Transcription
What I'm about to say will win you the respect of your friends, a lifetime full of happiness, a villa in the Bahamas, and maybe a really good hair day too. I, I don't know if it's gonna do any of those things; who's to say? But here's what it will do: it'll definitely make you a better writer. That's my promise. You will be a better writer in the next 60 [Music] minutes.
This week, somebody asked us a question. They said, "Hey, I really love your guys' writing. I don't know why I have trouble with writing, and uh, I would love if you guys just did an episode with the 80/20, so what is the just the stuff I need to know to help me be a better writer?" So me and Sam sat down, and we wrote down all of our secrets about how we've, we've used writing to grow our careers, which, by the way, by the way, I wouldn't even say we're necessarily great writers. I would say that you and I are really good writers, but what we've been great at is getting results from it. Would you agree?
Yeah, that's right. I don't, I don't look at my stuff and I'm like, "Wow, this is beautiful prose," but I do feel confident that if I needed to, I can use my writing to either, you know, grow an audience or sell a product or convince people of something. I, I, I feel confident in that after, you know, trying for 15 years, and both of us have, have done it right. So the credibility here, you know, before you ever listen to any advice, you should ask yourself, "Why should I listen to this person?" Well, both me and Sam have built and sold newsletter businesses for tens of millions of dollars. We've tweeted our way, you know, just typing little short sentences to, you know, a million-person audience between the two of us. Um, you know, I've sold maybe $20 million worth of product online in the e-commerce world just through email. Um, we both have taught writing courses, or in some form or fashion. I know I used to charge a thousand dollars a seat for my class, and it was the highest-rated class on Maven. But here today, you get the quick version for free. We're charging you nothing, except for there is one thing they got to do. What's, what do they have to do?
This is free, right, Sam? It's totally free, except for one thing: you have to subscribe. So whether you're listening on Apple, on Spotify, wherever you're listening, or if you're already on YouTube, you just got to click that button. We spend all this time doing this, and unlike the rest of the YouTube world where everything is completely free, we're mostly free. All we want in exchange is a subscribe on YouTube. That's all we want. We can't check if you do it; we call it the gentleman's agreement. It's just honor code amongst two legendary individuals—us and you—and uh, we, we just trust that you're going to do it. All right, so let's, let's jump in. How does somebody become a better writer? How can we teach them in the next, I don't know, 45 minutes to become, you know, twice as good or three times as good as their writing? I believe that that is possible if they actually do these things. Where do you want to start, Sam?
So let's start with before you guys start writing. And so someone asked us why write, or someone asked us how do you get better at writing. I actually want to change it to why you should even care about being a better writer. And so there's a few bullet points that we have. So the first being is this is the most self-serving thing, but I want to say it up front: it's persuasion in the most scalable way. The reason I got into writing was I was, uh, selling street meat hot dogs on the side of the road, and I was selling one-to-one, and I got pretty good at it, but then I realized this is really hard. And so I learned about copywriting, and I figured, "Look, now I can write something, and it could scale to an infinite amount of people. I never have to change it, and I can convince people to do something." Now we're not just talking about copywriting; we're talking about all types of writing. So I can convince someone to feel a certain way, whether I'm writing a short story or I'm writing a blog post. I can convince someone to join my company. I used copywriting on Tinder when I want to convince the girl to give me a chance and go on a date with me. We're talking about all types of writing, but at the end of the day, we're always typically trying to persuade someone to do something. So it's persuasion in the most scalable way, and that's one of the reasons, one of the most important self-serving reasons why I think people should care about writing. What else?
Yeah, that's, that's the first one. The second one is, is more internal and wholesome, right? Some people are like, "Ah, I don't know if I want to do persuasion." Truth is, you do. Anything, anything you're trying to make happen, you're usually going to need to persuade either people to come join your company, customers, partners, whatever it is. The second one is to write clearly; you must think clearly, and the reverse is true too. If you want to be a great thinker, you want to have clarity of thought; writing is an essential tool for that. So writing is a forcing function for you to be able to think clearly. Um, you can't hide behind bad writing; bad, bad writing will show bad thinking, uh, whereas if you have great thinking and you write, it'll come through. And so writing is this, uh, it's a truth-telling potion; it will reveal how clear your thinking is. And the, the trick is most people think about it as in writing is a way for me to communicate my ideas to you, and they think that, oh, writing is the bottleneck. They're like, "Ah, I'm just not a good writer." Nobody ever says, "I'm not a great thinker," but the truth is, if you actually get down to it, people who struggle with writing, it's because they don't have the idea clear in their mind. And so writing helps you clear up the fog in your brain and get crystal-clear clarity on what are you actually trying to say, what are the ideas. But it also works to not just communicate ideas but to generate them. I think Paul Graham said this, and it's so true. He goes, "People think that writing is only about communicating the ideas you already have, but actually the truth is when you sit down to write, you will generate new ideas." Writing is an incredible idea generator, and so it's like, you know, starting a little fire in your brain, and uh, you know, those sparks can lead to new thoughts, new ideas that are quite powerful. And if you're not writing regularly, you're missing out on some of those ideas. And I think that when we say writing, I'm particularly referring to longer form; it could be shorter form, a handful of sentences, a tweet, whatever, but oftentimes it's longer form. And the reason why I prefer that when I'm running out my ideas is you can't really hide a bad idea, or you can't hide bad thinking in long writing, you know, where, where you can hide bad thinking in a PowerPoint. Now that doesn't mean that your ideas in long writing are going to be good, but you just can't hide it; you can't hide that it's bad. And so that's why I prefer mapping it all out. And then the third point of writing creates new ideas. Uh, I think like you said, Paul Graham said it best. He has this great blog post he wrote in 2005. He said something like, "80% of your writing will be bad, and then you'll have to cut, cut it down to the 20% that's good." And when you start writing, you'll probably generate 50% more new ideas, right? And so it's a really great forcing function where it gives you the lanes of the road, and you have to stay within those lanes, and oftentimes you can change your opinion as you go, and you could evolve your idea and your thinking.
