good copy is differentiated. Here's an example: Elon Musk shouldn't write "The Cybertruck is the world's best truck." Ford or Dodge can write that sentence. But only Elon can write: "The Cybertruck is tougher than an F-150 and faster than a Porsche."
17) Some days, the writing comes easily. Some days, it takes sweat. The reader doesn't care if you wrote for two minutes, two hours, or two days. The ink looks the same.
18) Great copy reads like your customer wrote it. Talk to them.
28 - 3
Why is Warren Buffett's writing so popular?
Every year, thousands of people flock to Omaha every spring to hear him speak (and drink Diet Coke). Here's what you can learn from his writing style:
1. You can stand out in the business world by writing like an actual human being.
2. Don't just write about ideas. Joke around. So goes Buffett's famous line: "It's only when the tide goes out that you find out who's been swimming naked."
3. Write to a specific person, not a faceless group of masses. Legend has it that Buffett addresses the early drafts of his annual letters to his sister (Dorothy) and replaces her name with 'Shareholders' once he's done with it.
4. You can differentiate yourself simply by writing with a different voice. Buffett tries to come across as a folky, hokey, aw-shucks kind of guy who's nothing like the kind of Suit Guy you'd find in Midtown Manhattan.
5. Read things that other people aren't willing to read. Historically, part of Buffett's edge is that he was obsessively reading 10-K filings before they were as accessible as they are now.
6. What's another example of Buffett doing things that others weren't willing to do? Friends tell me he used to call managers at various companies and get them to disclose their business plans, back when this was legal.
7. Deadlines are your nemesis in the moment, but your friend in retrospect. Buffett has no choice but to produce an annual letter every year, and those annual deadlines have made him a prolific writer.
8. Share your wisdom freely. You don't need to share all of it, but it can help to share some of it.
9. Don't just share ideas. Name them.
10. What's an example of naming your ideas? In business, it's common knowledge that a company's success can compound. For example, it'll take 12 years for a company to reach $1 billion in revenue but only one more to reach $2 billion. Scale leads to more scale. Buffett calls this "The Snowball Effect."
11. You donât need to write much to have outsized success. Warren Buffett (and Jeff Bezos) have built their reputations by writing one excellent letter to shareholders every year.
12. If you're early in your career and don't know where to begin, start writing. Buffett attracted some of his early investors by publishing his ideas. His mentor, Ben Graham, did the same thing. He wrote two best-selling books on his way to getting rich by investing in Geico early.
13. Writing is a BS detector for your ideas. Buffett once said: "Some of the things I think I think, I find donât make any sense when I start trying to write them down."
14. Oh, and one more thing: Maybe you should drink more Diet Coke?!?
This is only a slice of the talk I've shared below about Warren Buffett's writing style. It centers around a framework called POP Writing, which you'll immediately be able to bring into your own work.
17 - 0
Something strange has happened with reading and writing. We're doing more of both, but not as well as we once did.
The sheer number of words people read has gone up. People spend hours per week on activities like reading emails and scrolling Twitter. But this isn't the the kind of reading that leads to clarity of thought. It's surface-level. There's no rereading.
The same thing has happened with writing. People spend more time typing than before, but that's not what makes you a better writer. If it were, then the knowledge workers who fire off 100,000 emails in a career would write as well as Hemingway. So, what's the move? Years ago, the author Venkatesh Rao published a post about how to become a better writer. Here's the TLDR: It's not the amount you spend writing that makes you a better writer; it's the amount of time you spend rewriting.
The speed of life has gotten so fast.
People don't have the attention spans to grapple with books or revise and revise a draft until it's perfect, but those are the activities that improve your thinking.
My point isn't that everybody should read and write intensely. That's unrealistic. But there's a level of seriousness that the most committed writers alive today don't bring to their craft.
To be clear, I'm guilty as charged. I write this from the thick of the fight, not as somebody who's overcome it. And my report from the trenches is this: When it comes to the intellectual life, we're at war with our information environment.
180 - 5
This is the most personal interview I've done in a long time.
Eric Siu asked me about how my faith intersects with my desire to write and build business on his Leveling Up Podcast.
To write is to crawl through the labyrinth of your own mind. Clear communication is rocket propulsion for whatever you want to do with your life. If you want to start a business, it'll help you raise money with investors; if you want to make friends, it'll attract like-minded people into your life; if you're stuck on a problem, it'll help you clarify a solution.
Here's the full interview.
25 - 0
David Perell is a writer, teacher, and podcaster. He believes writing online is one of the biggest opportunities in the world today. For the first time in human history, everybody can freely share their ideas with a global audience. David seeks to help as many people publish their writing online as possible.
More than 1,500 people from more than 70 countries have participated in Davidâs Write of Passage programs. The five-week bootcamp draws on Davidâs experience writing online, building an audience, and his interviews with dozens of great writers on his How I Write Podcast.