Study human behavior, storytelling, marketing, big ideas, biological problems, and yourself.

Grabbing and holding attention is the skill of all skills.

THREAD

I get asked for writing tips a lot. Of all the ones I’ve given, here are a few of the ones that seem to hold true and remain somewhat universal or at least mostly unobjectionable:

#amwriting #writingtips

1. If you are a fast writer (i.e., if you compose first drafts very quickly) then you absolutely must become a slow editor. Much of what I call “writing” is really, for me, editing.

2. If you don’t read you cannot write a lot or well. Sure, maybe you can read like a maniac for a decade and then read less after that, but without some large volume of intake, there will never be a meaningful output.

2.1 I sometimes say that I feel like writing without reading is like trying to run a marathan on a cracker. And sadly I see many students struggling to write when they have simply never read enough to fuel that demand of the task at hand.

3. All writing is writing if one decides to treat it that way. If one takes some degree of intentional will when sending emails, posting on social media and writing notes and marginalia, then all of that can count as meaningful daily writing.

IT WAS RISHI KANADA WHO GAVE THE ATOMIC THEORY & TALKED ABOUT THE GRAVITY OF EARTH, 2600 YEARS BEFORE AN APPLE FELL IN FRONT OF NEWTON'S EYES:

Scientists of the modern world credit an English scientist John Dalton (1766 CE -1844 CE) for the Atomic Theory.

And this is because, most of us are not even aware of an ancient Indian Sage named Kanada, who was the first to formulate the theory of atoms, almost 2600 yrs before Dalton and talk about earth's gravity.

Rishi Kanada was born around 600 BCE in Dwarka, Gujarat and he was the son of a philosopher named Ulka. He was fascinated with the minute detailing of the things right from his childhood. Once, when he was very young, he accompanied his father on a journey to Prayaga.

He saw plentiful grains scattered along the path leading to the shore of river Ganga. It's a tradition in Hindu families to scatter the grains for the ants and birds to feed on them. Suddenly, an ant caught his attention, who was feeding on a rice grain.

He was mesmerised by this very fact that how a small grain of rice becomes food for the ant but to satisfy the hunger of a person so many grains are needed together. This incidence made him realize the importance of a single grain of rice.