Writing

“Writing is like, just, it's just so critical, because it's one of the ways that you practice clarifying your thoughts, like writing is like really clear thinking, so you can't like take that exercise away from yourself, especially as like a, you know, a creato…”

“My take, it's very clear, at least empirically that models are getting better at coding at some exponential rate, right? And I don't think that's changing. Now I'm not that impressed with the progress in any other domain. It tends to be like, I don't think the…”

“One of the best ways to learn how to become a better writer is this thing called copywork, where you find work that you love.”

“I think writing, actually is very important, and it's not because the AI can't write. You know, AI will become amazing at writing just like any other domains, but because I think the skill of writing forces you to be very clear of what you have to say. And eve…”

“Is that writing right now is a big way of how you delegate things to agents. That's like a whole new, that's a whole new aspect of it. So if you can develop a writing habit, You have a lot more context that you can pass over to an agent, which then dramaticall…”

“Every word that you write is actually an obstacle that the reader does not want to have to go through. Your book is an obstacle between them and the result that they want.”

“Writing is, to me, it's just equivalent to thinking. So if you're not writing, you're probably not thinking enough about the problem. Because I just, working memory is limited. How many things can you keep in your head versus how many things can you keep in a …”

“I think we're going through a seismic shift now that's similar to when writing first came online.”

“Code is this weird form of work where sometimes really the next five, 10, 20, 30 minutes of your work is entirely predictable from looking over your shoulder. And I would contrast this with writing.”

“From that we got the renaissance, a renaissance in painting, and the same thing's gonna happen with writing.”

“Good writing is very easy because if your idea is right, it's easy to articulate it. And if you get writer's block, the reason you have writer's block is because your idea sucks and it's wrong. And that, and that's why you're struggling to articulate it. So I …”

“They lose the punch in the previous paragraph of, you know, the eight sentences and the punch is the last one. And I say, take the punch out and make it its own paragraph. It looks weird in the eyes of an editor because it is associated with the paragraph befo…”

“Writing is super strategic, but is the last unstructured business process that a company does.”

“If you're writing for an audience of one, yourself, then you're naturally going to do your best work. Writing for yourself is really fun, and I think it shows in the writing. Writing for other people is work, and that shows in the writing.”

“Ideas have this illusory nature, which is, on the surface, they seem really good, but when you force yourself to sit down and write the idea down and really unpack it, either they don't seem as good as they do on the surface, or By comparison to all of the oth…”

“If you want to make money as a writer, it's significantly easier to start with the end in mind, start with a problem, and then use writing as a vehicle to solve it.”

“And so my best guess of where, let's say, term papers or homework is going to have to evolve to is, especially in something like writing, you're going to have to do some in-class writing.”

“I said, write well, like I actually think, especially as you get to more senior positions, writing is the only scalable way of having influence on a larger and larger product org.”

“Forces you to really think through your ideas and to connect your ideas together. You can't hide sloppy thinking. And so it forces rigor, and I also think it creates clarity.”

“The only reason writing becomes, ah, easy to read is because it's hard to write. And writing is just hard. I think of writing as it's like running. If you're going to run your best, it's always gonna hurt. And so if you can run a five minute mile and then you …”

“Once you get yourself with the low expectation of the low bar, it works. Cause then some days, many days after the a hundred words, you're like, Ooh, I can keep going.”

“There are many fewer people who can actually do it, who implement the ideas, and so by practicing them, you set a really high bar for truth, and you probably guarantee that the ideas will be better when you do share them and write about them.”

“And I still, to this day, think being a good writer is a really great tool to being a good investor. It's important to be able to, I think, articulate how you're thinking about things. It's important to Be able to simplify your ideas down to a few key principl…”

“Writing is a really great way to clarify your thoughts and the vague ideas that you have in your head, the gut feelings to be able to sit down and put them to paper and clarify your thoughts for better or worse.”

“People really love when you write something that they already know. They intuitively know this idea. They just never put it into words. Because then when they see it in words, they instantly think, yes, you're right.”

“The reason it's hard to write is usually because the idea you're saying Is it right? You have this, like, conflict in your head, and the reason it's hard to write is because you know in your head that what you're saying does not make any sense.”

“Writing is a tool for thinking, and if you can't get compound interest on your thoughts, if you can't build up a thought structure over time and continually go back and revisit it and revise it, you're limited to just what you can hold in your head.”

“Write down some of the core insights in your own words. Just that action alone is going to crystallize the thought, test your understanding of it, and help you remember it later.”

“One hour a day of writing, you'll write a novel in a year, guaranteed.”

“Making decisions in the moment while you're writing I think part of you knows you're making the wrong decision. Like even if the book should be in first person or present or past tense, like these are very big decisions that if you haven't thought about them a…”

“And then, you know, I just do three hours every day of the writing because it's about all I can stomach.”

“Writing about things that really matter to you persuasively and explanatorily that turns out to be much more powerful and useful than math.”

“I think there's a paradox in that most fields, the more you do it, the better you get and the easier it gets. I think writing, especially writing about a single topic like investing, It's the other way around in that. So I've written 3600 articles now. So the …”

“What's definitely true, and I've heard this from other writers too, is that when you sit down and try to force yourself to think about a topic, you're never gonna get it. If you sit down and say, okay, I need to think about something What am I going to write? …”