All right, everyone, a quick break to tell you about HubSpot. And this one's easy because I'm going to show you an example of how I'm doing this at my company. When I say "I," I mean not my team; I mean I'm the one who actually made this. So I've got this company called Hampton; you can check it out, joinhampton.com. It's a community for founders, and one of the ways that we've grown is we've created these surveys where we'll ask our members certain questions that a lot of people, a lot of times people are afraid to ask. So things like what their net worth is, how their assets are allocated, all these like interesting questions. And then we'll put it in a survey, and I went and made a landing page. So you can check it out at joinhampton.com/wealth. You can actually see the landing page that I made. And the hard part with this is with Hampton, we are appealing to a sort of a, a higher-end customer, sort of like, like a Louis Vuitton or Ferrari. So I needed the landing page to look a very particular way. HubSpot has templates; that's what we use. We just change the colors a little bit to match our brand; very easy. They have this drag-and-drop version of their landing page builder, and it's super simple. I'm not technical, and I'm the one who actually made it. And once it's made, I then shared it on social media, and we had thousands of people see it, and thousands of people who gave us their information. And I can then see over the next handful of weeks, this is how much revenue came in from this wealth survey that I did; this is where the revenue came from. So it came from Twitter, it came from LinkedIn, whatever it came from. I can actually go and look at it, and I can say, "Oh, well, that worked, that didn't work; do more of that, do less of that." And if you're interested in making landing pages like this, I highly suggest it. Look, I'm actually doing it, but you can check it out; go to the link in the description of YouTube and get started.
All right, now back to MFM. And we've all seen Jeff Bezos ban PowerPoint from Amazon. He realized that, uh, PowerPoint was this thing that sort of the most charismatic, loudest voice in the room, or somebody with good slide design skills, could kind of like create an illusion of good thinking by using PowerPoint. And actually, uh, he forced everybody instead to write long, long-form memos, basically narratives. And he's like, "In the long-form written word, there's no place to hide; there's no way to use design or good presentation skills to, uh, to make it seem like this is more well thought through than it is. It either is or it isn't; you find out." So I think it works inside of companies as well as it does externally to your customers and potential customers. So all right, now let's get down to the actual tactics. So that's the, that's the theory; now how do you actually do it?
So for me, all the work begins before I've typed a single word. And I, I always say you want to begin with the end in mind. What I mean by this is I, before I write anything, I first decide what is the reaction I want. I learned this from a guy named Chris Quigley. I don't know if you know Chris Quigley, but he was a, um, just this character; he came to town in San Francisco from, from the UK, and he was, he hosted, he had an ad agency, and his ad agency did one specific thing: they would make videos go viral. And I remember talking to Chris, and I was like, "Wow, it would be awesome to do a viral video." That sounds kind of like a lottery ticket thing, like, "What if my YouTube video just went viral and got millions of views? How crazy would that be?" And I asked him like, "Go, what's your hit rate? Like, you know, out of every hundred videos you do, how many go viral?" One, two, three videos out of a hundred, and he's like, "No, if we do 10 videos, eight or nine will go viral, really." And I was like, "What?" He's like, "Well, for two reasons," and he said, "Number one, we have a large blog audience, so we, we can guarantee the first like 100,000 views; like it will get seen; it won't just get lost in the abyss of the internet of content, like whatever. We have it; it'll get seen." He's like, "But that doesn't make it go viral; that just makes sure it gets a chance." It goes, "The second thing is we always work backwards from an emotion." He goes, "People will only share or act if they feel something at the end." So he, he created this thing that he had like LOL, WTF, OMG, a, like, you know, something so cute, uh, heartwarming. And so he's like, "These are the only emotions that you can tap into; there's like seven or eight emotions that people can, can tap into," and he would work backwards. He would say, "We don't write a script until we first pick the emotion we're going for: wow, or we're going for WTF, outrage. Oh, WTF, outrage." Uh, you know, I'll give you an example of one that I just saw yesterday. Elon Musk tweeted out this thing that was, uh, some hidden, like, language in a bill, like a bill that's going through the Senate right now that was like, "If the next president gets elected and they decide to stop spending on the war in Ukraine, they could be up for impeachment because of the way this bill is written." And, and he was like, "Oh my God, the Democrats are baking this into the bill they're trying to pass this on page 140; they're trying to slip this right under your nose without telling anybody, and they're going to try to impeach Trump, Trump if he got elected and tried to stop, tried to, you know, if he got peace in the, in the, in the Ukraine and stop the spending, he could be up for impeachment." And of course, the post goes super viral because it's outrage; it's outrage from the Democrats, it's outrage from the Republicans; that is engineered to go viral. And so similarly, Chris used to have a search engine; he used to be able, he created a tool internally for them where they could just search by emotion, and it would show them YouTube videos that are targeting that emotion, and they would use it when they would brainstorm. And so I stole this, and I would start with, I ask myself three questions: What is the reaction I want? That's always an emotion. The next one is, what is the action I want? So what do I want them to do after they read this? Like, click the buy button, click the share button, forward this to a friend, sign my petition, whatever it is, who knows what it is, but what's the reaction, what's the action? And the last thing I say is, at the end of this, if they could just remember one line or one takeaway, one sentence, what would it be? What would I pick out of the whole thing that I just wrote? Because people remember sentences, not books, and so you have to think about that. So I always begin with the end in mind; I decide those before I ever write a word. Do you do something similar?
I do the exact same thing, and typically I start with a headline and I start with the sub-headline. So if you share on Facebook, the headline's the big text; the sub-headline is the 180-character thing underneath that. Oftentimes, I go back and I re-check and I change the headline a ton, but that one sentence, what I call the sub-headline, that doesn't change, and that one sentence helps like clarify what I'm going to write. So I actually don't do outlines. So there's a lot of things that I think you're taught in fifth grade that I think are really stupid; one of them is an outline. I, I guess, I, I guess it's okay to teach that, but I don't use outlines anymore. And my outline instead is that one sub-headline; um, that's what I use. In fact, you brought up a good point, which is to be a great writer in the world, like as an adult on the internet, the internet world, the internet world, you have to unlearn pretty much everything you learned in school. So in school, you learned like, what do they, what do they reward in school? They're like, "Minimum of this word count," so they're trying to get you, you must write at least this length, and they're trying to get you to, like, so people are writing long words and double-spacing their thing and trying to like add a bunch of filler and fluff. Well, you got to do the exact opposite when you write on the internet; you want to be concise, you want to be quick, you want to eliminate a bunch of the fluff; shorter is better on the internet in terms of adding just extra craft. But when you're in school, they almost force you and teach you to write these long-form things. They also want you to write with fancy, fancy vocabulary, so you get bonus points if you use, you know, "amarate" rather than, you know, "heal" or "help" or whatever. And, and so you're rewarded for using fancy words, but the reality is you want to be writing at a, at a very like accessible language, if you want, uh, reading level, if you want to do well on the internet. So you know, both you and I, we target kind of like fifth to eighth grade reading levels. And you can use these tools, these checkers, like Hemingway is an app that you could use where you could put in your text, and it'll tell you you're writing at a 12th-grade level or you're writing at a fifth-grade level, and the lower the better is better on the internet.
