"It is the long form essays and those where I grapple with the nature of reality and grappling with ideas that other people have thought about but not properly figured out yet - that's what pays the bills for me"
"Writing books are awful, they are really unhelpful. The problem is that they do things that sound smart but don't actually speak to the experience of being a writer. They are very focussed on the mechanics of writing but they don't actually talk about the life and emotions of a writer".
âPart of the reason why Iâve been able to be an effective writing teacher is first of all I wasnât trained in this and therefore I can come up with ideas that are different from what conventional wisdom and second of all CRIBs is something that is obviously useful and has resonated with so many people that I just doubled down on itâ
"I try never to write from a blank page. I rebel against the flashing cursor of doom with thew samurai sword of dumping all my ideas onto a page. I dump all my ideas onto one page and then begin to distill my ideas. It takes 50 gallons of sap to create 1 gallon of maple syrup and it's the same thing with ideas. You want to have a tonne of intellectual sap and create quality blog posts or syrup".
"I set a timer for myself and I'll get all those ideas onto a page and I'll give myself another deadline and a word limit to compress my ideas down into the finished article and then I distill and compress again"
"When I get to my third Google Doc, I've gone through two distillation processes and then I'll send it to my assistant who reads through it using my CRIBs feedback system. She sends it back, I do one final edit and then I publish".
"CRIBS stands for Confusing, Repeated, Insightful, Boring, Surprising. This framework takes the reader out of the thought process of 'I can't edit because I don't know anything about writing mechanics' and it takes them into the same state that any consumer is in which is about their emotions. There is an obvious answer to every observation there - when something is confusing, you rewrite it, when something is repeated, you delete it, when something is insightful, you talk more about it, when something is boring, you delete it and when something is surprising you create tension up to that moment because we learn best when we are surprised".
âWhat comes out of your brain when you start writing is what comes out of your mouth when you are talking. It is only through writing that you begin to think differently and improve your thinking. What is underestimated is the modularity value that writing adds â what writing has done is not to critique ideas but critique specific elements of ideas. Only writing can enable that degree of precision as a medium".
"A phase transition is when one element changes to from solid to liquid to gas. We see this when we take ice out of the fridge where it melts and the water begins to go all over the table. What you see is that what it ended up as was very different to how it started but none of the actual molecules changed. In writing you can do the same thing - you can create an intellectual phase transition. By summarising books for example you can generate your own epiphanies and producing a narrative that only you can write".
"There are no unique messages, only unique messengers" Pat Flynn
"Trying to come up with original ideas can be a fools errand. Many of the best teachers have no original ideas and can still be amazing. How many of your teachers from school had written books? Probably none and yet they communicated and taught ideas that changed lives".
"If I went travelling it would have to be for six months to a year in one place in order to learn the language. I spent a summer in Spain and learnt more from that than I would've done having hundreds of Spanish lessons
"I have a deep need to set really ambitious goals and now I have pigeon holed myself and this is extremely difficult"
"I wanted to externalise and put down my writing process. I have spent the last year and a half thinking about these ideas that I hadn't quite refined".
âPost-Its are everywhere and so Iâm always surrounded by my ideas. It allows you to externalise your ideas and move things round as well as making ideas concrete and tangible again. The abstract digital nature of the modern world can actually be very counter to our biologyâ.
"You want to take fear which is usually a headwind and flip it into a tailwindâ
"I want to help people break through but the most honest answer is that you are not going to break through it. You just have to learn to deal with it and work hard and deal with it anyway. My whole issue with this whole conversation is the idea of not having imposter syndrome â itâs like having a marathon runner asking, how can I not be tired, itâs a ridiculous questionâ.
"If you feel like you arenât qualified enough to write about something, just write more about it. It's so simple as to sound impractical but there is a deeper message here which is that these things won't disappear but these uncomfortable emotions can also spur your drive and your ambitionsâ.
âAt some level you need to have some level of expertise. You then want some way to certify that and on a broad level credentials can be helpful but a critique of credentials is that they are a way to solidify dominant structures of control within an industry. Credentials expand beyond control".
