writing

Blog about what you've struggled with

I'm against writing advice but here's some anyway

When your commonplace book is a public database

Give a good ending to your readers that’s good for business too. Here’s how to do that – Content Marketing Institute

And it’s not to be a generalist.

The “writer brain” helps content marketers in the early part of their career, but, left unchecked, it hinders them in the latter stages.

Narrative nonfiction writers who have written books: What one thing do you wish you'd known when you started working on your first book? What do you wish you'd done differently?

K guys I need all your book writing advice. Like, all of it. You may think “we’ll surely she knows this” I don’t I am dumb as rocks, help me

I started reading Paul Graham because I was interested in startups. But I continued reading him because I became interested in good writing. Similarly, he once told an interviewer, “You have got me as your guy for programming and entrepreneurship or something like that. And, actually, probably, it is writing. More than anything else.”

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I learned writing from The Economist. Back home, it wasn’t easy to learn English. No one in my social circle was fluent in the language and I couldn’t afford a private tutor. The best I could do was to create my own syllabus. The kiosk near my house had, to my surprise, the newspaper

My writing brought this woman to me – the highest ROI of my life I’ve been publishing for 20 years and wanted to pass along what I’ve learned. Giving away good information for fre…

Everyone should write. You know why? Because everyone is full of ideas they’re not aware of. You don’t talk about these ideas, even in your own head, because you’ve never put them into words. They’re gut feelings. Intuitions. You use them a dozen times a day. But you’d shrug your shoulders if someone asked why. How you react to career risk. Why you invest the way you do. Why you like some people and question others. We’re all brimming with opinions on these topics that we may never discuss, even with ourselves. Like phantom intelligence. Intuition is strong enough to put these ideas into practice. But intuition isn’t a tool; it’s a safety net at best, and is more often the fuel of biased decisions. Turning gut feelings into tools means understanding their origin, limits, and how they interact with other ideas. Which requires turning them into words. And writing is the best way to do that. Writing crystallizes ideas in ways thinking on its own will never accomplish. The reason is simple: It’s hard to focus on a topic in your head for more than a few seconds without getting distracted by another thought, and distractions erase whatever you attempted to think about. But words on paper stick. They aren’t washed away by the agitator in your head who won’t shut up about the tone of an email someone just sent you. You might be able to hold focus just briefly in your head, but a sentence on paper has all the patience in the world, waiting for you to return whenever you’re ready. It’s hard to overemphasize how important this is. Putting ideas on paper is the best way to organize them in one place, and getting everything in one place is essential to understanding ideas as more than the gut reactions they often hide as. Take four questions: What is your edge over competitors? How do you react to unforeseen risk? What have you changed your mind about recently? What part of your job are you not good at? These are vital questions that most of us, if asked on the spot, couldn’t answer well. Not because we haven’t thought about them; we certainly have. But the thoughts are probably vague, unsubstantiated, or pure emotions. Many people’s response to the first question would be an uncomfortable pause, a ponder, and a lump in the throat. Which says a lot, just not in words. It’s not until you put thoughts on paper that everything from ignorance to denial to unfulfilled potential is viewed in the raw, ready to be analyzed. Sometimes writing is encouraging. You realize you understand a topic better than you thought. The process flushes out all kinds of other ideas you never knew you had hiding upstairs. Now you can apply those insights elsewhere. Other times it’s painful. Forcing the logic of your thoughts into words can uncover the madness of your ideas. The holes. The flaws. The biases. Thinking “I want this job because it pays a lot of money” is bearable. Seeing the words on paper looks ridiculous. Things the mind tends to gloss over the pen tends to highlight. Warren Buffett once said: Some of the things I think I think, I find don’t make any sense when I start trying to write them down. You ought to be able to explain why you’re taking the job you’re taking, why you’re making the investment you’re making, or whatever it may be. And if it can’t stand applying pencil to paper, you’d better think it through some more. A common question people ask professional writers is, “Where do you get your ideas?” A common answer is, “From writing.” Writers don’t know exactly what they’ll write about until they start writing, because the process crystallizes the fuzzy ideas we all have floating around. This chicken-and-egg problem is probably why writing is intimidating for some people. They don’t think they can write because – in their head, as this moment – they don’t know what they’d write about. But hardly anyone does. So, write. A journal. A business manifesto. An investment plan. You don’t have to publish it. It’s the process that matters. You’ll uncover so much you never knew.

Perfectionism is killing me...

Content that converts must first persuade, so content marketers would do well to learn from professional persuaders: lawyers.

Have you ever noticed that nearly all relatable founders have a compelling backstory? It's commonly referred to as a "founder story" and it's the narrative of how a startup company came to be. The story often helps build deep brand loyalty among the company's user base...

The World War II fighter pilot who sold 250 million copies of children’s books

How to iterate your way to quality

More than ten, actually. Millions of books will be published this year and for good reason. People rarely regret the effort. Everyone has their own, but here are some of the reasons to get you star…

A collection of concepts to help you figure out how to write blog posts that attract readers, create opportunities, and help you accomplish your goals.

Issue 30

I love this from Tim Stoddart : “Hate to break it to you, but the people who read my morning blog read my worst work. Which is actually the point. This is my warm up. This is my set of jumping jacks before I do burpees. This is my slow jog around the track before I do sprints. Creative work is

In my last round of edits, right before I publish an article, I have one focus: writing CLEAR sentences. The acronym CLEAR stands for: Create a rhythm Link your sentences Eliminate anything that adds confusion Add colorful details Remove unnecessary details I’ll describe each in turn. Create a Rhythm: Great writing has rhythm. It’s like

Writing like you talk is good advice because it forces you to write clearly. But follow the advice too closely and your sentences will suffer.

There are two kinds of articles: Clear Thesis articles where you know exactly what you’re going to say before you start writing, and Foggy Intuition ones where writing helps you discover what you think. Foggy Intuition articles are harder because you have to start writing before you have the answers. Since you don’t know how

Matt Stone and Trey Parker want each episode of South Park to have a sense of cause and effect, tension and rising action. To do that, they’ve studied the science of effective storytelling.