Hello and welcome to the North Star. I'm your host David Pharrell. And this is the North Star podcast in each episode. We explore the intersection between different ideas cultures and life philosophies. The guests are diverse, but they share profound similarities. They're Guided by Purpose Driven by curiosity and see the world with a unique lens and in each episode we get to dive into their hard-earned wisdom and apply it to our lives.
What I'm not recording podcasts I write essays on my website for al.com send a weekly email newsletter called Monday musings and run an online writing school called rite of passage. I hope you enjoy the show. My guest today is marketer and software engineer Patrick Mackenzie who writes mostly about software as a service businesses. He currently works for Strife as a writer and an overall software business Expert. I remember when I signed up for stripes
this program to incorporate my LLC almost all of the documentation that wasn't legal documentation had been written by Patrick Patrick is also started multiple software businesses such as bingo card creator that made Bingo cards for teachers an appointment reminder that automated phone calls emails and text messages to the clients of Professional Service businesses a company called Starfighter that built games that programmers played to match them with jobs and a software Consulting.
See called kazuma's software. Now. I have devoured Patrick's work. He is one of my favorite online writers. So before we begin here's my attempt to summarize what I learned from him in three sentences first charge more for your services and products second. The economy is much bigger than you think and number three create for Unique people not average ones. So in this episode it is mostly devoted to the mechanics of writing online.
So first we talked about why Patrick is pro writing but anti blogging he insist that every person should have a website with that they own with at least three essays on it. And on the writing front. We also talked about what Google analytics undervalues the benefits of building an email list and what even the best marketers don't know about marketing and at the end of this conversation we talked about what Patrick is learned living his entire adult life in Japan and
One encounter with a professional knife sharpener. We're going to have to wait for that one. So, please enjoy my conversation with Patrick McKenzie.
So, this is a question from Matt. What did you expect when starting to write online that ended up surprising you something that you didn't expect where your assumptions ended up being different once you started to actually go through the craft
sure. So I guess it's a question both about surprising about expectations manager comes back in 2006. I didn't really have high expectations for writing online I had
Set the stage. I had just arrived in Japan actually not sure I'd been there for two and a half years at that point. I have been described as a good writer for a while at this point bye-bye teachers, but you know being out of college there was no longer any impetus to to write large volumes into right? Well, that's not well writing is a useful skill and like all skills it decays over time. If you don't use it and my day job in Japan is not causing me to write a lot of English and so
I rather enjoy writing it would be unfortunate if my ability here to fade to nothing. So one of the reasons that I wrote was just sort of like the bicycle for the mines / stationary bike for the craft of writing just I will probably use this in the future. I don't want to Decay at it a surprising thing. Is that go figure when you spend a lot of time doing something for a while. You don't tend to Plateau at that thing you tend to get better over time. Typically if you keep pushing yourself some different directions.
And another thing that surprised me relative to expectations is that not all writing from effort perspective is created equal with regards to achieving those goals or for any other for that matter any other goals. I am I selection of topics for the first several years of writing on that and was basically I'm just going to blog there's that word again just going to blog about whatever is on top of my mind today and so in a day where I did a lot of counting I would read about accounting a today where I did a lot of optimization of
of the performance of my Java Swing app, I would write about the performance of a Java Swing applic cetera Etc. And it was very sort of scatter shot. There was no Rhyme or Reason. Other than that. Well, if you if you enjoy my story then here's the next update on it. But if if you weren't like bought into the patio 11-story then there was no particular reason to come to my blog on any given day and well aside from maybe like you enjoy just the consumption of things that I write in my voice etcetera.
And and it turned out after a couple of years when I was looking at back at bills to my stats and what people were telling me. I'm like, this is clearly your best work is that I have a external to the craft of writing about it. I have a comparative advantage on the intersection in the Venn diagram between marketing and Engineering much better engineer than virtually all marketers. I'm a much better marketer than virtually all engineers and I wrote about that intersection very well and the more I wrote about things in that intersection the better it did.