âAfter I got laid off, I used to do the 5 minute journal and I used to write in it every day and there are only two things that I wrote every single day â 'I am somebody who turns my dreams into reality' and 'I am somebody who takes advantage of being young and turn it into an asset rather than a liability'. And I think that's where you should focus assets and liabilities. There are some things where being young and lacking experience won't help, for example, becoming a financial advisor advising on market crashes. BUT at the same time is that when you do YouTube, when you're working with cutting edge technology, when you're teaching people to write online, being young is an advantage".
âThere's a whole paradox with how we see age â we donât treat our elders with as much respect as we used to but the other stuff is, in school, we basically only spend time with people our age. If someone was to come back from 200 years ago thatâs one thing that would make them scratch their heads at modern society â we have become so age segregated. I grew up spending time with older people which means teaching people who are older actually comes more easily to me".
âI donât want to worry about the productivity of my curiosityâ
âIâm more of a process and journey person. My goal is to spend as much time in a state of obsession as possible both within writing and outside of writing. I do have goals insofar as people to pay and then itâs important to me that I have enough that I can do this and do it comfortably and do it in a way that Iâm not sacrificing too much. However, we set some goals earlier this year and they just ended up making us less happyâ.
âThereâs a book called Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. Finite games are something that you do for a prize like sports. An infinite game is something that you play so that you can keep playing the game. I had a moment a couple of months ago where I was like this imposter trying to build the business, build the business, build the business and found myself getting into these finite games and I realised that I didnât want to do that and I just wanted to write. The creative process is life at itâs fullest for meâ.
âThe etymology of the word amateur is love. To be an amateur is to love what you do without an end goal. We should be very critical of this modern notion that you can only create videos, you can only write, you can only do podcasts if there is a guaranteed outcome for your career. I encourage people to ask, what is the creative medium that they can love in an infinite game sense and let them bathe in the amateur mindset and enjoy the process of creationâ.
âYou can tell me that you donât want to write or do a podcast because you canât see a path to success. But what I refuse to accept is that there is no creative medium that won't bring you tremendous amounts of joy and satisfaction when you turn it into an infinite gameâ.
âWorst comes to worst â you have spent hours thinking and writing about something that you are interested in. Writing is thinking and so when you put words on a page you raise the quality of your thoughts. Your mind is like RAM, there is a limited amount of working memory that you have but you can have strategies and writing gives you a strategy to put ideas out onto a page and you no longer have to think about it. So worst case scenario for writing online is that you've thought really deeply about all your ideas, you can speak really clearly about them and then if there's ever an opportunity when somebody is trying to find and evaluate your work you can say BOOM here are 5 amazing essays that I've written about whatever it is that you're interested in. If you're applying for a job, no other candidate would've delivered that"
"How many robots do you have working for you? A robot is not what we conventionally imagine in films like iRobot. A robot is whatâs happening the data storage centres where there are computers that are working for you automatically. If you can change what you think what a robot is, youâll realise that if you create you can have millions of robots working for you.
"What happens when you create and share an idea, little robots will basically carry your idea all around the world. And there are people who are sitting all around the world who want to learn about whatever you have written about or made a video about. What's amazing is that you can make something once and the robots will work for you for the rest of your life".
"As they deliver ideas to people, serendipity happens â people reach out to you, you meet new people. What they can imagine with the ideas they share are beyond what you can possibly think of what they would want. And the things that end up entering your life are things that are out of the scope of your imagination and beyond whatever you could ever imagine beforeâ
âTo spend your life as a passive consumer and never step into the arena as an active creator is setting yourself up for a life of regretâ
âYou want to think of the internet as open and owned platforms. An open platform is something that is open to everybody. An owned platform is something that you are in control of. An open platform is where you are going to end up finding people. I would choose one open platform, like Twitter for instance, and the benefit is that you get free access to connect with people, the drawback is that if Twitter were to close tomorrow you will lose everything. So you want to convert people from your open platforms into owned platforms and there are two that I recommend â email and texting. So you want to find people on open platforms and convert them to the owned platforms - do that over and over again and you can build a career from doing thisâ.
âItâs HARD but there is NOTHING in life that is both meaningful and easy. The people in life who are at their final days who have the most regrets are those who had a strong creative vision but never shared it. The urge to create is not in the world of rationality it is a human primal urge to express ourselvesâ
âI call it heart, skin eyes. Listen for moments that make your heart beat faster. Skin is the same thing â what gives you goose bumps. Eyes â what makes your eyes open up that grabs you by the collar with interest. If you can find something that focuses on heart, skin and eyes, thatâs what you should write about. It's a very intuitive processâ.
