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:

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.)

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.