How can some people write so beautifully?

I think I've figured it out.

THREAD: The four elements of writing style:

Pardon me while I open a wormhole into your brain and thrust style advice into it.

See, that’s an example of style.

I could have just said: "And now let’s learn about style."

Four elements of style I'll cover:

• Your voice
• Your presentation
• Engaging the senses
• Engaging the imagination

Part 1: Your voice

Ask your friends what it's like to talk with you.

Perhaps they’ll mention your:

• Tone of voice
• Sense of humor
• Eccentricities
• Viewpoints

Convey those traits in your writing, and readers will recognize your voice.

In other words, voice is not your choice of words. Voice is your unfiltered self.

THREAD: 10 significant lies you're told about the world.

On startups, writing, and your career:

People don't have short attention spans:

• They finish 3 hour Joe Rogan episodes.
• They binge 14 hour shows.

They have short *consideration spans:* they must be hooked quickly.

Point: Don't fear making great, in-depth content. But, ensure your first minute is incredible.

In observing friends who’ve sold startups and made millions:

After a year, they’re back to toying with their old side projects.

They used their money to buy a nice home and eat well.

That’s it. They’re otherwise back to who they were.

Point: Aim to be fulfilled, not rich.

Reading many books is the most socially accepted vanity metric for adults.

You get zero kudos for reading 100 books a year.

You get massive kudos for learning efficiently and making interesting things.

Bloggers who post frequently (2x/wk) are rarely worth reading consistently.

I read for insights. And no writer can generate profound insights on a fixed schedule.

I aggregate writers who publish sporadically. When they post, they truly have something to say.

Elon Musk is on record that he makes decisions using the same technique as Jeff Bezos.

I found YouTube videos of them explaining it.

A thread on thinking more clearly:

This thread is about mental models.

Yes, Twitter has enough of these.

BUT, people never answer the question:

How do I use mental models for everyday decisions? How do I put them into practice?

Mental models are frameworks for thinking.

They simplify complex situations so you can reason through them easily.

They help you make good, long-term decisions without needing to know everything about a situation.

Your hunter-gatherer brain is not wired to use the best model for every decision.

However, in every generation, a few humans manage to rewire their biology:

They force themselves to think in models constantly.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos appear to be two of those people. They're on record about this.

14 steps for acquiring your startup's first customers:

1. Pay to interview people who've successfully grown a startup like yours. You can find them via LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

2. Ask them which 3 channels (ads, SEO, etc.) you should prioritize for acquiring customers.

3. Ask for examples of companies who run these channels well.

Some channels to ask about:

• PR
• Ads
• SEO
• Influencers
• Sponsorships
• Organic social
• Word-of-mouth
• In-depth content
• Referral incentives
• Product-led invites (think Slack, Zoom, Dropbox)

4. Reverse-engineer how those companies run their channels well:

A. Map each step the customer takes between the channel and becoming a happy customer.

B. Study what makes each step great: its pitch, its design, and its user experience.

Here's an example of steps.

• Someone sees your Facebook ad ← Channel
• They visit your page
• Enter their email
• Trial the product
• Pay for the product
• Stay engaged
• Refer more users

(Tools like Ahrefs + FB Ad Library show you competitors' ads and landing pages!)

THREAD ON BUILDING A WRITING HABIT:

If it's hard to get yourself to write,

I surveyed 100+ people to identify how they overcome their blockers.

For writing blogs, books, screenplays:

Blocker #1: Procrastination

If you procrastinate occasionally, that’s normal—forgive yourself.

However, if you procrastinate endlessly, that’s a problem.

Procrastination is the result of two reflexes:

• Indulging in immediate rewards like browsing YouTube instead of writing.

• Avoiding work you perceive to be uncomfortable or tedious.

Let's tackle these two blockers.

A. Avoid distractions

Have you noticed how much writing we can get done on airplanes—despite having our knees and shoulders uncomfortably squeezed together for hours?

Why is that?

It's because there's nothing else to do on an airplane.

This reveals a truth about writing: needing a comfy chair, room, or "the right ambience" is a myth.

If you're waiting until your room is the right temperature to begin writing, you're lying to yourself.

