RC #018 🧠✍️
You don't need more mental models & Stephen King's best writing advice
Hello my friends,
Welcome to the 18th issue of Rational Creatives!
Before we get down to business, I want to thank you for letting me into your inbox and taking the time to read my work. Especially if you’ve been a subscriber since the beginning. Knowing that there’s at least one person who finds the things I write helpful or encouraging or interesting is what keeps me going when I feel like throwing in the towel.
Starting Rational Creatives was definitely one of the best things I did in 2020, and I’m excited to keep doing it in the upcoming year.
Anyways, in this week’s edition I’m going to cover:
Building my first landing page ever
You don’t need more mental models
Stephen King’s best writing advice
Digging subreddits
Let’s dive into it!
Growth 💸
Building my first landing page ever
On Tuesday I finally shipped my last atomic essay and started working on my first Launch MBA project, The Online Writing Bible:
Since the launch deadline is very close, I decided to start building a landing page before building the product itself. That way, if the product isn’t ready by then, I can still start getting leads and taking pre-orders.
I had never built a landing page before, but I pushed myself to avoid procrastilearning and figure things out along the way.
So I bought a domain, designed a quick logo on Canva and upgraded to Carrd Pro. An hour later, I had finished v1.
On Friday, after getting feedback from different people, I built v2. This time, though, I did use some help:
Harry's 5-step formula for building effective landing pages was incredibly useful.
Louis' Landing Page Checklist also came in very handy. Although it is a bit longer of a read, I think it is the perfect if you want to dive deeper and complement Harry's advice.
If you’re curious about the result, you can see my landing page here. Please just keep in mind that’s still a work-in-progress. I'm aware I’m still missing social proof and some cool images of how the product looks inside. But if there’s anything else I should add, change or remove, please let me know. I’d love to hear your feedback.
Rationality 🧭
You don’t need more mental models
A few days ago I was looking for a YouTube video explaining Bayesian thinking and I ended up finding this thought-provoking TED Talk by Julia Galef, host of the Rationally Speaking podcast.
In the talk, Julia tells the unfortunate story behind Captain Alfred Dreyfus’ conviction to illustrate a sad but true reality: intelligence alone can't save us from the trap of our own cognitive biases.
To become better thinkers, Julia argues, we don’t necessarily need more knowledge and mental models. Not that there’s something inherently wrong with them. But without the right mindset, they just make us more sophisticated fools.
Thus, the first step to become a better thinker is changing your values and then adjusting your emotions accordingly:
We need to change the way we feel. We need to learn how to feel proud instead of ashamed when we notice we might have been wrong about something. We need to learn how to feel intrigued instead of defensive when we encounter some information that contradicts our beliefs.
Before we keep adding mental models to our cognitive toolkits, we need to stop being the soldier who fiercely protects his beliefs and become a curious scout that relentlessly seeks truth.
Creativity 🎨
Stephen King on writing
As I’m gathering material for the Online Writing Bible, this week I’ve found some hidden treasures. One of my favorite findings was this blog post curating Stephen King’s best writing advice.
Although 99% of King’s work is fiction, a lot of his advice is universal and might be valuable even if don't write fiction.
Out of the 50 quotes that the blog post features, these five were the ones that resonated the most with me:
The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.
One who does grasp the rudiments of grammar find a comforting simplicity at its heart, where there need only be nouns, the words that name, and verbs, the words that act.
If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.
It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.
If writing is a skill you want to develop, I highly recommend you read the whole blog post or, even better, read King's memoir On Writing. Right now it's just $2.99 on Amazon.
Curiosity 🤯
Digging subreddits
I had heard about the r/InternetIsBeautiful subreddit before, but I had never dug it. Yesterday I spent almost an hour digging it and found some rabbit-hole-worthy posts. These were some of my favorites:
A blind youtuber describes how confusing the idea of seeing colors is for him
A website that plays a musical note every time someone edits a Wikipedia entry
After going through all these mind-blowing stuff I'm seriously considering start paying for Mailbrew so I can get a digest of the best Reddit posts via email.
If there's any other cool subreddits like this that you know, please let me know. I'd love to check it out!
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Landing Page is looking good. And I am looking forward to that website.