RC #014
Building a daily writing habit
Hello friends,
Welcome to another edition of Rational Creatives!
Today I’m gonna cover:
Building a daily writing habit
Voice and curation
“Great Thoughts” Time, part 2
Creativity in the digital age
Let’s dive right into it!
Building a daily writing habit
After seeing David Perell commit to writing 100 essays in 100 days, Dickie was inspired to do something similar.
But instead of doing this on his own, he decided to find some collaborators. After making a public announcement on Twitter, Dickie ended up creating and hosting a community of almost 60 writers committed to ship an atomic essay every day for a whole month.
That’s how Ship 30 for 30 was born.
I'm happy to say that I am one of those writers.
Last week I shipped my atomic essays every day, and let me tell you something: it feels amazing.
This experiment has allowed me to see for myself the power of two creative driving forces: accountability and constraints.
Accountability works like magic. Having a group of peers who checks on you, encourages you and supports you increases both the rewards of shipping and the downsides of giving up.
Constraints, on the other hand, have also been key. By limiting your essay's length and subjects, writing something from scratch every day stops being so daunting and becomes much more manageable. It's counterintuitive, but nonetheless true — the more creative freedom you have, the more difficult creating tends to be.
You can find a thread with all my 7 essays here.
Voice and Curation
Yesterday I read this interesting essay by Alex Lieberman, cofounder of the Morning Brew, who also happens to be a member of the Ship 30 for 30 community.
In Lists-as-a-Service, he explores the idea of the Brew creating very niched Twitter lists to curate the best accounts in each of these categories.
What I found most interesting about his essay, though, is what Alex himself described as the Brew’s secret sauce:
Media is crowded. Business media is even more crowded. How can we cut through the clutter & compete with 1000 lb. gorillas in our industry. Three words: voice and curation.
As of right now, Morning Brew has over 2 million subscribers. And although there might be other contributing factors to its success, its unique voice and impeccable curation seem to have a lot to do with it.
But I wonder if this “recipe” could also work for individuals. Can a personal brand's "tone of voice" be a game-changer the way it is for business brands?
I DMed Alex to see if he had any thoughts on this and he told something very powerful: "[voice] is literally just being acutely aware of how you communicate to your customers [or audience] in a way that feels personalized to them".
That makes a lot of sense.
“Great Thoughts” Time, part 2
Sundays are the perfect day for what Richard Hamming used to call "Great Thoughts” Time: A block of time used exclusively to discuss and reflect on big, important questions about your work or career.
Every Friday afternoon he would do this and consider questions like "What will be the role of computers in all of AT&T?'' or "How will computers change science?''.
As I said in an earlier issue of this newsletter, the hardest part about doing "Great Thoughts" Time is to figure out what questions to ponder in the first place. The questions you should ask yourself might vary a lot depending on your field, your goals, etc.
However, a couple of weeks ago I discovered a short compilation of deep, thought-provoking questions that Morgan Housel shared in this blog post. And I think they could serve as a fantastic template to start doing your own "Great Thoughts” sessions. They're profound and powerful, but also also broad and general. So you can easily adapt them to your specific circumstances.
These are a handful of my favorites:
Which of my current views would I disagree with if I were born in a different country or generation?
What do I desperately want to be true, so much that I think it’s true when it’s clearly not?
Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different?
What are we ignoring today that will seem shockingly obvious in a year?
What are yours?
Creativity In The Digital Age
This week I finally spent more time creating than consuming! And although that's very great news, it comes with a price — I have to put more effort into finding awesome content to curate and share with y'all.
The single best piece of content I consumed this week was this fascinating, deep-dive conversation between Ali Abdaal and Austin Kleon.
A few months ago I read Austin's first book Steal Like An Artist and I've been intermittently checking his awesome blog ever since. But I had never listened to one of his interviews before.
I'm still halfway through this one (it's a 2-hour-long conversation), but so far it's been incredibly rich and valuable — full of creative wisdom, insights, and interesting references.
These are some of my favorite highlights:
What you say is not as important as how you say it: "There are no unique messages, only unique messengers."
You don't need to be an expert in order to teach and help others: "It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can."
Gary Vee's "Document, Don't Create".
A lot of interesting things happen to you when you start sharing your work online.
Writing as tool for self-knowledge: "Writing is actually just not a way of communicating with the world. It's actually a way of communicating with yourself".
How to write a book: "Why don't you assume you've already written your book and now all you just have to do is find it?".
How to pick what to do when you have different interests: "Don't pick. You figure out a way to keep these things around... [Then] let things speak to each other to create a richer life".
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Loved it. Cool stuff.
Daniel, good stuff. I was enticed to sign up Dickie’s challenge also. I’ve been doing it thru the sheer force of will - it’s way better with accountability and feedback - which I’ve been missing lately. I do love your thoughts on making time for great thoughts. In my own writing, I sometimes find a larger narrative (sometimes completely different)than I originally planned for emerges.
Keep up the good work.
-George