what i'm about to say will win you the respect of your friends a lifetime full of happiness a villain the bahamas and maybe a really good hair day too i i don't know if it's gonna do any of those things who's to say but here's what it will it'll definitely make you a better writer that's my promise you will be a better writer in the next sixty minutes i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road less travel never look this week somebody asked us a question they said hey i really love your guys writing i have trouble with writing and i would love if you guys just did an episode with the the eighty twenty so what is the just the stuff i need to know to help me be a better writer so me and sam sat down and we wrote down all of our secrets about how we've we've used riding to grow our careers which but but but by the way by the way i wouldn't even say we're necessarily great writers i would say that you and i are really good writers but what we've been great at is getting results from it would you agree yeah that's right i don't think i don't look at my stuff i'm like wow this is beautiful pros but i do feel confident that if i needed to i can use my writing to either you know grow an audience or sell a product or convince people of something i i i feel confident in that after you know trying for fifteen years and both of us have i've done right so the credibility here you know before you ever listen to any advice you should ask yourself why should i listen to this person well both me and sam have built and sold newsletter businesses for tens of millions of dollars we've tweeted our way you know just typing a little short sentences to you know a million person audience between the two of us you know i've sold maybe twenty million dollars worth of product online in the ecommerce world just through email we both have taught writing courses or in some form of fashion you know i used to charge a thousand dollars a seat for my class and there was the highest rated class on m but here today you get the quick version for free we're charging you nothing except for there is one thing they gotta do what do they have to do this is free right sam it's totally free except for one thing you have to subscribe so whether you're listening on apple on spotify wherever you're listening or if you're already on youtube you just gotta click that button we spend all this time doing this and unlike the rest of the youtube world where everything is completely free we're mostly free all we wanted exchange is a subscribe on youtube it's all we want we can't check if you do it we call it the gentleman's agreement just honor code amongst two legendary individuals us and you and we we just trust that you're gonna do it alright so let's let's jump in how does somebody become a better writer how can we teach them in the next i don't know forty five minutes to become you know twice as good or three times as good as a writing i believe that that is possible if they actually do these things where do you wanna start sam so let's start with before you guys start writing and so someone asks us why right or someone asks us how do you get better at writing i actually wanna change it to why you should even care about being a better writer and so there's a few bullet points that we have so the first being is this is the most self serving thing but i wanna say it up upfront it's persuasion in the most scalable way the reason i got into writing was i was selling street me hot dogs on the side of the road and i was selling one to one and i got pretty good at it but then i realized this is really hard and so i learned about copywriting and i figured look now i can write something and it could scale to an infinite amount of people i never have to change it and i can convince people to do something now we're not just talking about copywriting we're talking about all types of writing so i can convince someone to feel a certain way whether i'm writing a short story or i'm running a blog post i can convince someone to join my company i used copywriting on tinder when i wanna to convince the girl to give me a chance to go on a day with me we're talking about all types of writing but at the end of the day we're always typically trying to persuade someone to do something so it's persuasion in the most scalable way and that's one of the reasons one of the most important self serving reasons why i think people should care about writing what else yeah that's that's the first one the second one is is more internal and wholesome some people are like do i don't know if i wanna do persuasion truth is you do any anything you're anything you're trying to make happen you're usually gonna need to persuade either people to come join your company customers partners whatever it is the second one is to write clearly you must think clearly and the reverse is true too if you wanna be a great thinker you're wanna have clarity of thought writing is a essential tool for that so writing is a forcing function for you to be able to think clearly you can't hide behind bad writing bad bad writing will show bad thinking whereas if you have great thinking and you write it'll come through and so writing is this is a truth teller potion it will reveal how clear your thinking is and the the trick is most people think about it as in writing is a way for me to communicate my ideas to you and they think that oh writing is the bottleneck they're like i'm just not a good writer nobody ever says i'm not a great thinker but the truth is if you actually get done to it people who struggle with writing it's because they don't have the idea clear in their mind and so writing helps you clear up the fog in your brain and get crystal clear clarity on what are you actually trying to say what are the ideas but it also works to not just communicate ideas but to generate them i think paul said and so true he goes people think that writing is only about communicating the ideas you already have but actually the truth is when you sit down to right you will generate new ideas writing is an incredible idea generator and so it's like you know starting a little fire in your brain and you know those sparks can lead to new thoughts and new ideas that are quite powerful and if you're not riding regularly you're missing out on some of those ideas and i think that when we say writing i'm particularly referring to longer form it could be shorter form a handful of sentences a tweet whatever but oftentimes it's longer form and the reason why i prefer that when i'm running out my ideas is you can't really hide a bad idea or you can't hide bad thinking in long writing you know where where you can hide bad thinking in a powerpoint now it doesn't mean that your ideas in long writing are gonna be good but you just can't hide it you can't hide that it's bad and so that's why i prefer mapping it all out and then the third point of running creates new ideas i think like you said paul graham said it best he has this great blog post he wrote two thousand five he said something like eighty percent of your writing will be bad and then you'll have to cut cut it down to the twenty percent that's good and when you start writing you'll probably generate fifty percent more new ideas right so it's a really great forcing function where it gives you the lanes of the road and you have to stay within those lanes and oftentimes you can change your opinion as you go and you could it evolves your idea and your thinking and we've also seen jeff bezos band powerpoint from amazon he realized that powerpoint was this thing that sort of the most charismatic loud his voice in the room or somebody with good slide design skills could kind of like create an illusion of good thinking by using powerpoint and actually he forced everybody instead to write long long form memos basically narratives and he's like in the long form written word there's no place to hide there's no way to use design or good presentation skills to to make it seem like this is more well thought through than it is it either is or it isn't you you'll find out so i think it works inside of companies as well as it does out externally to your customers and potential customers so alright now let's get down to the actual tactics so that's the that's the theory now how do you actually do it so for me all the work begins before i've typed a single award and i i always say you wanna begin with the end in mind what i mean by this is i before i write anything i first decide what is the reaction i want i learned this from a guy named chris qui i don't know if you know chris qui but he was a this character he came to town in san francisco from from the uk and he was he hosts he had an ad agency and his ad agency to one specific thing they would make videos go viral and i remember talking to chris and i was like wow it would be awesome to do a viral video that sounds like kinda like a lottery ticket thing like what if my youtube video just went viral and got millions of views how crazy would that be and i asked my what's your hit rate like you know out of every a hundred videos you do how many go viral one two three videos out of a hundred and he's like no if we do ten videos eight or nine will go viral really and i was like what he's like well for two reasons and he said number one we have a large blog audience so we we can guarantee the first like hundred thousand views like it will get seen they won't just get lost in the abyss of the internet of content like whatever we have it'll get say but that doesn't make viral that just make sure it gets a chance he goes the second thing is we always work backwards from an emotion he goes people will only share or act if they feel something at the end so he he created this thing that he had like lol wtf t f o g all like you know something so cute heartwarming and so he's like these are the only emotions that you can tap it there's like seven or eight emotions so people can can tap into and he would work backwards he would say we don't write a script until we first pick the emotion we're going for wow where we're going for wtf outrage oh wtf outrage you know i'll give you an example of one that i just saw yesterday elon musk tweeted it out this thing that was some hidden like language in a bill like a bill that's you went senate right now that was like if the next president gets elected and they decide to stop spending on the war in ukraine they could be up for impeachment because of the way this bill is written and and he was like oh my god the democrats are baking this in to the bill they're trying to pass this on page one hundred and forty they're trying to slip this right under your nose without telling anybody and they're gonna try to impeach trump if he gotta like didn't try to stop try to you know if he got peace in the in in the in the ukraine and stop the spending he could be up for impeachment and of course the post goes super viral because it's outraged it's outraged from the democrats it's outraged from the republicans that is engineered to go viral and so similarly chris used to have a search engine he he used to be able to he created a tool internally for them where they could just search by emotion and it would show them youtube videos that are targeting that emotion and they would use it when they would brainstorm and so i stole this and i would start with i ask myself three questions what is the reaction i want that's always an emotion the next one is what is the action i want what do i want them to do after they read this like click the buy button click the share button forward this to a friend sign my petition whatever it is who knows what it is but what's the reaction what's the action and the last thing i say is at the end of this if they could just remember one line or one takeaway away one sentence what would it be what would i pick out of the whole thing that i just wrote because people remember sentences not books and so you have to think about that so though i always begin with the end in mind i side those before i have a write a word do you do something similar i do the exact same thing and typically i start with a headline and i start with the sub headline so if you share on facebook the headlines the big text the sub headline is the hundred and eighty character thing underneath that oftentimes i go back and i reach and i changed the headline a ton but that one sentence that what i call the sub headline that doesn't change and that one sentence is what helps like clarify when i'm gonna write so i actually don't do outlines so there's a lot of things that i think you're taught in fifth grade that i think are really stupid one of them is an outline i i guess i i guess it's okay to teach that but i don't use outlines anymore and my outline in instead is that one sub headline that's what i use in fact you you brought up a good point which is to be a great writer in the world like as an adult on the internet the internet world the internet world you have to un learn pretty much everything you learned in school so in school you learned like what are they what are they reward in school they're like minimum of this word count so they're trying to get you must write at least this length and they're trying to get you to like so people are writing long words of double spacing their thing and trying to like add a bunch of filler and fluff we gotta do the exact opposite when you're at on the internet you wanna be concise you wanna be quick you wanna eliminate a bunch of the fluff shorter is better on the internet in terms of adding just extra crust but when you're in school they almost force you and teach you to write these long form things they also want you to write with fancy fancy vocabulary so you're you get bonus points if you use you know am amelia rather than you know heal or help or whatever and and so you you rewarded for using fancy words but the reality is you wanna be writing at a a very like accessible language if you want reading level if you want to do well on the internet so you know both of you and i we target kinda like fifth to eighth grade reading levels and you can use these tools these checkers like hemingway waves is an app that you could use where you can put in your text and it'll tell you you're writing at a twelfth grade level or you're writing at a fifth grade level and the lower the better is better on the yeah and in the in the second half of this episode let's go through all those like tips and tricks in terms of in terms of writing my process is i i do copy work and then i draft then i inc bait and then i edit it so what that means is copy work it's the same way it's this old technique that people have learned how to write we don't do it anymore but i found it to be the most effective way i i sat myself in a room for like two hours a day and did this for like eight months in order to learn how to write and copy work is basically when you take write writing that you love it could be a a full book it could be a script for snl if you wanna learn how to write comedy it could be a blogger that you'd like when i'm writing an important piece i'll will just write maybe for ten minutes i literally take my pen and by hand i copy someone else's writing that i really like and that helps me get into the flow so we we what we said was before you've written a word you like most people just sit down they start trying to write what we've told you is do two different things instead begin with the end in mind you know the what is the action the reaction you want and what's the what would be the headline that would grab somebody and then the second thing sam saying is you don't just jump in like you know if you're gonna go do a you don't just go start sprint right away you warm i do warm up sets and you do the same thing before you write a word of your own you start by writing but not your own word you take some writing that you really like that maybe you wanna almost like osmosis to steal their little writing j it's gonna go into your brain you'll start to talk like them right like them if you do this and you literally write word for word exactly what this said it's even more effective if you can write it but at worst type it but you wanna don't don't think don't add your own stuff don't improve it just literally write word for word and do it for like even ten fifteen minutes i still do this today this is not like advice that i tell other people who do i don't do i still do this today and sam you don't know this i use one of your posts as one of my i have three go one of yours is one that i use for my copy work it's this which one you i forgot the name of the blog but it's i always search for it with the same headline which is let me be perfectly clear you're reading this because i want because i want you to and you're like i have engineered the start of this you're and you basically talk about how you me them you're like every word of this was chosen every sentence to lead you to the next sentence and i love that it's the we call it the slippery slope and so you i use one of yours whenever i wanna write like in a really persuasive copy right anyway if i wanna write more like business sirius then i have a different one i use this one that the ceo of slack did where he wrote an internal memo that i really like called we don't sell saddle here but you literally just write a word for it so that's your warm up so again two things before you ever write your own stuff it's exactly like playing music okay so if you're whether when you're a beginner or playing music you just play other people's songs and then you steal a little bit you're like oh i like the i like this genre at this genre just i'm gonna commodity it my own thing same way where you're writing a new song you kinda warm up maybe playing the beatles and then eventually you're like alright i'm in the mood to write something more beautiful this is what i'm gonna you take someone's recipe and you make their rest exactly before you go make your own thing you play a cover before you write your own songs same way you do copy work before you write your own stuff the second step is actually where a lot of people get screwed up so it's the drafting step and the reason people get screwed up here is because they're afraid to look stupid and the drafting step is actually where you're supposed to look stupid and so whenever i draft something i just bang out as fast as i can and it sounds really dumb and i accept that it sounds dumb and i and here's why because after the drafting set is the incubation period you know like have you ever heard of like the phrase like shower thoughts where you like think of silly things in the shower i actually i think there's like some science behind this i think i forget what what it's called but it's like when you're out riding a bike you're out going for a walk where you're just sitting things i think it's called passive thinking you actually get great breakthroughs and so what i like to do is i draft my first thing that it doesn't take very long and i know that it's bad but i don't show anyone then i go for a walk or i'll just sit sometimes that will take forty eight hours sometimes that will take one hour sometimes ten minutes sometimes a week i just let it sit i then i do nothing now here's where the the last part and the most important part is og one of my favorite writers what's his first name david david og he's got this great line he goes i'm a lousy writer but i'm a good editor and this is where greatness happens it happens stephen king calls it killing your darling he says when the the editing phase where all the great stuff happens and this is actually what the gold happens and a lot of people don't do this process what they do is they write their draft and that's the final bit and they get afraid and nervous and they never write it and they don't actually inc incubator and they don't actually edit it do you do these things hundred you i learned this from you the inc bay part so i used to draft and then try to edit in the same session because i knew editing is where the value is right great writing is great editing let's be perfectly clear great writing is great editing however the mistake i was making before was i would write and then i would immediately try to edit and power through and i didn't have that break that gap to actually go back and improve my ideas passively just load the problem in my brain and go do something else go for a walk go for a run go for a workout go shower go cook some food chop some vegetables doesn't matter what it is but i give myself actually like at least ninety minutes away from it sometimes six hours away from it and then when i come back i look at it and it's just so obvious to me oh strike this eat delete this move this to the top that's actually the best part oh you know what i should say here i should say this oh that analogy i was missing here it is and so you immediately it starts to come together when i do that that part right and i also realized i need to shift my time ratio because like you like you said i used to be a over thinker draft where i would overthink how much i need to how much time to spend on the draft phase so i try to make a good draft bad idea you actually just wanna have a like like quick and dirty draft like a brain dump draft and so i used to try to make a good draft that would take me away too long and i get fatigued and i feel bad about it and i'd be like hate this this is stupid i even do this and all the doubts creep in and then i'll try to edit it right away now short draft and then high energy edit after i have that incubation period so this is hundred percent what i do and it is extremely effective and once you get good and once you find a process sometimes i'll wake up in the middle of night and i think of an idea and i just write that sentence in my phone and then i just forget about it but then i right see something else in the world and i'm like oh that reminds me of this concept i was i was thinking they wake up it out yeah figured out the cta yeah is where if i sign off with sci cyrus yeah wait what do you think about i love you at the end yeah would that be a thing but i actually do like well i'll have like a a note do you have like a notes app or a notes folder in your phone where it's like you just have like a sentence and you're like that's a beautiful sentence i'm just i don't i don't know where i'm gonna use that but that was a beautiful sentence or a lot of times i get it from podcast or youtubers i'm like you you hear how he phrase that that word that was a sharp phrase that cut to me one of the things we didn't say in the before phase is having a swipe file so well yeah classic thing that all writers have and all marketers have which is a swipe file it's basically a stash whenever you see something don't something that's well done something that's good you just stash it away so that when it comes time for you to make one you could be like i need to make a landing page and you would go and you'd look at your stash of great landing pages you've seen and you would have so much inspiration right there ready for you at your fingertips because you did the work beforehand and so that's another one of the before is you gotta have a swipe file we i have one for phrases for headlines for connecting words for sign for hello and goodbye because for some reason whenever i write my newsletter i knew what i wanted to say but the start always was so awkward it was like hello you know hello there friends and i was like god this sucks and then i started keeping a a file of like anytime i liked to liked an opener or a closer i have one openers file one closure file and i have a whole bunch of that that could used to rip off of because for whatever reason that was my my blocker when i would write i i'll just hear a beautiful phrase and i write it down so like i went to this guy's website and he was talking about the best like speaker system or something and he started off the paragraph with well folks