✍🏽 5 Insights from Writing Masters (Kevin Kelly, Tim Ferriss +)

The craft of writing is so important to anyone creating things in the world.

It’s the process of concretizing ideas, and articulating them in a way that’s clear and compelling.

The process impacts the way we think — which is why, with GPT able to write anything in any style, IMO it’s more important than ever to maintain and develop this skill, to prevent that part of the brain atrophying.

This week we’ve got:

¹ Insights From Writing Masters

• From this episode of David Perrell’s How I Write

• He distilled down key concepts from his 50+ hours of podcast episodes into 1 hour, and I’ve distilled that down further to a few key takeaways

• His Write of Passage Course looks useful

² The Best $42 I’ve Spent

• A tool I use to dial in when writing + journaling

✨Archegos & The Importance of Writing

• Archegos: Greek word meaning author, founder, pioneer, leader

• Represents a process: authoring an idea, founding something from the idea, pioneering a new way of thinking, and leading others in this new direction

• Examples

  • Mark Andreessen: uses writing to recruit people and share his ideas, building a new firm and leading it

  • America’s founding fathers: wrote the constitution and the Declaration of Independence, founded a new country, pioneered new ways of thinking about governance and democracy, and became the leaders of the United States

🧍🏽 Kevin Kelly: “don’t aim to be the best, be the only”

• Aim to work on something original, that doesn’t have a name yet — there’s no standard category or description for it. This is where the breakthroughs happen

• It may take a long journey of detours, backtracking, hard rights, and dead ends to arrive at the place where you’re doing something that only you can do. Follow your curiosity, passion, and enthusiasm

  • Believes most successful people’s lives are like this: detours, backtracking, hard rights, and dead ends because they’re on a journey of figuring out what they can do better than other people

• Encourages writing sentences that have never been written before

• Of course, his 1,000 True Fans Essay is a classic

🎨 Riva Tez: Writing as a Word Painting

• Thinks of writing as a word painting rather than a logical argument — doesn’t resonate with everyone, but it’s more poetic

• Believes in expressing oneself through different mediums of communication — i.e. she took an oil painting course to think in a different medium

• Compares writing to pointillism, an art of many dots that form a beautiful scene when viewed from a distance

• Reva’s writing method is influenced by the book “Against Method”

  • Chooses fanatical obsession over moderation

  • Waits for a strong desire to write, then writes non-stop until the project is done

• Advocates for reading Rilke, who she believes has mastered the art of word paintings

✍🏽 Tim Ferris: Minimum Daily Goals, Higher Quality

• Set a smaller daily goal than you think you’re able to, in order to build positive momentum

• Write two crappy pages per day to maintain a daily writing habit

• Ask friends for feedback on what to keep and what to cut from your writing

• Hire a lawyer or law student to proofread your work and tighten up your arguments

• Publishing a mediocre book is the worst thing you can do. The quality level of your work needs to be incredibly high

📖 The Cultural Tutor: Read Older Books

• Suggests not reading books published in the last 50 years

• If you’re reading what everyone else is reading, you’re going to think and write like everyone else

• Reading less popular or older books can provide unique ideas

• Side Note: Rick Rubin also recommends this to musicians — listen to the greatest albums of all time & abstain from contemporary music

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🎧 the best $42 I’ve spent

About 6 years ago I bought a pair of 3M construction earmuffs. It’s the best $42 I’ve ever spent.

They’re analog noise canceling — they create a full acoustic seal around your ear.

It’s a little world of silence for your brain. It’s an entirely different experience from earplugs or noise-cancelling headphones.

By drowning out the ambient noise of the outside world, I notice a palpable increase in clarity and focus.

I’m able to better tune into what’s happening with my thoughts, emotional landscape, and body.

Huberman’s episode on Music shared studies that show people work best on cognitive tasks in complete silence.

I find the silence especially conducive for musical ideas to emerge and arise. And, for writing.

“There isn’t really such a thing as silence… in the absence of sound, the brain often tends to produce internal representations of sound.” - Robert Zatorre, an expert on the neurology of sound.

My Use Cases

• Writing!

• Journaling / Morning Pages

• Deep Work

• Psychedelic Journeys → Cannabis, Psilocybin, Ketamine

• Reading

• Hape

• ‘Faux Tank’ → laying down for an hour with earmuffs + eyemask

• Flights

this & that

🫡 Willpower can be trained + it can atrophy

• From Huberman’s episode on Willpower & Tenacity: willpower is associated with the anterior mid cingulate cortex

• This region of the brain grows by doing things you don’t want to do

• It atrophies when we don’t do challenging things

• In order to keep willpower strong — keep a list of ‘micro-sucks’ to do every day, things that you feel resistance towards

📱 Phone Trick: turn iPhone to red at night to remove blue light

• (iPhone) Settings → Color Filters → Color Tint → Red

📖 Newsletter I’m Reading: The Cultural Tutor (mentioned above)

• Seven short lessons each Friday on Historical Figure | Art | Classical Music | Architecture | Rhetoric | Writing | Anecdotes

💭 Podcast I’m listening to: Daniel Kaluuya x Rick Rubin

• Excellent insights on true presence in the creative process, improvisation, embodying the character

• On imitation: watch the person, how does he make me feel? i want others to feel like that; i try to create the energy that makes people feel like that

💡 Quote

• “Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?”

  • Derek Sivers - Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur