How To Write Better Online With David Perell (Classic)

Alex Lieberman: What's up everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder's Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. For the next little while, we are going to be republishing classic episodes of Founder’s Journal. Why? Well first, I think they’re really good episodes and with so many new listeners over the last few months, it’s very like you haven’t even heard them. Second, I am spending the month of May evolving Founder’s Journal so that we can make the show as good as humanly possible for the next generation of builders and entrepreneurs. I would love your help as I dream up the future of this show, so once you’ve listened to this episode, shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com and tell me what you’d like to see from me moving forward. OK, that’s the update. Now time for the episode. In today’s classic episode, originally published September 1st, 2021, I talked to David Perell about why online writing is an important skill that you can have today, and how you can do it effectively yourself. David, great to have you on Founder's Journal.

David Perell: Thanks, Alex. Obviously a huge fan of everything that you're doing at Morning Brew.

Alex Lieberman: Thanks, man. Well, I'm going to stop talking. It is time to turn the mic to you. So I just want to prompt by saying, how do you become a great online writer? What are the principles that you have used to guide your craft and how other people can guide their craft in online writing?

David Perell: Yeah, so I think that when it comes to writing, we are all taught how to write in school and most of the way that we think about writing is framed with the assumptions of what we learned in the classroom. And there are three paradigm shifts, three assumptions, that I want to challenge today. And these three ideas make up the Write of Passage method, how I write, and they are going to help you with writing in your company so that you can move up in your organization, they're going to help you think better, and they're help you personally. And then also they're gonna help you socially because when you share ideas on the internet, what you don't realize until you do it frequently, is that you create all kinds of serendipity for yourself, where you're sharing ideas, you're sending, it's like a radio signal out into the world, and the world, what algorithms are doing, what people are doing when they're searching for things, is they're tuning into different intellectual frequencies. And so by broadcasting or signal, other people can find you and you're finding people on your intellectual wavelength. And so the three ideas that I want to talk about today: the first one is that you should write from abundance instead of scarcity, the second is that you should write from conversation instead of solitude, and the third is that you should write in public instead of just for yourself.

Write From Abundance 

So let me start with the first one, write from abundance. So when I started writing, I had horrible writer's block. It was, it was brutal. I remember I was living in New York City at the time and I would be out with friends, I would just be walking around the city and I would have all these ideas. My mind was so active and I was enthusiastic about whatever was on my mind. And I would go into like a Starbucks, I'd go into a co-working space or whatever. I'd sit down on the computer, I'd look at the screen and my brain would just go blank. Like it was like the movie 50 First Dates. I had just forgotten everything that I had thought about. And it was so frustrating, I was getting really mad at myself, and what I realized was that, okay, if I could start taking notes, if I could start capturing my ideas throughout my life, both ideas for myself and ideas from other people, if I could build a note taking system, writing would be a lot easier.

And you know, when you think of it, sort of like, so you go to a tailor's office to make a suit. So you walk in and you're like, "Hello, sir," or, "Hello, lady, I would like your help." And what does the tailor do? The tailor doesn't sit, sit you down for like a 30-minute conversation to try to start from scratch, to try to come up with what the suit should look like. Rather, what the tailor does is go to the back, and they pull out yarn, fabrics, buttons, everything you need for a suit, they put it on the table. And then you start mixing and matching ideas. And as you mix and match, you actually begin to get some momentum. You're saying, Ooh, this is interesting. Ooh, that's interesting. This could work well with that. And so what you're doing is you're making suits from abundance. Rather than the scarcity of, "Hey, let's just come up with ideas out of nothing." Writing is the same way. If you struggle to come up with ideas and what you should do is say, "I'm going to, just like that tailor, build upon an abundance of notes rather than scarcity," and get away from that blank white page of doom where you're just looking, there's the flashing black cursor, and actually start with an abundance of notes.

Now, when there comes to notes, there are really two things that you want to focus on: ideas from others and ideas from yourself. Ideas from others is very simple. Make sure that when you read an article, when you read a book, that you're saving the best ideas, you're actually making highlights in a Kindle, making a highlight when you're reading stuff, saving them to some centralized note taking system. It doesn't matter which one it is. And then also you're learning to recognize what are the best ideas that you're having, write those down so that you can save ideas over time. So one of my favorite artists, this is a little embarrassing, but she's a big inspiration for me: Taylor Swift. She has a song called “Blank Space,” came out like five years ago, and there's a great line in there: "’Cause darling, I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream." And what she did, the way that she wrote that line, she was out, she was shopping, she came up with that line, she wrote it down in her notes, and then a year later when she was writing “Blank Space,” she then said, "Oh, this could be really good. I'm going to throw that in there." And so what you do when you actually capture your ideas is you can develop these ideas over time, and you're not always having to come up with new ideas and just be on all the time. So that's the first one writing from abundance, tons of ideas, instead of scarcity, nothingness.

Write From Conversation

The second is write from conversation. You know, in school we learned that writing is a solitary activity. You type alone, you come up with ideas alone, and you make edits alone. Writing is something that you do you alone. But I, I've always struggled to come up with ideas alone. I need to talk to people. And what I've realized is that the more time that I spend in conversation with people who like ideas as much as I do, the more time that I am with people who are as inspired as I am about thinking. What I find is that conversations have this algorithm for creativity; it de-patterns in your mind, it sort of gets you out of your normal thought patterns. And it's like an algorithm for randomness too. You're just coming up with all these new ideas, and when you're in a conversation, you can just pay attention to other people's facial expressions. They're giving you all kinds of feedback on what's interesting, what resonates, what doesn't. So if somebody is leaning into you, hey, that's interesting. If somebody is laughing, oh, that's insightful. If somebody is falling asleep, as you're talking to them, well, you should probably stop talking so much, and that idea isn't probably that interesting.

