Writing is like a doctor's checkup for your thinking. So many of the questions that I ask myself when I get stuck are just questions that you've come up with. You know where to look or what questions to ask, you could find gaps that are just invisible until you sit down and think about it. If you could have a billboard for writers, what do you tell the city of aspiring writers? Do something interesting first, but you can take like A plus material with B minus writing and come out with something that people really want to pay attention to. My books are not short in case you have
have been posted there. I'm the way it's with your. Yeah, they're huge. I do travel mentors. Yeah, the travel mentors in for our body. I'm working on a book right now. It's the first book I've worked on six years. Can you share about that? Well, it's actually I can't share specifics, but I can share. Tell me about hypographio. Like what is it? I don't have an irritabit. So you could have, I guess, hypo like hypothermia and then you could have hyper hypermania, hyperthermia.
Hypergraphia, in my case, is not anything I've been diagnosed with, but it's a convenient term to use because I have notebook upon notebook upon notebook. I have effectively walls of notebooks going back to when I was probably 16 or 17. I mean, I've almost every workout I've ever done recorded as an example. Oh wow. That's just one category. So graphia would refer to writing, just like you have, let's say, it does.
Lexia and I have a lot of friends who take a lot of notes I think I take more than most hence the hyper and that's been I think a foundational aspect of a lot of what I've done certainly in the writing capacity when I ended up trying the shoe on to see if it fit for actual long form writing. It's all research. Yeah. Everything's not working. If you don't know what to do next for me the first question is have you done enough research. Do you have enough raw material? If not, get more.
Don't have something interesting to write about. You haven't done something interesting. Go do something interesting. When was that moment that you put on that shoe? Was it a Princeton with John McFee before after? I would say that I had dabbled in writing in the same way that any elementary school kid or high schooler is forced to with school members and so on but I never studied the craft of writing per se.
I was ashamed to admit it until my I guess with my senior year in college literature effect with John McFee and I'm sure I had English classes and guidelines and so on but in terms of getting good instruction from a very legitimate practitioner of the craft it would have to be that class with Professor McFee which was a game changer for me in a whole lot of levels and had side effects I couldn't have predicted for instance.
It was a small class I wanted to say maybe 12 kids and begged and pleaded and negotiated to make my case to be in this seminar and the class consisted of two pieces. The first was a lecture so every week we'd sit down and for three hours or whatever it was McFee would get up and he'd sketch out structures and he would explain pieces and teach us the lessons that he learned.
The other piece was once a week I was once a week we had independent writing assignments and then you would get one on one time with McFee and he would come in with let's just say it's by pages and there'd be more red ink than your original black ink of his notes and then you'd sit down you'd look at us and walk you through and explain his notes and that is I knew it then but even now I would say I appreciate it more.
I think draft number four does a pretty good job of running people through a lot of the content from that course. I think that there was also I want to say in the Paris review a number of interviews the art of nonfiction there's at least one long for a piece which was conversation with McFee which also covered a lot of the feedback he would give.
If something was amorphous and ill-defined it might be and I'm pulling this from a piece I didn't actually get this in class with him but pea soup so I just write in the margin pea soup and that would be shorthand for McFee as of sometime. What does that mean? That it's just it's unclear and we're trying to do it's unclear.
One of the repeat offenders on my side and I suspect on the part of a lot of these students was trying to sound fancy or dress up your writing in some way that was patently absurd to someone with the keen eye of a McFee right. He would be like what is this weird move and then you would not be able to defend it and you'd be like what does this sentence mean?
What do you try to say here? Remove and as he excised these things from my writing my thinking became much crisper and my grids in all my other classes that I can remember went up so it wasn't just writing it was revising writing which is revising thinking which
then transferred to a lot of my other classes that at face value would never expect to be affected by such a thing like language learning Chinese why would the literature affect my grades and something like Chinese yeah at least immediately even now it's kind of hard for me to explain but that was that was the effect.
What do you feel like made him a great teacher so I think of my favorite teacher in high school his name was Miles Chen and he had this way of teaching astrophysics in a way that was fun and it made me laugh and he would have these competitions and these prizes would actually
wasn't even about the information delivery all the time and then think of another teacher who more virtually I've gained a lot from like Jordan Peterson took a lot of concepts around psychology and the Bible that I thought were really dry and sterile and he just ignited them like brought them to life what was it about McFee that was so compelling for you.
First of all most he is an A plus practitioner so anyone who's in that class as a student knows that they are learning from an operator who has spent decades honing his craft in this case pull his surprise maybe two at that point I can't remember and yeah the bonafides you also had
there's there's McFee as a teacher so what makes McFee a good teacher there's also what makes a good class there's aren't necessarily the same thing yeah right so I think any teacher is beholden to the format they choose or that is chosen for them yeah so you can take a great teacher
and let's just say they're not allowed to have any class participation or interaction right and that might completely handicap them so the fact that we had a small class size the fact that he had been doing this for a very long time revising it revising it revising it refining it refining it
it's kind of like a comedian who at a very high level like takes a year to workshop material you see the finished product and you're like oh wow this guy must be funny all the time right and load be old you meet them in person you go to a dinner and
they're not immediately funny all the time there are exceptions but it's often because they started with something very rough right and polished it to a fine sheen so there was the fact that we were not the first muggy shot in the space on spaceship McFee like he had had he had a lot of
repetitions yeah is it also compelling charismatic teacher yeah in the sense that he he knows where to inject humor and I haven't thought about this in the decades but he's like what do you wear from the class like this is what I remember which is kind of embarrassing example but at one point
he was talking about quotations in written pieces okay in other words using dialogue so you know said so and so blah blah and he's like don't get too cute with it it's like you don't need to be like da da da da da da Robert ejaculate it he's like don't say ejaculate it like he
don't need to do that it's distracting yeah and I'm paraphrase well of course so he knew when to add in humor for me it was a good class I'm not sure I actually should say I am sure that my experience would differ from a lot of other people in the class yeah every student in the class I mean I
was intimidated by other students in the class they were good writers and a lot of good writers have come out of his class I think David Remnick also yeah was a student of his way back of the day and as one of many examples I guess his roster is pretty illustrious I would say another aspect is
his class was hard hmm and if you are going to rise to the occasion you need someone who's going to set the bar quite high and so a lot of the hard work I think that he did was also selecting the cohort the team matters yeah team matters a lot the fact that I was intimidated by the students
was a good thing for me hmm I didn't want to look foolish I was able to see good examples and therefore I gained a lot in the seminar and then the one-on-one is a complete game changer and that's affected how I also work for instance with some employees of mine in the sense that if
I want to try to train them to be better communicators clear communicators I will take say an email draft that they put into a Google Doc I'll switch the mode to suggesting as opposed to editing and I'll redline and then either do say zoom screen share or because we do almost
everything remotely use something like loom and walk through and explain my red lines it's not enough to just give someone a red line the rationale behind our advice is what matters and in that way you can over time email draft by email drafts refine thinking and writing
surprisingly quickly yeah and so there have been longstanding results I actually still have all of my notes from McFee's class in a box I have not reviewed them in a very very long time but the fact that my notes and resources and papers also that I wrote from that class have
traveled with me since 2000 yeah says something no kidding yeah you know you're talking about with McFee and the word ejaculate it is funny how later on he's gonna make a great clip for you right later on take care as ejaculate on camera later on what do you are writing the four-hour
work week you said your first draft you're trying to sound smart you're like okay this isn't gonna worst and that's sort of like that then the second draft you're like okay I'm gonna be funny and then that one doesn't work yeah and I guess it was the third draft explain it to friends after
a few glasses of wine and you're like that's my flow to be in for yeah so exactly right so you've done your homework write it as if I'm two glasses in with friends and I wrote it in an email composition box that's key in terms of setting the conditions such that the tone would be
right sitting in a word document felt formal but actually composing it at least parts of it in email help me to build a little bit of momentum and then I could transfer it into an actual word editor whether that's a word or generally with most of my book projects has been
scripted as a tool I think very visually and it's it's just an easier format at least thus far it's been the easiest tool for me to use for the job of writing long nonfiction I think we was Churchill who said first we shape our buildings or tools then our tools shape us how does
scrivener as a tool shape your writing it lessens attachment to a set table of contents so the way that I set up scrivener scrivener for those who don't know I believe was initially designed for scre... it was either screenwriter playwright and what makes it interesting to me and there may
be better tools out there but I'm working for instance on a book right now which I can't say too much about first book I've worked on six years and I would plan personally on using mostly scrivener and the reason for that is that you can for instance on the left hand side of the window
have a vertical list basically of all of the documents that you're working on and for me I break those into say three or four folders those are sections in the book and then I have these documents within these folders and if you want to move those around whether it's the folders or the documents
you just click and drag right furthermore below that table of contents which is constantly changing constantly moving around I have research below that so I have research that I can reference so rather than clicking through multiple windows you could have multiple screens for this too
but I have this left right so on the left you have this overview of what I'm working on on the right hand side then imagine that it's going to be a little easier for me to visualize than to explain maybe but you have the right three quarters of the screen split into a top half
and a bottom half on the top is what I'm working on that's the chapter I'm writing and then below that is the research that I'm referencing oh interesting so the amount of flow that I can achieve without interruption without losing tabs or windows without crashing words or just completely
destroying most word processing software is pretty remarkable so the text files themselves are very lightweight you can have footnotes and stuff I usually don't get too fancy I have done that for selling my books but those are a few other reasons that I like to use script or how does
it shape me it it emboldens me to experiment more with structure than I otherwise would because it's low friction very very very very very easy to move stuff around like I could switch two sections and read it and see how the flow goes don't like it no brown boom two seconds later it's reverted
so hey so when you're talking about research what is the percentage of research these are personal experience experiments that I've done observations that I've collected versus I was reading this book and I collected this fact and now it's in there so it's hard for me to say I mean historically
and the tool kit is going to change because the tools evolve but I would use ever note let's just say I have an idea percolating for a book whether that's for our chef including say a lot on accelerated learning for our body whatever I would use the web clipper forever note yes if I came across
anything that was sent to me anything that I found a scientific study and interview that I thought might be relevant I would web clip that and take it into every note yeah I would also take ever note notes and I use more tools now but ever note was this was the default for a very long time
then and I'm going to come to your question but I would go back and pretty much immediately since research can be a means of procrastinating also it's not always upside it can be a very fancy way of not doing your homework to avoid that and to avoid the overwhelm of looking back at say
two weeks of collecting random web clips and thinking holy shit now I have to read 600 pages I would go through immediately in ever note and put three asterisks and bold anything that I thought was most important in that piece this allows me to control after command that later
mm-hmm and just search for that yeah and find the the relevant pieces in each of these notes so then the review process becomes very fast I would say that in my what I would consider my best work which doesn't mean it's great work it's just the best that I can do it's most Lee personal
experimentation or interviews with people who have done first hand experimentation right if it's less just call it second hand or book based research there are a number of issues with that for me the first is that I think the readers attention is more likely to wander because
it's a depersonalized just a speculation but I think that would probably hold the second is I have no competitive edge right if it's digesting books and pulling anecdotes and stories and facts and figures from books anybody can do that right and increasingly so anyone can do that yeah
no kidding not to derail this whole conversation with AI but the process of doing that type of thing through research or honestly just getting very good at spellcasting with good queries and chat GPT or other tools you will not have a competitive edge yep my competitive advantage is
for at least the foreseeable next two years no i i robots going to be going out and doing the hair brand experiments that I do myself yeah and then writing about them in a personalized way that's harder to imitate it's harder for anyone to imitate because it is it is higher label it
is higher labor and they're more barriers to entry right so if I want to write compelling writing and if I want to write something that is highly differentiated I would say most of it's going to lean towards experimentation or reporting on someone else's experimentation that has not been
captured right one of the things that struck me as I was reading the for our work week was there is a section towards the end of the book where you have basically a set of principles on parameters for an assistant that you work with and I think it's point number seven nine something
like that is how important your brand and respectability is and you basically say if anyone of a who's a CEO of a well-known company saw this and they wouldn't they sort of scratch their head or something I'm probably not going to be interested and it's I then just started looking
over and over and over that seems to have been the nor star that you have used for your brand for for years and you talk about it with advertising deals that you work with for the podcast is like one of the places where I think that you've really gone for the maximum where a lot of people
are much more about just satisfying is around brand credibility respectability mm-hmm yeah if there are per-budget reasons right I mean one is I think if you want to be the fullest expression of yourself which for a lot of people will this can become a
weasley word so we can dive into this if you want but being creative on some level you need good constraints to be creative you need really strong constraints and people might think well I want to be outside the box or at least I want a really huge box and I would argue a lot of
the time you actually want the smallest box possible so that your options are constrained so you can make faster better decisions mm-hmm what that means is I have policies for all sorts of things in life and a lot of them are around this scarce resource which is very easily destroyed called
reputation credibility and this is going to become increasingly scarce and increasingly valuable like I think I think reputation and credibility is like the new gold mm-hmm and there is a certain finite supply at least a finite amount of trust that any consumer any person can put into other
people and so they're going to choose the people with the highest signal of credibility for them and from a competitive perspective I really try not to compete I mean in the sense that I think being a category of one is much more yeah interesting mm-hmm as an artistic challenge and it's much more defensible and sustainable nonetheless if you have to compete for attention what you do having impeccable and you slip up and you make mistakes and maybe you recommend something like ah man like
it had all five stars and now it's three stars because there was some defector maybe I gave them the hug of death right by sending too many people through the newsletter so I set two million people to this like hot sauce maker and then they tried to scale to boost production and the quality dropped