Yeah, and in the, in the second half of this episode, let's go through all those like tips and tricks, um, in terms of, in terms of writing. My process is I, I do copy work, and then I draft, then I incubate, and then I edit. So what that means is copy work; it's the same way; it's this old technique that people have learned how to write. Um, we don't do it anymore, but I found it to be the most effective way. I, I sat myself in a room for like two hours a day and did this for like eight months in order to learn how to write. And copy work is basically when you take writing that you love; it could be a full book, it could be a script for SNL if you want to learn how to write comedy; it could be a blogger that you like. When I'm writing an important piece, I'll just write maybe for 10 minutes; I literally take my pen and by hand, I copy someone else's writing that I really like, and that helps me get into the flow. So we, what we said was before you've written a word, you, like, most people just sit down, they start trying to write. What we've told you is do two, two different things instead: begin with the end in mind, you know the, what is the action, the reaction you want, and what's the, what would be the headline that would grab somebody? And then the second thing Sam's saying is you don't just jump in like a, you know, if you're gonna go do a workout, you don't just go start sprinting right away; you warm up. I do warm-up sets, and you do the same thing before you write a word of your own; you start by writing, but not your own words; you take some writing that you really like that maybe you want to almost like, through osmosis, just steal their little writing juju. It's going to go into your brain; you'll start to talk like them, write like them. If you do this, and you literally write word for word exactly what they said, it's even more effective if you hand-write it, but at worst, type it, but you want to, don't, don't think, don't add your own stuff, don't improve it; just literally write word for word, and do it for like even 10, 15 minutes. I still do this today; this is not like advice that I tell other people to do; I don't, I still do this today. And Sam, you don't know this, I use one of your posts as one of my, I have like three go-to's; one of yours is one that I use for my copy work. It's this one where you, I forgot the name of the blog, but it's, I always search for it with the same headline, which is, "Let me be perfectly clear; you're reading this because I want, because I want you to," and you're like, "I have engineered the start of this to," and you basically talk about how you've mesmerized them; you're like, "Every word of this was chosen, every sentence to lead you to the next sentence," and I love that. It's, we call it the slippery slope. And so you, uh, I use one of yours whenever I want to write like in a really persuasive, copyrighted way. If I want to write more like business, serious, then I have a different one I use; this one that the CEO of Slack did where he wrote an internal memo that I really like called, "We don't saddle here." But you literally just write it word for word. So that's your warm-up. So again, two things before you ever write your own stuff; it's exactly like playing music, okay? So if you're, whether, when you're a beginner playing music, you just play other people's songs, and then you steal a little bit; you're like, "Oh, I like, I like this genre, this genre, this genre; I'm gonna combine it to my own thing." Same way where you're writing a new song; you kind of warm up, maybe playing The Beatles, and then eventually you're like, "All right, I'm in the mood to write something beautiful; this is what I'm going to do." You take someone's recipe, and you make their recipe before you go make your own thing; you play a cover before you write your own songs; same way you do copy work before you write your own stuff.
The second step is actually where a lot of people get screwed up, so it's the drafting step. And the reason people get screwed up here is because they're afraid to look stupid. And the drafting step is actually where you're supposed to look stupid. And so whenever I draft something, I just bang it out as fast as I can, and it sounds really dumb, and I accept that it sounds dumb, and I, and here's why: because after the draft set is the incubation period. You know, like, um, have you ever heard of like the phrase like "shower thoughts," where you like think of silly things in the shower? I actually, I think there's like some science behind this; I think I forget what it's called, but it's like when you're out riding a bike, when you're out going for a walk, where you're just sitting, things; I think it's called passive thinking; you actually get great breakthroughs. And so what I like to do is I draft my first thing; it doesn't take very long, and I know that it's bad, but I don't show anyone. Then I go for a walk, or I'll just sit; sometimes that will take 4, 48 hours, sometimes that will take one hour, sometimes 10 minutes, sometimes a week; I just let it sit, and then I do nothing. Now here's where the, the last part and the most important part is, uh, Olie, one of my favorite writers, what's his first name? David. David Ogie; he's got this great line; he goes, "I'm a lousy writer, but I'm a good editor," and this is where greatness happens, happens. Stephen King calls it "killing your darlings." He says when the editing phase, where all the great stuff happens, and this is actually where the gold happens. And a lot of people don't do this process; what they do is they write their dress, and that's the final bit, and they get afraid and nervous, and they never write it, and they don't actually incubate, and they don't actually edit. Do you do these things?
100%. You, I learned this from you, uh, the incubate part. So I used to draft and then try to edit in the same session because I knew editing is where the value is, right? Great writing is great editing; let's be perfectly clear; great writing is great editing. However, the mistake I was making before was I would write, and then I would immediately try to edit and power through, and I didn't have that break, that gap to actually go, "I can improve my ideas passively," just load the problem in my brain and go do something else; go for a walk, go for a run, go for a workout, go shower, go cook some food, chop some vegetables; doesn't matter what it is, but I give myself actually like at least 90 minutes away from it, sometimes six hours away from it, and then when I come back, I look at it, and it's just so obvious to me, "Oh, strike this, delete this, move this to the top; that's actually the best part. Oh, you know what I should say here? I should say this. Oh, that analogy I was missing here it is." And so you immediately, it starts to come together when I do that part, right? And I also realize I need to shift my time ratio because, like you, like you said, I used to be an overthinker drafter where I would overthink how much I need to, how much time to spend in the draft phase. So I try to make a good draft; bad idea. You actually just want to have a, like, like quick and dirty draft, like a brain dump draft. And so I used to try to make a good draft that would take me way too long, and I get fatigued, and I feel bad about it, and I'd be like, "I hate this; this is stupid; should I even do this?" And all the doubts creep in, and then I'll try to edit right away. Now, short draft and then high-energy edit after I have that incubation period. So this is, um, 100% what I do, and it is extremely effective. And once you get good, and once you find a process, sometimes I'll wake up in the middle of the night, and I think of an idea, and I just write that sentence in my phone, and then I just forget about it, but then I see something else in the world, and I'm like, "Oh, that reminds me of this concept I was, I was thinking about."
He woke up, figured it out. Yeah, I figured out the CTA. Is it weird if I sign off with "cyanara suckers"? Yeah. Wait, what do you think about, "I love you," at the end? Would that be a thing? But I, I actually do like, well, I'll have like a, a, do you have like a notes app or a notes folder in your phone where it's like you just have like a sentence and you're like, "That's a beautiful sentence; I'm just, I don't, I don't know where I'm going to use that, but that was a beautiful sentence." Or a lot of times I get it from podcasters or YouTubers; I'm like, "You, you hear how he phrased that, that word; that was a sharp phrase that cut to me." One of the things we didn't say in the before phase is having a swipe file. So yes, classic thing that all writers have and all marketers have, which is a swipe file; it's basically a stash; whenever you see something dope, something that's well done, something that's good, you just stash it away, so that when it comes time for you to make one, you could be like, "I need to make a landing page," and you would go, and you'd look at your stash of great landing pages you've seen, and you would have so much inspiration right there, ready for you at your fingertips because you did the work beforehand. And so that's another one of the befores; you got to have a swipe file. We, I have one for phrases, for headlines, for connecting words, for signs, for hellos and goodbyes, because for some reason whenever I write my newsletter, I knew what I wanted to say, but the start always was so awkward; it was like a hello, you know, "Hello there, friends," and I was like, "God, this sucks," and then I started keeping a, a file of like anytime I liked an, like an opener or a closer. So I have one opener's file, one closer file, and I have a whole bunch in there that I can use to riff off of because that, for whatever reason, that was my, my blocker.
