I loved Henrik Karlsson’s piece, “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.”

​ ​ ​ Hey [FIRST NAME GOES HERE], Have you ever noticed how some people seem to get all of the press and attention even when other people have built something similar? It can be...

If you work in a 500-person company, even if you’re junior, you can gain attention by writing. You just need experience and ideas to write about, but you don't need authority or influence. Let your ideas speak for themselves.

Write about what you’re learning or strategies your team can pursue, and share it. People can comment on what’s interesting, or even disagree, but either way, you’ll increase your attention and influence.

Writing automatically elevates you from the sea of other people doing the same thing.

David shares a compilation of the best links from his newsletter Friday Finds. Read here.

Darwin learned about logbooks and recordkeeping while aboard the HMS Bounty.

He ought to remember Bacon’s aphorism, that Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man;

What the Rationalistic World Forgot. the stupor of rationality • stories, building intuition • alchemy, building process • religion, building wonder

When you're chasing a big goal, you're supposed to feel good a third of the time, okay a third of the time, and crappy a third of the time. If the ratio is off and you feel good all the time, then you're not pushing yourself enough. Likewise, if you feel bad all the time, then you might be fatigued and need to dial things back.

Learning the Rule of Thirds was life-changing for me as a person in general, because it made me believe in the days that didn't feel great. In fact, I relished them.

Work the iron while it’s hot

Just like programming, writing requires a lot of context that you hold in your short term memory. You need to recall a lot of details about the topic you are writing about, as well as your punch-line and the current state of the document. All this state takes time to load into memory, and is easily lost by distractions or context switching.

Start at the Top not the Beginning

For documents that are more than a page long you must take a top-down approach and start with an outline. An outline is a list of sections together with rough notes, often in the form of bullet points.

Submit your questions here: https://forms.gle/DXuYQMVtfxKpt6ds7

Submitting your book to Amazon

BookVault printing seems high-quality

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08S67KEb6hQ

Writing online is the fastest path to success in the internet age. It allows you to learn faster and meet incredible people.

Talking with David Perell about why online writing is one of the most important skills you can have in 2021 and how you can do it effectively.

Write From Abundance

there are really two things that you want to focus on: ideas from others and ideas from yourself.

Write From Conversation

What I find is that conversations have this algorithm for creativity, D patterns in your mind, it sort of gets you out of your normal thought patterns.

Write in Public

But also it's an incredible tool for making friends and a way to cure what I call intellectual loneliness.

It can be challenging to express your thoughts clearly. Alan Alda recommends three rules of three for effective and empathic communication.

1. Make no more than three points

Research suggests that short-term memory is far less robust, maxing out at a meager three to five items.

2. Explain difficult ideas in three different ways

3. Make important points three times

In some close-knit relationships, spaced repetition is a phenomenal tool. Teachers, parents, psychiatrists, or team managers can use it to return to and reinforce difficult ideas across many conversations.

I've been using Markdown for a long time, and have grown accustomed to it. It has various quirks, features, and oddities, but what doesn't. But recently I decided to take a look at Asciidoc, a Markdown "competetor". I found it a great little document toolchain, but it won't replace Markdown.

Focus on your text and let Typst take care of layout and formatting. Join the wait list so you can be part of the beta phase.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

This how you legit write online (and crush it):

Entire books don’t remain in people’s minds. Sentences do. Get good at writing great sentences to become memorable.

A writing session that isn’t scheduled will never happen.

https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/life-moves-pretty-fast-why-gen-x-got-it-before-the-rest-of-you-kpkn/

Look, we have heard all the jokes. We know how you talk about us. And now you are saying there might never be a Gen-X President (as if Donald Trump did some sort of credit to his generation in that…

We were the last generation to have a technology free childhood and to learn patience waiting for Saturday morning cartoons or a favorite song to come on the radio.

We were the first generation to write papers on computers and the last generation to use typewriters. We were the last generation to know a time when a missed call was a missed call and the first generation to play video games. We were the last generation who spent a largely unsupervised childhood on dangerous playground equipment.

Epistemic status: High confidence about my own experience, mid-high confidence that it generalizes to others'. Epistemic effort: Low-to-medium effort. It's a concept I've had in my head for a while, then I did a stream-of-consciousness oral draft with...

Like most writers, I procrastinate like mad. When I’ve finished my research and time comes to start writing, I’ll poke around in a zillion other tasks — rearranging my desk, tackling old email, going…

• I begin each paragraph with a hyphen.
• I lower-case the first letter of every sentence.
• I don’t put a period at the end of a sentence. (A question mark or exclamation point is fine.) Instead, I end each sentence using two forward-slashes, like this //

I leave it in that odd format right up until the day before I’m filing a big magazine feature. Then, on the last day, I slowly go through the whole piece, transforming each sentence into the correct format.
This frees me up, on this final day, to become an obsessive about word choice on a sentence-by-sentence level.

@david_perell: If you're feeling stuck in your professional life, start writing online. Here's how it can accelerate your career:

1. Building a Network: Writing shrinks the world.

2. Building Expertise: Quality writing begins with clear thinking.

3. Team Truth-Seeking: If you write well about an industry, your readers will respond with ideas of their
   own.

4. High-Level Conversations: Many of the most important ideas aren't shared in public.

5. Build a Personal Monopoly:

The ultimate goal of writing online is to become known for having rare and valuable expertise.

During the pandemic, I didn’t do a ton of actual writing. I barely blogged. I don’t think I did more than 1 or 2 publication, popular or academic. Even worse, I didn’t do a ton of actual reading. At first, I thought it was the pandemic itself. This is stressful stuff, my work life had been through into complete chaos, and my daily living routine was in tatters.

Over the past year or so, however, I slowly realized it was something bigger: I was having trouble concentrating, especially for the 3 or 4 hour blocks of time it took to write well. Or to blow through a book. Or to really study bridge defense. At first I thought I was just getting old. Doesn’t this happen to everyone when they hit their mid-40s? But the more I examined it, the more I started to believe it was a function of how I was consuming information. I was massively multi-tasking, almost full-time. And the two biggest culprits were my email inbox and my twitter feed.

Workers now inherently multitask, because they build their work world around their inbox, which is constantly delivering them different streams of work.

In part II on your engineering superpower (technical writing), Sophie DeBenedetto talks about how to write well.

Blogging

Try these strategies to help you get started:

• Write an outline first.
• Start with a detailed introduction.
• Write the conclusion first.

If you use the conclusion first approach, focus on what the reader should walk away from your post having learned.

Pull Requests

A good PR description has a few elements:

• A descriptive title.
• An explanation of the what, why, and how.
  • ____ What problem does the code solve?
  • ____ Why is this solution needed?
  • ____ How does the code solve the problem?
• Extras: Anything from usage instructions to info on testing/QA.

How to Write a Ticket

• What problem needs to be solved and why?
• What value does the project gain by delivering this work?

How To Ask For Help

• What is the current behavior? Describe the bug that is occurring.
• Under what circumstances does the behavior occur?
• How does the behavior differ from the expected behavior?