I found this thread by Andrew Chen super interesting so I thought I’d use it as a test for Darius Kazemi’s little tool, spooler. Works great! (Not sure why some tweets were regrouped in one paragraph and others not though…)
I simply pasted from spooler to here and made some small tweaks.
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After 10+ years of publishing professional writing at, I have a couple opinions on how to get your stuff read (andrewchen.co).
Titles are 80% of the work, but you write it as the very last thing. It has to be an compelling opinion or important learning.
There’s always room for high-quality thoughts/opinions. Venn diagram of people with knowledge and those who can communicate is tiny.
Writing is the most scalable, professional networking activity. Stay home, don’t go to events/conferences, and just put ideas down. Think of your writing on the same timescale as your career. Write on a multi-decade timeframe. This means, don’t just publish on Quora/Medium.
Focus on writing frequency over anything else. Schedule it. Don’t worry about building an immediate audience. Focus on the intrinsic. To develop the habit, put a calendar reminder each Sunday for 2 hours. I forced myself to stare at a blank text box and put something down.
Most of my writing comes from talking/reading, deciding I strongly agree or disagree. These opinions become titles. Titles become essays. People are often obsessed with needing to write original ideas. Forget it. You’re a journalist with a day job in the tech industry.
An email subscriber is worth 100x twitter or LinkedIn followers or whatever other stuff is out there. An email = a real channel.
I started writing while working at a VC. They asked, “Why give away ideas? That’s your edge.” Ironic that VCs blog/tweet all day now ;)
Publishing ideas, learnings, opinions, for years & years is a great way to give. And you’ll figure out how to capture value later.
Today I learned that tweetstorms can be way less structured than writing an essay, which makes it much easier ;) This is my first one! OK that’s all for now! Thanks for reading :)
Bonus: In order of value, Writing > Reading books > Reading reddit > Twitter > FB/Instagram.
Photo by Freddy Castro on Unsplash.