When I would write, I’ll just hear a beautiful phrase, and I’ll write it down. So, like, I went to this guy’s website, and uh, he was talking about the best, like, speaker system or something, and he started off the paragraph with, “Well, folks, it doesn’t get any better than this,” and I was like, “Oh, in beautiful, that’s mine! Yes!” And like, I, I just have this whole bank of, like, these things of people saying like cute phrases. I’m like, “Oh, that’s a be like…” I just felt an emotion when I read that. Basically, you have to think: every people are scrolling through thousands of articles every day, and if I see a line that grabs my attention, I know that’s good. That’s mine. That’s mine. And I just have this whole bank of these.
So let’s move on to um, some more tips about talking about the actual writing part, because I think that what you’re taught in school, we’re basically going to say, do the opposite of a lot. Yeah, here’s right, here’s the mistakes, common mistakes, mistake number one: they start with a bunch of intro, context, background fluff. Uh, you wrote a… the tip is actually: don’t bury the lead. So the first sentence should punch. So try putting the most important sentence at the top. Try putting the most provocative statement at the top. Try putting the promise at the top, or the, the bait, the hook at the top.
So as an example, you have one here that when, when you were building the Hustle, one of the things you tried to do was these viral blog posts. You were like, “I’m gonna write these blog posts; if I can get a million views on those blog posts, and you know, some percentage of them will subscribe, that’s how I’ll grow my subscriber base,” right? And I remember reading this, which was first sentence: “I spent the last 30 days eating nothing but Soylent, a new-age powdered meal replacement. Why would I do something so stupid? I’ll explain, but first, if you’re not familiar with Soylent, here’s the gist.” A great opener, right? Because rather than saying, you know, um, you know, “the last few days have been, uh, you know, really tough for me because I’ve been doing this new experiment…” to give you background, “who I am, I’m Steve, I’m a programmer here at this company, and you know, I’m blah blah blah boring,” right? So instead, “I spent the last 30 days eating nothing but Soylent. Why would I do something so stupid? Let me explain.” Curiosity has been created, and now I want to know.
Yeah, typically when you’re thinking about the lead, so I found it helps with a few things. One, if you’re new, what I tell people is: let me see your opener, cut it in, like, cut almost all of it except for like the last couple sentences, and that’s typically a good trick. And the reason why I say that is: when you’re taught in school how to write, have you ever heard of, like, a thesis statement, where you have like an opening paragraph with the thesis at the bottom, 0.1, point two, three, and then a closer? I’m like, “Just tell me your thesis statement right off the, right off, like, just… just say that, just punch me in the face with that.” That should be your, that should be your opening line.
Another thing is I like to think of, um, have you ever been to England, and have you ever noticed they have signs that say, “Mind the gap,” right? I guess that’s like when you’re… I always say, “Mind the Curiosity Gap.” So mind… so with the Curiosity Gap means: I’m gonna, I’m gonna punch you in the face to grab your attention, because that gets you to fall down the slippery slope, and the more that you fall down that slope, the further you’re going to continue to read. And so I, I want to grab your attention, but I don’t want to tell you exactly everything, but I want to grab your attention by not burying the lead, and I’m going to get you to fall down this slope a little further. Yeah, that’s simple test is: take your hand, cover up all of the text except for the first two sentences. Read those first two sentences and be like, “Would, if I didn’t know me, if I didn’t care about me, if I didn’t, if I didn’t have to read this, would I want to read, would I need to read the next sentence?” Not, “Would I need to read the whole thing,” but, “I need to read the next sentence.” If it’s yes, you’ve created a curiosity gap, then you drag your hand down, you reveal that next sentence, you say, “If I read this sentence, would I need to read the next sentence,” right? Would I want to know what, what’s the next sentence? And then by the third or fourth time you’ve done that, now they’re in, now they’re invested, now you have a little more leeway to let it breathe and, and, and cre, and create a little bit of background, because they’re, they’re, they’re invested in getting to the end of the, of the outcome.
But like, the reason this sounds so brutal, where you’re going to cover up… I like, I’m going to cover up 85, 90% of the text, yes, because the reality is that’s actually how the reader’s eyes work. 80, 90% of people are only ever going to read the headline, and if the headline is no good, they’re never going to get to any of the other stuff. And so some people are resistant to write a juicy headline, but the reality is: if it’s not juicy enough, they’ll never get to that, those great ideas that you have inside. You’re sort of doing your own ideas a disservice, and so you want to find that line between, like, without completely winging yourself out or making a false promise, still find a way to make it juicy enough where you created that Curiosity Gap, where I have to read the next sentence. And that’s it. What I, what I used to say was: “It ain’t clickbait if, if you’re actually getting something.” Like, it bait means it’s fake. So as long as I can say the truth, but I say it in a sensational or clicky way… we used to say clicky… it ain’t bait if I actually deliver on the promise. You have to pay it off. If you don’t pay it off, then, then it’s bad. But if you’re paying it off, and you’re paying it off soon… you can’t pay it off like, you know, 10 minutes later. You have to, you have to be able to do that.
All right, next one is: write like you talk. So so many times people are like, “I can’t really, like, I’m not good at, I’m not a good writer,” and again, “I’m not a good writer” is actually code for, “I’m not a good thinker.” And the way you test this is cool: forget about writing it down, just tell me, like, explain it to me. Either they just say it out loud, and I’m like, “Great, you wrote it! Just write that down now.” Like, write down literally what you just said. You don’t have to have like this second character, this Shakespeare inside you that writes in a completely different style and communicates completely differently than you actually talk. You don’t need that; you actually want them to be very similar. It’s actually the most engaging type of writing is when you feel like the author’s just talking to, having a conversation with you specifically. And so, write like you talk is a good, good method, but it also reveals: if you can’t even talk about it, you’re not ready to write it yet. You got to first be able to, like, explain it just in plain language yourself. What I tell my team, so they’ll, like, write this huge thing and ask me to read it, and I’m like, “I don’t really want to read this, just tell me what it means,” and they’ll say in one sentence. I go, “Okay, cool, that’s your first sentence,” um, and that’s probably all you need to say for this thing.
Uh, but like, there’s a few ways to figure out what not to do. One is you go to people’s uh, LinkedIn. If they use the word “utilize,” that’s probably not good. Have you ever heard someone say they utilized or they did… what are other, like, LinkedIn jargon, LinkedIn… like, that’s, that’s so good, we should make a LinkedIn hit list of just uh, [ __ ] words that nobody ever says, but people think it’s okay to write. Yeah, it’s like, “Dude, I’ve never heard you, you use that word, ‘utilize.’ ” Right? The second thing to remember is: there’s informal, is, or rather, informal can be professional. A lot of times people think informal is the opposite of professional, and I actually say that’s, that’s nonsense, and I’m going to actually show examples of how that’s not true in a few minutes, but… and another good line that I think about is, uh, it was Stephen King, he says, “Any word you have to hunt in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There’s no exceptions to this rule.” Uh, and so like, if you have to, like, look up, like, what a word means, you don’t use it. You want to use words that most everyone uses. And I’m again, I’m going to show you examples of really complicated stuff explained in a really simple way.
Like, here’s a really good example of writing like you talk. So one of my favorite pieces of writing is Louis C.K. So Louis C.K., about 10 or 15 years ago, he used to release his own specials, like, on his website. And if you Google Louis C.K. Neville Madora or something like that, you’ll see my friend Neville wrote a blog post about some of his stuff, because it’s, it’s actually not up anymore, but he’s got this great uh, line in one of his bits, he says, or one of his landing pages, he goes: “Please, please don’t torrent the special. If you want to share it, direct people here. It’s so easy just to drop $5. We don’t make you join anything; we let you download any file you want. It costs a shitload of money to make these specials, and I do it myself. I love offering directly for so cheap and so easily, and I would like for that to continue being a good idea.” That’s a great simple way just to say, “Don’t steal,” uh, and, and, and that makes me feel… I’m like, “All right, you’re right, this is… I should abide by this. You are exactly right. There is no jargon; simple language.” Yeah, 100% agree.
I also think that, uh, you know, this also works for choosing what to write about. So, for example, sometimes people will write about [ __ ] that they would never talk to you about. We had this problem early on at the Milk Road. So when we did the Milk Road, I was the initial writer, so I created the initial voice, and Milk Road was a newsletter that we built in the crypto space, and we went from zero subscribers and never have written a daily newsletter before to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and sold it for millions of dollars, that in one year. So that was the success outcome. So how did we actually do it, and more importantly, how did I train other people to write it instead of me? Because I didn’t want to wake up every morning and stress about sending this email out at 5:00 a.m. to, you know, a couple hundred thousand people. That, that was not the idea of a good life for me. So I was like, “Me, see if I can train people to do this.” One of the hacks to training people to do this was: I, I was like, “God, I feel like they’re writing this both with too much extra fluff and jargon, and secondly, they’re writing about stuff that’s kind of boring.” So like, the topic is boring. I’m like, “What’s happening?” I was like… and I told him, I was like, “I feel like you would never just tell me about this, like, if I was just talking to you, if I was your, your friend, and you were like, ‘Oh, did you hear what happened today?’ Which is what a news, what a new, what the news is trying to tell you, right? ‘Hey, did you hear what happened today? This crazy thing happened, this interesting thing happened, this big event happened.’ ” I was like, “You’re writing about stuff that wouldn’t even make that filter. You wouldn’t even tell me about it, so why are you doing this?” So what I had them do, I was like, “Forget writing a draft and having me be the editor. Instead, I want you to send me a voice memo, no more than 60 seconds in the morning, which is basically, ‘Oh, did you hear what happened today? Uh, this guy said this thing, and people are freaking out because of blah blah blah, and this announcement was made, and people think it’s going to be a big deal, and the price is going to go up because that would mean this.’ ” And as soon as they started doing that, I was like, “Yep, that sounds perfect, just write that down,” and it just was such a good filter. And so one way to think about what to write about and how to write it is do this little kind of voice memo test. So can you just, if you were just to tell your friend about this, you know, “Hey, I have this idea, blah blah blah,” or, you know, “I noticed this thing, I found it really interesting because blah blah blah blah,” and if you can’t, if it’s not interesting to your friend, guess what? It’s not gonna be interesting to a stranger, right? Like you have to be able to, to explain it in a way that’s simple, and use that as a filter. If you would never talk about it, don’t write about it.
Well, and the tip that I used to give, so when I sold the Hustle, we had close to 2 million subscribers, I believe, and for new writers, they would, they, like, would kick ass in their audition, and then they would get nervous, like, when they’re… I’m like, “Yeah, 2 million is a lot of people, I get it, but here’s the tip: write to me, write to Sam. Just literally, you are only writing to me.” And that’s what I tell people when they’re writing blog posts, when they’re writing anything else: just write to one person. You’re only writing to one human being; it’s just coincidence that many others might read it, but just only write to one, one person, direct to that one person, and that’s the way to go, uh, and so it makes it a lot easier, right? Uh, let’s go to, let’s go to uh, write simply. What I found is: around… you can go as low as fourth grade, but around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade reading level is the way that you want to write. Now, to give you guys perspective, I think USA news.com, USA news, the newspaper, I believe that’s at a fourth-grade reading level. New York Times, which is highly regarded by a lot of people, that’s at a seventh-grade reading level. And I actually went and put Warren Buffett… Warren Buffett writes about insurance companies, a very complicated topic. I went and put his stuff through Hemingway App as well; same thing, sixth, seventh, eighth-grade reading level. And it teaches you how to write at that level, and there’s tactics on how to do that, like: don’t use adverbs, keep sentences short. But Hemingway App is an awesome way to, um, check, yeah, to check to do it for you. Yeah, I think that’s a great one.
