Notes from Turning a Weak Skill into Your Best Asset with David Perell
When I listened to it: March 2021
Why I listened to it: I've followed David Perell on Twitter for some time, and I've wanted to learn more about his work and ideas. This Indie Hackers podcast conversation with Courtland Allen was a perfect entry point into David's headspace.
Go to the podcast listing for the episode or scroll down for my notes.
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My notes
About David Perell
David Perell (@david_perell) is known online as "The Writing Guy".
David used to be “horrible” at writing until he decided to get really good at it.
He writes, hosts a podcast, and runs an online writing school called Write of Passage.
At Write of Passage, he teaches students how to write on the internet. It's offered in 5-week cohorts and generates a couple of million dollars in revenue per year.
The writing opportunity
Writing and sharing ideas on the internet is one of the most underutilized and unexplored opportunities in the world right now.
It's much easier to distribute and share your writing today. Writing on the internet is a near-zero cost way to reach the majority of people on Earth. More and more people are on the internet every year.
Writing makes you better
Writing cuts to your core and changes you.
It is the ultimate process of self-discovery.
Writing helps you build relationships
You can use writing to attract people who are on your intellectual wavelength.
Good writing is the closest you can come to inhabiting someone’s mind.
When people spend time reading what you write and see what you see, you can't help but build relationships with them. These relationships lead to opportunities.
You can build a business by writing online
First, build expertise and connections within a specific niche or industry you're interested in.
Second, grow an audience that allows you to pre-validate demand for future offerings.
Build public-to-private bridges
You attract your audience on public platforms, then you invite them to join on your private platform, and then you build relationships with them on your private platform. The trick is to build a bridge from the public platforms to your private platform.
Public feeds versus private feeds
According to Courtland Allen, there are three types of public feeds.
Addictive feeds are the ones people check because they are addictive. Examples include Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
Required feeds are the ones people check because they have to. Examples include email, messages, and phone calls.
Solution feeds are the ones people check when they're trying to solve a specific problem. Examples include Google search, Quora quora, and YouTube search.
Examples of private feeds include newsletters and blogs.
Repurpose your leftovers
According to David Perell, BBQ joints used to throw away burnt ends. Then, they started giving them away to people waiting in line. And now, they're often the first menu item to sell out.
When you write, you create your own burnt ends. You often have work leftovers you don't use such as references, anecdotes, and drafts. You can repurpose these "burnt ends" into other forms of content to share.
For example, David refers to one of his newsletters as the burnt ends of his intellectual life.
Writing and thinking
The best speakers are good writers. Writing is refined thinking.
It's like a parlor trick. People see these amazing speakers on stage telling stories, but what they don't see is the hours behind the scenes practicing and refining the speech in writing.
According to David, Neil deGrasse Tyson told him that 90 percent of what he says in public he has written down before and whenever he says something that sounds eloquent, it's just because he's already structured the ideas and done the hard work in writing.
Long-form writing
Long-form writing is a lot like comedy. You have an overarching message that frames the entire presentation, but you also have all these mini moments that are entertaining.
When writing long-form ask yourself two questions: 1) what is an idea that I should really focus on? and 2) how do I create a bunch of mini moments? Think of it as a Hero's journey with all these mini-stories along the way.
Don't start from scratch
Reusing previous work is key. Writing can save you time.
Everything you write is a new intellectual building block. David Perell refers to them as "legos". David only works on writing projects that are 80 percent done. He collects the notes and stories until all that is left is just puzzling them together.
Rather than starting from scratch, ask yourself: "What have I already produce and learned and how can I recombine them in new ways?"
Writing advice
According to Courtland Allen, when writing, be novel. Make things sound fresh and new. The purpose of your title is to get people to read your first sentence. The goal of your first sentence is to get people to read your second sentence.
According to David Perell, you should use stories to illuminate your point. Talk about your personal stories and stories of other people. Also, use metaphors and analogies. Be novel when you can. Give examples. Make an abstract point, then clarify it with concrete examples. We learn by analogy. We take ideas from one domain and compare them to ideas in another.
Work on one big thing
You should work on one thing, but it can be a big thing. Then you can explore that idea in many different ways. Double down on them, study them over and over again, and reapply and refine them.
Make sure everything aligns to your big idea.
Don’t be a polymath, but also don’t be a specialist. Get the best of both while removing the worst of both. Take the best of two worlds and leave the bad.
Why write, build, and create pseudonymously?
The internet is going to change identities in a big way. There are benefits to working pseudonymously. For example, it helps you avoid burnout and it allows you to have multiple, diversified identities.
There are many examples of pseudonymous creators including Satoshi with Bitcoin, AJ with Caard, and Banksy with street art.
Random anecdotes:
Many creators make money so they can have the free time to make whatever they want. (For more on this, see Sahil Lavingia's article No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees.)
According to William Gibson, "the future is already here— it’s just not evenly distributed". The future can best be predicted by looking at the world of today and asking what is already here that will get bigger in the world of tomorrow?
Use shared staffing to avoid having to hire part-time contractors. David Perell shares his Write of Passage staff with Tiago Forte who offers a course on Building a Second Brain. This allows David to focus on teaching four months of the year and being creative the other eight months without having to figure out how to manage a seasonal course staff.
Goals are great for prioritizing the future. They help you orient your life around what you want. Goals are less useful in retrospect. Be careful using them to measure past success.
Focused attention is powerful. Find what you are good at and apply it everywhere you can. This creates a high return on your invested attention. Build Thor’s hammer and find nails.
One of the best ways to meet people is to ask others, "I don't know anyone, can you introduce me to some people?"
Avoid performative effort and vanity metrics. For example, don’t read as a competition to prove how many books you've read.