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How I Write → I Spent 50 Hours With 20 Master Writers

  • Tim Ferriss
    • Have a lower quality bar for inputs, but higher bar for outputs → Do less than you think you can do. The most important thing is building positive momentum of success. Complexity fails. Do two crappy pages a day.
    • Don’t focus on volume, focus on quality → You wouldn’t want to publish a poor quality book, because that will follow you throughout your career.
  • Kevin Kelly
    • Don’t aim to be the best, be the only → Aim to work on something that has no name yet, something that is very niche. In other words, you should have a tough time explaining it to your mother. Every sentence you write should be something that’s never been said before.
    • Surrender to your nature → Look for writing projects that you never want to stop doing. You must also be really, really good. You need both quality and distinctiveness.
  • Cultural Tutor
    • Don’t read something that’s been published in the last 50 years → Those are the books that everyone else is already reading. If books are the soil with which the ideas in your writing stem from, choose soil different from others so you may spawn a unique idea/concept. This will give you an edge as a writer.
  • Marc Andreessen
    • Barbell approach → It’s the timely or the timeless. You either read things that are super current like on Twitter or within the day or week, and on the other end are very old content like what you would read in history books.
  • Steven Pressfield