And be better, I wrote sort of like long media detail heavy posts in that intersection the better they did versus like that 200 word. Well, I'm trying to keep it my streak so I might as well write something today to say that it wrote something on Thursday. And so after I started operationalizing that and said, okay, I don't have a boss per se for my blog. I can still write about anything I want to write about but when I'm thinking of things to write about I should probably be company stuff that's in quote unquote might be
It's
were adjacent to it. And I should probably be writing form factors that work for me. Which tend to be like 8,000 word effort posts. The people started liking the output more. I started getting better at that variety of output. It was a compounding goodness to it. I had it more of a quote-unquote brand developing for myself at that is not scare quotes and that was a virtuous cycle there of like a tighter brand for my work cause more
people to like it cause them to come back more often and to recommend it to people cause them to like if if things adjacent to that brand were discussed online people would inject me into the conversation, even with without me being in that room, etc. Etc. Which gave me more opportunities to write which gave me more virtuous circle all the way around so I don't specifically regret spending a couple of years just in that experimental phase of throwing stuff to the wall on the internet and seeing what sticks but if I got a do-over
Would probably have been actively looking for. Okay, what is working? What do I enjoy writing what fills a need for contemporaneously phrased at what fills the hole on the internet and there are holes in the internet, but there are some that are more valuable than others at the it is extremely useful that the thing that happened to be my intersection of the Venn diagram happens to be extremely commercializable for well-heeled companies software companies.
In particular aren't going to run out of money to throw out the question of like engineering plus marketing software at any time soon. And so if I got to do over I would be look at like what are the opportunities that you know hit both my interests by ability to write something well and that expressed no needs of relatively well heeled participants of the economy
how like in network building. There's the famous chicken and egg problem.
Like if there's a demand driven Marketplace, how do you actually get those first customers there and there's a similar question within writing of when you were doing your bingo card maker. How did you get people to discover your blog at the beginning or maybe you can tell a story from stripe. I know in the early days of stripe there was writing as part of the history. How should we solve the chicken and egg problem of online writing
one metacomet before we get into solving the chicken-egg problem. I think too many people
Lara paralyzed and the ability to write or the desire to write by saying like it doesn't matter if I write if I don't have an audience to be able to ship those words to and I think that even if you have literally zero people who read what you write today, it is still worth writing that thing today because you will produce an asset that you can use in the future in one-on-one conversations. And this is a hundred eighty degrees from how most people think about audience building writing online and playing for the numbers, but if the
The thing you got out of writing an essay about whatever the topic is for you. Is that the next time you're doing a job search when you are writing cold emails to hiring managers for whatever the position is that you're going after you can use that one essay that you wrote back in the day as a proof of work. I'm like, hey, I have clearly thought about this more than most people who are sending you a cold email with a link to a resume that you're going to like skim for 30 seconds and that would already be like the highest Roi on writing a piece that most writers will get
Yet so don't feel like you need to solve the chicken and egg problem prior to prior to writing that said the chicken and egg like cold start problem. It is a real problem and your audience exists somewhere and it is likely a combination of both. Like if you're solving this need that doesn't yet exist on the Internet. It's probably a collection of people who don't yet know that they should be friends. But also some folks that are already friends or all are already in the audience elsewhere.
So if you find those places where your crowd or the people who should be in your crowd naturally congregates sort of participating in those spaces and then gradually injecting your stuff into those spaces Works. Rather. Well too few people remember it but there was back in the day. This sad Forum called The Business of software that was hosted by Joel spolsky and there were yours truly and maybe two dozen other at people there that we're building software companies all at the same time and then if you know use the magic method of participation on the internet that
Implies that there were a couple hundred people reading it and a lot of those two dozen people went on to do great things and of the note 60 people that read my blog on the first day that it existed back in 2006. I assume virtually all of them saw it because they had seen the participating on that form for 6 Plus months and so saw it when I posted a hey yet. I started a Blog today and I'm going to launch a piece of software and week I here's my post about it and
the explosion of social media the last couple of years makes this easier because you can sort of like interact with people who have large audiences on social media and then the tricky bit of it gradually and in an authentic way introduce your pieces into replies about their pieces or your thoughts into replies about their thoughts and and there's some deep deep social technology and nuanced about doing that in a way that is both true to your values and
Annoying for the person that you are sort of glomming onto and also in that annoying for Their audience, but I've seen many many people.
sort of do that and do that relatively well, and there was also by the way, like people who
Affirmatively make space for that sort of thing. And I feel a little weird pointing at particular examples, but there are well. I appointed myself have a standing invitation on my website that please send me e-mail. I like getting email at like reading things to people have written excetera Etc. And there are other people who have like standing policies with signal boosting people who are new to the industry, etc. Etc. If you DM them on Twitter, and so if you wrote something that was relevant to an industry and you knew that
Like that existed that might be a DM or setting on Twitter or similarly anyone with the podcast is typically looking for an interview based podcast. They're looking for more folks to interview and there are both social reasons for them to want to vary the like career stage, etc. Etc of the folks the interview such that they will be willing to interview at least some relative unknowns and there's also in addition to social reasons like that helps them with both and availability.