Your blocker is not comfort, but rather distractions.

Two strategies:

This is my 5 year story about becoming a far better storyteller.

Goal: Tell a story as well as Neil deGrasse Tyson.

It started with me podcasting to share stories with friends. Every time I spoke, however, I sounded lifeless like a stressed-out amateur.

Why?

I tracked down great storytellers to learn from them.

Unexpectedly, even the best could only articulate *some* of the ingredients that make them great.

There was something intangible underneath their explanations that they couldn’t address when pressed.

That sounded like a treasure hunt to me:

Collect the hidden ingredients needed to tell a remarkable story charismatically.

I would finally become a storyteller.

Because these ingredients were hard to identify, I used the process of “learning by inversion.”

This is where you learn how something works by studying its bad examples. Then you do the opposite of them.

So I watched a lot of bad storytellers on YouTube.

Thanks, TED.

It became clear that there are two ways to tell a story:

1. In whatever way suddenly comes to mind
2. *Strategically*

10 of my founder friends are forces of nature.

Their startups are now worth $400M+ each.

4 behaviors I've observed:

Effective people optimize for what compounds—not just quick wins.

They train themselves to get a dopamine hit when they help their future selves—even if they receive no immediate benefit from the action.

What compounds:

• Building audiences
• Relationships
• Investing $

In school, we learn by being curious and by accepting when we're wrong.

As adults, we forget we're still students—of life.

Effective people recreate environments where they're still told they're wrong:

They befriend blunt, independent-minded thinkers who'll call them out.

Effective people defer stuff that doesn’t matter, and always get started on what does.

Momentum is about rate of iteration and persistence, not brilliance.

I don’t know one force of nature founder who isn’t strongly biased toward taking action.

Success therefore appears to be two things:

1. Point yourself in the right direction.

2. Do the work even when you're not in the mood to.

Both are necessary.

(Plus luck and privilege, of course.)

THREAD: 10 significant things that the best startup founders get right.

(From my notes helping 400+ founders grow their startups.)

The smartest people I’ve met:

They retrain their minds to enjoy being wrong.

They get a dopamine hit when proven wrong because they’re excited to be closer to the truth. The truth is addictive.

In contrast, if you refuse to lose a debate, your brain keeps running old firmware.

I don’t know one highly effective person who isn’t strongly biased toward taking action.

They defer the stuff that doesn’t matter, and they always finish the stuff that does.

It's about rate of iteration and persistence, not brilliance.

The successful people I know have mastered delayed gratification:

They let themselves feel a dopamine hit when they do something that makes their future selves better.

They've learned to value their future self as much as their present self.

Success in life really appears to be two things:

1. Point yourself in the right direction.

2. Do the work even when you're not in the mood to.

(And privilege.)

A framework for good writing.

1. Use draft 1 to find your novel ideas, which are:

• Counter-intuitive
• Counter-narrative
• Shock and awe

2. Draft 2 is for making those novel ideas stick—via:

• Stories
• Analogies
• Examples

Writing quality = Novelty x Resonance

THREAD: How to choose what to write about.

When you're blocked by the lie of "writer's block."

1. First, where I get ideas from:

• I teach others and rewrite the transcriptions into blog posts.

• I capture real stories I tell over dinner. Vulnerable, authentic experiences.

• I find strong opinions (on Twitter) that I disagree with. My counter-argument becomes a post.

Of these ideas, the BEST is whichever I can't not write about.

Which idea, of all those swimming inside your brain, are you compelled to pursue the way Ahab was driven to hunt Moby Dick?
—Steven Pressfield

Here's the two-step framework for finding your "must write" ideas:

My first step is choosing an objective for my article, such as:

I've helped 400+ startups acquire customers.

Here's the framework I teach them—for ads, content, referrals, and product.

Hope this helps! A thread:

Part 1. The growth trajectory

Steps I'm seeing startups follow in 2021:

1. Build an amazing product that naturally encourages word-of-mouth.

2. Then kickstart user growth with a scalable acquisition channel, such as ads.

3. In parallel, I'm seeing them spend most of their growth resources optimizing their user funnel + product experience.

At every step of the user's journey, they A/B test to maximize per-user revenue.

