Transcription
Alex rosi has written two killer business books that, together, have sold more than one million copies. And all that obsessive writing has gotten him to 9 million followers across social media platforms. This is the first interview he's ever done that's all about the writing process.
One of the things that super distinguishes you is you just like go into Hero's cave every morning and you just write, right, right? So tell me about how you do that.
I wake up, and then I caffeinate, and then I put earplugs and headphones on. Um, I close all the windows, and I really only write on days that I know have at least like six hours or more uninterrupted. Um, sometimes eight. Like I definitely suffer from like the Zeigarnik effect, which is open loop, right? The idea like if you have something later on in the day, like it it it messes with me a little bit because I feel like I want to be able to lose myself in the writing and then like come up for air whenever I want to come up for air, rather than think like I have to be done by this time so that I can prep for this meeting or take this call or do this thing. Um, and so I almost exclusively write on days where I have nothing on my whole calendar. And so I optimize a lot of my calendar around when I'm in a heavy writing season, around not having anything at all on my on on it.
And then when you sit down to write and say at 6:00 a.m., are you like, "I want to write for six hours; these are the things I want, want to get done"? I'm gonna get to-do list. How do you think about that?
Man, I feel like I'm incredibly unstructured with the writing besides just like violent effort, but that's about it. Like I I write what I write. Um, I never had writer's block in my life. I usually have a game plan of what I'm going to write. So like I would say, from a writing process perspective, I outline a book with what the table of contents is first. I think we were talking about that before this started, like the table of contents is the hardest thing; I spend my time on. Once I have that, that's like basically the game plan. And so each of the chapters I tend to have the same structure because I write the way I would like to read. And so I like to have some sort of narrative or story that kind of puts context to what I'm talking about. I also write, obviously, non-fiction, and so this just gives color to that. Um, I give a very short description of what this thing is that I'm that I'm going to be talking about, um, and then usually plentiful examples, and then I will basically put all of my my Alex notes, um, basically is the end. And I pretty much stuck with that setup for all of the books that I've written, um, and I think that that setup has just gotten cleaner and clearer between the books, um, because they fundamentally are like my notes brought to life in a book format. Um, but the hardest part for me is usually picking what story I want to tell, um, in each chapter that best embodies whatever the principal is or whatever the the the the core message of the chapter is, um, and what visual framework I can tie to that that kind of like melts everything together or like ties it all together in a really clear way. That's what I spend like—I and I usually do words first, and I'll then put these highlighted caps marks where I'll say like a picture that looks like this, and then I'll move on. So I basically do words first, then I'll go back through; I'll keep cleaning words, and then I'll put rough doodles in, and then only at the very end will I come in and put the final doodles because sometimes like my orders change, and I'll put numbers in a doodle that if I move the paragraph around, like I have to redo it. Um, but that's been my my overall process for writing, but I just I just write, and I write as much as I can until I can't write anymore, where I feel like my words per unit of time starts to like drop pretty precipitously.
Tell me about those notes; where do they come from? Is that like a note on your phone? Is that stuff that you've written in emails?
I have so many books to write like right now; I have like 20 more books that I have outlined. My books are limited by my ability to promote and launch them more than they are limited by my ability to write them, uh, because I have what I know what my other books would be like. I already know what my next two books are going to be. Yeah. Um, and I write a lot of stuff down because I don't want to forget it. Like I have this this Excel sheet that has like 600 stories of my life, and when I go back through them, I'm like, "Oh yeah, I forgot what that happened," like and it's like it's it's in some ways it's kind of scary because I'm like, "Man, this was my life, and I barely remember," and I have to like retrace the synapses to like go back into the experience. And I think that um a great a great fear of mine is forgetting, um, and so I write to crystallize um the memory, but also whatever the finding was because I feel like if you can't remember the lesson, you might as well not have lived it and learned it. And so I spend a lot of time trying to crystallize uh the knowledge into like artifacts that, and I refer to my own stuff like I I use my own books for reference. I think there's an Indiana Jones quote that I like a lot; it's a it's Sean Connery who says, I think it's Indiana Jones th um, and he says uh he says, "I wrote it down so I wouldn't have to remember it," and uh because he was like, "You don't remember it," he's like, "That's why I wrote it down." But but it's funny because people write things to remember things, but they also write them because they think they'll forget them, so it's just kind of this really interesting dichotomy like how how writing serves people different ways.
Yeah, so then when you're writing your books, it seems like you're really good at crystallizing ideas in your head. So when you sit down to write leads or offers, how much fidelity do you feel like you had before you started the writing project versus how much of writing is a process of discovery for you?
I say it's two-thirds discovery, one-third getting the stuff that I already have out. Okay, yeah. Like as I'm writing it, I'm like, "Oh, I didn't think about about that; I'm going to have to clarify that," and that's kind of like I feel like the most exciting part; that's the fun part is when I like encounter some apparent conflict between two ideas that I know are both true but seem to be conflicting. Yeah, that's where like, "All right, where's the nuance here? Under what context? Where where's the through line for this that can create some framework that actually applies to everything?" And so um the two modes that I use for the frameworks or even the writing that I have in general is uh utility and validity. So uh is this true, and in how many situations is it true, and is it useful? H. And so, for example, if I say, "Sometimes things happen, and sometimes things don't," incredibly valid, not very—right now. On the flip side, a lot of like, at least in the non-fictional world, a lot of like sales and marketing lore, very useful, not valid. So I can prove a time when there's some sort of tip or trick that works maybe in this scenario but not that scenario. And so trying to distill out like what's the fundamental principle that applies to all scenarios is what makes that interesting for me. Like I have tons of anecdote, and that's what creates some of the stories that are like in the books that I have, um, but I I call it like, "How do I break this?" So I'm like, "How do I break this model? How do I break this truism?" And if I can't break it, I can't think of a way that I'm like, "It's done; like it's good."
Yeah, my challenge when I do that is I kind of fall in love with my ideas, especially after I've just written them. So like if I'm 2 p.m., I did a morning writing session, I mean it's like I it's like my mom—like you can't say anything bad about her—you mean, but like it kind of takes time. And so I'm pretty depended on other people that how we break ideas. It doesn't sound like you have that same challenge though.
I definitely rely on my editor, but I feel pretty strongly in saying that like I have very little um loyalty to my ideas. Like I'm very willing to be like, "Oh yeah, this is probably not right." I'm absolutely married to the truth; zero about how we get there, right? And I think that's that's um that's at least how I approach this.
So what do you do? You enter these intense writing seasons, and is that like a season of no type thing where it's like an official thing? So let everybody know, "I'm gonna be writing."
I do say it's a season of no. So um, my team knows that basically like I'll probably cut my calendar down significantly and maximize for full free days. And typically during that season, I'll only have two days of team meetings. And so I have five days a week that are completely empty, and one of those days will probably get hijacked, but I would say I'm pretty good about keeping that schedule because I also really like writing. Writing has definitely been a um a guilty pleasure. Um, I love writing, and it doesn't it doesn't make the most monetary sense for me, but I really enjoy it. Like I was the um VP of the school paper; I was the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine when I was in high school. I got a full scholarship to Tufts for writing um when I was in high school; I ended up going to VCU, but like that's so like I I really love writing, um, and I think that a big part of it is I love learning, and I feel like if I really want to understand something, I write a book about it. Yeah, and that's been the process. And so I love business, and so I love the components of business, and I come in with like my preconceived ideas; these are these anecdotal frameworks that I—when I have four, five, six, eight, ten frameworks that all of a sudden start have like a through line that I see, I'm like, "There's a book here." But then when I dive in, it sometimes sometimes it goes great, and I'm like, "Wow, I was right," and then sometimes I'm like, "Oh my God, I was wrong." That's when it's like really going through the muck, sometimes not as fun, but I want to like get to the other side, and I know the value of getting to the other side because that's where I feel like you get the most uh fulfillment, where you're like, "This is true." Like you either talk to people one-on-one or you talk to people one-to-many; they're either people who know you, they're people are they're not; fight me, right? You I mean it is valid, and it's useful.