Any concerns that it is a true fact that you know, the same a hundred people and whatever your neck of the woods is get a quote unquote all the requests AB given that they have limited amounts of time there. You can help people with that filling holes in their scheduled by saying hey, I actually have an interesting take on this. Here's a proof of work that I've written that that shows you about this. Would you like to have me on your
podcast? I feel like you're hitting it something here between owned platforms and then like borrowed.
So you spend a lot of time on Hacker News you were talking about the Joel sapolsky platform earlier. So how do you think of see like, there's two ways to sort of give this Brash advice for Riders and I actually think that they're both wrong. The first is go publish on sort of the BuzzFeed bottle. We're just going to be everywhere and we're not going to be collecting a lot of emails and then we're just going to depend on these platforms for our own livelihood. That's the first model and I don't think that's right the second model.
Oil is only right online, but then you struggle to get distribution or only right on your own website, but then you struggle to get distribution. So how do you actually go on a Hacker News how to actually go on a Joel sapolsky and then transfer that Social Capital into your own Walled Garden?
So interestingly, I think that people should probably have a slightly more detailed model of how their business works. Then it all being in a Walled Garden. We can talk about that in substantial amounts of detail. But as feisty say that you probably want to have something available which is friend catcher that is accessible by anyone and then in email gate at which doesn't require payment and then probably some paper products perhaps I was the scope of this discussion dude Consulting for a while.
Mountains have this nice sort of mental model. And what is the level of depth you go to in a coffee chat versus what is the level of depth to you? Go to in a deliverable and making sure that like coffee chats are free use that as a it's a cost of doing business for you just to get into conversations that could turn into a potential engagements deliverables on the other hand are very not free and they're the scope of them is committed to advance they have some features and then the price is the price.
So when I'm writing on Hacker News anytime, I feel that a comment is becoming and less of like an ad hoc is just meet participating water cooler discussion and more of like no wait actually have something that there is a core value here and people would probably be referring to this for years if it had a permanent home. I make sure that the permanent home for that thing is my blog actually my best blood well best according to the page views metric and blog
Whatever was originally Hacker News comment. It was at John Graham Cummings wrote a blog post about his frustrations of being told his name was invalid and I there was a threat of Hacker News about this and I wrote a started writing calmative all the different ways that suffer got names wrong. And after I had 25 of them like this really should not be a hacker news Comet and so flipped over to the blog and posted falsehoods programmers believe about me.
Names, this is back in 2010 and it still gets named checked on Twitter 10 plus times a week. It has more citations in academic work. Then I feel is reasonably justified in a sort of like the canonical place people point to when someone again gets this frustration about, you know software has rejected by name and that now I feel a little annoyed / that which happens to be on a weekly basis because they have the last name McKenzie and I live in Japan.
Definitely drove a bit of my heat when I was pounding out this site agent coming and so what I do things like know tweet storms, etc. Etc. When I feel like okay my level of Engagement in this tweet storm is getting over like 15 minute Mark and there seems to be some
I don't know. I won't say there's no actual thought that goes into tweet storms and I'm like developing themes here and inner laying them against other pieces and maybe like sighting out to two other work that has been done has been done on this. I start thinking maybe I should like promote this into a blog post and typically that I don't just like copy paste tweet storm into blog post and call it a day rather. I use the Tweet storm or the hn comment or that sort of thing. She like
Think out loud if it were do my best Thinking by writing and then go back into the cave right up a real version and then post
that Tyler train guests had a good question about the benefits of long form writing. You said earlier that your sweet spot was right around eight thousand words and it does seem that you do prefer those long-form essays. So when it comes to being online and and and you said this to me a couple weeks ago, there are people who quite
Literally run the world people who are the CEO or is CEOs of Fortune 500 companies Executives and they'll wake up in the morning. They'll read ten thousand word essay and - right off to work. So Patrick, I thought that the internet was optimized for short posts attention spans are falling yada yada yada all these traditional narratives what are people missing incentive
structures rule everything around me. So the we could have a long long time.
Discussion about this but so much about that the received wisdom of The Art of Doing the internet. Well is Downstream of the incentive structures of large BTC advertising platforms and like large producers of inventory for b2c advertising platforms and you know not to pick on BuzzFeed but since BuzzFeed is widely acknowledged to be extremely good at exploiting this
And like BuzzFeed has done a lot of research and what the cost curve for production of a listicle is versus the number of eyeballs. It will get if it has a attractive title on it versus what the cost curve is for producing long firm reporting and how many people will stay on that long form reporting long enough to count as an impression for their advertisers and the Roa trade-off for BuzzFeed is pretty clear they want
To have almost all of their work in an easy to consume easy to share preferably easy to share without even having to read it kind of bucket and yet like most people in the world are not selling Remnant inventory via and add publisher. And if your goals are not selling it Remnant inventory and add publisher don't take advice from people whose writing habits have been optimized for that incentive structure. And so
Like what is my incentive structure from writing is an interesting and deep question. You could probably drop, you know, a hundred people out of my Professional Network and say, you know, there was like some curve of how much you know how much they like me or believe that I'm sagacious or believe that I'm capable of doing material work and how recently has that impression been reinforced and then you know, what is the lifetime value of that?
Ship to me and so I'm fairly certain that if I drew out that curve and then drew it out to there's like some notion of core audience for me. I think I have some somewhere on the order of like 80,000 followers on Twitter and I bet of those 15 to 20,000 or more core audience. So maybe like extending out to like 15K and then extend it out to that ATK and then maybe extend it out to some penumbra of people who have like, oh, I know that petty 11 guy from rumors from
I'm around the internet, but it wouldn't exactly call myself a fan and I'm pretty sure that the most of the weight in that curve is in the top hundred and so that if I'm being rigorous enough to him around it at the right form factor is whatever I can produce in a in such a fashion that the top hundred like get more weight in the curve and possibly you know.
possibly like how do I do that while also continuing to expand the number of people who are in those like Closer Closer Circles of the orbit and increasing the aggregate value in those squares or circles and but like I'm not competing with BuzzFeed not competing with the New York Times and I'm not even competing with most people who know our engineers and right like if you write about Docker bully for you the the
Like the person you were writing for and sort of that the time that they would allocate to read the things that you were writing. Don't come out of the same. It's not the same person. It's not the same bucket that my writing comes out if and so you know, we are were disjoint in the same way that Game of Thrones and I are disjoint and and that's not a value judgment by the way, and it's not even a value judgment on BuzzFeed. Although I have some value judgments on BuzzFeed that I could share but neither here nor there it you just have to
Understand who the audience is what your goals are what the incentive structure is for Meeting those goals.
Yeah, so I have two questions and you can take them. However you want. So the first one is how should like our people just systematically under rating the illegible incentive structures. How would you think about actually making those illegible structures legible so that you have something that you're at least oriented towards
I think that Google analytics is the best were softer than ever existed because of exactly that reason
Even the what's the old saw that as soon as a measure becomes a Target it yada yada yada. Somebody's law the good Hearts law good Hearts law. Thank you soon, as people put things on a dashboard. It starts to recompile their decision-making process around it. And so you have to be very careful about what you put on the dashboard and Google puts and time on site on the dashboard because it's extremely easy for them to well. It isn't actually extremely easy for them to measure
It's measurable. It's are measurable and whereas, you know both for like privacy reasons and because that there just isn't good data who something affected How Deeply it affected them and whether it affected them in a positive fashion, whether caused them to change a decision they were going to make and did that decision. Like did it spring a big door in their life not Google analytics won't give you any of these things, but these are far closer to the sorts of
Act that. I think most people want to have and the illegibility of comes in all over the place. I think it is one reason why people sort of systemically under undervalue writing as a discipline one of the things people a say when they are citing you know blogging is so over there used to be all these great blogs and then nobody blogs anymore. What happened to that is they're not realizing how effective blogging was.
For the people that were doing it and and a lot of people who are bloggers back in the day and like they didn't have a heart attack in Keel over there. Keep keyboard while writing a blog post they're still around and kicking it and their careers have done things in the last couple years and often their careers have done things such that they are no longer considered like bloggers. And and so, you know if I ask somebody like okay if you think
Ink log instead and was not dead in 2010 who are your five top loggers of 2010 and usually they have an answer to that question. I'm like great. What's their job title right now like CEO too rich to ever work. Again CEO senior staff engineer at Google and Etc. Like, you know, the reason why they're not describing themselves a Blog for anymore. It's because it's a massive downgrade over the thing that blogging got them to and
Like similarly when people are thinking of incentive structures, I think folks would probably be a lot of folks would be surprised and the like raw numbers of that how many people read my stuff? Like I'm you know, I do not run a media properties sort of a sort of numbers a think first run. Sa from itself will probably get somewhere on the order of like 50,000.
Readers or so and then my granted the best stuff from the archives. He's a couple hundred thousand readers every year for essentially forever. As far as I can determine if a post from 2012 about salary negotiation that did 500 thousand readers last year and so presumably will be seen by many many millions in years to come on the school sides to I take a whack at me but the you know those numbers they don't adequately
Crab, like the degree to which my habit of writing helped accelerate my for software businesses that they run they don't adequately describe how it helped, you know, expose me to people that will both help the stripe stage in my career and a future stages of my career and and they think they also don't describe like internal changes that made you know, it might seem a little weird like you wouldn't say it's weird for someone to have an internal changes result of going to a gym. I think there are
there are some people who would think that it has it is weird to say that you have an internal changes result of like doing push-ups before your brain, but I think that is probably descriptively accurate and so, you know, it is probably better for me on that but I spent ten thousand plus hours writing versus spending ten thousand plus hours playing World of Warcraft or watching TV or something.
Yeah. So would you talk about ten thousand plus hours writing. What is your writing process look like because from what I've read about you.
The kind of person who sits down on a Saturday morning and the entire idea has crystallized and you just bang out an essay and you don't leave your chair until that essay is basically done which is the exact opposite of how I do it. And I know Tyler Cowen is also like a right everyday guy. You don't seem as much like a write every day guys. So what is your process for stringing together ideas, and then I know that people are thinking this but like, do you have a motivation issue or like, how do you keep yourself?
Land or are those even questions that you're thinking
about? So I'm all over the map on this as someone who's talked to a number of great writers and just throw out some names. They haven't come up yet, but should not Lovin You writes a column every day called money stuff, which is delivered over email and is sort of my North Star for when I grow up. I want to be able to write more like Matt Levine burn Halbert etcetera etcetera.
And the everybody has their own process. Mine is substantially like you described with with I'll say one thing to that prior to the Saturday where I spend six hours Shackled and share writing like a man possessed. I typically am chewing over an idea for the low-end a couple of days on the higher end a couple of weeks and a bit of an obsessive and so it's a lot of like shower thought.
Thoughts which go everything from like, you know, what are the angles that I could take any particular piece all the way to what are some anecdotes that I could bring in maybe even like particularly good turns to the phrase and then I don't sit down for writing like a man possessed until I'm pretty much decided on the angle and I have the rough structure of it in my head. And then please don't feel like you need to duplicate this anybody because I know a lot of great writers don't do this, but I see
Start at the top right until I get to the bottom. I do one reread for structure to say like on a paragraph by paragraph level is this narrative like structure in the right fashion, or would it would it look better if I like move this third of the essay up a little bit then do one more read and you know attempting to get less red marks from my sophomore English teacher and and then push go that's when I can control the the writing style.
And the timeline for the piece, you know occasionally have been known to write for other people or write in a professional capacity. And then sometimes there's other constraints like sign-off from various other stakeholders, you know, a deadline which is a terrifying word for me. We have a business event happening on Tuesday the 27th, and then there is a you know production workflow which happens and so we will need you know, the word slapped by
Whatever it is the 15th. And so your words need to be ready by the 15th. That's the thing that happens. I attempt to make do with that. You asked about motivation the given that I'm an obsession driven writer, you know cultivating more intellectual obsessions causes me to write more and so to the extent that I want to write more which I certainly want to write more the thing that gets me inspired to do that.
It is either having more conversations with people and much like this conversation or reading more interesting things. And so more and more varied input leads to more and more varied output at least with respect to Yours
Truly. Yeah you once said that ramit Sethi is like for you one of your all-time favorite marketers and one of the very best people at using the internet and what the two of you have in common is you have a big regret of not using emails sooner what
Said that people miss about email. Why is it important and how should people think about growing their list?
So I will say that do what I say not what I do. I don't have an actively email list at the moment which is a straight-up missed opportunity and there's reasons for that time quite busy between my day job and having two small children, etc. Etc. And when I was evaluating life back in 2016, well one thing has to get dropped.