4. Once their funnel is profitable + efficient, they scale it.

They also start to experiment with many more channels until they exhaust all of them.

5. Over time, they switch their emphasis to more sustainable and cost-efficient channels, such as:

• Product-led growth
• Organic social
• Influencers
• Referrals
• Content
• Sales
• More

This removes their dependency on ads, which can be volatile.

My day job is growing startups.

I've worked with a few hundred by now.

Here's how to grow your podcast, newsletter, blog, YouTube, and Twitter.

Hope this helps! A thread:

Growth marketing, a timeline:

2015: "We need to go viral."

2017: "Well, we raised $25m of VC. Let's dump it on Facebook ads."

2021: "Wow. We should have been focusing on content and building a great product."

How to grow a podcast:

• Be YouTube-first; do video
• Split eps into 8min YouTube clips with SEO’d titles
• Get guests that are searched for on YouTube
• Consider not publishing bad eps
• Exchange eps with other shows
• Niche is fine, but be widely accessible

How to grow a YouTube channel:

• Describe the video's value in the first five seconds
• Ask a question you don't resolve until the last five seconds
• With YT algo, 1 amazing video > 10 good videos
• Quick cuts don't give people time to ask if they're bored

—Mr. Beast

Some tips for growing newsletters:

• Plug it at the end of a tweet thread.
• Swap plugs with other newsletters.
• Send a sample issue upon signup to excite people for future issues.
• Consider twice-monthly over weekly. My poll revealed people are fatigued with newsletters.

School is an astonishing failure of modern society.

We're taught about dinosaurs before learning how to function as people.

Thread: Life lessons I wish school taught all of us.

Schools don't teach us to:

• Think critically
• Nurture curiosity
• Save and prep taxes
• Sustain relationships
• Have difficult convos
• Navigate mental health

Yet they teach how to:

• Differentiate dinosaurs
• Memorize the periodic table
• Make paper snowflakes

Why is school curriculum so broken?

1. Awareness: Those in power don't realize how bad it is.

2. Priorities: It's not a pressing issue. Voters care about the cost of education—not enough about WHAT is taught.

3. What to do: Shout to the politicians and educators in power.

Onto the lessons I wish I was taught.

These are the ones on my mind lately. This list could be 1,000 items long. Add yours to the thread.

Here we go.

Many relationship troubles emerge from one root cause:

Assuming bad intent.

One of the highest ROI things we can teach our children:

Start by assuming good intent: Train your reflex to ask questions before making assumptions.

Always lead with curiosity—never critique.

How to rewrite bad writing 👇

After rewriting 400,000 words on my site...

Advice for blog posts, tweets, emails:

Great authors’ first drafts are bad—no better than yours.

However, they aggressively *rewrite* those drafts.

Your first draft is for messily generating ideas.

Your second draft is for identifying the best ideas then making them resonate.

The enemy of rewriting is being precious about what you originally said and how you originally said it.

You need to be willing to destroy.

Part 1. Write to be understood

Readers don't assess the quality of nonfiction by its elegance nor its complexity.

Instead, they assess:

[How strong your ideas are] x [how intuitively they understand them]

Unclear sentences distract from that understanding.

Technique #1: Use simple sentences

Write sentences that a thirteen-year-old could follow.

If they can understand you, so can everyone else.

That isn't to say children should understand the details.

Rather, children must be able to follow the logic of every argument.

How can some people write so beautifully?

1/ Two of my favorite writing techniques:

Writing technique 1: Don't always be direct

Instead of saying "the day was hot," you could write "even the bugs were looking for air conditioning."

That's what I call a second-order description: describe the *impact* caused by the hot day—instead of saying it's a hot day.

Why? Poetic writing is often one step removed from a straightforward description of the events.

The more steps you're removed while still communicating your point, the more "elegant" it might feel.

For example, let's start with a plain statement:

"The day was hot."

With a second-order description, you'd describe the heat by stating the effect it has on its environment:

"The day melted our popsicles." (Without mentioning the heat.)

Readers infer that the day was therefore hot.

As C.S. Lewis said:

"Instead of telling us a thing was 'terrible,' describe it so that we’ll BE terrified."

Let's go deeper now: