How to Write Seriously Well | Tim Ferriss

Key Takeaways

when you create content or you blog, you write, you podcast, it seems like you make a uh you make a decision and that decision is about what you're interested in, but also kind of who would be interested in this is kind of baked into it. So, for example, there's things you can do that might get more views on YouTube, but it might be views of people who you're not that interested in attracting, right? like um whereas I've seen that for you >> the people that probably you respect and I respect they respect your work and then you've gotten to this like wonderful outcome there of what I call like sort of like I don't I want to call it like luxury content but it's definitely like up market in a way right it's not um kind of just lowest common denominator content is that were you intentional about that or like I guess how do you think about that because I don't think this is a bit of content nerddery but like you know from one kind of creator to another like how do how do balance those trade-offs or think about that those those opportun those options those forks in the road of like >> I'll give you an example we just had Alex on the podcast and I think he's doing a great job on YouTube but there was a season where if you looked at his YouTube like thumbnail history title history it was like if you're broke and do this if you're totally stuck and like you know do this and every single title had if you're broke do this and then he was like surprised that you know he was attracting a bunch of people who were broke to you know his content well you kind that was the magnet you created. >> Um whereas I think other people do it do do it slightly differently. He's made adjustments by the way. That's not like his whole thing. But >> as just as an example. >> Yeah. Yeah. Uh so it has been super super deliberate on my side. Not to aim upscale but never to deliberately dumb things down or pretend to be interested in things that I'm not interested in. Uh I would say also one thing I left out of maybe that prior list of factors is I took and still take but especially during the let's just call it kind of 1998 even prior to that but especially like 1998 to the publication of the first book I took writing incredibly seriously incredibly incredibly incredibly seriously man I I don't think that is a skill that is going to go out of style even with AI I I really feel like and part of that is the practice of writing makes you a cleaner thinker, a crisper thinker, a more capable thinker, even if you never share what you're writing. >> What is taking it seriously look like on a daily basis? Well, taking it seriously for me looked like at the time, you know, I was in school and I took the hardest writing classes I could find. And took one class by John McI who's won a Puler Prize and it's just this legend in non-fiction writing. And that was an ass kicker of a class. And just to just to make it really concrete what can happen, I was shocked by this because I didn't expect it. >> This was as a kid, a college kid. >> This was in college. Yeah, this is my senior I guess it was my senior year in college. And the the class consisted of like 12 students. You had to apply. It was hard to get into. And then there was a three-hour seminar a week where he would talk about John McY would talk about structure. He's he's very well known for how he structures different pieces of writing. And then you'd have a writing assignment and then he would do a one-on-one with you to review your writing assignment, which let's just say it's like a 3 to 10page piece. and he would always handed those pieces and give them back to you beforehand. And you might have, let's just say, three pages of typed out writing. So, right, printed out writing. And you'd get it back and his red ink would be, it would seem like it's the same amount of ink as your black ink. And most of it was like, "This word makes no sense. You have no idea what this means. This is pea soup, which means just like word salad." He's like, "This is redundant." and he could make the piece 50% shorter without losing anything. And as I got trained to be more concise and just have a higher kind of density of of meaning without the fluff, my grades in all my other classes went up even though that class took a ton of time, which is wild. Uh and and then taking it seriously otherwise means that I'm reading books on writing. So anything I can get a hold of like on writing by Stephen King >> which is not even my genre right uh bird by bird by an Lamont also not my genre these are both mostly focused on fiction books on screenwriting I'd read read screenwriting to try to understand story arc by the way you can apply that to non-fiction uh now you can get all sorts of other books draft number four by John McY which is based on the class that he taught at Princeton for ages and talks a lot about structure Sure. Uh I think it's on writing well or something like that. It's by William Zinsner, but I just devoured all these books and kept my notes. I still have a three- ring binder with my notes from John MC's class from college. I still have all of my notes. And uh also paying people to review your stuff or asking people to review your stuff. So even before I had published anything when I would write something uh if you have friends who are in law school or went to law school even if they don't practice law great proof readers because what are they paid to find anything that's ambiguous anything that's redundant if they're accustomed to doing contract review like lawyers or people who are trained to be lawyers great at proof reading. >> Is this only non-fiction stuff that you like to that you were referring to? Uh, >> I was I was exclusively non-fiction for >> So, what does that mean? Like, uh, advice? I mean, you're only 21. Were you giving advice or is it just like >> No, no, it could be it could be uh not necessarily advice. Actually, most of it would not be advice. Most of it would be something like, for instance, a writing assignment might be really broad. So, he would say, there's a statue in this courtyard a mile from here. Write