Probably shouldn't be either of those two things or sleep. So maybe I should write a little less than I have previously outside day job, but do what I say not what I do the why email so many thoughts here.
one email something that you can own and that is very difficult to take away from you in a way that your presence on social media platforms Etc is not the people who have not just opted in after then is so overused in email marketing circles like
Folks is like really just stuck up there their hand and said, yes, I want to exactly what it is that that you do and I would like to get that in my life on a daily or weekly or whatever basis and those folks are a less likely to burn out on your stuff. Then the folks in you know.
have an interesting relationship with Hacker News at the there is a better than 50/50 shot that anything that I write will hit the top of a canoes which is an interesting cheat code for writer to have and and yet like partly as a participant in that Community who doesn't want to see that Community gets stressed over thing and partly as someone who hates seeing negative stuff written about him on the internet and I'm sort of rate Limited in how much I can write because you know,
Most people on Hacker News did not come Tacker news specifically to see my stuff and so if my stuff was hitting the top Factor news and like a weekly basis or a daily basis, that would be too much. Whereas I feel far less or doesn't sound like if I told you hey sign up for this for this, you know daily newsletter and I will give you a daily newsletter. There's probably not a great framing but whatever it's easy to understand and like nobody who signs up for a daily newsletter from Petty 11 is going to be annoyed when on Wednesday, I'm back.
In their their inbox covering my usual beat like it did exactly what it says on the tin and so being able to control the framing of what it is you offer the Cadence the sort of like brand positioning of it and is much higher as with regards to emailed and it is in perspiration in forums and communities on social media Etc. And you also have more control over both
Who gets your thing and in what way they get it theoretically speaking your email can get forwarded to anybody and that is a good thing for many people who write email because they you know forwarding to your friends is one way to grow your list, but there isn't really a culture of like forward and newsletter to a business associate to dunk on the newsletter in a way that there is definitely culture and Twitter of like retweet with comic to dunk to a much larger audience.
so that changes the risk calculus both like the psychic Chris calculus under you know, extremely real like career-oriented Risk calculus of like participating and so you can think participate a little more authentically with respect to writing email to a closed audience of people who have largely they largely know you and like what you're selling quote unquote versus writing on Twitter and you kind of also always have to hit have in the back of your head, you know a process running on
Is this going to excite one of the many opposed internet outrage machines that are active on Twitter? And it cost me to have a really bad day and that's very definitely something like I have to think about when when writing on Twitter that it wouldn't have to think about when writing to my usual audience and I know some great authors who write less than they would and write them in a less than
less impactful or pointed or true matter then they would specifically because they're worried about you know, social media pylons, which seems like
on the one hand and centers rule everything around me. I understand the thought process that just seems like a bad way to live life and to the extent that you put you know much of your writing output to your own email list. And in your own spaces, you will get exposed to that downside risk less you have
this quote that I really like, which is you radically underestimate both how much you know that other people do not and the instrumental benefits of you publishing it. Why don't you talk
About the Arbitrage of knowledge here and all the things that people have built up ideas around that they haven't shared but also there certainly isn't like there's a hierarchy here. So how can we identify which ideas are worth publishing and which ones are just noise?
I think that it's useful to understand that there's like an instrumental / use value for an idea will someone be able to add to take this technology the idea that
I have written down and like replicated in their own life. And that is not the only value that a piece can have even though I think a lot of folks wait that particular value very highly and you know your particular way of explaining something and whether that lands with a particular audience is another dimension of value, which is often underappreciated and I'll come back to that thought in a moment and you're sort of
Persona or demographic information, etc. Etc. That would cause the idea to be accepted by people who might not accept it from another into lurk interlocutor. How do you pronounce that word? I've only ever seen written at that is also like another dimension of value. And so there are widely more things that should be written down than actually our window be talked about that. You know, this might not be a new idea, but it might be new to
You a particular audience.
I've had it relatively few new ideas with regards to marketing over the course of my career and I think I've only ever had one actually just the one most of the other stuff is been things that have been well known in the marketing community and but the marketing community and the engineering community don't talk all that much and polite way of phrasing it is that Engineers Are from Mars marketers are for Venus less polite way of phrasing it is that
Most Engineers think that marketing is exploitative bullshit. And so a lot of what I've done over the course of my career is just explaining things that are well understood in marketing land like a be testing in such a way that the culture that is engineering doesn't dismiss them and then you know, like hey if you learned enough about marketing to be dangerous you as an engineer without having to turn in your coding badge would
Have more organizational sway get your projects approved more often be paid radically more money have a better career outcome excetera Etc. And that isn't quite an Arbitrage but as you know, figuratively I suppose an Arbitrage and it's fun that you know, you think people would catch on after me doing it for ten plus years that hey all I'm doing is like taking Seth Godin things and then putting a
Like put a get analogy in there, but it works really really well and I think I'm I have a tendency to be a little too self-critical and a little too self-deprecating. That's perhaps more self-deprecating than I should be but there is a lot of repeated value in that and in a hitting something at the intersection of two ideas. Does that answer the
question? Yeah, would you talk to good marketers? What do they still miss about what it takes to mark it well.
Online what is something that to you feels like this obvious secret hidden in plain sight that even the best people aren't understanding.
There's been a meme bless couple of years like Performance Marketing is the future, etc. Etc. And we're going to rigorously measure the effect of our campaigns and double down on the ones that are winning blah blah blah. I think that even given that people's time allocation and they're like relative amount of brain sweat allocation is often determined more
I what seems to be high status either for themselves or their organization. What feels fun what feels like a good idea. I mean like, you know Google did an art installation. What do we have planned for an art installation? Etc, etc versus the things that are actually winning the
Things that caring about quality is surprisingly underrated and not just doing something because you know, it was on our cue to plan to get a podcast up and running but like what is the best possible version of the podcast then podcast needs to happen for music because podcast needs to have interviews like step back. Yeah, what's the best possible version of the intro music? Etc, etc. Like just a appreciation of craft is something that is under indexed.
Them one of the reasons I love working at stripe. Is that varies a great deal of appreciation of craft the
talk about that. I'm really curious to hear it because like stripe does have an appreciation for crafts and I notice it from the second I walk in last time. I went to stripe HQ the woman at the front desk. She had seen my photo she greeted me by name when I arrived and I was like, wow then to like when I get lunch there it like the lunch is fantastic and then just talking to the people at stripe and looking at your documentation and your design there is like a level of
crafts that somehow stripe has avoided some kind of reversion to the mean that infects all these different kinds of companies and there's a lot of other companies particularly in Silicon Valley who get very influenced by what the data says and you can see the quality of the product actually degrading over time because I think that they're too focused on metrics and I wonder if craft and metrics are in some Subway opposed or in some way of a different language and I'm wondering
What does stripe do to maintain that love for crafts and beauty and like care that goes into a
product? My instant spit-take answer on this is it's ultimately a culture question and then I'm remembering a great great line from one of the best books ever written about Japan, which is that when people say something is a cultural question. That means that they don't have a good structural explanation for it and
so carrying those two ideas in my mind and in synthesis at the same time, there was one sense in the way that and this is by the way a certainly not a thing that we have achieved an asymptote at I think that if you were to ask people in striped generally or senior decision-makers who would definitely say that we're not happy with where our Quality Bar is either at any point in the past in the present not likely in the near future either but be that as it may
create a culture of like caring more than the other guy. We're carrying more than the median in your industry one is to like explicitly say and model two people we care more and you know, we are willing to spike a launch over it not being the best version of the launch that you know, there are mechanical ways to do this internally such that, you know, you don't incentive systems rule everything around me if you incentivize
Hitting the schedule on time every time you will cause people to hit the schedule every time if you incentivize shipping the best version of something you will tend to shift the best version of Something. Those are two like caricatured answer the poll, but you can sort of like choose where along that Spectrum you sit and we were relatively intentional on where on the Spectrum we are.
the being responsive to internal and external evaluations of whether something is good thing that we do very frequently is
Take so interestingly. I think that I do not do in my writing personally is to show writing to people prior to it being done. I mostly publish to the internet to and everybody got to the same time. That would be crazy talk at work. We have multiple internal checkpoints where we show either other people internally or sort of like trusted Outsiders. Hey,
Here's an early version of an essay. We're working on or early version of landing page, etc. Etc. What do you think and there's often the substantial amounts of rework in response to feedback up to and including like we are institutionally ready to say eight people worked on this new landing page for six months and five out of five of The Trusted feedback. People hated it. All right, throw it away. Let's we will start from scratch etcetera Etc and
There there are pluses and minuses to that. Believe me. Like there's some very toothy internal rail management consequences to thank you for doing that work for the last eight months. We're going to throw away throw it all the way because it was bad start over we wouldn't face it as because it was bad, but that's definitely what people might feel if you tell them we're soaring Wade. Let's see it work. So, you know being willing to make those calls being like willing to back.
People would they make those calls be willing to back people up and down the organization and when they say no, hey, I'm not an original gangster stripe. I just joined two weeks ago and my role is not one that would normally have decision-making Authority with respect to X. I'm actually I do user operations, which is sport-oriented roll stripe.
But I've got some thoughts with respect to this artifact and saying like yes, we will listen to those thoughts because when we gave you an employee badge, we were buying access to your brain cycles, and we like those separate cycles and making sure that you increasingly get signal from the people that have been good at doing that over like previous iterations of the game formally or informally, what is it about stripe really
talks about its writing first culture.