âObscure topics are exactly what you should be writing. When you start writing, donât even think about what the world is going to be interested in â write about what interests you. If there is any lesson of the internet, it is that you are not the only person interested in what you are interested in. The benefit of writing online is to meet people who have similar ideas as you, create serendipity and to have an email list of people who share your intellectual obsessionsâ.
"Writing online is like a dance and you are leading the dance. You do more of what works, less of what doesn't but you are always in control and that is important. You are not just doing what your audience wants but as you write you should listen to how your audience is repsonding to what you are saying and provided it aligns with what you want to do, you can do more of what your audience wants"
"If there is any lesson of the internet, it is that you are not the only person interested in what you are interested in".
âHumans are horrible at long term goals â weâre just not good at it. So when someone does something for the long term, they have taken a long term goal and found a way to make it amazing in the short term. This matches their desires in the short term with their desires in the long term â that is the recipe to success, not long term thinkingâ.
"So the real question is how can we make writing an enjoyable enterprise in the short term so that I get what I want in the long term? That's what we need to talk about".
âNew creators worry about two things â they think every single person is going to make fun of them and at the same time they are really annoyed that people are not reading or watching their content â both those things canât be true. Itâs stupid but thatâs how the brain thinks. Fear always exists in paradoxesâ.
"When you have a small audience you have a nook of safety where you have people who are so on your wavelength, think so similarly to you, that then end up becoming really good friends".
âIf you can move forward in the uncertainty, youâll know that there are people who are still struggling to move forward and so you are already ahead of themâ
âWriting online has such potential â there is still so much growth here. You are not too late to do whatever it is you want to do in this spaceâ.
âI created a 5 week programme to tell people over and over again to start writing online because it's so valuable. Thereâs a line from Steve Cheney and he has this essay called on How To Be Discovered â he says âthe thing that happens that you donât see, is that when you share your ideas the smartest people who are lurking in the background reach out to youâ. So what he is saying these things happen invisibly, these people are the smartest in the world and rather than you begging them for advice, they reach out to youâ.
"Writing online is so underrated - I realised that writing was a tool for finding people with similar interests. When you're online and signalling to world that you are interested in similar ideas you become overwhelmed by people with similar ideas".
âI went to college and played Division 1 golf but then discovered I wasnât quite good enough to play and that was painful. Then I started doing college television and did that very intensely and then after college I started working for an advertising agency in New York which ran accounts for a lot of prestigious companies. I got fired from that job and then I tried YouTube and that didnât work out. I realised video wasnât where it was and then I started writing after taking Building a Second Brain and then I started the blog and then things started to changeâ.
David Perell is a writer, podcaster and founder of the course Write of Passage. He has a highly successful newsletter as well as a blog where he writes essays covering topics from travel and culture to media, marketing, and technology. He also teaches thousands of people how to improve their writing online, share their ideas, and build an online audience through his popular course, Write of Passage. In our conversation, we'll dive deeper into the writing process, how to write good content for the internet and how to build an audience.
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Ali is a doctor, YouTuber and podcaster. His day job used to involve saving lives, but as of this week he's making videos about productivity, tech, education and lifestyle stuff.
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00:00 Introduction
01:30 David's Introduction
03:20 David's Journey
08:00 On Encouraging People to Write Online
14:00 On Starting Out Writing Online
18:30 On Knowing What to Write About
22:40 On Being Discovered & Building an Audience
27:10 On Serendipity Vehicles
30:45 On Fear of Wasting Time
39:00 On Finite and Infinite Games
44:00 On Goals / Process
51:55 On Age & Imposter Syndrome
01:09:10 On Notecards / Post-Its
01:12:00 On 100 Articles in 100 Days
01:14:50 On Living with Friends
01:17:00 On Travelling
01:19:55 On Assembly Lines & Ali's Creative Process
01:27:30 On Assembly Lines & Original Ideas
01:30:50 On Phase Transitions
01:39:40 On The Value of Writing
01:41:45 On David's Assembly Lines
01:46:10 On Books on Writing
01:49:20 On The Power of Naming Something
01:54:30 On Short vs Long Form Writing
01:59:40 Summary & Concluding Thoughts