Hello Friends,
And happy Monday!
Today, I am sharing some of the readings that pushed me to start writing online, about 2 years ago.
The first one is by David Perell, arguably the “online writing” guy:
The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online 24min
Writing online is the fastest way to accelerate your career.
It’s the best way to learn faster, build your resume, and find peers and collaborators who can create job and business opportunities for you.
Content builds on itself. It multiplies and compounds.
Day and night, your content searches the world for people and opportunities. Projects, mentors, speaking gigs, job offers, pitches, investment opportunities, interview requests, podcast appearances, and invitations to special events. It all starts with sharing ideas online.
The Five Pillars of Writing
Write Evergreen Content
Publish Quality Ideas
Be Specific
Listen to Feedback
Re-Package Your Existing Work
Steve Cheney said it best: “You’ve already spent 10,000 hours working on the craft you know about. And you’ve already probably spent 100 concentrated hours consuming, reading, and listening to podcasts that you can recall in your short-term memory about the topic to even consider writing. The truth is the 10 hours it takes to write something is already dwarfed by this sunk cost. If you don’t write, you are effectively stopping at the easier ask. It’s important you emphasize to yourself that you don’t need to relive the experiences it took for you to become a subject expert in order to share them.”
The second insights are from Andrew Chen, partner at a16z and very relevantly board member both at Clubhouse & Substack, the SaaS platform behind this newsletter and many others:
10 years of professional blogging – what I’ve learned 9min
Titles are 80% of the work, but you write it as the very last thing. It has to be a compelling opinion or important learning
There’s always room for high-quality thoughts/opinions. Venn diagram of people w/ knowledge and those we can communicate is tiny
Writing is the most scalable professional networking activity – stay home, don’t go to events/conferences, and just put ideas down
Think of your writing on the same timescale as your career. Write on a multi-decade timeframe. This means, don’t just pub on Quora/Medium
Focus on writing freq over anything else. Schedule it. Don’t worry about building an immediate audience. Focus on the intrinsic.
To develop the habit, put a calendar reminder each Sunday for 2 hours. Forced myself to stare at a blank text box and put something down
Most of my writing comes from talking/reading deciding I strongly agree or disagree. These opinions become titles. Titles become essays.
People are often obsessed with needing to write original ideas. Forget it. You’re a journalist with a day job in the tech industry
An email subscriber is worth 100x Twitter or LinkedIn followers or whatever other stuff is out there. An email = a real channel
I started writing while working at a VC. They asked, “Why give away ideas? That’s your edge.” Ironic that VCs blog/tweet all day now ;)
Publishing ideas, learnings, opinions, for years & years is a great way to give. And you’ll figure out how to capture value later
The last one is by “SWYX”. It is very specific to online writing for networking and personal branding, which I am very poor at doing because I can’t follow his very sensible advice and pick a niche. It might be relevant to you though:
How to Market Yourself 24min
Thanks for reading, and have a writing-rich week ahead,
V