I love the idea when you're writing and you feel like you've just got an X-ray vision on how reality works. It's like I've looked at a hundred sales letters, and I just saw like the core component that just went in all those. That for me, the line that people say sometimes is, "I don't like writing; I love having written." That's how I feel about the craft.
It sounds like you enjoy the process a lot more though.
I like both; I really do think I like both. I really enjoy writing; I do enjoy writing, and I enjoy having written. Those moments where you have those like little mini breakthroughs, ever we call them—at least my editor, we call them like "fight me, fight me" statements. We it's like we say his things; it's like fight—like that is true; like there's nothing you can say about that, you know. And um when it's also useful, that's when it's like we create these at least these little mantras to live by.
Tell me about usefulness; you've mentioned this a lot. Usefulness, utility—how do you think through that?
When someone uses this thing, because I write non-fiction, right? And so when someone uses this framework, this tool, this tactic, do they get to the desire; they get the desired outcome? And so if it is valid, um, then it is true, but if it's not useful to anyone, there's no context under which they would actually use it, and it would materially change the decision-making process or their behaviors in a way that would illuminate or make their lives better. And so I like the the best frame—like the value equation—was is probably the core framework of the "Offerus" book, right? That's the like that was the me that actually took like multiple years before I actually, you know, crystallize that, um, but that framework is useful all the time, everywhere. Like it's useful for ads; it's useful for sales letters; it's used for making offers because fundamentally it's what do people want, right? They want things that are fast; they want things that are easy, and they want things that are risk-free. And if you try to find another component that that's that's not one of those variables, it's like it probably is one of those variables. I have yet to see, and maybe we'll see it later, um, but I I've seen many people will republish the value equation either as their own or they like change the icons, but like no one has changed the for—like they are the forward. And so I see that as like it is valid. Now when I see like I think bad frameworks, you can make a framework—anything you put a triangle, you put three things on it; it's a framework, right? Yeah, but that's not a good framework because I can break it pretty easily. If I see lots of people starting to morph things around, then it means that it's not correct, right? Whereas the the like value equation has like stood the test of time, at least for now—I only a few years.
Do you know the concept of MECE? So this is they use this a lot at McKinsey, different companies like that. So it's mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. So an example would be, "Ah, we're struggling with our content strategy for the business. All right, well, we got three options: we can do more, yeah, we can do better, or we can do different." But actually, there's no kind of content improvement plan that isn't part of those ofs. So when people break down problems, they'll use the word MECE, and then that's how they think about it. So it can hit all the options, but also all the options are different from each other.
Wholly agree, and that's the that's 100% how I think about it. I can't think of something that's where I think breaking the model—like if I can think of an example that doesn't fit in this the model's wrong, and I just keep doing it until I get those. I mean, "More, better, news," or "More, better, different," um, is a great mantra that I use a lot just in business to um, but it's like, "Are there are there other of those indiff sub segments or subcategories that don't exist or that that people aren't using?" And that's that's what I enjoy trying to discover.
Let's do this: take a 100 million dollar leads, and I want to walk through how you think about book marketing. So let's just focus on the cover, okay, and then just show it to the camera, and what I want to hear is, as you talk through it, how did you think about leads, the icon, yeah, the subtitle, and then we'll talk about the back of the book after. Okay.
So the cover, I basically had to make the decision—so this was the first book—I was like, "Am I going to do something totally different, or am I going to just basically make this into a series?" So immediately what we see is 100 million—the same; you took out the testimonial at the top; that's what I see. Yeah. Um, and so I just went with another color; there was really no rhyme or reason for blue. I was like, "Blue sounds fine." Yeah. Um, in terms of uh the the icon, I'm pretty sure I wanted to do a magnet; I just kind of was like, "You want to attract leads," and I couldn't think—it was either going to be fishing or a magnet.
I think I saw somewhere that you A/B tested the heck out of them.
Yes, so I A/B tested the heck out of this; I A/B tested probably like three or four of the image of different basically different um different magnet variations, um, but the word "leads," I tested the hell out of, and so I had "$100 million promotion," "$100 million advertising," "$100 million leads," "$100 marketing," and "leads" was the one that won, uh, and so I was like, "Okay, if leads," and kind of interesting though because "leads" is the output of advertising, and so no one wants to advertise; people want leads. Huh. I mean, that's that's Alex's conclusion; I could be wrong; I haven't tested it, but like, right, but if I if someone said, "Why do you think that?" that would have been my that would have been my answer. And so um I tested because what's really interesting, I mean, and to be fair, it's like kind of the contents of the book is um people do judge a book by its cover, of course, and if you're going to go through all the all the the work of writing the book, which is significantly harder than testing the cover and the title, um, like do that right, you know what I mean? I think the first time I heard about this was I think Tim Ferriss uh tested "4-Hour Work Week," yeah, for his book, and he hated the title, but it it crushed uh all the other titles, and so he because he's like, "I don't even really believe like just only working four hours a week," but it just it murdered, and so that's what the book became, and obviously became a bestseller. And I read this um there was this uh like white paper that was released by this uh publishing company or that helped self-publishers, and they talk about this uh dating help book that sold like no copies, and saw this, okay, yeah, and then all they did was they changed the cover and they changed the headline or the, you know, the title of the book, and they became like an international bestseller. And when I saw that, I was like, "All right, this is important; I should take the time time to actually like make sure."
Now the big picture that was basically how I picked the the the headline and then the image and then the subhead. I also tested a ton too, which is "How to get strangers to want to buy your stuff," and "How do you test that?" When you say this, what I would assume as I go to Google or Facebook, and I see what drives the most traffic, but how do you test the subtitle?
I can tell you I have the actual tests here. So it's like, okay, I had the realistic versus the cartoon version, so I tested that out, and so the real one did better; it also was aligned with the real image out the first one, so I was like, "Okay, that's good." Um, "advertising crush promotion," so I was like, "Okay, advertising is the winner," and then I did um "advertising versus leads," then "leads" was the winner, then I did "leads versus marketing," now that one was really close, but "leads" still won, so that's why I ended up doing "leads." U. In terms of subheads, I only showed two of the tests here, but I ended up doing like probably five or six: "How to get more people to want to buy your stuff," "How to get strangers to want to buy your stuff." So "strangers" narrowly beat out "more people." Now this is the one that I thought was the most interesting test of the whole thing. So "How to get more strangers to want to buy your stuff," "How to get strangers to want to buy your stuff," 71% to 29%, like just a one word. And so when I saw it's like it's so sensitive, and I just I just come in with like no ego about what I think it's going to be, and even because some people are also like, "Hey, you should do a shorter version," so "Just get strangers to want to buy your stuff" versus "How to get strangers to want to buy your stuff," 70 to 30 with "how to" in front, right? And so even word concision wasn't necessarily um the thing that people kind of like optimize for, right? And so anyways, yeah, I tested that—the "how" of the the title, the image, and the subhead—because fundamentally anybody who's in my audience who has read the first book, they have a high likelihood of buying the second book if they got value from the first one. I'm not making that for them; I could just call this "Book Two," and they probably would have been willing to at least take a shot on it. I have to make this for all the people who don't know who I am, and I have to optimize for that one split-second decision where they're like, "Uh, it's like, you know, actually, it sounds pretty good," like and it's clear like, "What does this book do? Get strangers to want to buy your stuff. Okay, what's the opp of that? Leads. Okay, this makes sense; I need leads, so I will buy this book on how to get strangers to want," right?