it doesn't get any better than this and i was like oh and beautiful that's mine yeah and like i i just have this whole bank of like these things of people saying like cute phrases and i'm like that's a beat like i just felt an emotion when i read that basically you have to take every people are scrolling through thousands of articles every day and i if i see a line that grabs my attention i know that's good that's mine that's mine and i just have this whole bank of these so let's move on to some more tips about talking about the actual writing part because i think that what you're taught in school we're basically gonna say do the opposite of a yeah here's right here's the mistakes common mistakes mistake number one they start with a bunch of intro context background fluff you wrote a the tip is actually don't bury the lead so the first sentence should punch so try putting the most important sentence at the top try putting the most provocative statement at the top try putting the promise at the top or the the bait the hook at the top so as as an example you have one here that when when you were building the hustle one of the things you try to do was these viral blog posts you were like i'm gonna write these blog goes if i can get a million views on those blog posts and you know some percentages of them will subscribe and that's how i'll grow my subscriber base right and i remember reading this which was first sentence i spent the last thirty days eating nothing but soy a new age powered powdered meal replacement why would i do something so stupid i'll explain but first if you're not familiar with so here's the gist a great opener right because yeah rather than saying you know you know last few days have been you know really tough for me because i've been doing this new man to give me background who i am i'm steve i'm a programmer here at this company and you know i'm blah about boring right so instead i spent the last thirty days even with silent why would i do something so stupid let me explain curiosity has been created and now i wanna know yeah typically when you're thinking about the lead so i found it helps with a few things one if you're new what i tell people is let me see your opener cut it and like cut almost all of it except for like the last couple sentences and that's typically a good trick and the reason why i say that is when you're taught in school how to write have you ever heard of like a a thesis statement where you have like a opening paragraph with the thesis at the bottom point one point two point three and then a closer i'm like just tell me your thesis statement right off the right off like just just say that just punch me the face with that that should be your that should be your opening line another thing is i like to think of have you been to england and have you ever noticed they have signed let's say mind the gap right i guess that's like when you're i always say mind the curiosity gap so mine so with the curiosity gap means i'm gonna i'm gonna punch you in the face to grab your attention because that gets you to fall down the slippery slope and the more that you fall on that slope the further you're gonna continue to read and so i wanna grab your attention but i don't wanna tell you exactly everything but i wanna grab your attention by not bearing the lead and i'm gonna get you to fall on this slope a little further yeah the simple test is take your hand cover up all of the text except for the first two sentences read those first two sentences and be like what if i didn't know me if i didn't care about me if i didn't if i didn't have to read this what i wanna would i need to read the next sentence not what i need to do the whole thing what i need to read the next sentence if it's yes you've created a curiosity up then you drag your hand down you reveal that next sentence you say if i read this sentence what i need to read the next sentence right what i want to know what what's the next sentence and then by the third or fourth time you've done that now they're in now they're investing now you have a little more leeway to let it breathe and and and and create a little bit of background because they're they're have they're invested in getting to the end of the of the outcome but like the reason this sounds so brutal or you're gonna cover up like i'm gonna cover up eighty five ninety percent of the text yes because the reality is that's actually how the reader eyes work eighty ninety percent of people are only ever gonna read the headline and if the headlines no good they're never gonna get to any other stuff and so some people are resistant to write a juicy headline but the reality is if it's not juicy enough they'll never get to that those great ideas that you have inside you're sort of doing your own ideas of disservice and so you wanna find that line between like without completely hoarding yourself out or making a false promise still find a way to make it juicy enough where you created that curiosity gap where i have to read the next sentence and that's it what i what i used to say was it ain't clickbait if it you're actually getting something like it bait meat that's fake so as long as i can say the truth but i say this sensational or clicky way we say clicky it ain't bait if i actually deliver on the promise pay it off if you don't pay it off then damn is bad but if you're paying it off and you're paying it off soon nick can't paid off like you know ten minutes later you have to have to be able to do that alright next one is right like you talk so so many times people are like i can't really like i'm not good i'm a good writer and again now i'm not a good writer is actually could not a good thinker and the way you test this is cool forget about writing it down just tell me like explain it to me either they just say it out loud and i'm like great you wrote it just write that down now like write down literally what you just said you don't have to have like this second character the shakespeare inside you that writes in a completely different style and communicates completely differently than you actually talk you don't need that you actually want them to be very similar it's actually the most engaging type of writing is when you feel like the author just talking to you having a conversation with you specifically and so right like you talk it's a good good method but it also reveals if you can't even talk about it you're not ready to write it yet you gotta first be able to like explain it just in plain language yourself what i tell my team so they'll like write this huge thing and asked me to it and i'm like i don't really want to read this just tell me what it means and they'll say in one sentence and like okay cool that's your first sentence and that's probably all you you need to say for this thanks but like there's a few ways to figure out what not to do one is you go to people's linkedin if they use the word utilize that's probably not good have you ever heard someone say they utilize or they did like what are other like linkedin jargon linkedin like that's that's so good we should make a linkedin hit list of just bullshit words that nobody ever says but people think it's okay to write yeah it's like dude i've never heard you you use that word utilized right the the second thing to remember is there's informal is or rather informal can be professional a lot of times people think informal is the opposite of professional and i actually say that's that's nonsense and i'm gonna actually show examples of of how that's not true in in a few minutes but an and another good line that i think about is it was stephen king he says anywhere you have to hunt a the so is the wrong word there's no exceptions to this rule and so like if you have to like look up like what a word means you don't use it you wanna use words that most everyone uses and i'm gonna again i'm gonna show you examples of really complicated stuff explained in a really simple way like here's a really good example of writing like