🎙 David Perell: The Write of Passage Podcast

Notizen zu allen 21 Folgen des Podcast, allesamt released am 10. Februar 2020

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Writing Improves Your Thinking

• „Writing online is one of the best ways to improve your thinking. When you actually write, you don’t just share what you think, you actually discover what you think.“
• Warum es eine gute Idee ist „to write in public”: „It doesn’t just benefit other people, it benefits yourself, because you are now incentivised to clean up your ideas, to remove any logic that doesn’t make sense, to make sure your metaphors are clear and vivid and it forces you to raise your quality standards – which ends up improving your thinking.“

You Are Not Too Late

• „We are still in the early days of the internet.“
• „With writing, you might think that you are late, even though it’s still really early.“
• „If you can write consistently about a topic that nobody else is writing about, you can do it well, you’ll find tons of opportunity.“
• „There’s a temptation always to write about things that other people are writing about, to be the 77th writer writing about personal finance. […] Yes you can write about personal finance, but throw in a couple little twists.“
• „Yeah, there are a lot of people writing online, and it’s hard to stand out. But I would focus less on trying to be better and more on trying to be different.“
• „The internet rewards people who think well and connects people who think differently.“

Writing Changes How You See

• „When you know that you need to produce something every single week […], all of a sudden I see opportunity everywhere.“
• „I consume other people’s writing with the intent to produce writing of my own. So rather than trying to run faster and faster and faster on this treadmill of information consumption, I say: I’m going to consume less, I’m going to make sure that I consume higher quality information because I don’t need more, I need better.“
• „Consume with the intent to produce.“

Creating Your Own Serendipity

• „Your level of luck will increase as you do things that other people just aren’t doing.“
• „The way that I think about writing online is that the words that you publish are like magnetic attractors.“
• „It doesn’t even need to be the best writing. It does need to be different and distinct though.“
• „I’ll tell you: If you publish content, blogs, podcasts, videos, people will discover you and they will reach out to you. They’ll open doors you didn’t even know existed.“

Better Inputs, Better Outputs

• „Ultimately, there are no original ideas in the world. What an original idea really is, is just somebody who has sources that aren’t familiar to you, and when somebody is combining all these obscure sources, you end up saying: Wow! This person is such an original thinker!“

Produce More, Consume Less

• „I encourage you to shift from a consumer to a creator.“
• „Look, I know it’s difficult, but it’s precisely why it’s so valuable.“
• Es ist ein Paradigmenwechsel: Vom „couch consumer” hin zu einem „prolific producer of ideas”, „from holding your best ideas internally to […] sharing the very best ideas that you have.“
• „It is precisely the people who share their best ideas that are most visible, that create the most opportunities.“

My Formula For Interesting Ideas

• „Writing is not about grammar and syntax. It is about communicating interesting and informative ideas in ways that are easy to understand and just plain old fun to read.“
• „The question that you should obsessively be asking if you want to become a better writer is: How do you find interesting ideas?“
• „So what you do is, like an artist you train your taste.“
• „Raise the standards of everything you read so you can develop a sense of taste.“
• „The hard part isn’t knowing when other people’s ideas are interesting. The hard part is knowing when your own ideas are interesting. And that’s why you need to talk to people.“
• „Remember: It’s about the conversations with other people.“

What Should You Write About?

• „What ideas are you thinking about when you are in the shower?” (Paul Graham)
• „If you can write about things that you are excited about, […] if you can produce words that excite you, you will end up exciting the reader.“
• „Readers can sense when there’s no life in the writer. They can sense when the writer is bored.“
• „The most important thing for writing is to maintain the habit – for years.“

The Netflix Principle

• „Write what is called ‚evergreen content‘. Write articles that are going to be relevant five years from now, ten years from now, fifteen years from now.“
• „The way to do that is to write about concepts, not the news.“
• „The time that we spend writing you could think of as very expensive time. It is tiring, you need to be in a quiet space, you also need to think a lot about the ideas that you are going to write about before you actually sit down at the computer.“
• „You need to be smart about the things that you actually invest your time in.“ 

Write In Small Chunks

• „You have already done most of the work of actually learning something that other people don’t know.“
• „If you want to get more writing done you need to get more milage out of the small junks of writing that you are already doing and out of the experiences you are already having.“
• „Write your ideas down. Otherwise they will be lost to the evaporation of time.“

Writer’s Block

• „I don’t want it to be an excuse for not actually writing.“
• „If you’re struggling to put words on the page, speak them out. […] Just talk.“
• „I can get the raw materials by speaking.“
• Speak out the ideas and turn them into writing (z.B. mit automatischer Transkription).