Back cover, talking about that. So this is like my little mini sales letter. So I just wrote this as like kind of like blind bullets um of the stuff inside of the book. It's so I basically just took the chapters and tried to translate it into a a bullet that doesn't say what it is but gives kind of like the benefit of it.
But hold on, when you say this is my sales letter, that is like uber-Hermos brain going to do that. So what matters in a sales letter?
So you can get 2x, 10x, or 100x more leads than you currently are without changing anything about what you saw. That I think is fair; like it's a fairly compelling promise. And so then it's like, "Okay, I want to learn more about that." Now the next kind of like bigger fun is I wrote this book to solve your leads problem. And if you talk to small business owners, the largest reason that people will say—if you look at like the small business surveys—why they go out of business, they say lack of lack of leads, lack of marketing, lack of your business; whatever second is running out of money, but I see that as lack of leads, right? Chicken, you—chicken egg. And so then I put a little bit of proof. So it's like, "Today, our companies generate 20,000 new leads per day across 16 different companies, or sorry, 16 different industries," um, and they do it using eight never-go-hungry playbooks inside uh—once you see them, you can't unsee them; they're so powerful; they work without your permission, right? So like once you once you use it, like you don't you don't have to believe it's going to work; it just works better, period. And so you know the easiest way to get another five customers tomorrow, so that's warm outreach; that's the first the first of the core four. So it's the benefit of the core four; that's warm outreach; it's the how you get your first five customers, uh, the hook, retain, reward system, so that's content; it's the second chapter, um, and so I just talk about the media part of it, uh, for that you know six-part ad framework that gets more people, especially strangers, to want what you sell; that's gonna be the paid ads chapter. And so I just took the chapters and turned them into the benefits of the chapter.
Those are super specific; that's what strikes the bullets, yeah, right? Cuz if I look at these bullets, right, "The six-part ad framework that gets more people, especially strangers, to want what you sell," "How to get people to want what you sell" would be like, "Ah," but you're like, "There's actually a lot of things going on." Six-part ad framework—the specificity leads to credibility; there are more people, especially strangers, to me that nuance is like, "Yo, I've thought about this; I know how you think." Well, and these are just very concrete. Yeah, so that's how I thought about the front and the back cover of the book.
I like it. How is your writing different for when you're writing—
For books like that versus video, and what comes first? The books lead to the videos; the videos lead to the books. How do you think about that total process?
Yeah, so um, mainly because of the volume um that has to go out. If I'm on camera, I'm not very scripted. Um, it's more like these are bullets that, you know, we'll probably make sure that we nail the introduction because that's very important. Um, so nailing the introduction, nailing what the road map is for the for the see the movie for the video, and then like it's almost like I'd say this: the the YouTube videos are far closer to what my writing outlines look like than my final prod. Because if I were to write the YouTube videos as they were writing the book, it would take me probably a week of pure of five days, five full days to to write just the video to make it to air, you know, airtight, air seal uh all the words. But we can do uh, you know, a a writing outline in like 30 minutes uh or an hour, you know, for for a video, and that's much more manageable. Like I actually do other stuff for a Liv.
How do you think about those hooks? So we will look at other industries that have higher-performing videos typically and look at packaging that seems to have performed well, and we say, is there a business version of this that we could do? So what's an example of that? Uh, there's this one where this girl said like my my memor my my system so that you can uh outlearn anyone or something like that, and I think we made a version of that was like how you can outwork anyone uh and I think that's what we ended up doing for the video.
So then, as you think about the interactions, the hooks, the frame for the videos, what matters? Because it's interesting you basically said I'm pretty unscripted except for the very beginning, which a lot of work goes into, kind of like the book. Well, except the book is very scripted a l way through, but like but like the amount like 80/20 on the effort of like where's the biggest the biggest bank for the buck is always going to be it's, you know, hook, packaging, title, thumbnail, first you know, 30-60 seconds is going to be where you have probably the biggest leverage on performance for a video, and this is just something we learned. Um, obviously average VI duration long term is going to be something that lifts a video, but right out the gate um it's hard, not impossible, to overcome a video that's just tanky. Yeah, we want to make stuff that people want to consume, and so I think the like solving for making sure they want to consume it is the title and the packaging and the introduction, and we have to just solve for congruence: like is the thing they clicked on the thing that they're going to get, and making sure that they feel like they're going to get it, like that that promise is going to get delivered on.
How do you think about when you're delivering a story, how that is different in video versus writing? I actually feel like my stories in video are pretty are pretty comparable in my stories in writing, yeah, because I think I have a pretty colloquial kind of tone that I use in the stories and writing. I my writing more mirrors how I talk when it comes to stories. Right? Yeah, so here I am in the middle of nowhere, right? Like, you know, like and a guy pulls a gun, like Stephen King: like if you're not sure what do with the story, just bringing a guy with a gun. Yeah, um same same kind of idea uh but I just I tell it like I would be telling it to a friend.
There're probably different styles of writing, I assume you would know this better than I do, but um I tend to try and get everything out as fast as I can. Yeah, and then I kind of look at as like coats of paint, and that's the description I like: it's just like yeah, I let it breathe, then come back to it, and then I do another coat and then another coat, another coat. And for me, most of the kind of coats of paint, I'd say the the vast majority of my editing that not socialized is me crunching is crunching things down, crunching things down, crunching things down. How can I use few words? How can I use simple words? How can I use few words? I can use simple words, and I keep doing that until I feel like anything else that I would remove would materially detract from the substance of the book. Once I do that and the that process right there is usually like 10 drafts, so I do a lot a lot of drafts.
You did 19 for Leads. Yeah, *Leads* was unor, and I basically started from scratch at about halfway through those, so like at like I think it was I think it was draft 12, I like I remember it, it was like draft 12 was like I was like I'm done, like this is it, this is this book's awesome, and then that's when I socialized with like 10 or so readers and was like okay, let me know what you guys think, and the feedback that I got I was like I have to rewrite the book, and so I rewrote the book. Um, but most of the time um the editing from the socialized post um is I actually use Stephen King's kind of like method there, which is if people have like little tidbits I'll usually clarify those pieces, add those in, that's easy. If I have many people who have different comments about one section, their comments usually don't matter; it's more that there's something wrong with the section. And so um in the third book that's coming out there was there were like like two chapters that were short that I put at the beginning, which is you know, Prime territory in terms of you know, people falling off on. I'm super to front-end feedback, and there was just like every reader had something to say about this chapter, and um I just cut the chapter entirely and then just like edited the book to not reference the the material in that chapter. And I thought of the chapter as a pretty core chapter to the book, and so then I was like okay, how can this book exist without this chapter? And I ended up being able to do it by literally just doing control rrf for a word that I basically hardcore toine as this as one of the Core Concepts, and it was like I just will fully explain it every time I have it throughout the book. And as soon as I cut uh it was it was actually I think it was three chapters, one section um it was like the book was just it's like reading downhill, you I mean it's just like you just you just keep rolling, totally. And um that's kind of how I see so little things I'll just if I agree with them I'll quick fix; if I don't agree I'll just ignore, but if many people come in one section I'll strongly consider deleting it entirely um or I have to just delete, well I'll delete the whole thing and then rewrite it, or I'll just delete it entirely. Most times I'll just delete it if I can.