you talk so one of my favorite pieces of writing is louis ck k so louis ck k about ten or fifteen years ago he used to release his own specials like on his website and if you google lewis c k neville or something like that you'll see my friend neville wrote a blog post about some of his stuff because it's it's actually not up anymore but he's got this great line in one of his bits he says or one of his landing pages because please please don't toward the special if you wanna share direct people here it's so easy just to drop five dollars we don't make you join anything we let you download any file you want it cost a shit load of money to make these specials and i do it myself i love off offering it to you directly for so cheap and so easily and i would like for that to continue being a good idea that's a great simple way just to say don't steal and and that makes me feel i'm like alright you're right this is i should abide by this you are exactly right there was no jargon simple language yeah a hundred percent agree i also think that you know this also works for choosing what to write about so for example sometimes people will write about shit that they would never talk to you about we had this problem early on at the mill road so when we did the milk road i was the initial writer so i created the initial voice and milk road was a a news newsletter that we built in the crypto space and we went from zero subscribers and never have written a daily newsletter before to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and sold it for millions of dollars that in one year so that was the the success so how do we actually do it and more importantly how did i train other people to write it instead of me because i didn't wanna wake up every morning and stress about sending this email out at five am to you know a couple hundred thousand people that that was not the idea of a good life for me so was like let me see if i could train people to do this one of the hacks to training people able to do this was i i was like god i feel like they're writing this both with too much extra fluff and jargon and secondly they're writing about stuff that's kinda of boring so like the topic is boring like what's happening i was like and i told her was i feel like you would never just tell me about this like if i was just talking to you i was your your friend and you were like oh you hear what happened today which is what a news what a new what the news is trying to tell you right hey did you hear what happened today this crazy thing happened this interesting thing happened this big event happened i was like you're writing my stuff that wouldn't even make that filter you wouldn't even tell me about it so why are you doing this so what i had them i was like forget writing a draft and having me be the editor instead i want you to send me a voice memo no more than sixty seconds in the morning which is basically oh did you hear what happened today this guy said this thing and people are freaking out because of blah blah and this announcement was made and people think it's gonna be a big deal and the price is gonna go up because that would mean this and as soon as they started doing that i was like yep that sounds perfect just write that down and it just was such a good filter and so one way to think about what to write about and how to write it is do this little kind of voice memo test so can you just if you were just to tell your friend about this you know hey i have this idea blah blah or you know i noticed this thing not really interesting because blah and if you can't if it's not interesting to your friend guess what it's not gonna be interesting to a stranger right like you you have to be able to to explain it in a way that's simple and use that as a filter if you would never talk about it don't write about it well and the the tip that i used to give so at when i sold the hustle we'd close to two million subscribers i believe and for new writers they would they like would kick ass in their audition and then they would get nervous like when they're i'm like yeah two million a lot of people i get it but here's the tip right to me right to sam just literally you're only writing to me and that's what i'd tell people when they're writing blog posts when they're writing anything else just write to one person you're only writing to once human been being it's just coincidence that many others might read it right but just only write to one one person direct it to that one person and that's the way to go and so it makes it a lot easier right let's go to let's go to write simply what i found is around you can go as low as fourth grade but around six seventh and eighth grade reading level is the way that you wanna write now there's this app called hemingway app i love that app i don't really have to use it too much anymore but it's a free thing it's hemingway app dot com you could put your writing in there and i prefer to keep my stuff around six to seventh grade now to give you guys perspective i think news dot com news the newspaper i believe that's at a fourth grade reading level new york times which is highly regarded by a lot of people that's a a seventh grade re reading level and i actually went and put warren buffett warren buffett writes about insurance companies a very complicated topic i went and put his stuff through hemingway way up as well same thing six seventh eighth grade reading level and it teaches you how to write that level and there's tactics on how to do that like don't use adverbs keep sense this short but hemingway way app is an awesome way to check do you have a check to do it for you yeah i think that's a great one another one that you wrote in here is about storytelling and so i think storytelling is now like kind of in the more advanced a little more advanced category of how to be a great writer is being able to use use the art storytelling do you wanna give an example of that or how do you wanna talk about storytelling here so here's an example of storytelling so about ten years ago there was this company called hint hint water it's you see it's like a beverage that you guys see in the stores it's called and the the lady named cara she had this great story she went and gave this talk at one of my events and there was at the very end there was one question that someone asked her and i heard that story in a sixty minute talk i was like that's a that's a hit because that i just made me feel something i'm gonna give you an example of this story so the headline was getting called sweetie help this entrepreneur create a multimillion million dollar business sweetie the executive set and i just dropped the phone for a minute and let and here's the the opening line last week we get pizza pizza in forties kara hint the founder kara gold the founder told me a story that fired me the setup goes like this and it explains a story about how she was drinking ten coke today she was on the phone with an executive of coca cola and she said i'm gonna create a new version of water that just has a little bit of fruit in it and no sugar an executive at coco listed sweetie america's love sweet this is never gonna work by the way that's a great example of working backwards from an emotion even if you didn't consciously do it in this case you you knew that story would hit because it has outrage it has a w it has o g type of reaction of like like your asshole but let me fill you in on the results so i wrote the blog post not in order to promote hint i wrote the blog post because i thought this was just a cool story of a this entrepreneur getting like it was a sexist moment and she was getting hated on whatever hint saw the article they ended up spending millions of dollars to promote this article and at the very bottom of the article and it it says something like this conversation inspired golden now seventeen later seventeen years later to found hint and they do a hundred million in sales here's the flavors they have this article made them tens of