to like ah fuck and then people get upset well understandably like I mean things like this happen but I really try to think very carefully often very slowly about decisions so that I can play the long game right of credibility which doesn't mean trying to be a expert it just means
if you ask someone do you trust Tim's recommendations that their answer is going to be yes is often as possible yeah and you have to turn out a lot for that mm-hmm I hate my experience anyway yeah now you need to turn out a lot 80% of the sponsors who come through including people are
willing to spend millions of dollars and saying no that is that has a cost very measurable cost then there are all these other attachments that are harder to measure but when I look at the ability to do something I love doing for 10 years and to feel good about it
I don't feel conflicted about at all like I never second guess those decisions you're talking about distinctiveness and being a category of one how intentionally did you think about cultivating your voice like I know that you learned a lot from Kurt Vonnegut and maybe we can start there but
how did you think about that so there are ways to develop voice but I think it's a preoccupation that is premature for a lot of folks and I think it is the top of mind for a lot of people who are ambitious or eager to get started it was top of mind for me I would say content is king
hmm like worry about the what before you worry about the hell yep right if you look at for instance 50 shades great funny example to bring up maybe I know so many people who have tried to read that and have been unable to because of the right in quality but how many copies do that sell
yeah 10 million 20 million 30 hundred million I thought I'm ha ha Hollywood movies why great premise it it struck a chord in a very off menu way that that captured the imagination of a country and then an entire world start off as fan fiction to that's all separate thing you know worry about
the what first if your subject matter is like a B minus and you're going to rely on A plus writing to make it super compelling if you're John McKeith fine if you're David Foster Wallace fine but maybe you shouldn't assume that you're gonna have the superpowers to pull that off yeah
and I think in the beginning the cheat is do something more interesting interview some one more interesting which by the way doesn't mean they need to be a superstar one of the writing assignments we had in McFee's class I remember was effectively
and I I may have adapted this from the letter of the law of the assignment but effectively interviewing invisible people like people who are largely ignored service staff yeah whatever the case might be and it's your job to make it interesting yeah and you can do that have you heard
the McCullough look at your fish story no okay so McCullough had a teacher and when he was in school and basically on the first day the teacher flopped the fish on the table and goes I'm going to leave the room right about the fish so he leaves for 20 minutes and he goes okay students what did you
what did you write and the students are like what are you talking about you put a fish on the table there's nothing to write about he's like no keep looking at it goes again and again and again and the whole point is that by the end of the semester they have to write 10 pages or something
about the fish and they can because the whole lesson is that the things are always there you just have to look and look and look yeah it's a great exercise so another short format exercise which were always kind of like three to five pages I want to say in the literature fact class was to
look at this somewhat bizarre abstract figure this large statute which was in a courtyard at Princeton right about it does it and and I want to emphasize again the conditions right small class seminar plus one-on-one you're getting to hear other students writing and you realize how much of
a roshamun gain the sense of being it I haven't seen roshamun go watch it a cure a curacao amazing film also has inspired a lot of movies that are more recent that people will be able to the last duel for instance really also a great movie but look at the shifting of perspectives
and you realize okay at first glance you might think there's very little to write about but how many different perspectives could you take now you could take the historical you could take the aesthetic you could take the environmental you could talk about everything around the
statue which is what some people do for profile pieces right they can't get a hold of subject they take this sort of 360 interview approach to paint a picture of the person they can't get a hold of there's so many different approaches but the the principle I'm trying to underscore is
when in doubt do something more interesting like the what instead of the how but if we're talking about the how and voice I do think you you get there over time by embracing your weird self as my friend Chris so I could be and not necessarily exaggerating but not hiding your idiosyncrasies
leaning into it yeah like I have all sorts of jokes in most of my books to make them amusing for me yeah they make no sense to anybody yeah and editors and copy editors are like this makes no sense like we need to take this out and I'm like now you can leave it so it's like an inside joke with me
and a researcher yeah and they're stupid but they're highly highly highly functional in the sense that if you do not have some degree of fun or excitement around what you're writing at some point I still find writing incredibly difficult somebody asked me recently they're like I imagine each book
got subsequently easier than the one proceeding and I was like I know my writing I think it's just gotten harder for me actually but it doesn't get easier and therefore the need to make it interesting on some level which can be in the writing the free writing experiential phase right doing
cool things interesting things and or it can be in the writing phase but it's a lot easier to do something interesting while you're still honing your craft so you can take like a plus material with B minus writing and come out with something that people really want to pay attention to then I
think to do the opposite right tell me about how you have used your newsletter to reboot your writing like the hand been running a lot and you're like hey I'm gonna use this newsletter what have you been doing if you are connecting with your audience predominantly through Facebook Instagram
TikTok whatever might be you're renting your audience you do not own a direct means of communication there might be exceptions where you can export and perhaps their workarounds but fundamentally there are a couple of things that are proclaimed dead every year okay blogs are dead emails dead
this is dead and yet they're still here yeah yeah all the kids now they're never gonna use email like yeah until they get a job and then guess what they're gonna use email so I recognize the importance of having that direct means of communication I wanted to do something novel
wanted to experiment with a new format I also wanted to try to resurrect my writing which I had backed off of in a really significant way because the podcast was easier the podcast was fun podcast had my full attention it was far more lucrative than any writing I could do and
yet I wanted to continue to sharpen the eggs and that was important why it was important to me because I think you become a slower dollar thinker if you don't write hmm regularly you will get worse and writing is like an annual checkup or a doctor's checkup for your
thinking so I feel compelled to write at the very least just check how sloppy or tight my thinking is and with the newsletter which has whatever it is two million plus subscribers now the Bible of Friday which is the name of it was important because it's set of the
Hasfield mark at a really low bar so that makes sense my bullets that's it of course I have no excuse mm-hmm not to write this newsletter but then occasionally and most people who have done a fair amount of writing will feel see where this is going for instance and I went to career recently
first trip to Seoul had an amazing time and wanted to do a career focused five bullet Friday there's plenty to talk about yeah and I put the other five bullets that became eight bullets and then once I started fleshing out these various bullets turned into like fiber six pages yeah so in a sense it
violated the basic parameters of the newsletter ended up being pretty long but I felt very good about it because it got the wheels moving and I spent a good amount of time on it so it was effectively a blog post right and I probably will end up being a blog post but do less than you think you can do
mm-hmm is the takeaway if you want to forge a new behavior do less than you think you can do the most important thing is building positive momentum of quote-unquote success if you don't have an exercise habit and your new year's resolution is to work out six days a week and you've
for the last year have not worked out even twice a week don't do that mm-hmm hour workout no 10 minutes of workout do less than you think you can do two things I've taken from you is complexity fails yeah and two crappy pages per day yeah yeah yeah if I get that from
they might have been Pope Branson I got it from somebody else I think it was Pope Branson two crappy pages a day yeah yeah yeah that tracks in my prep I think it was two crappy pages per day I guess this was inspired by the IBM sales team oh yeah with the sales quotas what's the story
there this the story there and I might be getting some of the factual but as I remember it is that at one point time IBM had an incredibly dominant sales force and I want to say journalists was asking might have been a writer investigating why this was the case and counter intuitively
one of the answers that was provided by an insider was that the the quotas were quite low so the compensation so a contingent commission based compensation was very high so you have that incentive but the quotas were set quite low so that people were not intimidated to pick up the
phone there was less of a fear factor right and so they were able to take that first step in my case like putting together five links in five both right it that's enough mm-hmm I could mail that out in some weeks I do I'm busy I know what I want to include you know what people can figure it out
on their own right don't gonna be valuable that's all it goes out but it gets the wheels moving so that if I do feel the muse knocking at the door or I've had too much caffeine who knows that I can sit down I can write five pages six pages I feel really good about them and I think
that returns back to something I was mentioning which is just set the bar low now there are times when I'm very perfectionist and when I'm very meticulous but that's later right right later that comes later it's like okay when the car is done when you've got it in mint condition you've
taken it around the track you know it works and then you want to like buff the hood fine then you can be a perfectionist mm-hmm really do when you are doing the initial when your brain storing possible designs for the car that's about the time to do it yeah there's a nice bit from
your interview with Jerry Seinfeld where he says early in the process you want to treat yourself like a baby yeah and whatever goes oh do whatever play around and then later on you're like a sergeant you're sergeant you're super strict and that these two modes of being have to be separate
in the creative process yeah I feel that way when I mean my my inclination is to be the sergeant so the one that I have to do is more on the forebar and then some people are very easy going go with the flow and they probably need just like the yoga people need to do more weights and the way people
need to do more yoga it's it's it's it's always matter trade off so if you have any super barriers you're gonna have super weaknesses yes so it's it's and it's not a question of fixing the super weaknesses is just like all right how can you leverage your strengths while addressing
the weaknesses enough if need be such that you can continue to play whatever long game you've committed to so what do you feel like you're working on in your writing what is the thing that you would maybe even say is a weakness and you're like I want to address that I want to get better at that
playing with different formats so I mean after five successful books right I have a formula that works right I know how to do it just like there's certain people out there I'll leave them unnamed but it's like their tweets are always format in the same way they have three parts
if you look at it closely you can be like aha I see the recipe and they never deviate and people love these tweets yep but at some point I find that personally very unfulfilling right it's like okay I get it I can do this and I can take a certain type of subject matter kind of
copy and paste that into these various structures that I know work but after five at bat so I have experimented within books also I would like to toy around with more unusual ways of structuring the narratives and explorations when you're going to give us some
fiction I have actually written quite a bit of fiction and I've shared some of it as a podcast actually with voice actors bizarrely we can get into this if you want but it's called the Legend of Cockpunch I could do not so people can look that up and they can unpack that on their
own but I love fantasy and I love sci-fi I read a lot of fiction actually and I wanted to I wanted to actually publish not just rake because I'd done like small tiny fiction experiments in my own and never shared it with anybody I wanted to actually force myself
to publish to face that discomfort yeah for a number of reasons and to experiment with world building this is ongoing so I ended up writing 13 I want to say chapters about describing the histories of various greater houses and the thologies and intercoining political alliances and old
MNVs all the stuff about this fantasy realm and that was part of experimenting with format because like what works to me in nonfiction there's certain there's certain tools and certain tricks and kind of literary devices that you can transplant but it's also a very different thing and
I wanted to play with a completely different mode of expression not just expression but also writing in the sense that generally I'm amassing vast cement research picking the most interesting bits and then flushing it out right I know exactly where things are going right so I've I've the
blueprint I execute the plan and it's bricklay well one of the things hold that thought one of the things that I thought was interesting in terms of your process for the four hour chef was you looked at all the books with a four and a half star review you read their views you said what's missing
and then you started there and then you said okay I'm going to begin there do a bunch of research and then compile that and I think that's a good example of how you're thinking about writing a nonfiction book that's the third in a series and then what you end up getting is like a
supreme density of insight like I could not believe it the most highlighted books and Kindle history at some point were the ESV Bible the four hour body the one year Bible and then the four hour work week and that density is so core to how you write it is so I wanted to try doing
something completely different right and in the world of fiction what that meant was since I'm not wedded to research I'm not wedded to facts I should be able to defend mm-hmm I was able to set conditions I was able to say all right here are two characters in a weird situation right
until the chapter's done mm-hmm no research there was a lot of research that went into certain aspects of these worlds and I'm studying architecture or certain types of mythology but I felt free to use t-k's mm-hmm things I would come back to and fix later and just make shit up yeah
and that is a very uncomfortable and I would say nourishing approach to writing they will ultimately make me a better nonfiction writer not because you can just make I don't think you should make shit up if it's nonfiction I'm kind of defeats the purpose people do it but I feel strongly against
it but that type of embracing a flow and not interrupting your writing to fill in gaps and research that you can fill in later this is a practice I would like to cultivate so it's cultivating that in fiction but I think that will apply and actually it is applying to some nonfiction that I'll be
working on uh so I wouldn't view these is is totally distinct disciplines that view it is cross training for me right and if you're stuck on one go do something else right in the sense that I always want to I like to give myself a way to cross train and switch if I am at an impasse for
whatever reason and I do that with my writing also maybe this will be helpful to people but one of the best pieces of advice that I received very early on was actually from an agent I don't know if she's still agents Jillian Manus in the NUS and I'll paraphrase it because I don't
remember exactly what she said but she read my original proposal for the four hour work week and she's very encouraging she's like I can't take out as a client but let's meet up and she gave me some feedback and she recommended that each chapter be entirely self-sufficient and stand alone strong
like a long-form magazine piece right and I thought about that for a long time and I ended up by a large approach before our work week that way what advantages that have well first advantages for the reader the reader can jump around even though the four hour work week is intended to be
a logical linear read so would suggest that to most people but the the reader can jump around and it'll be coherent just as important but not as explicitly obvious it makes it easier to write if everything is contingent on all the pieces that come before it it's very hard to write in a
non-linear way but if each chapter is effectively a self-sufficient module if I get stuck on chapter three I can have to chapter eight and I work on that so I can keep momentum and avoid getting demoralized by an impasse tell me about this advice you got from Michael Gerber before writing the
four hour work week you may need to remind me if they're gonna write a book right a fucking write a fucking book that's so good it is good it is good I I'm often asked by friends acquaintances strangers who I've unwind to for book advice and or they
will say I've got a great idea for book I'm definitely gonna write a book sometime or I'm planning on writing a book and there are people who are very serious about it and they say I would I would like to write a book if they've given it some dedicated thought they have a plan
they have a premise etc etc and generally what I will say to people and there are mutants out there who can violate this and produce a great book but they're very few and that relates to my answer which is if this cannot be your hot priority your hot priority so you're gonna have to beg