And then when you say the pain is the pitch, I mean I understand what that means conceptually, but tactically when you're sitting down to write copy, you're working with a business and you're trying to get more leads or something like that, what do you do with that sentence? So you fundamentally have two two two methods of persuasion, right? Um, you could go for I can go into that, but like you have more good stuff, less bad stuff, huh? Fundamentally, so you got promise, you got pain; these are your two weapons, right? Uh and so my goal is to highlight both of those. Now, from a selling perspective, you make an offer at the point of greatest deprivation, not at the point of greatest satisfaction. And so, for example, let's say you're you're incredibly hungry and you come to my steak house and I say do you want a steak? And you say yeah, so you have a steak, and after you have the steak I'm like how was it? You're like oh my God, it was amazing, thank you so much, and I say awesome, do you want another steak? And you'd be like uh no, I'm good. I be like what, you didn't like the steak? And you're like no, I liked the steak, I'm I'm I'm good, right? And that's because I'm trying to sell the coin of greatest satisfaction, not a great greatest coin P coin of greatest pain, whereas if you walk in the second time a week later and you're starving and you walk in I say hey, you're really hungry, and you're like yeah, you're like want two stakes? You might be like yeah, two stakes, hungry, right? And then you buy you buy more, right? And so we sell the point of greatest pain, not the point of a satisfaction. Now the caveat to this is people are like wait, you should sell when you provide value, only when the value that you deliver creates a new problem that you can then solve. And so, for example, if you are a marketing agency whatever and you help a customer um get a whole bunch of leads, all right, you once you solve their leads problem if you say hey, do you want even more? Than they're like no, I can't even handle them. So at that point you solve the first problem, but now they need somebody to help them work the leads; they're now hungry for dessert, right? Right, or whatever, so they have a new deprivation that we can then sell the next day. And so I see that as a big mistake from a copyrighting perspective is actually the timing of when the copy is being delivered in the in the larger context U rather than the subc context of the of the the Prospect. And so when I'm thinking about the pain is the pitch to bring this full circle is I want to think about as many very concrete examples that someone would experience pain. And so I remember when I was uh so when Le I were really poor and I just lost everything and we decided that we weren't going to actually do the gym business anymore, so there there's this like you know 30-day period where we decided we're not going to do the gym Fin, and so uh I said okay, she had lost 100 pounds, intended a fitness competition, all that stuff, and I was like all right, I'm going to write a sales page of your story because my story isn't compelling, I've had a six-pack my whole life, no one cares. And so but her she had all this weight loss whatever, and so I wrote her life story, and she was like this is more compelling, and I'm the one who lived it, and I didn't live any of it, but I just thought about like how she would wear a coverall when she would go to the beach and she would get chafing between her thighs when she was walking all day, she was overweight, back to that specificity and not wanting to be in pictures and just be always in the second row or to the side because she didn't like having a picture taken, and I'm like how many these moments, right? So like pain happens in moments, and so it's I want to capture the moment because anyone who's had that pain is like I never want to live that, I will never never want to have that happen again. I think that if you can accurately describe a prospect's pain in their own language, in their own experiences, you can persuade them to buy whatever your product is based on how well and how knowledgeable they believe you to be as a function of how specific you were about the pain they're experiencing. And so if I if I'm talking to a business owner that's doing $10 million a year and I'm like this is what's going wrong in it, right? And this is what's going wrong in sales, and this is what's going wrong in your marketing, and this is what's going on in, they're like okay, I get it, I get it, you you know where I'm at. I'm like right, do you want my help? I don't have to make a promise if I can describe the pain so acutely, and they're like you can't know that pain this well and not be able to deliver, sure. And so that's where the pain is the pitch comes from. And so often times um when people trying to write sales Pages or even they're trying to do sales pitch um they I think many people will overemphasize promise, and there's nothing wrong with having promise, you know, private it's compli all that stuff um but the thing is pain is what motivates a lot of people take action.
It's cool to hear you speak because what really stands out is how much of an engineer you are, and you have this almost mathematical, not formulaic way of speaking, but you are in search of formulas in the way that Engineers are, and basically trying to break down reality into formulas to basically say yo, I'm trying to figure out how things work, simplify it, get it to a place where it's super clear, concrete stories, examples, and then I'm going to share it for you so that any problem that you have, here's an answer. Feel like that's a lot of what you're going for.
And you're right, it's 100% what I'm going for, is actually very well described. When I get like in my deep emotional places, I'm like I just feel like I want to understand the world better, and a lot of times I feel like I don't understand it well at all, and so a lot of my writing is an attempt to just understand one tiny quarter of it, and that's just happens to be the quarter that I spend a lot of my time in. And so I spend a lot of time thinking about business, and so a lot of my Frameworks, a lot of my writing, a lot of my content is in search of simplified formulas of seeing the world accurately. And so fundamentally, if you can predict, you can control.
What do you mean? If you know all the variables that you can influence to create an outcome, right? Which means that if you have a perfect predicted model, so this would be like from a science perspective, like if you have all the variables that predicted outcome, then if you verse that it means you can also control the alome. Okay, if you can manipulate the variables, if the weather is one of the variables, fine, if I can't control the weather, but if I can put someone indoors and mimic the weather, then I can in a very way, in a real way uh control the outcome.
So what you're saying is that businesses have these similar equations, and you can say I'm shing with this, I can pull the lever on leads, and then I know what's going to happen here or there. Yeah, we don't have enough demand. Okay, well demand is straightforward: are we going to talk to people one-on-one? Are we going to talk them one to many? Well, what how many customers are we going after? Fortune 100, so it's probably going to be a one-to-one approach. Are we going after Mass Market weight loss? It's probably one to many. Okay, cool. If we're doing one to many, like are we going to do paid ads or we gonna be making content? Okay, well we could use one-on-one to get Affiliates who then are doing paid ads or doing content on our behalf. Well then we can use that strategy, but fundamentally the only four things that you can do as the entrepreneur or whatever is cod, Outreach, form Outreach, PID ads, content; that's it, it's the only thing you can do. But what about Affiliates? Well, you do one of those four to get the affiliate MH, you reach out to them, you make content saying hey, I'm looking for Affiliates, or you run ads saying hey, I've got an influencer program; you're going to still have to do that first core 4 to get other people to come do the other stuff on your behalf.