millions of dollars in sales we used to get so much traffic to this article because they ended up promoting it i wasn't selling hit water i was just telling a cool story about the founder and in exchange it made all these people wanna buy this stuff and if in fact if you google hit water sweetie article you'll see articles written about this article about how it was a huge success and this was sort of an accident i just wrote something cool and may actually were like oh let's promote this but it works wonderfully because it was a story that grabbed your attention do you wanna say a few words on on how to how to write a great story i have a couple of tips you you do it so a couple of tips on on writing a great story or telling a great story so go look at the greatest storyteller tell ever one of them is aaron s he's known for writing great dialogue he wrote you know the the social network movie he wrote what is it west wing he wrote the newsroom he great writer famous right famous hollywood writer he says i worship at the altar of intention and obstacle so what he says is a story is just two things somebody has an intention somebody wants something and there's an obstacle in their way by the way that line i worship at blank altar at the altar of like blank yeah so yeah that that is going into my bank your bank alright so so intention and obstacle intention is some character wants something and then there's an obstacle in the way the more they want it like their daughter was just taken hostage huge huge intention obstacle they don't know by who where they are and all they have to go on is this one five second call that they were on or whatever right like obstacle dave they have no way to find them and they're just a bad how are they gonna ever you know get their daughter back and so intelligent intention and obstacle is the core element of any good story so somebody wants something in in the case that you just said not only does carol want to make her a business successful she wants to be taken seriously as a female entrepreneur obstacle coke executive men men are pigs nobody believes in her right that's a core that's a core of a story and so any story if you can they always say like in a movie you should be able to pause at any moment of any story and say what does that character want and what's in their way and if you can't pause and name that right now you have failed as a storyteller because the audience you you think they're you're gonna tell them later what the they want no no you've lost their attention the the initial stakes and if you watch any movie they establish this right i mean even like silly rom comps it'll be she wakes up she's got her assistant and chauffeur for driving her to work she's clearly high powered but her but she's alone and she's doesn't have a relationship right like that be it'll be obvious to her she'll see somebody out the window while she's driving to work in her chauffeur limo and it's this girl in love with her boyfriend and she looks at it kinda longing and then she just goes back to her her you know pom pilot or whatever before back to work and so you know what the character wants and you know what's in her way she's she doesn't have somebody because she has to find the route guy and she's still busy with work and so everything is always this intention obstacle the second thing is you have to establish like how you make a story better or worse stakes is the next thing so what is at stake what do you have to lose if this doesn't go well and stakes doesn't have like stakes initially the beginner version of stakes is life or death but the true art and some if you like some of the stories i've told in this podcast the true art is when you can establish high stakes emotions in a low stakes environment so if i can tell you how i was feeling and if i can get you to believe that i thought everything was on the line just with some little interaction i was having with the like this person in the grocery store and how i didn't want them to win because fuck them and they can't cut they cut in front of me but i'm not gonna not gonna cut front of them but i need them to know that it wasn't okay but i don't know how to do it without being an asshole myself and if i can establish the stakes that this matters to me i can get you to care about the outcome of it but it can be in a low steak situation now you're really cooking with gas if you can do something like that because otherwise you're limited to just life or death stories the best example you have done that you're very good at this is i i distinctly remember the story of you do it you doing a shirtless workout on your driveway and your h hoa be like no we we can't have this and you're like we're going to petty court yeah we're going to hoa like i just that was a like go oh i could fight to the death as a matter of prince here because you know what do you try to say and what does this mean right and if it means something to me that i can make it mean something to use so that sort of so larry david's great at this too like whenever i watched that show career enthusiasm like they're making a story out of something so silly and small you know like it's ten times more likable when it's something relatable or small but it still carries the emotional impact and if you could do that you have infinite supply stories he notices that people don't talk people don't talk to someone if they're wearing a mega hat and so he starts wearing a mega hat all the times he's like don't what i wanna talk to me i'm just gonna wear this hat yeah but that's a really good example of a high stakes high stakes and a low stakes environment where like it doesn't really matter but it's very funny and then let's talk about really tactical stuff so short sentences i'm a firm believer in short sentences and so the i'll give you i'll explain why but warren buffett owns you know runs berkshire halfway berkshire owns dozens and dozens of companies arguably the most complicated one is geico insurance companies are very very very hard to understand however i don't remember if the hustle did analysis on this or someone else did but he writes these famous annual shareholder letters every single year he's a very good writer and listen to this from nineteen seventy four to two thousand thirteen someone analyzed this and the letters per sorry the words per sentence dropped from seventeen to thirteen if you look at like we actually did an analysis on this every year it gets shorter and shorter and shorter and the reading level dropped from a tenth grade to a fourth grade reading level so the richer he got and the more complicated his business has got the simpler the writing got because he just got better at explaining it in a really easy to understand way and he's probably once kind of somewhat the average show to be able to understand this and so short simple sentences are key even in complicated environments and here's a really good example so if you go to hay dot com so hey dot com is an alternative to gmail it's a it's a service that makes you pay though so it's even they they've raised the stakes there so you have to pay for this email there's a letter from the ceo and that's one of my favorite like tactics by the way on a sales page it's letter from a ceo and he says hey everyone i'm jason ceo of thirty seven signals email gets a bad rap but it shouldn't emails is a treasure and he goes on to explain why email is awesome and why it should be more special than it is and it's the most simple language to explain email and i love it and there's lots of examples of simple language and and simple ways to explain complicated things and if you're able to do that oftentimes that will have shorter sentences less words and it it's significantly more effective than longer stuff related to that it doesn't have to be only one length so there's this great graphic that's gone viral many times you've probably seen it but i'll share it anyways we'll put it up on youtube because it's a visual thing you