Um, another one that you wrote in here is about storytelling, and so I think storytelling is now, like, kind of in the more advanced, a little more advanced category of how to be a great writer is being able to use, use the art of storytelling. Uh, do you want to give an example of that, uh, or how do you want to talk about storytelling here? So here’s an example of storytelling. So about 10 years ago, there was this company called Hint, Hint Water. It’s, you see it’s, like, a beverage that you guys see in the stores. It’s called um… and the lady named Cara, she had this great story. She went and gave this talk, uh, at one of my events, and there was at the very end, there was one question that someone asked her, and I heard that story, and of the 60-minute talk, I was like, “Oh, that’s a, that’s a hit,” because that just made me feel something. So the headline was: “Getting called ‘sweetie’ helped this entrepreneur create a multi-million dollar business.” “‘Sweetie,’ the executive said. And I just dropped the phone for a minute. Last week at pizza and 4S, Cara Golden, the founder of Hint, told me a story that fired me up. The setup goes like this…” and it explains a story about how she was drinking 10 Cokes a day. She was on the phone with an executive of Coca-Cola, and she said, “I’m going to create a new version of water that just has a little bit of fruit in it and no sugar.” An executive at Coke goes, “Listen, sweetie, Americans love sweet; this is never going to work.” By the way, that’s a great example of working backwards from an emotion. Even if you didn’t consciously do it, in this case, you, you knew that story would hit because it has outrage; it has a WTF, OMG type of reaction of, like, [ __ ]. But let me fill you in on the results. So I wrote the blog post, not in order to promote Hint; I wrote the blog post because I thought this was just a cool story of a, this entrepreneur getting, like, it was a sexist moment, and she was getting hated on. Whatever… Hint saw the article; they ended up spending millions of dollars to promote this article, and at the very bottom of the article, and it, it says something like this: “This conversation inspired Golden, now 17 laters, 17 years later, to found Hint, and they do 100 million in sales. Here’s the flavors they have…” This article made them tens of millions of dollars in sales. We used to get so much traffic to this article because they ended up promoting it. I wasn’t selling Hint Water; I was just telling a cool story about the founder, and in exchange, it made all these people want to buy this stuff. And if, in fact, if you Google Hint Water “sweetie” article, you’ll see articles written about this article about how it was a huge success. And this was sort of an accident; I just wrote something cool, and they actually were like, “Oh, let’s promote this,” but it worked wonderfully because it was a story that grabbed your attention.
You want to say a few words on, on how to, how to write a great story? I have a couple of tips you do it. So a couple of tips on, on writing a great story or telling a great story. So go look at the greatest storytellers ever. Uh, one of them is Aaron Sorkin. He’s known for writing great dialogue; he wrote, you know, The Social Network movie; he wrote, uh, what is it, West Wing; he wrote The Newsroom; great writer, famous, right, famous Hollywood writer. He says, “I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.” So what he says is: a story is just two things: somebody has an intention, somebody wants something, and there’s an obstacle in their way. By the way, that line, “I worship at blank altar, at the altar of blank,” yeah, so that, that is going into my bank, to your bank. H, that’s F. All right. So, uh, so intention and obstacle: intention is some character wants something, and then there’s an obstacle in their way. The more they want it… like their daughter was just taken hostage, huge, huge intention, obstacle. They don’t know by who, where they are, and all they have to go on is this one 5-second call that they were on or whatever, right? Like obstacle, they, they have no way to find them, and they’re just a dad. How are they going to ever, you know, get their daughter back? And so intention and obstacle is the core element of any good story. So somebody wants something. In the case that you just said, not only does Cara want to make her business successful, she wants to be taken seriously as a female entrepreneur. Obstacle: Coke executive, men, men are pigs, nobody believes in her, right? That’s a core, that’s a core of a story. And so any story, if you can’t… they say, like, in a movie, you should be able to pause at any moment of any story and say, “What does that character want, and what’s in their way?” And if you can’t pause and name that right now, you have failed as a storyteller, because the audience… you, you think they’re, you’re going to tell them later what the, they want. No, no, you’ve lost their attention, the initial stakes. And if you watch any movie, they establish this, right? And even like silly rom-coms, it’ll be, uh, she wakes up, she’s got her assistant and chauffeur driving her to work; she’s clearly high-powered, but her, but she’s alone, and she doesn’t have a relationship, right? Like that’ll be, it’ll be obvious to her; she’ll see somebody out the window while she’s driving to work in her chauffeur limousine, and it’s this girl in love with her boyfriend, and she looks at it kind of longingly, and then she just goes back to her, her, you know, Palm Pilot or whatever, before, back to work. And so you know what the character wants, and you know what’s in her way. She’s, she doesn’t have somebody because she hasn’t found the right guy, and she’s so busy with work. And so everything is always this intentional obstacle.
The second thing is you have to establish, like, how do you make a story better or worse? Stakes is the next thing. So what is at stake, uh, what do you have to lose if this doesn’t go well? And stakes doesn’t have, like… stakes, initially, the beginner version of stakes is life or death, but the true art, and some… if you like some of the stories that I’ve told on this podcast, the true art is when you can establish high-stakes emotions in a low-stakes environment. So if I can tell you how I was feeling, and if I can get you to believe that I thought everything was on the line just with some little interaction I was having with the, like, this person in the grocery store line, and how I didn’t want them to win, cuz [ __ ] them, and they can’t cut… they cut in front of me, but I’m not going to, I’m not going to cut in front of them, but I need them to know that it wasn’t okay, but I don’t know how to do it without being an [ __ ] myself. And if I can establish the stakes that this matters to me, I can get you to care about the outcome of it, but it can be in a low-stakes situation. Now you’re really cooking with gas if you can do something like that, because otherwise you’re limited to just life or death stories. The best example you have done of that, you’re very good at this, is um… I, I distinctly remember this story of you, you doing a shirtless workout on your driveway and your HOA being like, “No, we, we can’t have this,” and you’re like, “We’re going to Petty Court, we’re going to Ho…” like, I just… that was a… I let this go, or I could fight to the death as a matter of principle here, because you know what are you trying to say, and what does this mean, right? And if it means something to me that I can make it mean something to you. So that sort of thing. Larry David’s great at this too, like when… whenever I watched that show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, like they’re making a story out of something so silly and small, uh, you know, it’s, it’s 10 times more likable when it’s something relatable or small, but it still carries the emotional impact. And if you could do that, you have an infinite supply of stories. He notices that people don’t talk, people don’t talk to someone if they’re wearing a MAGA hat, and so he starts wearing a MAGA hat all the time. He’s like, “I don’t want anyone to talk to me; I’m just gonna wear this hat.” Yeah, uh, that, that’s a really good example of a high-stakes, uh, high stakes and a low-stakes environment, where like it doesn’t really matter, but it’s very funny.
Um, and then let’s talk about uh, tactical stuff. So short sentences, um, I’m a firm believer in short sentences, and so the… I’ll give you, I’ll explain why. But Warren Buffett owns, you know, runs Berkshire Hathaway; Berkshire owns dozens and dozens of companies. Arguably the most complicated one is Geico. Insurance companies are very, very, very hard to understand. However, I don’t remember if the Hustle did analysis on this or someone else did, but he writes these famous annual shareholder letters every single year. He, he’s a very good writer, and listen to this: from uh, 1974 to 2013, someone analyzed this, and the letters per, or sorry, the words per sentence dropped from 17 to 13. If you look at, like, we actually did an analysis on this, every year it gets shorter and shorter and shorter, and the reading level dropped from a 10th grade to a fourth-grade reading level. So the richer he got, and the more complicated his businesses got, the simpler the writing got, because he just got better at explaining it a really easy-to-understand way. And he’s probably once kind of somewhat the average show to be able to understand this. And so short, simple sentences are key, even in complicated environments. And here’s a really good example. So if you go to hey.com, so hey.com is an alternative to Gmail; it’s a, it’s a service that makes you pay though, so it’s even… they, they’ve raised the stakes there. So you have to pay for their email. There’s a letter from the CEO, and that’s one of my favorite uh, like tactics, by the way, in a sales page is letter from a CEO, and he says, “Hey everyone, I’m Jason, CEO of 37signals. Email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn’t. Email is a treasure,” and he goes on to explain why uh, email is awesome and why it should be more special than it is, and it’s the most simple language to explain email, and I love it. And there’s lots of examples of simple language and, and simple ways to explain complicated things. And if you’re able to do that, often times they will have shorter sentences, less words, and it, it’s significantly more in uh, effective than longer stuff.