Ah, here's the other Fair Alex, there's the dude, there's two lines that I feel like I've really that that I think you really nailed. Okay, the first is we'll talk about this one first, that if you put in 10 times more work into a book MH because the quality is better, you end up with a 100 or a THX, the word of mouth. Yeah, talk to me about that. It's kind of the difference between you know, gold medal and fourth place; the real difference is small, the Practical difference is enormous. So what's the difference in terms of someone's life when they're the gold medalist of something? They get endorsement deals; they're forever the gold Champion, like all that stuff. Fourth, it's like you get nothing, right? And so I think a lot of people don't even get fourth to be real, you know, like they're like number 100, and they but the thing is they still try pretty hard. Yeah, it's just that all of the best Returns come at the end of work; it's like those it's the it's the 16th coat of paint that really just makes it that little bit better. And I think in an increasingly connected World, more things are win or take all. Well, the way that I put it is that the curse of the internet is global competition. Yeah, the gift of the internet is global reach. Yeah, and because of that your stuff has to be way better in order to stand out, but then the rewards on the other side are way bigger. Yeah, I think nval has a good quote on this; he says um technology uh democratizes consumption and consolidates production, and so it means that if you're the best in the world you get to do it for everyone Y, and so then it's like if you get to do it for everyone, then it's like then trying to become the best in the world, and the best in the world definitely not going to do it on four yards a week; it's higher leverage to work more, which sounds ironic or counterintuitive, right? Because then that's kind of the point, the like I think why you like that statement, it's like how are you telling me that this unscalable effort where I'm putting in n equals whatever many more repetitions, like I'm getting diminishing returns here, right? How can it how can that be more efficient than doing half the work or having a ghost riter? It's like well, if I have a ghost writer, no one's going to tell talk about my book, right? Like I'm just going to have a marketing campaign; I'm going to sell whatever it is before people read the book, and that's it. But the long tail on time is huge, and so the fact that like *Rich Dad Poor Dad* still sells 100,000 copies a month 40 years I 50 years later than when he originally wrote it, I'm like I want to build assets, not magazines with hard covers. And that's also why I spent a long time on all the books to try and make them to make them Evergreen.
Like think about writing a book on Advertising without talking about any single platform; Facebook is not in there, Instagram is not in there. So as you were thinking about these, you were like in 20080, I want this book to be as useful as it was when I wrote this, and the easiest way I do it is I back test it. What does that mean? Does this make sense 2,000 years ago? People still want things to be risk-free; they still want them to be fast; they still let them be easy. You can reach out to people one-on-one that you know that you don't know, reach out one to many uh that you know that you don't know; like reaching out one to many is standing on the corner corner of a street and shouting, right? That's what it is, right? Right, you could put a billboard up, you can have a sign; like this works 2,000 years ago, and so that's so rather than try to predict the future, I just look at the past and say does it still work?
This one's good too: it's from mangela: if people saw how much work I put into my they wouldn't think it's as exceptional as it is. I love this um this visual, which is that if you look at a marathon, right? If you've ever like God with somebody to some Marathon that they're running and you wanted to support them, 95% of people are in two places: at the beginning, at the end. But the marathon is everything in between, and so we as a society, the Highlight Reel is only these two places. And so what happens is most people in their mind assume that that is the race, starting and then finishing, but the 26.2 miles that happens in between, like the mundane middle, right? Master the middle um is the part where the Champions made. And so I think that to the same degree like if people saw that I wrote 19 drafts of this book, they wouldn't think it was that special.
Can we do this? Can we open up to that table of content once again? I just want to remind you, take as much time as you need to find, so it's the second sticky note here, so if you go right here, should opened up right to it, but as much time as you need to go through the table of contents, and I think it'd be really cool to walk us through how some of these ideas changed. And also I just want to emphasize before you start here, this table of contents, it's not like oh, Alex made a table of contents, no no no, this the table of contents is the outline for your book, yeah, and so it does a lot more than a standard table of content, and I feel like that's how Alex's opinion, I feel like that's how books should write; like if you want to if you want to figure out if you want to read a book, I feel like you should read the table of contents and be able to make a good decision. Sure, and that's kind of and I try to make my my titles and chapter headings like pretty descriptive, like this is about Orma reach. So what's going on here? So when you start, what am I looking at? So believe it or not, this book was was the original through line was going to be about leverage, and I ended up cutting all of the leverage Concepts from the book for the most part except for one chapter right before *Lead Getters* um because I just it was so difficult to try and weave it in that I it felt forced. I still believe it to be like the actual essence of that, but because it's like how can I as one man get 20,000 30,000 leads a day? Like how? Well, I can't do it; I do it through leverage. Sure, and so that was kind of like the the Catalyst for wanting to even like begin writing about this. Yeah, um but anyways, so uh this was kind of like my rough ideas, okay, you know, I have to Define some terms, right? I have to define media, lead gen, leads, content, promotion uh the three contact types, which is not even a thing uh I thought it was going to be a thing, it wasn't a thing. Promotions I ended up just cutting entirely from the book and using somewhere else, I'll just leave that there um you know, and you know I was going to take this very like like everything we used to talk about marketing is wrong, right? And um I do believe that to a great degree that that is somewhat true, but it's like okay, now you got to define the target, so there's like the market, you know, deeper up, down, adjacent um different Market types, I ended up cutting that from the book. So but what I see you doing here is you're kind of trying to do a full pass, give yourself enough Fidelity to see where you're going, but you're not married to this; I mean we did 19 drafts here and we completely rewrote it after number 12, but you're not married to this, but it's crucial that you're actually putting enough on that you're like I can at least start walking now. Yeah, and so I would say that one of the biggest filters that I use for utility is whether it can be operationalized H, and so the fact it's unsurprising to me now because this was however many years ago that I wrote that the activity box is what I called this, I didn't even have the name of the core for yet, but the idea that like what can I tell someone to do? If I can't change their behavior, they cannot learn, which means that there's no point in writing about it unless it changes their what they do, right? And so that has pretty much been the a the biggest lens that I use.
From a cutting perspective, when I'm making the book, and so I think the reason a lot of people are like, "Man, the books are," from what I understand people say that it's they're they're really digestible, they're really easy to use, really easy to understand, it's because I talk almost zero about theory.
Yes, I only talk about what you do. Yeah, and by talking that way, it it it demystifies a lot of it. I will eventually write a book on branding, but I looked up all the all the definitions of branding on the internet from different marketers, and I was like, "I don't know what any of this means." They're all fluffy. Yeah, it's all like the feelings, impressions, experiences that a prospect has and associates. I was like, "I don't know what any of this is," right? It's like, well, if I want to brand, I have to figure out what I do, what I do to brand, right? And and answering that question has pretty much been how I try and answer everything within business. It's just like, okay, how like what is sales? Sales is just having a conversation that increases like that someone purchases, right? It's like, "Okay, cool, so then everything that increases the likely that someone purchases within the context of conversation is sales," right? And so then like, okay, now I can start working through this, right? Okay, so this is the first version, and what I will say that often happens is like I'll write all these ideas that I want to have in the book, and I'll probably end up being able to make the book like 10% of it. So like, if I look at all of this, I cut out like I cut out so many PE, like I have this the just this one line was the second half of the book, like just this one line. Um, like operational drag, reliability, method, platform, off all of that was cut. Uh, "More new better," I actually put at the end of section one, around the activities. Like, anyway, I move. So actually, this is really interesting that you don't actually have a very good sense of what ideas are going to be the best ones. Like, you love "More new better," you absolutely love that idea, but look where it is; it's section six, bottom line. Almost looks like an afterthought. So that this idea right here that's like an embryo that then really grew through the process of writing this book.
Oh yeah, so like once I get tired enough of something, I'm like, "All right, I'm going to rewrite it from the top again." And so this is me rewriting it, uh, the sections, right? And so I'm like, okay, now it's actually just toine the target, where, when, give, ask, evaluates, scale. So I thought it was going to be this like incremental process that I'm leading somewhat because again, leverage was like this through line that I wanted to have, um, uh, through the book. And so then I got to like, okay, maybe I can try and visualize this a little bit better. And so, you know, marketing, like where do people actually come from, right? Because people exist, how do I get them to find me? Like, I would have forced them to find, which fundamentally is what I think advertising is: you force people to find out, right? It's also just striking that you're doing a lot of drawings to basically work out the high-level thing. This isn't you're writing and then you're drawing; it's like you're drawing, and that's how you kind of get the conceptual map of where you're going to go.
Yeah, I do almost all doodles in the beginning. Yes, so doodles are at the beginning, at the end, and this is an iPad thing. Yeah, yeah, just like just you know, just notes or whatever. I mean, there's a huge amount of time that I was like, you know, media, different, you, this a book on advertising, so I'm like, okay, well, media is a huge thing, platform's a huge thing, audience selection is a huge thing. And so the whole time I'm thinking like, okay, maybe that's media section one, platform section two, audience section three, and I'm like, that's not that's it's going to be so boring; like it's going to be a terrible book. Um, and then I was like, okay, what about the process, like how do people buy? Now, real quick, when you get there, you're like, "Oh, it's going to be so boring, it's going to be a terrible book," are you down on yourself, or you at this point like, "You know what? I'm going to work through this; I need to find another way." So right here, this right, you these four little lines end up being the second half of the book. Wow. Right? So like it it totally like it just keeps, and a lot of times it's like this cutting away process, right? This actually just continued from the the one before because I went, this is all leverage, all this stuff was leverage, so I'm like, okay, this is the first time I'm like, really, I've got this, attract attention, interrupt attention. So I was like, maybe that's going to be like an angle, yeah, because I didn't I did, but see, this is the MOSY method, which is like you're always trying to find either mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive, or these contrasts where you're either on this side or you're this side, which I think is how you can make the mees. Yeah, like if you draw like if you draw one line, it's going to be valid; if you draw two lines, it's much harder probably not be valid because are they all true, mutually exclusive, right? Um, yeah, so this is me trying to put sentences in place of all the different ways you can get customers. Okay. Um, God, this is so like, and then I try to make this like leverage equation of like you times promotion times offer times the medium times the platform, like that's all the variables that that exist. This whole thing ended up being one paragraph, wow, in um, in the second half of the book. That's absolutely striking to me is how you just don't actually have a very good intuition for which one of the ideas are going to be good, and that's not I think that that's all writers; we just kind of have to wait and see. And I was like, "I'm supposedly good at marketing," so that was a little humiliating.
This has been my big filter is like, what what do I do? What do I yeah, what does someone do as a result? And if I if I can't clearly define that, then I probably either just need to break it down more, or I just need to cut it; it's just not a thing. Yeah, that's been probably my number one filter for everything: like what does it change about someone's behavior? And that's why defining learning was so important for me: like if I want this book to educate, educate, it's about changing behavior. If you don't change your behavior, you didn't learn, just like in the simplest like that is how you find learning. Um, and the speed of the speed of the rate of uh uh of learning is intelligence. So if I have to show you the same multiple times before you change your behavior, then you are dumber than someone you can change it immediately. Sure, right? Um, so growing a, you got to do more, pay more, new platforms, more frequency, more uniques, more impr, like I I kept like working through this, and so this was actually just continued there from that same that same page, and them like, okay, SC, all of that, let's start with just like what about the basic questions of like, okay, maybe it's just who, what, where, when, how, how much, how long? And what's crucial is you don't get here unless you have all these pages. And so that I for a minute I thought this was going to become the table of contents, and then what it really became is this became the action uh at the end of every chapter for you. Yeah, go for it. Yeah, so that's the final result of me being like, "Oh, this isn't the table of contents; this is what I need to show for every way of advertising." So when you're posting content and you make your action checklist, you just have to say, okay, who's my customer, you know, what what am I like what am I going to do, where am I going to do it, what medium or platform, when am I going to make this post? So this is basically how you make your list of this is what I'm going to do.
Ni, I love how messy all this stuff is. I don't know; I find that to be so gratifying, you know, because it's so clean in the output, and it's just that this is a train wreck. Thanks, man. Yeah, three ways. I mean, I could keep going on this, but if we do this, go to the very last one or the table of contents in here. Fin. Yeah, let's go to the finals. Yeah, and so I got to here, and then I thought, and this this is what was so painful, I thought this was going to be a thing forever, like I thought that I had this like friction framework thing, like filters, cuz I thought was like maybe it's like a distillation process, like you distill, like raw attention is the input, and then leads is the distilled output of that. And so I kept doing that, lead, legally, distillation process. And so then I was like, maybe I make an acronym around this. Um, and then I'm coming back to this method, medium thing that took forever to try and work through. Um, and then I was like, can I do PCE? Like, I don't know if I can find an outr, I use it, I kept going, I don't even know where the end of this thing is, right? So right here, I see, start here, get understanding, get leads, get getters, get started. Yeah, and then this became the final. So this was like a couple versions before the final, and then that was the final. Nice. That very messy process got me to here. Wow. I mean, this is the work, man, if it's all it's draft after draft after draft. So we look at how much stuff is here. Yeah, right? The amount that actually made it to here is like this this line. This became one chapter, and that's it. Everything else, I more or less threw up. So that's how I came over to the table of content, and then I was like, "All I gotta do now is just write the book," right? So then once you did that, then it was basically game time. Yeah, then then it was easy.
I want to tell you about the only app that I use to read articles, and it's called Reader. So tell me if this sounds familiar: you read something brilliant, like an amazing quote, the perfect article, but then one day you go back, you're looking to find it, and it's just gone. You can't find the thing that used to drive me crazy, but then I found this app called Reader, and it's become the backup system for my brain. Here's how it works: so whenever I'm on my phone, I'm on my computer, I'll come across a new article, and what I do is I just toss it into Reader, and then whenever I'm ready to read, I can find all the articles pre-downloaded with no ads and no clutter. But here's the kicker: every time I highlight something, Reader automatically saves it for me. So then if I'm writing and I need that perfect quote, that perfect example, it's just right there waiting for me. And because of that, I don't have to dig through old notes or endless browser tabs anymore, and that means that I can focus on writing. Reader is the sponsor of today's episode, and look, I got to love a product in order to promote it, and I can tell you that I use Reader every single day. So this what I did, I called up the CEO and I said, "Yo, will you give How I Write listeners 60 days free?" And he said, "Sure, they got to sign up though at readwise.io/DavidPerell," and there's a link in the description below. All right, back to the episode.
Tell about this, how do you think about who you're writing for? Because one of the things I learned from you is there's this difference between being known and being respected. True, and it's really easy to look at the analytics and say, "Number go up, therefore good," but no, you're trying to reach a specific kind of person. So how do you think about that? I think it's the validity, utility piece: like is this useful? And I think that people will consume things that are useful for them. Like, does it make their life easier? Does it make things happen faster? Does it make things less risky, depending on who you talk to? Like, if I talk about food, then that applies to everyone. If I talk about leads, it's only apply to people who are advertising, which is usually business owners. And so I think about this in context of deep and wide, deep versus wide. And so wide I define as um something that is only useful for a beginner, and deep I toine is something that is useful for anyone like in a in a verile. And so "How to get your first five clients" is useful really only for a beginner because anybody who already has customers is like, "I know how to get my first five clients," but if I talk about um strategy, that's useful for somebody who's starting out and somebody who's got a billion-dollar company because I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I can have something that's deep and wide. Um, and those that's that's kind of our sweet spot for what we try to do. Now, we don't always succeed, but like that's our that is the intention is I'd like to have something that a beginner can get value from and somebody who's super advanced can also get value from them independent of their context.
And how do you think about the general strategy of what you're doing? Like, what was the Genesis moment of "We're going to make rock and business content, and then that'll be the first domino that then makes all these other ones fall"? Tim Ferriss has his concept of like the big domino, so you kind of like I don't know if you're purposely referencing it, but basically like is there one thing that is so important that I can do that if I do that it makes the rest of my to-do list irrelevant? And so it's like if you have 100 things on the to-do list, it's like there's probably not one that's important enough because if it were important enough, it would make the other one disappear, either shrink into irrelevance or accomplished by consequence, right? And so we're investors, right? And we have capital. And so what does every investor want? They want proprietary deal flow, and you want to shift the supply demand um in your favor. And so if I can have unlimited people coming towards me who have good businesses that want to do deals only with me, then I can decrease the likelihood that basically I can decrease my skill at picking and and negotiating and still probably do well. I saw the ultimate way of maximizing my luck surface area as building, you know, our hope is the most valuable business brand out there to business owners. And if we can build that, then I don't need to worry about all the negotiation tactics, I don't need to worry about having the most capital, I don't need to worry about having the best term sheets, I don't need to worry about any of these things if I just have more people who want to do business with me than I can possibly do business with. And then after after you you you match the supply demand of like, okay, there's more people who want to do business with me, then it's how what quality of person like basically then you can just consistently continue, and that's kind of an unlimited I think continue to raise the bar of the quality of company and entrepreneur that you work with. And so like the companies that we that we invest in now don't even look close to the companies that I invested in four years ago.
Talk for you about this: the number one creator mistake is building new products for their audience rather than building more audience for their product. Okay, I'm going to tell you this little side story, and then I'll ask the question. So um I I'm I'm really a pretty big stickler with written word, um, and so it's been very difficult for me to have anyone write for me at all. And so as a result, basically the only thing that's fair game that my team can use to put captions on stuff is stuff that I have said in a video, and they can just transcribe it or tweets. Okay, that's it. And anything else that you've seen that's written is me. Okay. And so like just put context on like if all the words that are out there like I have written all of them or I've said them, that's it. And so um to your question, this is more of a business mistake than I think it it's just creators fall in the same traps. And so let's say they they spend this time growing their audience, and they get to call it, you know, 100,000 followers, whatever, and then they come out with a product, and then they sell the product, and they make money, and then they're like, "Huh, I should come out with another product to make more money," but what it did was it reinforced the wrong activity because it was late. So the activity that made the money was building the audience, not coming with the product. And so what happens is you find these creators who have like six businesses essentially, which is really just like six different products that each of the businesses in of themselves could be hundred-million-plus businesses, but they don't have enough audience. And so they do the short-term fix, which is come up with another thing, but long-term you end up drowning in the fact that you have six businesses and your attention split. And so there's two components to this: so one is that if you just launch a product on its own and there's no repurchase rate or it's not consumable and there's nothing recurring about it, then you're going to have to keep coming with products, which means that's kind of a strategic mistake, right? You should have just thought of something that like if we launched it, people were going to buy it quickly, but then keep buying it. Now you have a regular stream of income, and you can take that income and keep doubling down on the audience to grow it or pay for other people's audiences or pay for ads or like all the other strategies that are in the book of like expanding expanding your reach. Um, but fundamentally, that's the trap is that rather than saying because like you just think about a long enough time horizon, do you just keep starting new products, and then you in in 20 years you have 30 products that you're doing? Uh, or and my when I say products a lot of times it's businesses because the products are actually not they are too differentiated to be like a second product in the same line. If someone has two different t-shirts, I don't see that as a different product. If someone goes from t-shirts uh to selling consulting, that's a different product, right? Versus the alternative, which is like I just make t-shirts and I keep advertising, and all I do is I keep getting more and more people to find about my t-shirts and my my brand, and that's how I grow my sales, and it's going to be more steady, less pops, but that's how you can build a really big company, whereas if you have seven businesses, which are like the most common thing I see, um, you're end up just going to be split thin, and all the products are going to be crap. Yeah, and I see it all the time.
So when you say, "Hey, I'm a real stickler about words," how does that show up? We have by large solved this problem by having lots of video content and the team being able to take any snippet from anywhere, if it's appropriate to use it as, you know, like a caption or something like that. Um, like LinkedIn is the only thing that I don't write, right? Uh, so captions and LinkedIn are the basically things that I don't manually write, but they are taken from either tweets or they are taken from videos. And so that's but emails I write, books I write, copy I write, um, not ad copy, that's one that I don't write much, but that's a problem, so I'm fixing it. So tell me what is the business model of these books? Break it down for me, cuz it's you sell them for cheap, they're you spend a bunch of time on, I mean, the the sort of naive person could be like, "What are you doing?" Yeah, makes no sense. Uh, so that's part of it is that it does make no sense, um, but the other part is that long term like I think that I'll die, and my hope is that these will still be around, but but I don't think that's true. Isn't this the thing that sort of initiates everything else, kind of gets you?
Oh yeah, yeah. So from the asset perspective, I write these because I really want them to be assets. I want them to help a lot of people, and that it like I think that anybody who reads my books can feel my intention behind what I'm trying to do. Like, if it were just a lead magnet, which is why I think it would cheapen it to describe it that way, they wouldn't be bestselling books, right? I think they would just be lead magnets and suck. And so I think the ultimate lead mag should be timeless assets, and I think that's where a lot of people mess up when they would like 99% of people will never buy anything from you, and but 99% of people are what create your reputation. And so I would want them to consume something that is still exceptionally valuable because they are ultimately the ones who will create the reputation you have. Now, of course, be like, "Well, you don't know them or you've never done business with them." It's like, yeah, but the internet doesn't really deal in nuance. And so yes, this is the gateway drug, but really before this, the gateway drug is the content. And so the content is really the first thing that's consumes, and we want to make that really really good. Um, and then if they got enough value from the content, they're like, "Maybe I'll give one of his books a shot," and if they read the book and then they get way more value, um, then you know, maybe they come into my world, they show by our headquarters, come to you know, comp one of our you know, advisory events. And when you speak to people, come to the advisory events and whatnot, what kinds of people, what kinds of businesses do you recommend that the founders be writing like you do? And then if if they do that, what do you tell them so that they can be successful?
Yeah, honestly, I I basically try to dissuade most people from writing a book, and I think that's because it's people who aren't writers who don't love writing see my book and think, "Oh, I'll do that," and it just like it's the Michelangelo quote: you don't understand how much work it is, and you I could already tell you if you've never written before, you aren't willing to do it. Like, I've been writing for a long time; I haven't been writing as publicly from a books perspective, but I have four books. Like, it's not like I'm and before that I I loved writing, you know, in my I've loved writing since I was a kid. And so it's something that I I can do and can immerse myself in and really lose myself to the to the craft, and a lot of people can't do that. The amount of people who are entrepreneurs who I know who are like, "Hey, man, I I wrote my I wrote my book in in 12 weeks," and I'm like, "That's amazing," um, but it's it's probably not that good. Uh, and I try to like, got to say that mean way, but it's like, yeah, I'm like, "First draft?" They're like, "Yep, just knocked it out." I'm like, "That's okay, you know, sure, good luck." How you launch a book determines how good you are at marketing; how well the book is selling two years later determines how good the book is. Is there a tactical way that you get more Amazon reviews, or is that just one of those things? Or yo, if the book is good, people are going to review it, but you really can't influence it that much. I'm always scared to make a review ask because my own insecurity is like, well, what if it sucks and they remember to leave a bad review, right? Um, but I think that in some ways it's almost a litmus test of how confident you are about the quality of the product: like if you're willing to ask everyone to leave a review, then you're
I'm really confident that people will like it, and so I have a review ask in the middle of both of the books. Um, and I figured I put it in the middle so it's like, if someone got to the middle, then they probably like the book, like right, enough to get to the middle, right? Not on page five.
Yeah, exactly. Not exactly. Oh, by the way, you know, like it's like I haven't given you any value yet, so like, no, I've put it after they hopefully they've got a significant amount of value. I do think that making the ask increases the likelihood that they leave a review, um, but I think if you have a crap book, then people are like, "no," or they'll leave you a bad one, which is, you know, arguably worse.
Okay. I don't know anything about your love for writing as a kid, and I want to hear about that.
Yeah, I wrote short stories or wrote poems, um, and I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that stuff. The free—that's why the literary magazine was probably where I spent like—that's where I wrote my stuff. So it's all student submissions for short stories, poems, um, and so I—so and art, and art too, like kids who put art. So like the cover art, you know, we'd get a bunch of paintings and we'd be like, okay, which of these will be the cover? And then between stories and between poems, we'd put other art from, you know, the art department, from the kids who are, you know, making paintings or whatever they're doing—pictures of that, sculptures, things like that. And so we, you know, we do a review every week. And so that that helped me get better at writing, just being able to like look at other people's writing, um, and so I just I enjoyed it. I enjoyed that writing significantly more than everything that was assigned to me. I didn't enjoy that writing. And that was actually a really interesting breakthrough for me is that like I didn't like reading that much, and that's not common. Usually writers like reading, I think.
Um, I didn't even know that non-fiction was really a genre until like, like after I graduated high school, because everything you read in—just about everything you read in high school is fiction or a textbook. Right? Textbooks suck, and fiction I felt was useless. And so I enjoyed making my own fiction, but like, think about like from a learning perspective, what does this change about my life? Nothing. I'm like, okay, some person, some random land, just did some thing, and whatever, it doesn't affect me. So I never really understood the point. As soon as I became an adult or whatever, uh, I got introduced to non-fiction, and I was like, "Oh my God, this is useful!" And so then I got more into reading for specific purposes, but I'd still separate that as like I was trying to learn a specific thing, not analyze the writing, right. Um, and so yeah, I just I really liked writing, and I just—it was one of the few I feel like I can get to flow really easily with writing, like writing and drawing, which is why all my books have lots of drawing, lots of writing. And I like doing my brainstorming with a pen because I—I don't know—it feels more tactile. I lose myself in it more easily. That that was pretty much my experience. And I did take a bit of a break from writing when I got into the business world, and it was only like, gosh, it was probably—was this like the gym launch days?
Yeah. Well, I wrote the gym launch book, but getting—I think I wrote that book in 2018. So writing the gym launch book was the first like real writing that I had done that wasn't like copy or things like—like writing writing that I'd done. And I think as soon as that happened, I was like, "Oh, I missed this." It's like I'd forgotten how much I liked it. And so then I I pretty much haven't stopped writing.
Last question: So you get a call from UNLV; they're like, "Hey, Alex, we want you to teach a writing class." Yeah, how do you structure the curriculum? What are the core things that you want to teach people?
I'll bet you the first day—I probably define terms, uh—first week, I mean, that would—I break this into sections rather than than the sessions, but like the first section would be definition of terms. Um, the next one would be clarifying the objective: Why—why are we writing? What are we writing for? How does writing service? Why is it even—why is there—why does it even matter? And then I would probably transition from there to the rules of writing: What are the rules of writing? So there's at least—as I see it—and I would probably be parroting a lot of Stephen King's *On Writing* if I were to say, but like I think that's one of the best books on writing out there: as few words as possible; like if you can use a simpler word, use that word; um, you know, vary sentence structure, so there's a rhythm to it—you know, short, short, long; you know. And then from a stylistic perspective, I purposely try to use uh lower-grade language because I want more people to understand it. I don't think there's—I don't have um any ego to people thinking that I'm—I also have no—nothing against people who use bigger words. It is like ultimate word concision uses more complex words, right? But I want maximum comprehension rather than maximum word concision. So I use concision only as a tool to increase comprehension uh at large. Yep. Uh, so short words, short sentences, big promises. Uh, this is—so they have rules of writing. Anything else? Um, that would be—yeah, that probably be the next section. And I would probably practice super constrained writing for people if I was trying—so if the objective of the course was to teach people to write, yeah, then it would be like, I want you to write an entire paper on this thing in one page and really force people because I think like Twitter—I think is—or X, I think is a wonderful platform for learning how to write because it just—you have—you have to force the—you have to keep crunching it down. And I think that's honestly—I think X is one of the best tools for learning to write because you get fast feedback. Um, the other one is I would probably use—like Hemingway—as a—because that also gives you real-time feedback. Yeah. And so typing into there is so helpful because, you know, Stephen King pretty much says this: it's like just don't use adverbs, by large; just don't use them. Like there's a better verb that you're not using. X and Hemingway would probably be the vast majority of the remainder of the time that I had. It would be repetition of them getting fast feedback on the writing that they're doing under specific constraints. And I would probably have a lot more uh freedom in terms of topic and far less in terms of rules—like you have to obey these rules, but you can write whatever you want. You have to do it in a page, or you have to do it in half a page, and you can write whatever topic you want, but you have to obey these 27 rules now, right? Because fundamentally what I'm writing for the most part—I now—they're like a lot more or less ingrained in how I write, um, but if like a section still doesn't seem good, I'll paste it into Hemingway and be like, "Oh, that's why," like—and like I, you know, long sentences—like there's just—there's things that you just learn that you're like, "Oh, this might have sounded good in my head, but no one can read this." And so that's—get super—right, tactical, but that's—that's why we do this. How I write, mate. It's called *How I Write*. Yeah, that's probably how I'd lay it out. So definition of terms, uh, why this matters and how—how it's useful for you, and I basically sell them on why they should even do this; uh, rules of the game; and then practice, and that'll probably be everything. The rest would just be practice.
Rock on! Well, I just want to thank you because I've read a lot of your stuff, consumed many, many, many of your videos, had a lot of questions, and uh, feel like you answered them. Well, but also you've been a big inspiration, so thank you.
Oh, I appreciate it. I'm glad they—I'm hopefully they were useful and valid. That was cool. Thank you. Yeah, appreciate it. Boom. Okay, quick thing before I bounce: If you just listened to that episode and you're thinking to yourself, "Okay, I need to listen to another HIGHT episode," the one I recommend is the one with Harry Dry. It's all about copyrighting, but it's not boring, cliché copyrighting, like that LinkedIn course that you started a few months ago but never finished. It's not that. Okay? And if—if you have anything to sell, anything to promote in your life, I recommend listening to it. I think you're going to love it. All right, see you next time.