gotta see this the rhythm thing the rhythm thing which is great writing has rhythm so there's a an example so i'll just read this out he goes this sentence has five words here are five more words five word sentences are fine but several together become mono listen to what is happening just writing is getting boring the sound of it drones it's like a stuck record to ear demand some variety now listen i vary the sentence length and i create music music the writing sings it has a pleasant rhythm a lil a harmony i use short sentences and i use sentences of medium length and sometimes when i'm certain that the reader is rested i will engage him with the sentence of considerable length as sentence us that burns with energy and builds with the impetus of on cr send the role of the drums of crash of the symbols and sounds that say listen to this this is important so right with a combination of short medium and long sentences create music create sound that pleases the reader ears don't just write words write music love that thing this is amazing right and so you want have short by default but then like he said says when the reader is rested and ready use long sentence it's too great effect and so that's like a advanced move when it comes to writing most people's problem is every every sentence just too long and so you start with short sentences but then you figure out how to vary it so that you're writing things whenever i sometimes when write something that i get really into i am i almost feel like i'm like i channel like my inner m and m or like some rapper or something where i'm like what type of rhythm could get people flowing like i need to have a rhythm that gets people to fall down this and like they're small tactics like anytime you wanna use a comma use a period and then start the next sentence with and or but or there's other things like put your internal dialogue like or like or or the reader internal dialogue like so why would i do this you're asking yourself right now right or who the hell is this person talking to me through my computer screen telling me what to do and why on earth should i trust them like you can do these little things to change the rhythm and grab people's attention yeah hundred percent the that's a that's a great way of putting it i also think like the rhythm thing is it comes from the copy work so back to the copy at the beginning if you do copy work on something that has rhythm like i will write that that same thing that i just read out loud i'll write that in my copy it takes well whatever fifty five seconds but now i'm already kinda rev up to write that style to have that that variety that rhythm when i write the next thing so we wrap up saying some resources that we both use in order to get influenced yeah yeah how how do you learn how do you get better from here because this was the crash course just hit on a bunch of bunch of the big topics there's obviously a lot of nuance and subtlety and like doing it takes both practice as well as like a little bit of deeper understanding but where where should people go so what i'll start with some some books that i like i like writing by stephen king that changed my life i like that one a lot what you like about more by the i read that book i didn't love it well what what was still good about i just felt that he was teaching me how to write better and but he was living it as he was going and so the first half of the book i believe is his biography in the second half his tool he calls it the the toolkit where he explains like how he does stuff and i just felt in the biography part he was doing it and then in the in the toolkit part what you mean yeah yeah and so i really appreciate that but then i also get a lot of inspiration from funny original thinkers you know who is one of the most original like people with words right now is theo von so i'll hear theo von like for example he had an ad for athletic greens and he goes today's sponsors athletic greens i know what you thinking and what is this just a bunch of aliens playing track and feel and like like he he does these like silly things perspective it unexpected silly things and he's like a treasure trove of like interesting phrases so i'm a big fan of like listening to what he's saying and why i also listened to a ton of comedian because they've perfect this so like dave chappell is really great with timing shane gill really good with timing and so i pay attention to i love those guys on how they get people's attention so i like writing i like theo von i listen to a lot of true crime podcast podcasts in true crime podcast because they're supposed to be thrilling they are excellent at storytelling and setting up tension and so i love there's this company called cast they've got serial killers unsolved murders and i really love how they set up tension what do you like i like a lot of those same things you said i also like to consume them in a different way so i think everybody likes dave chappell or c k but you know when i wanted to get good at this i started to study what they do not just laugh and move on right so i would there's there's an amazing amazing thing what i think is the i have two two things i've learned from comedian and i think are the best examples of both storytelling to win people on your side and of apologizing so the apologizing one is after louis ck k got canceled they basically disappeared for like a year and a half and he came back and he did his first show on stage and there's a big question on my my head it's like how is he going to address this what he say you people should go listen to it in in but basically first he doesn't address he's he's doing his normal act and he pauses just in the middle of like doing a thing and he's just like so should we talk about it we got we could talk about it and he just brings up like in the he makes it awkward because like what he did was like weird and pretty gross and bad whatever it so he what he did was instead of back pedal and apologizing instead of denying instead of trying to spin it as good he was like everybody's got a thing some people's things are weird than others but got a thing that they like barack obama knows my thing basically you guys fun of them stuff like it's no they say poke like my thing is so weird that i liked and did and everybody knows about it and he kinda wins you on his side like just the commute the i idea of even obama knows my thing like everything's everybody's gotta but it's secret usually and so that he ghost and he and he there's more to it but he does that chappell does one win when they took a chappell show they put it on netflix and he wasn't getting any royalties he's from me he's like man they're using my name they're putting my show up there i have a fight with these guys and my fans are watching it and netflix is winning and the the studios everyone's winning except for chappell from the chappell show right so it goes on stage it does this twenty minute thing called i think it's called unforgivable or unforgiving or something like that i'm gonna do a full usually breakdown of this because it is to me it is like the masterclass class and how do you tell a story to win people on your side it is so well done i i i can't even do it adjust i do a full breakdown of like what i think he did that was so smart and i have studied this thing and i i've been like i can't believe like i would have never come up with this as a way to to make that point to get people at the end to be totally on his side and willing to like boycott the show how did he get people to do that and the way he told the story where he's not giving you a lecture he's not just coming out and saying it outright he kinda baked it in at the end but he set the setup up was so strong that you there's only one outcome you could have it's amazed that led you to one door which is i'm on dave's side i'm gonna do exactly what this guy just said and to me when i saw that i was like that was the best example i've ever seen of using storytelling