for forgiveness with your family or they're gonna have to give it freely you're gonna have to compromise your work whatever your company is so to speak that's gonna have to play second fiddle if this cannot be your hot priority for the next year minimum don't do a book
hmm there is a glut of mediocrity in the world now kidding please don't contribute to it furthermore there may be a hundred thousand plus books published in the us alone which I'm sure is the case probably much higher now and books for a reader come and go for you Mr. author if you
put out a book that is a c-minus you're gonna have to live with that c-minus for the rest of your life so if you're gonna do a book do a fucking book take it seriously and very few people will follow that advice a lot will do a book it'll be priority number six it'll have a very short life it will
not do what they hoped it would do and then they have to live with that mediocrity forever because it is attached to their names and if they went through traditional publisher and it's not out of print they're going to have to be reminded of that on a pretty regular basis and a fair number
of friends who are close to me say if that's true then I shouldn't do a book I'm like great that maybe one of the best decisions you've ever made yep not everyone needs to write a book at all ever writing a book is hard it should be hard if it's easy then either you are a freak of nature
and god bless you there are those people but chances are you're not that person yeah I couldn't believe how many of the best sellers calling Hoover has I was blown away man yeah some people are just built for it and the and just like there are people who are super sleepers with a genetic
predisposition they I know some of these people they only need four hours they cannot sleep more than four or five hours a day right and they're fully rested some of them after three or four hours and that is an advantage that most people do not have yeah one of the things that I love doing
with every book I pick up is I start right at the end with the acknowledgement section and it is writing to see how many people go into a book there's obviously the agent the publisher but you know you always finish at least in your first two books finish with a thank you to your parents
one of the things that I found to be an interesting tactic is first of all talking to friends and asking for what is the 10% that you would cut and also I'm going to instantly implement this I need a lawyer friend who can look at my arguments and say do a little John McFee redlining
and say you missed these things I don't have that I think that's a good piece of advice it works really well lawyers are allergic to enlists to their advantage in negotiation there are times ambiguous language and if something has the possibility of being litigated in terms need to be super
clear right and the more extra words there are that should not exist in an agreement the more liability there is frequently so lawyers good lawyers can read something and identify unclear thinking very quickly and there are exceptional proofers yeah so that's that's a cheat right and they don't
need to be a senior partner at a law firm I mean chances are if someone is a top student at law school and a given class go ask a professor I've never tried this but I'm sure it would work like who's your best and brightest who has the best attention to detail great
I would bet a sizable amount of money that person's going to be better than your average proofer mm-hmm at least a copy editing to look for ambiguous language or unnecessary language and then there are the questions including the one that you mentioned right like which 10 or 20
percent would you cut mm-hmm if you had to cut what would you cut and you got a force them to do it because unless you do like if I was at it in your work I feel like I don't know but if you're like David I need 20 percent from you then I got to give it back yeah and now you've just given me
permission to do something that if I don't want to offend you or anything like that I'm not going to say anything yeah you have you have total protective air cover right in my my request similarly like if you could only keep 20 percent if 20 percent sounds
to abstract you can just say what out of every five pages can stay that's it which stay yeah I'm giving your job to this 20 pages right so there you go well Jason free to base camp he has a little blog post called writing class I'd like to teach and he goes
write a thousand words cut it down to 200 words cut it down to one paragraph cut it down to one sentence and you just force people just do that distillation and compression both define the essence of what they're trying to say but also to make them distill and narrow and one of the things that
you find is once you get to that super compression often you begin to find things it's almost as if there's a phase transition and an example of that in your work is you started with lifestyle hustling as the name of your first book and then you get them for our work week for our body for our chef
and that's a good example of a transition that occurs that makes the packaging of whatever it is that you're saying so much more compelling yeah and then I retired the jersey four hour jersey right yeah I wanted to retire that and then move to tools of Titan why'd you do that I think it's
easy to end up imitating yourself and that's a dangerous place to be so I could have kept milking the four-hour thing forever I think you're right and I could have franchised out or licensed it and done all sorts of things that I chose not to do for reasons that I think we already touched on
in terms of playing the long game and not commoditizing what you're doing yeah but I didn't want that to become a crutch or to feel at some point if I did enough of that that I could not do something else because it was too speculative and felt very confident in the content of tools
of Titans which came out whatever it came out 2014 15 16 yeah can't remember but I felt very confident that that book was going to do well and I was enjoying writing it I was having a really good time with that book which was probably the first time that I could say that really oh yeah
first three books were very difficult and for tools of Titans I wanted to set my the circumstances environments and people in my life such that it would be my not just my writing but my existence would be as nourishing as possible yeah exercise sauna the people around the food I thought about
all of those elements and also working with someone who had been my researcher who I then brought on full time to help with many different aspects of the book even though I am always writing in my own voice in the sense if you read something in my voice there may be a few tiny exceptions
with like social posts that I direct via phone or something but by large if it has my name on it I've read that at the very least I have gone through it and revised very rather than that that's not the case and book was a blast to write so I felt like I had lightning in a bottle with that
and that gave me all the confidence that I needed I was already committed to moving off from the for our thing so I want to test what was possible in the same way that with for our work week every external pressure and expectation was that I would do some extension in business as my next
book for our week three hour week for our week extreme for our week you've ever revisited that it that I would end up using the business applications of parade oh et cetera right within the branding of the for our work week and beat that drum until I can no longer beat the drum I knew
that was a dead end and there would be diminishing returns but I had I had permission through the success of the first book can do whatever I want it I was like okay I may not get this opportunity again I can always go back to the for our work week I don't think that's going anywhere so let me
do something in an entirely different section of the bookstore if that works and my audience follows me now I have permission to do anything to write about any sort of matter yeah right a la cladwell or Michael Lewis right the John McVea John McVea all the atomic feet especially John McVea tire book on oranges and tire book on on canoes you see an entire book on one tennis match with the guy really has an incredible spectrum of subject matter and I wanted that freedom so I tested it and it
worked it doesn't always work then I tried Amazon publishing with for our chef and that was a huge task trophy at a lot of levels to this boycotted by all the big box retailers it's not just Barnes Noble but Hargit and Costco like none of these people carried that book is that right oh yeah
so I sold a hundred according to Nielsen books can I sold 120 thousand copies I want to say that first week and I ended up number four on the New York Times under people who had sold like 12,000 copies because didn't come for the right reporting sources or ours to them came from Amazon because
it wasn't available in other places so it was it was a wake up call burn me out in a sense the silver lining which is a major silver lining is that I started the podcast right break from the writing here but come back to tools of titans I knew I could always go back to the four-hour thing
and I felt very confident that's like why not do something very different because if it works I've now bought slash provided myself permission to play with a much larger canvas it worked great so as you think about learning from experts and being a better writer how does the interview style show that you have how does that factor into the kind of writing that you're going to do in the future and a nice place to begin might be what you've learned from Cal Fussman.