Personal Monopoly

• What is the goal of writing online? Building a personal brand = „a personal monopoly”.
• „You want to be known for something on the internet. You want to be known for something other people aren’t known for, something that is uniquely yours.“
• „You want to be the only person who does what you do.” (Jerry Garcia)
• „Don’t just focus on yourself. Focus on what the world wants you to do.“
• „Think like an investor.” -> „The big fish in a growing pond”-Strategie
• „Specialising in something often leads to more opportunities in the long run.“

Own Your Audience

• „You need to own your distribution.“
• Blogs, Podcasts, Newsletter, Website, e-Mail-Liste
• „As you collect emails, slowly but surely your audience will grow.“

Writing To Start a Future Company

• „audience first products”: Es ist zunehmend wichtiger, zuerst ein Publikum zu haben und dann erst das Produkt.
• Darum: „Start writing NOW!“

Intellectual Isolation

• „Turn writing into social experiences.“
• Dadurch, dass man schreibt, hat man die Chance, Menschen mit gleichen Interessen kennenzulernen, die man in seinem bestehenden Umfeld einfach nicht hat. Man fühlt sich dann weit weniger intellektuell einsam.

Learn To Write Fast

• „The internet rewards people who work fast.“
• „It helps if you can learn to work fast. And here’s why. When the cost of failure is high, you plan first and act second. But when the cost of failure is low, it’s better to act first and plan second. When you’re making content online, the cost of failure is almost always low.“
  • Problem: cost ist auch trust, nicht nur Geld!
• Build a note-taking system.
• Have conversations: „Think about what you are going to write before you sit down at the computer.“

Look At Your Fish

• „Insight comes from looking at what’s been on that table all along and not always from trying to go discover something new.“

POP Writing

• „Make your writing POP.“
• P = Personal: Writing about stories and experiences.
  • I saw, I felt, I’ve heard, You may have noticed that…
• O = Observational: Writing about these hidden truths, things that people see but not quite notice. Things that surprise you.
  • I noticed a pattern, Look at this trend, You don’t know this, but…, You haven’t seen that…
• P = Playful: Making your writing fun with puns and jokes.
  • Play with words, use silly words and phrases, …
  • You bring out the kid in your reader.
• „It makes your writing catchy and memorable. And it makes your writing stick in your reader’s mind – which we all want!“

What You’ll Learn in Write Of Passage

• „There is way too much focus on social media, but email is really where you can build audiences, and you can own your relationships with them.“
• „Writing isn’t about ,Oh, oh, what am I going to say?’, it is much more a process of distilling the ideas you already have into something as densely powerful as the atomic bomb.“

What If I’m Not Ready Yet?

• „You will never feel entirely ready.“
• „If you know things that other people should know about I think you have a moral obligation to write about it because otherwise humanity doesn’t benefit from all the thinking and learning that you’re doing.“
• „You don’t need to strategically lay out all the seeds, have a plan for what every single step is going to look like. Your plan of ,Hey, I’m going to build an online audience. It’s going to be around ideas that I’m really interested in, and I’m going to attract likeminded people.’ That’s plenty!“
• „You don’t need expertise on a topic to write about it, because when you write you actually develop expertise.“
• Write with a beginner’s mind.

Why Write Of Passage Is Different

• „Most courses are easy and relaxed, Write Of Passage is hard and intense.“
• „Most courses are solo experiences, Write Of Passage is social one. It’s built to create lifelong friendships.“
• „It’s always the difficult things that change your life.“
• „We’ve created an ambitious curriculum where when you put in the work you won’t be the same person by the end of the course.“
• „A lot of this information is available for free online. Yes I’ve done a good job of distilling it, presenting it for you, but what doesn’t exist anywhere else is a community like the Write Of Passage Community that gives you the momentum to push through the difficulties of writing online and to support you as you grow and test your limits.“

Zum Write Of Passage Online-Kurs (keine Empfehlung von mir, nur Information)