for bass persuasion i i i i wanna go watch that another person i love have you ever read joel on software joel on software dot com yeah going to patel to to joel the maker of trello nice dude i know that that like sounds ridiculous but he's just like nerdy guy who has started i think stack overflow and trello all these like companies dude his blogs are very funny on the do topic like i don't even understand a lot of the topics because it's like heavy engineering he does such a good job of writing on on these topics i love what i one of my favorite things to do is find the top posts on hacker news because typically these engineering types of people are particularly quirky and they kinda like think outside the box was a weird yesterday i don't know if you saw it yesterday there's a great one of every great example of this some guy wrote the k app sucks or something like that and it was like the number fifteen thing on hacker i click it and it's this like ten thousand word blog post about k technology he's just like he's like i like k k is the biggest grocer in the world and he's like they should be good at technology they have all the money and they have the customers they've have all the locations like they should not be getting their their you know their ass handles them by insta car and these other like startups he's like look at this you open the k app and it doesn't like you swipe and it doesn't he's like the whole internet is if you swipe it'll load more stuff for k if you want to swipe to c more products it stops you and there's this tiny button that says like next page you have to go page after page doesn't just load he's like that's terrible a's like here's this other thing and he wrote is like ten thousand word thing like nerd out about the k app and i loved it i read every word it i was like this is a this is incredible notary right here i love this thing he's got a great opening line he says i'll start by saying i know nothing about the grocery industry but what i do know about is tech and ux and so that's a great way to like kinda get people down your slippery slope but this is a really good article and i love not even that this is particularly good writing but what i would say is that this is effective writing because the best writing the biggest lesson up at all is that you want your content to just be you pushed out i think everybody thinks they have to like become some character in order for their content to hit to work to be to be a to be a popular or whatever and you can kinda do that and you might even get some popularity but it'll never work in the long because it's not you being you and those people are attracted to something that's not your actual brain your actual thoughts it's free flag fly baby you gotta let and you know that's how this podcast worked is like i started with this interview format trying to emulate almost a copy work because like em the tim ferris show or how i built this or whatever but then when it was just this me pushed like i'm gonna get on here we're gonna talk some days about writing and some days about mindset sense some days about this niche business that's you know tire rims in in north carolina that's crushing it's like that's the shit i'm into so that's the shit i talk about that's the thing i'm most passionate about that's the thing i can have i have those most interesting things to say about and because of that it's just me pushed out and then it's gonna attract people who really like that and nobody can compete with me at that thing right like that that is a a personal monopoly there is nobody else who could do what i'm doing as well as i'm doing it you could do the same thing with your writing so just take the stuff you're most interested in or nerd out about the most and post that even if it seems like does anyone else really care about this you'll find the people that care about it if you just consistently do that which is what this episode is we're talking about a topic that you and i actually care a ton about and i guess we're gonna find out if the rest care about it but it will find those who do next time for the next what what do we call this question advice this next time are we doing business plans i think yeah we're doing a a one on the next question of advice which is we've kind of laugh at like oh you don't need to write a business plan that's archaic but like we do do some for version of planning before we just start a business so we're gonna share what do we actually do in our planning before we start a business that we found is effective for us so that'll be the next one so we and we each got to plug our thing although i think your thing is no longer a thing yeah but i've inspired by doing this i'm like i wanna tell people about this that actually like have i have a course that does but i have a ton of examples so the examples are actually what's valuable because you might hear some of the things you talked about like i gotta i look that up gotta look that like that up but in the course i basically put it all there i'm like here's the principal here's the example you don't know actually it's principal you try it then it's here's the example of it done well another example of it done well another example of done well try it again and literally if you just do that you'll get better as a writer it that's like a a structured form of practice so my courses does so much me talk about it was that and i'm like if somebody actually wanted to learn that you kinda need that you kinda need to have those gold star examples and you need to have like a place to go practice like try it learn it then try it again so i just googled sham prairie power writing it takes me to m in and you can join the wait list is that where people should go yeah but i'm gonna boot it back up so i have this wait list scott i don't got a lot of people and i but i should i haven't done it in over like a year and a half i kind of like retired from it but this episode made me fired up about it so maybe that'll fade in in an hour i'll be like now fact that i'm not doing it but if not i'll i'll do one more one more of these this year and then i have a thing only on copy work i love copy work it changed my life i got this thing i made it like in a weekend two years ago just for shits and giggles because i it just i like it it's fun for me it's called copy that dot com and it's my best versions of what i think people should write and copy and then you copy it by hand and i break down why each point is interesting so you can check it out copy that it's got a ton of good reviews you could actually i actually try to post all the negative reviews and the positive reviews so you could see all the reviews but copy that dot com so google sean prairie power writing and you'll see his page on m dot com and then copy that document we wanna put both in the description so it'll be at the top of the description here we'll put the links to the to the things we talked about in this episode because i think if you're listening to this you're driving or you're walking it's very hard and we're usually not that good with show notes but today alright let's try to be good with the show notes where all the resources we talked about let's make it easy and put it put it there for people so they can just scroll down and get it do thousand people on the waitlist list for the course didn't know anyway i haven't looked at this i'm so long this was like five hundred last time i looked that's crazy you should do that again right but takes you too many i don't think i can do how many people at once because i'm pretty like i'm live with them and i'm like doing student feedback so that would be i don't think that's even doable i i i couldn't possibly do even i've never the biggest one of ever everybody was four hundred so eight thousand people just not gonna work you'll figure it out is that the pod that's fun i feel like got rude to work i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a less travel never looking back