Ha yeah Cal's great so if we don't know the name Cal Fussman Cal wrote the what I learned and Cal I believe it was called an Esquire for very long times we interviewed Mahawada Ali interviewed Gorkh Bachchaf he interviewed everyone and anyone you can imagine I'm sure to Nero and
all of the stars at the time and it was quite a time quite a span of time Cal from an interview standpoint has taught me a lot I'd say the principal takeaway that I have from Cal is let the silence do the work so sometimes what you don't say the space you provide does heavier lifting
than any clever follow up you could possibly bring to bear on the situation and the tendency of a novice or a seasoned but nervous interviewer is to fill space right and I did that at the beginning and there's a time and a place for that but it is it is one tool silence goes a long way because
the interview we will often feel a little uncomfortable and eventually they'll break and they'll say something else which often ends up being quite interesting not always so that was part of it I would say that interviewing is for me very similar to writing
in so much as I think about sequencing a lot but it's the right order in which to present this information or to interrogate this subject matter this person the order matters a lot so how do you grab the attention in the beginning if I'm writing a chapter say you can look at this
in the four hour body like in media rest right like I'm starting in the action almost always there's not a preamble not starting with dry facts and figures it's like I'm at shurley and empty and I just finished my third pizza rise reaching my hands into the bowl of chocolate covered all
men's and two friends of mine were staring at me right in a slack jawed in disgust right that's the opener I mean that's paraphrase but that's the beginning of one of the chapters in the four hour body to pull people in you also have to do that in interviews if you are just as you would
be if you're an author competing for attention you do not have a in most cases unless you're very famous there are very few authors I will wait a hundred pages for there are some like John Crowley who wrote little big east poet his stuff takes a long time to warm up there's a lot of four
plate of all inside Tarantino with hateful eight yeah it can be very slow but generally I would say that is asking too much of your reader it's asking too much of your listener you need to provide something juicy that they can sink their curiosity into early so the sequencing is is very interesting
to me and I spent a good amount of time thinking about sequencing when I am preparing for their view I would say that fundamentally thinking and also writing is asking and answering questions hmm so if you are trying to identify a possible subject matter theme for a book maybe that's a
statement but I think it's more interesting to approach it from what question am I trying to answer hmm what are the questions for your books I would say that for the for our body for instance to be like what is the minimal effect of dose for the 10 most important dimensions of physical fitness
right what's it and for the for our chef it would be like in eight weeks how would I how can I take someone from ground zero to super accelerated learner with any subject matter question work right that's that's basically like could I can I develop a curriculum
that would take eight weeks or so that would enable someone to go from average learner to hyper accelerated learner with any subject matter and you can apply those questions to your book you can apply those questions to your chapter if you are stuck on a chapter which happens to me
happen to me with especially with four hour work week hire someone to interview you about that chapter and record the conversation and I beat myself up and suffered through weeks of being stuck on this one particular chapter and I danced around it like I went to other chapters yeah but you can only dance around it for so long eventually you have to do it and I really got to a point where I thought the book was not going to be
finished I was like this might be the end I can't seem to solve this riddle and I spoke to I want to say it was Jack Canfield who generously provided a quote for the book he's the co-creator chicken soup for the soul and a very sweet guy very smart guy and I believe he introduced me to a woman he had used as a researcher and she interviewed me on this chapter and I kid you not within 60 minutes I thought I was going to have to go back and listen really carefully to the interview by the end
of 60 minutes I was like oh yeah I know exactly what to do yeah forcing me to speak it out loud and if something was unclear having her make it clear that it was unclear and asking good follow questions help me to solve that chapter which is probably the first or second chapter in the
automation section which gets a little technical compared to the other chapters so there was a question of how to make something that is very potentially dense potentially boring interesting enough that people will actually make it through and enjoy these chapters because
those are important principles you can't just remove the automation section for the book and have things work so that was that was one of the bigger challenges and that was solved by being interviewed yeah it's not just that you can clarify existing ideas with one of the things that I find
with a good question is I think of my brain like amaze and they're these walls and a good question will just have one of the walls go well and it'll fall and all of a sudden I'll just jump and I'll make it connection between ideas that then gives me this flow in this moment and time where I
can just go and then the other thing is bending constraints and I think that this is what a lot of your questions do which is how do I achieve a goal that I have for 10 years and six months what would it look like if it was easy I just had this moment of epiphany listening to you share your last
point about questions I'm like oh my goodness so many of the questions that I ask myself when I get stuck or just questions that you've come up with and the defining thread of those questions is that what you're doing is you're taking some constraint that's like a 10 and you're bringing it to a zero and you're like now that we've bent the shape of reality how now it's contoured differently what can we achieve now and it's not like you have to do this but it opens up oxygen where there
was none. Totally great. Yeah I mean the in a sense the more outrageous the question the more helpful it is because totally if if it's an off-the-shelf question you would have perhaps asked yourself already that would be operating within whatever assumptions and constraints you already have and if you if you're going to solve that problem you would have solved that already. Yeah.
So it's not just more thinking it's looking at the problem from a different perspective or oftentimes completely looking away from the thing that you have defined as the problem. And so for instance maybe instead of like how do we hire a making this up? A head of paid acquisition. Maybe the question is if you had to run your business without any paid acquisition where would you put 50k where would you put that salary that you were planning
up and where would you allocate that money. Right. That's a more interesting question even if you end up not pursuing the outcome of that question it will inform how you think about this
director of paid acquisition you thought you were going to hire. Yeah. Right so I do that a lot with my business and thinking about a lot right now frankly with what my next zigg or zag might be from a professional standpoint because I think the I think the podcast world is going to become 10x hyper competitive than it is already within the next few years. Let me go. Okay. Started in blue motion it's turning into a red ocean.
There's still plenty of space for excellence but the game's getting a little bit tougher. Right. And it's going to get a lot tougher and AI tools are going to make it incredibly difficult to compete for attention if you are mimicking the format and the let's just call it kind of algo driven types of content that are being produced by almost everyone now. Right. Okay. So so what if I couldn't do the podcast. Right. What would I do? What if I could never do any video?
Could I make that work? Could I make that financially viable? Could I make it a behind the paywall only podcast? I'm not planning on that but like these are these questions that you might shy away from because the initial responses. Yes. The answers no. Yep. It's probably good to take that thing that's an immediate yo no or an immediate yes. And say all right. What if I had to do the opposite of whatever Mm hmm. Play answer was. Right. In what way does your level of fame
make creative work easier and in what way does it make it harder? I would say it hypothetically makes it easier. Let's find why I have that flourish on my answer. Hypothetically makes it easier because I have access to a lot of people. Right. So if the rate limiter is access to amazing experts, I have access.