three write three pages. And it has to have as a theme that sculpture. And so the students in the class would come at it from every possible angle. Like you could you could take it anywhere you want. You could it could be like the grandson of the person who made it and you tell the story of the grandson and the you know the the motherland or it could be the aesthetics, anything. So he would deliberately keep it pretty broad or he would say have an assignment that's like interview someone. And I'm making this up because I I remember how I executed on it, but he'd be like, "Go interview someone you would normally never have a reason to talk to, right?" I was like, "Okay, so like find somebody who's like sweeping the floors and like interview them for an hour or two and write your entire piece on that person." Again, keeping it pretty broad so you'd get a lot of different types of pieces. And so I would have something like that that you could you could get proofed. And then as I when I graduated, I was still practicing writing, but I didn't have a class, right? So I would uh I would try to write pieces for at the time, you know, like Black Belt magazine or Maxim magazine even as even as a student just for fun. I was trying to get stuff published in in big magazines. Didn't always succeed, but occasionally got something in. Fortunately now, I mean, you can find the curricula of so many good classes online from so many amazing universities and teachers. It's like just get a couple of friends and go through it together and then proofread each other's stuff, critique each other's stuff. I mean, it it's like you can do that now. It takes some planning, but you could certainly do it. Uh, and then to come back to your question, Sean, uh, I figured out pretty early on, and I'm not sure when I first read it, but reading Kevin Kelly's 10,00 true fans, I mean, my philosophy was always pretty tightly aligned with that because when I lost when I launched my sports nutrition company way back in the day, right, the f the first real company that I launched, I had tried various things before that. when it finally worked is when I applied very tight constraints and I said okay I'm not going after X market which is huge I'm not going after Y market like sports performance which is too still too big and too expensive for me to reach with paid marketing for instance I mean this is before effectively all social media I was like okay I'm going to focus on certain power sports like powerlifting Olympic weightlifting I'm going to focus on boxing but particular partularly MMA, which was very early days. I mean, to give you an idea, like it was it was affordable for a startup to sponsor the UFC and be on pay-per-view, right? It was early early days, and I'm just going to go after these very small segments with the idea that, and Matt Cuts at the time of Google had a great presentation on this. I think he called it katamari, which was a video game reference, but basically you start with something he was talking about it in the context of a blog. You start out very very narrow and then over time as you build an audience you can broaden you can broaden and this you're sort of rolling a ball that collects more and more until you have a lot of latitude to write about or do kind of whatever you want which is fortunately where I feel I am now more or less right but in the beginning it was very tightly constrained and I suppose if you're honest with yourself and you're your weird self the stuff I already talked about and if the personal is the most universal and you're kind of scratching your own itch because the 4-hour work week was the book I couldn't find for myself, right? You would go to the bookstore and either it was like how to run a Fortune 500 company by Jack Welch or it was like the minimalist guide to convincing yourself that money doesn't matter. And it was like, okay, well, I'm not going to like recycle my lint and do all make my own sheets and do all this stuff. I'm not I'm not that person, right? I don't want to be that person with super extreme reality and sort of uh living a purely aesthetic lifestyle, but I also have no desire to be Jack Welch. It's like, well, where's the stuff in between that I actually care about? And there were some books on small medium-sized businesses, but I couldn't find it. So, when I scratched my own itch, did all these experimentations and then wrote it. If you are sufficiently authentic to yourself, and that word is so overused, but if you if you actually are truthful in how you represent yourself and all the quirks, it's not going to resonate with uh you know 8 billion people, at least not off the bat, right? Your early adopters are going to be pretty tightly confined. And I think there was an element of luck in so much as I was in Silicon Valley. I was tech forward. I was focusing on new tools. Some of that some of that ended up after the fact being deliberate with launch strategy for the 4-hour work week. But they also happened to have incredible capability of broadcasting, right? And and that that also contributed. But my feeling is and when I put up a blog post or I put out a podcast episode and you know I I've my team has also been sort of indoctrinated into this just because I've been doing it for so long is I don't want 100% of my audience to like any episode. I want 10% of my audience to love each episode or each blog post. I want a very very strong reaction positive like I'm I I don't I don't fully subscribe to the PT Barnum, you know, just measure the value of PR by the inch kind of thing. I I don't totally subscribe to that. Uh and I assume over time, people are too busy to read all my stuff or listen to all my podcasts anyway, but it's like over time if one out of every 10 is like a holy this is for me. Then if you have the endurance, part of that is scratching your own edge. I don't I think it's very hard to sustain something over you. The podcast is 10 plus years now if you're not scratching your own edge that you end up just occupying a very unique type of mind share for your audience and they are much more interesting, much more powerful as a result of that.