FAQ: “How do I get better at writing?”
Me: Write a million words.
Follow up: “Hah but seriously.”
Me: Start with 20,000 words. Everyone gets to that 50 times in their first million.
Follow up: “No seriously.”
Me: Nobody expects 10 Quick Tips To Play Violin At Carnegie Hall.

If an employer is willing to be abusive to you prior to hiring you, when you have maximum leverage and they are maximally incentivized to play nice, I think that gives you *extremely actionable* signal as to how they'll treat you when you're working there and dependent on them.

For candidates: evaluate prospective employers accordingly.

For startups employing e.g. engineers: given that your candidates should evaluate you accordingly, be *extra special* careful to operate like professionals with regards to e.g. interviewing, offers, and negotiation.

"Can you be more explicit about 'abusive' here?"

Not without violating a confidence, but as someone who has been on hiring side of table and is a capitalist, there are *clearly* things you could do which would be "sharp operating, but we're all sharp operators" in some contexts.

Hiring employees is often not one of those contexts. The nature of the relationship, the asymmetry in power, and the social contract strongly counsel you to be a lot better there than you are minimally required by law / contract.

A thing which aesthetically frustrates me is that a lot of the things I've heard companies do here serve *no legitimate business purpose.* In some cases it's getting tens of dollars of advantage. TENS! On an engineering candidate!

The payments wars in Japan are heating up and one of the battlegrounds is convenience store coffee.

“Coffee? What does that have to do with payments?” I’m glad you asked.

Convenience stores are low net margin businesses, which sell some high gross margin goods/services but a lot of low ones, and have high fixed costs and a low ticket size. The typical transaction is under 500 yen ($5) and many are about $1.

They need repeat custom.

A few years ago, all of the chains had a good idea for increasing frequency of use: make a minor capital investment in automatic coffee machines. Sell access to them for the price of a cup / ice; customers self-serve with the machine.

The price point is $1 to about $2.

Coffee quickly became one of the most frequently repurchased items at convenience stores, in no small part because it’s the one thing they can sell which is phameceutically habit forming but totally unregulated. (Just telling it like it is.)

But the coffee is not very defensible

The problem, such that it is, is that competing chains are everywhere and *all* of them serve Thoroughly Adequate Coffee at similar prices, so you’re back into the brutal economics of “Who is 3 meters closer to 40 customers at 1 office?”

Enter payment apps.

Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.

In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.

Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.

Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")

Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.

The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't.

Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.

LARPing Our Way To Armageddon

The intense and present danger of fantasy

a thread

One of the interesting things about the scifi / fantasy writing community is that it contains many people who have much higher tolerance for fantasy than the norm.

People who can be around fantasy a lot, without losing track of reality.

Counter intuitive perhaps. But people who deal with fantasy at a professional level become expert at recognising its stench.

That's a useful skill in 2021, when the world, and particularly America, is being sucked into a vortex of unreality.

Because human beings do not, as a rule, have good tools for distinguishing fantasy from reality.

This isn't a bug of humankind, it's very much a feature.

Humans are what we are because of our ability to engage in the shared fantasy we call society / culture / civilisation.

Homo Sapiens are the species that LARPs

Which has always brought with it some structural issues

That just got waaaaaaaaaaay more serious

In early days I did all our copy.

It sucked so bad. Good thing, I made friends with people who taught me how to write.

Copywriting is the #1 skill for entrepreneurs. You write emails, articles, landing pages every day, and it helps you grow.

This will 10x your copy 👇

First, let's talk fundamentals:

Users on different stages of awareness will respond to a different language.

• Most aware readers understand your solution and are ready to purchase

• Product-aware readers are learning about your product. Free trials, demos will help conversion

• Solution-aware readers are considering solutions to their pain/problem

• Problem-aware readers are dealing with pain/problem

• Unaware readers haven’t experienced the problem

Make sure, that in the copy you:

• talk the language that mirrors the reader's stage of awareness
• move them from that stage to product/most-aware
• prompt them to take action

Focus copy on users.

Instead of saying "we offer" or "our solution," rewrite the copy to address your customers.

Exercise:
• begin with the word “you.”
• on landing pages, start your sentence with a verb.

How to outline articles:

A blend of @david_perell's process and SEO:

1/ David starts with a quote, a vague idea, or a concept that generates curiosity.

2/ Then, he searches inside his note-taking system for extracts and reflections related to the prompt.

These ideas come from his daily knowledge consumption.

3/ He then assembles extracts to create a narrative around a thesis.

An incomplete thesis will make a reader bounce. While the opposite makes them crave more of your content.

4/ Some of us never built a database.

To fix this, type your prompt into Google and examine the search results:

-People also ask
-Google autocomplete
-Image recommendations
-Related searches at the bottom

These will help you structure your post while following SEO practices.

5/ After creating an outline based on his notes, David rewrites sentences, words, and paragraphs from memory.

He adds personal anecdotes, analyzes ideas, and creates his narrative—A process he defines as POP writing.

I can feel it in my bones: NaNoWriMo starts soon. If you meant to do some novel planning this month but never quite got around to the planning part, here are a few questions to help you think through your story arc.

These questions are based on Hollywood screenplays, the hero’s journey, and the work of writers who are much smarter than I am—looking at you @RachaelHerron and @LaniDianeRich and @darynda. I didn’t invent any of this.

And, it's totally okay to do no outlining and just wing the whole dang thing! Or do your planning in a wildly different way. But I've found these questions useful. So.

To start, you’ll need a main character. Let’s assume your main character is an orphaned boy whose horrible extended family has forced him to live in a cupboard beneath the stairs. Question #1: What’s missing from your main character’s life?

All of us are missing something. Maybe it’s a feeling of danger or true love or a sense of higher purpose. Maybe it’s a large animatronic penguin that can dispense boba tea through its nostrils. For our orphaned boy, it’s a sense of belonging.

🚢 Atomic Essays Republishing Framework 🚢

1. Write Atomic Essay
2. Post image on Twitter
3. (Bonus) Copy/paste text as thread
4. Find relevant Question on Quora. Copy/paste Atomic Essay + image.
5. Copy/paste again on Medium.
6. Again on LinkedIn
7. Win

Guide below ✍️🚢👇

Step 1: Write Atomic Essay

I really enjoy writing right inside the Figma template. It helps give me a good sense of exactly how much "real estate" I have/have left before my time us up and I'm out of space.

Once finished, I export the image and send to my phone on Slack.

Step 2: Post image on Twitter

Before I publish my Atomic Essay on Twitter, I use the Edit/Photo Markup function on the iPhone to highlight standout sentences.

These are usually power-phrases: things the reader skims and thinks, "That's interesting," prompting them to read more.

Step 3: For the Ship 30 for 30 challenge, I only turn Atomic Essays into threads if...

1. The piece is SUPER actionable and lends itself well to the thread format (lots of bullets, quick points, lists, etc.)

or...

2. I'm referencing research and want to link to the pieces.

Step 4: Find relevant Question on Quora. Copy/paste Atomic Essay + image.

Search on Quora around the topic you wrote about. Find a related Question. Copy/paste the whole Atomic Essay as your "answer" (& fix formatting). Then include image so it appears in the thumbnail.