You're all right. Or I can create access. Mm hmm. Pretty easily. I would say that is offset hence the hypothetical by a degree of inbound that is hard to fathom unless you have a large public platform. Mm hmm. And what you have put out that has created that large platform is very personal, very long form. So the people are reaching out to you. Not just think they know you
but actually do know you. Right. Right. And the the dynamics at play with that type of both information management can get reasonably complicated on some levels very simple. The more inbound you have, the more you are reactive. Even if the opportunities are great, occasionally I see amazing opportunities that come in. But if let's just say my inbox and I
have employees who help with inbox and management and so on. But if I am suddenly responding to things that are coming in as opposed to sitting down with no distractions and deciding what my plan is and executing to play. The former this reactive business existence makes it very difficult or has made it very difficult for me. And I own it because all these things are consequences decisions I've made to block out extended periods of time for deep creative work.
Right. I can change that. I have I can pull a few levers and move a few things and change it. But there's a seduction to the inbound. Mm hmm. Great word choice. Yeah. It's not necessarily a fear of missing out. But it's variable reward. It's like a slab machine totally or like if you want to train a dog really well, you use variable reward like it wasn't a lot of you give a jackpot especially in the beginning and you just like tend to it's instead of one. And they turn into like
crackets. I mean they're basically gambling addicts but you can hardest that for operant conditioning and actually being very effective with dog training and clickers and so on. But I think you mentioned earlier like first we shape our tools and then our tool shape bosses. Being shaped by inbound and becoming reactive I think is antithetical to fully expressed
creativity and right. And I say fully expressed because if your goal is to be most yourself if you are inundated by the requests and projections of other people you will lose sight. Maybe a very hard to decipher what is yourself what your goals are versus what the rest of the world's goals are. So I think that's that's a challenge. I would say that overall it has made it harder. Yeah for me there are people out there who have the exact opposite experience. They're like
I appreciate the scape velocity. I've just enough fame. I've got money great and then they can buckle down and go into a cave in monk mode and just spend all their time writing. I have friends to do that so they've made it work. I think my blessing in my curse without the business side without my study of PR without my many experiments and paid acquisition and negotiation and so on. Though I do not think the four hour work week would have gone parabolic in the way that it did.
So having the operator ability was critical to that success. But that operator ability and we tend to like the things we're good at means that I'm very susceptible to sexy shiny business things that come in over the trance or through friends who are very trusted who send me things that are very interesting but they are not fundamentally creative projects. So I take the bait more than I should. Is there a creative project that you feel is some sort of magnum opus that you've been thinking
about or something that you almost don't feel like you're ready for that challenge. But it will excavate a depth of who Tim Ferriss is that someday you'll be able to do that. Yeah, I do. Really? Well, actually, I can tell you a bit. I have, I'll tell you by way of a story because why not. Stories are fun and it's easiest way for me to get my point across and away.
I've been rowing dinner as many years ago now. Was it a dinner? It was a dinner with Michael Pollan and a handful of other folks and he had just given the people at the dinner galleys of what would later be how to change your mind. Now, cool, which is about the history of psychedelics, the potential of psychedelics, therapeutics, how to change your mind that book ended up catalyzing worldwide a huge resurgence of interest in psychedelics.
Michael has been incredibly instrumental in publicly, but even more so behind the scenes with a lot of things that have happened in the last, let's call it five to 10 years with respect to psychedelic therapies. I have a lot of respect for Michael. He's very good at what he does and he
takes writing very, very seriously. When I first read that book in Galley form, I had been gathering notes, meticulous notes on all of my experiences related to psychedelics were, I'm guessing here maybe five years, a wall of notebooks, to a level of detail that I haven't seen shared anywhere. In terms of not just the higher concept stuff, but front line practices, innovations, dosages, like what are people doing at the frontier, at the edges? Yep. And the edges could be
very modern. The edges could be thousands of years old, which is like at the edges. What are the most interesting things that are happening and what have my personal experience has been? So at that point, I had hundreds of pages of notes. And then I saw and read Michael's book, which is outstanding. I mean, I have an entire shelf full of this book so that if guests ever stay with me, I can just
give them a copy. It's a very powerful book, very user friendly. I think he does a brilliant job of weaving that book into a tapestry that can really pull in people from many different worlds, with many different viewpoints, many different prejudices. We all have biases. And when I saw the Galley, I thought to myself, my first thought was, thank fucking God,
that saves me so much trouble. Then Michael has put together this book because a lot of my motivation behind potentially writing the book that I alluded to was to catalyze new conversations, policy change, hopefully reclassification of some of these compounds out of schedule one, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I knew as soon as I read Michael's book, to the extent that I can know anything, it's like this book's going to do it.
Yeah. He's already done before, like I'm divorced to lemma, et cetera. I've seen him do this before. The book is great. And I was like, thank God, books are so hard. Yeah, that just saved me so many years of grinding. But I still think about it because it's a story not just about psychedelics, which have become very much a mainstream conversation. And I've been very involved in that world since 2015 or so officially, let's just say publicly facing.
But it would be a story also about mental health, a story about selling from childhood abuse, a story about very specific, very, very specific tactics and protocols and so on, that I've not seen anywhere else. So we'll see. It would be a tremendous amount of work. If I were to write it myself, yeah, they're alternatives. I could have somebody interview me, I could have somebody ghost write it, but it's not the type of thing. It's so close to me.
It's so personal. I really don't think I'd be comfortable having somebody else write it. That may mean it just doesn't get written. But that's the one that I do think about. Because I've got it, I've got the notes. And it's the ongoing, I'm still gathering things and experimenting with other technologies by the way outside of psychedelics. There's that's the interest is in unorthodox, high leverage, uncrowded areas that are also under reported. That includes quite a bit.
And that book would also talk about some very, very, very, very bizarre experiences. There is a lot of questions about what the human experience is or is not or what the gaps in our knowledge may be. So I do think that book, it would be very interesting. But I haven't been able to bring myself to think about the amount of time that it would necessitate. Now that's where I'm making assumptions that I should test. What would this look like if it were
easy? Is it better for me to not publish this because I want to write it myself? Or is it better for to come out and be half as good as I think it should be? Maybe the latter. Maybe I'll get there. But for the time being, I'm just sitting on it. Yeah. Well, to weave some of these ideas that we've been talking about together, there's also a way that teaming up with somebody on a book like this might actually be better.
And I'll make the argument for why, as I was hearing you say that, if I was writing a book like that, it's so intimate and close and personal that sometimes it's just hard to touch those ideas. And what will come out when you're writing those and how vulnerable you need to be, it might actually be easier with a co-writer who can hold that out of you. I agree. I think it would definitely be easier. Definitely be easier. So we'll see. TBD. I have another thing to write first.
Can you share about that? Well, it's actually, I can't share specifics, but I can share why it's important to me. I am working on a writing project for the first time ever with a collaborator. Nice. Not a ghostwriter. Not someone who's going to be behind the scenes. I'm not going to claim to write a book. I didn't write that shit, driving bananas. If you want to call yourself a best-selling interviewee, that's fine. But if you didn't write your
book, please don't call yourself a best-selling author. Please. Anyway, Pepeave. You just think about where that would be unacceptable, which is pretty much everywhere else. It's just so bizarre. It's like if someone's manager got that they're like, yes, I'm a, I'm a, I'm one of the Academy Award for Best Actor. I'm like, that was, no, it was, but I know you're kind of involved, but like, it's just, it's very strange to me that in the
writing world, that is perfectly acceptable. It's very odd. In any case, it's okay. There's some great ghost writers. I'm not faulting ghost writers, by the way. It's the other side that I sometimes find a little strange. So I'm working with a collaborator. It would be very credited. And this is another major experiment for me. And I'm holding it lightly. And we're both very open at any point if it's not working to just dropping it. But I have always had people
helping. You mentioned the acknowledgement. Like, there are always a lot of people who go into a book. But as far as like hands on the keyboard writing, it's always been me. My books are not short in case you haven't noticed. They are big. I'm the way it's with your mind. Yeah, they're huge. I do travel mentors. Yeah, that's right. I can just superset with the different books. Exactly. It's my books tend to be very long. And if this works even partially, this collaboration,
that opens up a whole new universe of things that I can do. Nice. Which does not mean watering things down. Right. The quality level has to be incredibly high, which is a constraint I'm happy to always embrace. Of course. Right. I don't. The volume. I don't care about volume. I just do not care because there's no competitive advantage there. You're going to lose to the robots. You're going to lose to the people using robots. If you think you're going to win on a volume game,
long term, you're not going to win. At the very least, if you're doing a manual, you're going to burn out. So for me, at least the quality by my standards needs to be incredibly high. To the extent that I can make it high, and I recognize not Leo Tolstoy, right? I'm not saying that my books are the amazing works of art that are going to be in the Smithsonian. I'm not saying that. But to the extent that I can make something as good as humanly possible, I want to ensure that
which also saves me from overcommitting to projects. Like the question I posed to my friends, can you make this your top priority for the next year? Yep. If not, my suggestion is you go to. So, TBD, we'll see. We shall see, but very excited about that. And should have more to say about that. Hopefully, not to just in future. But if things work out, the book should be done, certainly in 2024. So people might hear more about it.
That's my first, that's my first write project in six years. I mean, long for, really long for. It's not going to be scratchy and stuff. It's going to be another it will be another tone. It will not be as long as my previous books, although every time I write a new book, I say that. So we will see, but it'll be highly, highly tactical. Not anything. Anyway, it's going to be like very nuts and bolts. As soon as you open this book, you can use something kind of book, which show excited about.
Last question for Tim Ferriss' question. If you could have a billboard for writers and you just had the billboards, only for writers, what do you tell the city of aspiring writers? The first is do something interesting first. Even if you're writing fiction, by the way, writing is already hard. Don't make it harder than it needs to be. Do something interesting first. Or if you're like, ah, something intimidating, do something
fucking weird first. Great. Because you're probably going to choose something fucking weird that you are personally interested in, which your friends with the plan makes you kind of fucking weird. That's perfect. Right. All right. So that's the first that came to mind. The second that came to mind would be a category of one. Yeah. Figure out what that is. Figure out what that is.
There's so plenty left. They're just invisible until you sit down and think about it. Kind of like my looking at those say four star most constructive reviews or at least our most constructive reviews on Amazon. If you know where to look or what questions to ask, you can find gaps. Oftentimes, the gaps are really simple. Like what book are you trying to find? The omittable fun. Right. Right. Okay. Maybe that's your category of one. Maybe. Let's say two less than you think you can.
I guess. Why that? You're writing to be co-famous. Stop. Do something else. Oh, she writing to make money. Generally. Stop. Do something else. If you're writing because it does something for you. Maybe it's therapy. Maybe you have these things knowing that you, these things upsetting you or things just bouncing around your head that you need to get out. Great. Maybe it's because you love writing. I know many friends who just love writing. Great.
Maybe there's another reason. But if the reason leads you to want to write long term, trying to bleed the stone every day is a great way to make that impossible. Yeah. But I really, I have more than most tried to really over-deliver every day. And that is a recipe for burnout. That is a recipe for beginning to drag your feet and not look forward to the
thing that you really used to look forward to. Right. So whether that's two crappy pages a day or some of Neil Gaiman's advice from my interview that I do with him, they're many writers. I've interviewed certainly and they all have slightly different approaches. But you mentioned some of the anecdotes from Jerry Seinfeld. I mean, you see that one of the
patterns is on some level at the very highest levels. A lot of these people are more like shaperones at daycare to themselves than they are like a drill sergeant in the military. Yep. Right. Like this is very fragile in the beginning. I believe it was Jerry who said, like for 24 hours or 48 hours, like don't show people anything that you've written. Like bask in the glory or having done one of the hardest things that a human can possibly do.
I think that that positive reinforcement is very important. And to set the conditions so that the positive reinforcement is possible, you need to leave some gas at the tank. This is my feeling. It's much better to do two crappy pages five days a week than it is to do like 10 pages one day, but then you went to bed at four in the morning. So that you're worthless for the next two days.
And then you freak out because you haven't written for the last two days. So that you turn out some garbage or rush into something that's formulaic and then you have to toss that and then you're building panic on panic. That's not a good existence. And I've done that. I've looked at that for years at a time. So if you have it, take my word for it. It doesn't produce good writing. And there will be days where you capture lightning in a bottle and those two pages turn into four,
five, six, ten, who knows? But it's tempting, I think, to try to model mutants. And that's a risky business. I've read interviews and there are people who are like my minimum. I stop when I put up 1500 great words. Like, 1500 great words, really? Okay. If I said that bar, I'd want to throw myself a Facebook, through a win, fly like day three. Maybe that makes me weak. Maybe that makes me an utter before,
or I don't know, but I know that I cannot do that. Right. And there are other people who are like, I chain myself to a desk eight hours a day and I don't move. In fact, a stereotype blank screen for eight hours, then so be it. Same result. Tim, face first, I don't know. I can't do it. And then you have alternatives that I've interviewed a lot of them like BJ Novak,
because it's talked about like really sitting the conditions in the morning. It's like, if you need to have cappuccino and read the newspaper and bullshit and talk to the barista and do this and that to get in the mood, great. The common thread though that makes these people buy in large hyper productive. It's just consistency. And I know that a lot of people deliver this message, but the key to consistency is coming back to the billboard, which is like, stop
before your exhaustive. Would be a better way to put it. Stop before your exhaustive. Beautiful answer. Thanks, Matt. I've been a fan for a long time and you had a big influence on me. I remember in 2016 going to your event at the 92nd Street Y. And I mean, it's really thanks to you that ideas became so captivating to me. I didn't have that until I started listening to your stuff and listening to your podcast. And I was just thinking of how many interviews I had listened to
of viewers throughout the years. Thank you. Oh, thanks, man. Really appreciate that. Yeah. This is this is a this is a tight ship you got here. So let's work. Thanks, man. Keep it up. Yeah. Thanks for