Related to that, it doesn’t have to be only one length. So there’s this great graphic that’s gone viral many times; you probably seen it. Great writing has rhythm. So there’s an example, so I’ll just read this out loud. He goes: “This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine, but several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. This writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones; it’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings; it has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences, and I use sentences of medium length, and sometimes when I’m certain that the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with the impetus of a crescendo, the role of the drums, the crash of the cymbals, and sounds that say, ‘Listen to this, this is important.’ ” So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create sound that pleases the reader’s ears. Don’t just write words; write music. That I love that; it is amazing. And so you want to have short by default, but then, like he says, when the reader is rested and ready, use a long sentence to great effect. And so that’s like an advanced move when it comes to writing. Most people’s problem is every, every sentence is too long. And so you start with short sentences, but then you figure out how to vary it so that your writing sings. Whenever I, sometimes when I write something that I get really into, I, I almost feel like, uh, I’m like, I channel like my inner Eminem or like some rapper or something, where I’m like, “What type of rhythm could get people flowing?” Like, I need to have a rhythm that gets people to fall down this… and like there’s small tactics, like: anytime you want to use a comma, use a period, and then start the next sentence with “and” or “but,” um, or there’s other things, like: put your internal dialogue, like, um, or like, or, or the reader’s internal dialogue, like: “So why would I do this? You’re asking yourself right now, right?” Or, “Who the hell is this person talking to me through my computer screen telling me what to do, and why on Earth should I trust them?” Like you can do these little things to change…
The rhythm grabs people's attention, yeah, 100%. Uh, that's a that's a great way of putting it. I also think like the rhythm thing is, uh, it comes from the copy work. So back to the copy work at the beginning: if you do copy work on something that has rhythm, like I will write that that same thing that I just read out loud, I'll write that in my copy work—takes whatever, 55 seconds—but now I'm already kind of revved up to write in that style, to have that that variety, that rhythm when I write the next thing.
Should we wrap up by saying some resources that we both used in order to get influenced?
Yeah, yeah. How do you learn? How do you get better from here? Because this was the crash course—just hit on a bunch of bunch of the big topics. There's obviously a lot of nuance and subtlety, and like doing it takes both practice as well as like a little bit of deeper understanding. But where where should people go?
So what I'll start with some some books that I like: I like *On Writing* by Stephen King. That changed my life. Um, I like that one a lot. Um, what do you like about that, by the way? I read that book; I didn't love it. What what was so good about it?
I just felt that he was teaching me how to write better, and but he was living it as he was going. And so the first half of the book, I believe, is his biography, and the second half is a tool—he calls it the the toolkit—where he explains like how he does stuff. And I just felt in the biography part he was doing it, and then in the toolkit part, he—me, yeah. And so I really appreciate that. But then I also get a lot of inspiration from funny original thinkers, you know, who—one of the most original like people with words right now is Theovon. So I'll hear Theovon—like, for example, he had an ad for Athletic Greens, and he goes, "Today's sponsors, Athletic Greens. I know what you're thinking: What is this? Just a bunch of aliens playing track and field?" And like like he he does these like silly things and unexpected silly things, and he's like a treasure trove of like interesting phrases. So I'm a big fan of like listening to what he's saying and why. I also listen to a ton of comedians because they've perfected this. So like Dave Chappelle is really great with timing; Shane Gillis is really good with timing. And so I pay attention to a lot of those guys on how they get people's attention. So I like *On Writing*. I like Theo Von. Um, I listen to a lot of True Crime podcasts, and True Crime podcasts because they're supposed to be thrilling; they are excellent at storytelling and setting up tension. And so I love—uh, there's this company called Parcast; they've got *Serial Killers*, *Unsolved Murders*, and I really love how they set up tension.
What do you like?
I like a lot of those same things you said. I I also like to consume them in a different way. So I think everybody likes Dave Chappelle or Louis C.K., but you know, when I wanted to get good at this, I started to study what they do—not just laugh and move on, right? So I would—there's there's an amazing amazing thing—what I think is the—I have two two things I've learned from comedians I think are the best examples of both storytelling to win people on your side and of apologizing. So the apologizing one is: after Louis C.K. got canceled, he basically disappeared for like a year and a half, and he came back and he did his first show on stage. And there's a big question in my my head: it's like, how is he going to address this? What's he say? You people should go listen to it in in full, but basically, first he doesn't address—he's he's doing his normal act, and he pauses just in the middle of like doing a thing, and he's just like, "So, should we talk about it? All right, we could talk about it," and he just brings it up like in the—he makes it awkward because like what he did was like weird and pretty gross and bad, whatever. So what he did was: instead of backpedaling and apologizing, instead of denying, instead of trying to spin it as good, he was was like, "Everybody's got a thing. Some people's things are weirder than others, but everybody's got a thing." That they like. "Barack Obama knows my thing." He makes fun of himself—like it's basically poke—like, "My thing is so weird that I liked and did, and everybody knows about it," and he kind of wins you on his side—like just the comedian—the idea of even Obama knows my thing—like everybody's got a thing, but it's secret usually. And so then he goes, and and there's more to it, but he does that. Chappelle does one when when they took the Chappelle Show, they put it on Netflix, and he wasn't getting any royalties from it. He's like, "Man, they're using my name; they're putting my show up there. I have a fight with these guys, and my fans are watching it, and Netflix is winning, and the studios—everyone's winning except for Chappelle from the Chappelle Show," right? So he goes on stage; he does this 20-minute thing called—I think it's called *Unforgivable* or *Unforgiven* or something like that. I'm going to do a full YouTube breakdown of this because it is, to me, it is like the Master Class class in: how do you tell a story to win people on your side? It is so well done. I I I can't even do it. I'm going to do a full breakdown of like what I think he did that was so smart. And I have studied this thing, and I've been like, I can't believe like I would have never come up with this as a way to to make that point, to get people at the end to be totally on his side and willing to like boycott the show. How did he get people to do that? And the way he told the story—where he's not giving you a lecture, he's not just coming out and saying it outright—he kind of baked it in at the end, uh, but he set the setup was so strong that you—there's only one outcome you could have. It's a maze that led you to one door, which is: I'm on Dave's side; I'm gonna do exactly what this guy just said. And to me, when I saw that, I was like, that was the best example I've ever seen of using storytelling for mass persuasion.
I uh I I want to go watch that. Another person I love—have you ever read Joel on Software—joelonsoftware.com?
Yeah. You're going from Chappelle to to Joel Spolsky, the creator of Trello. Nice dude. I know that that like sounds ridiculous, but he's this like nerdy guy who has started, I think, Stack Overflow and Trello—all these like companies. Dude, his blogs are very funny on the dorkiest topics. Like I don't even understand a lot of the topics because it's like heavy engineering. He does such a good job of writing on on these topics. I love—what I—one of my favorite things to do is find the top post on Hacker News because typically these engineering types of people are particularly quirky, and they kind of think outside the box. Yesterday, I don't know if you saw it yesterday, there's a great one—a great example of this—some guy wrote, "The Kroger app sucks," or something like that, and it was like the number 15 thing on Hacker News. I click it, and it's this like 10,000-word blog post about Kroger's technology, and he's just like—he's like, "I like Kroger. Kroger's the biggest grocer in the world," and he's like, "They should be good at technology; they have all the money, and they have the customers; they have all the locations—like they should not be getting their their, you know, their ass handed to them by Instacart and these other like startups." He's like, "Look at this: you open the Kroger app, and it doesn't—like you swipe, and it doesn't—" He's like, "The whole internet is: if you swipe, it'll load more stuff. For Kroger, if you want to swipe to see more products, it stops you, and there's this tiny button that says like 'Next page.' You have to go page after page; it doesn't just load." He's like, "That's terrible," and he's like, "Here's this other thing," and he wrote this like 10,000-word thing like nerding out about the Kroger app, and I loved it. I read every word of it. I was like, "This is this is incredible nerdy right here. I love this thing." He's got a great opening line; he says, "I'll start by saying I know nothing about the grocery industry, but what I do know about is tech and UX," uh, and so that's a great way to like kind of get people down your slippery slope. But this is a really good article, and I love—it's not even that this is particularly good writing, but what I would say is that this is effective writing because the biggest lesson of it all is that you want your content to just be you pushed out. I think everybody thinks they have to like become some character in order for their content to hit, to work, to be to be a—to be a popular or whatever. And you could kind of do that, and you might even get some popularity, but it'll never work in the long run because it's not you being you. And uh, those people are attracted to something that's not your actual brain, your actual thoughts. You got to let that freak flag fly, baby. You got to let it fly—flag fly. And you know that's how this podcast worked is like I started with this interview format, trying to emulate—it's almost like copy work. I was like emulating the Tim Ferriss Show or *How I Built This* or whatever. But then when it was just me pushed out, it's like, I'm going to get on here; we're going to talk some days about writing, and some days about mindset, some days about this niche business that's uh, you know, tire rims in in North Carolina that's crushing it. It's like that's the [ __ ] I'm into, so that's the [ __ ] I talk about. That's the thing I'm most passionate about; that's the thing I can have—I have the most interesting things to say about. And because of that, it's just me pushed out, and then it's going to attract people who really like that, and nobody can compete with me at that thing, right? Like that that is a a personal monopoly; there is nobody else who could do what I'm doing as well as I'm doing. You could do the same thing with your writing, so just take the stuff you're most interested in or nerd out about the most and post that—even if it seems like, "Does anyone else really care about this?" You'll find the people that care about it if you just consistently do that, which is what this episode is: we're talking about a topic that you and I actually care a ton about, and I guess we're going to find out if the rest care about it, but it will find those who do.
Next time, for the next—what what are we call this? Questionable Advice. Next time are we doing business plans?
I think yeah, we're doing a one on the next Questionable Advice, which is: we kind of laugh at like, "Oh, you don't need to write a business plan; that's archaic," but like we do do some version of planning before we just start a business, so we're going to share what do we actually do in our planning before we start a business that we found is effective for us. So that'll be the next one. Should we—and we each got to plug our thing, although I think your thing is no longer a thing.
Yeah, but I'm inspired by doing this. I'm like, I want to tell people about this, and actually like because I have I have a course that does this, but I have a ton of examples, and the examples are actually what's valuable because you might hear some of the things we talked about—you're like, "Okay, I got to look that up. I got to look that up; look that up"—but in the course, I basically put it all there where I'm like, "Here's the principle; here's the example. You actually—it's principle; you try it, then it's—here's the example of it done well; another example of it done well; another example of done well. Try it again." And literally, if you just do that, you'll get better as a writer; that's like a a structured form of practice. So my course is not so much me talking about it—it was that—and I'm like, if somebody actually wanted to learn that, you kind of need that—you kind of need to have those gold star examples, and you need to have like a place to go practice—like try it, learn it, then try it again. So I just Googled Shan Purry Power Writing; it takes me to Maven, and you can join the waitlist. Is that where people should go?
Yeah, but I'm gonna boot it back up. So I have this waitlist; it's got—I don't know—it's got a lot of people on, I think, but I should—I haven't done it in like a year and a half; I kind of like retired from it. But this episode made me fired up about it, so maybe that'll fade—in an hour I'll be like, "No [ __ ] that; I'm not doing it"—but uh, if not, I'll I'll do one more one more of these this year, and then then I have a thing only on copywork. I love copywork; or it changed my life. I got this thing—I made it like in a weekend two years ago just for shits and giggles because I—it just—I like it; it's fun for me. It's called copythat.com, and it's my best versions of what I think people should write and copy, and then you copy it by hand, and I break down why each point is interesting so you can check it out—copythat. It's got a ton of good reviews; you could actually—I actually try to post all the negative reviews and the positive reviews so you can see all the reviews. It's copythat.com. So Google Shan Purry Power Writing, and you'll see his page on maven.com, and then copythat.com. We'll put them both in the description, so it'll be at the top of the description here; we'll put the links to the to the things we talked about in this episode because I think if you're listening to this, you're driving or you're walking; it's very hard, and we're usually not that good with show notes, but today, Ari, let's try to be good with the show notes where all the resources we talked about—let's make it easy—um, and put it put it there for people so that they can just scroll down and get it.
Dude, there's 8,000 people on the waitlist for the course. I didn't even—I haven't looked at this in so long. This was like 500 last time I looked.
That's crazy. You should do that, right?
That's actually too many. I don't think I can do so many people at once because I'm pretty—I'm live with them, and I'm like doing student feedback, so that would be—I don't think that's even doable. I I couldn't possibly do—even—I've never—the biggest one we ever did was like 400, so 8,000 people is just not gonna work.
You'll figure it out. Um, is that the pod—that's the pod [Music]