And so what you do is rather than thinking of writing as the place where you start developing an idea, I say no, spent a ton of time in conversation with people. And when you're in conversation, you are being transported into new intellectual territories and you are then...John O'Donohue, an Irish poet, has this great line: "A good conversation lets you hear the things inside of you that have always been there, but you never knew that you knew." And that's what conversation is, right? Conversation sort of brings things out of us that we didn't realize that we understood. And so what I say is that what we want to do is spend a lot of time in conversations, framing, structuring, evolving our ideas, developing them, listening to the questions that other people have, and then be conscious of what resonates, what do I want to double down on, what are the ideas that I enjoy talking about? And then when you write, you've actually already developed the ideas through conversation rather than sitting to underwrite and say, what am I going to talk about here? So those things you can do in the workplace, you can do them in whatever kind of writing you're interested in. 

Write in Public

And the third thing is writing in public. So, you know, I was in school for what, 12, 16 years or something. And my entire childhood, I only wrote for one person: the teacher. From kindergarten to college. Good grades are basically my only motivation to write. Just wanted to impress my teacher. And what was frustrating to me was that looking back, had I been able to share ideas in public, I could have actually just created all these opportunities for myself and I could have achieved and enjoyed writing a lot more. By writing in public, what's so cool about it is I talked about that radio signal earlier in the world, writing in public actually attracts people who are just like you, who are actually hard to find in the physical world.

So say that you're obsessed with, say that you're obsessed with, for example, right now I'm obsessed with the Wright brothers. So what I'm going to do is, you know, I've been studying them a lot, I want to write a piece about what made the Wright brothers so special. What was it about about them that allowed them to invent heavier-than-air flight and then be so influential, and what I want to do is I want to write a piece and what will happen if it's good, is different people who are obsessed with the Wright brothers, people who might even be scholars about the Wright brothers, they might reach out to me, and what's amazing is you can and get a lot of people who are reaching out to you very early on in the writing process. 

You don't need thousands and thousands of subscribers, actually many of the very best people who I met, who we're still friends today, people who have gone on to become founders, whose companies I've invested in, people who are my go-to intellectual thought partners that helped me write from conversation. They are people that I met when I had less than a thousand subscribers. They are people who I met, who were drawn and attracted to my work because I was on their intellectual wavelength. And when you write, when you put something out into the world that is specific, that is something that you're just enthusiastic about, something that you're obsessed with, don't worry about the total addressable market. Just write for you or write for one other person. Say, "Hey, I have this friend, what would they want to know about a super obscure aspect of music theory?"

And what you realize is that the market on the internet, the number of people who can read your work, I mean, it's, it's global. And I remember I used to walk through New York City after work and I'd just be on Fifth Avenue or something.  And I would just look at the streets, I'd say, oh my goodness, there are so many people, there are so many people. And even just there, I can't imagine just the leap from how many people are on Fifth Avenue to the number of people in the world.  And what happens is basically the internet's the greatest matching tool ever connected. Airbnb connects people with people who want to rent out their homes with people who want to rent homes. Uber, this morning, I wanted a car, three minutes later, there was a car. eBay early with Pez dispensers, all these people selling Pez dispensers connected with all these people want to buy them. And what you realize is that when you write in public, you can build an audience, so you can have a bunch of people you can use now to start a business and to have a bunch of people who trust you.

But also it's an incredible tool for making friends and a way to cure what I call intellectual loneliness. So when I was in college, this is where I'll end, when I was in college, the reason that I started to write online, this was many years ago, I'd grown up in San Francisco, so I was in a small town in North Carolina and I would go to my room and I would just watch these YouTube videos with professors, just hearts on fire, so enthusiastic, and I'd want to go talk to people in my life about those videos. And I would bring up intellectual ideas and people just wouldn't be that interested in them. And I was just soul crushed. I was like, am I going insane or are ideas actually really interesting? And so I just started sharing ideas more and more and more. I just discovered what it was like to feel this intellectual loneliness. And when I shared ideas, I was surprised by how fast I started making friends, making friends with people who were as passionate and as enthusiastic about ideas as I was and about the specific ideas that I was interested in. And so whether you want to make friends, you want to start a company, move up in your company, or get promoted at work, writing in public, too is, is useful there. A lot of companies are increasingly hiring from people who are writing online and together, those three things, writing from abundance, writing from conversation, and writing in public. If you can just flip the assumption on each of them and really embrace all of those, writing will be more enjoyable for you, you're going to be better at it, and it's going to have a transformative effect on your life.

Alex Lieberman: God, so much, so much good stuff there. I feel like that was the, the ultimate mic drop. I think what was so good about that from David was he started with the “why?” What, like why is online writing such a powerful tool and then got into, you know, everything from, like he said, writing from abundance, writing from conversation, to writing in public, how do you actually, what, what do you do in practice to send out this broadcast as he described it?

And so my hope from this conversation, what you've gotten from this, is that writing is an incredible tool for many things, for learning, for clear thinking, for connection, and for serendipity, and I would implore all of us to just really think hard about how can we do more of it to create all of the opportunity that David alluded to.

So, David Perell, thank you so much for joining Founder's Journal, and Founder's Journal listeners, if you enjoyed the show and know others that would enjoy it as well, make sure to share the episode with them. As always, thank you for listening to Founder's Journal, and I'll catch you next episode.