And I think that you show it sort of a lot of the things that we do for marketing is presented as for Outsiders, but in actuality, it's also for insiders and with stripe, press a lot of what stripe press is like with the art of doing science and engineering and daddy egg. Paul's new book and Revolt of the public one of my favorite books of all time. Actually a lot of what stripe is trying to do I think is raised the bar of thinking both within stripe and then
Then extending out to Silicon Valley and then hopefully for the world. What is it about Stripes commitment to writing and what do you think the Genesis of that is what does writing so regularly do for a company,
so I'll make one observation which is that we have a lot of words that are available on the internet via stripe recipe a stripe incrementally of the at misguides stripe blog, etc, etc. And that if you were
Just do just by word count and just by word town too long that documents. I think that upwards of ninety nine percent of stripe word count would be internal rather than external so granted we have plus or minus three thousand people working at the company, but the company is total available. Corpus is massive. What does that do for us? So for obvious reasons, I can't
I can't disclose things like the the stripe growth rate in terms of either business or in terms of headcount. Just the way that typically described by the number of people working at a company but say hypothetically speaking a lot of businesses go well some businesses on the Venture trajectory go through a hyper growth phase and a company in a hyper growth phase might be growing at them or doubling their number of employees every year.
And this has some implications which are not broadly appreciated one is that if you join in 2016 a company that is growing at 2 x per year the day you join half of your colleagues will have less than one year of tenure at the company one year later in 2017. Have your colleagues will have less than one year tenure at the company one year later in 2018 half of your colleagues will have one less than one year of tenure at the company continues for the
duration that you're on that hyper growth curve that's so given that
your corporate existence is constantly largely waited to people who do not have the context of having been there for a number of years we're still getting spun up as you know members of the company but while they are spun up are like you know you can't do work if half of your people can't do work so while you are like inviting the company culture and getting acclimated to how stuff is done you're producing that culture at the same time you need to have Force multiplier on the
Of democracy of the dead that's the traditional way to describe history outside of companies. Hopefully most of your prior employees won't have died yet that isn't it like reproducing the culture and amplifying the culture of people who have were there before who might be, you know numerically. If you just go by the numbers that people who have four plus years of tenure that will be a very small portion of your employee base if you're doubling every year, but the impact that they can have by
Reducing highly-leveraged artifacts extends for years decades Exeter Exeter particularly when it changes the set point of the company culture and helps people like build off of that set point in the
future. That works. Well, I like the Democracy the dead idea. I that that that that is what writing is doing it is saying from all these people who have been there before as the company grows. You can still get their ideas.
actually you could almost use a Bitcoin metaphor that they are on the chain and they're they're sort of permanently over time even as you begin to add to the Ledger over time I want to shift into talk about software companies I think that one of the ideas that I'm just ecstatically excited about is building an online audience writing online then through that actually validating demand and meeting people who could be future coworkers
Or feature customers feature investors for your company and through that actually launching small software businesses. One of the things I want to do with my career is basically take hundreds of people through this path. I have the writing online path. Now then end up having a place where people can grow their audiences together and then basically create some kind of Y combinator for bootstrap software businesses. That's the path that I'm on and so my question to you is what have you seen in terms of validating these
Small software businesses and then the go-to-market strategy. Like should we go to market once we have a hundred email newsletters five thousand email newsletters or is that not the parameter that we should be thinking about this at all?
So scoping it to be to be SAS companies for the moment because B2B SAS is the kind of software that I know the best as time goes to Infinity. Every bead recess company will say Thump Thump head. We should have the content marketing engine.
And every content marketing engine will eventually publish a book either like an actual book book or something, which is morally equivalent to a book based on word count degree of intellectual depth, etc. Etc. And the thing that I would suggest most people do is to pull the content marketing forward and sort of like write the book before writing the software if that makes sense and why
One when you think it's like the production function, so Brooks versus suffer. It is and doesn't have to be a booking be yeah an e-book blog, etc, etc. But broadly re-sequence that they usual sequence of deliverables. If you were going to start a software company at your pot committed to doing it eventually. Anyhow, if you do it earlier, it's quicker to get up and running on the internet and quicker to get something worthy of the attention of others up and running on the internet. So you get
to start the clock on things like Google and giving your domain some Authority get start the clock on things like social application via social media and attracting people to your banner on getting newsletter subscribers, etc. Etc. Earlier, those things tend to compound over time both time that there's a distinction between wall clock time like the amount of time that you were sitting at your desk periodically looking up the clock and doing the work and calendar time and just some things like Google Authority take just a while to bake.
Have regardless of whether you're like physically hands on keyboard during it and if you sequence those activities earlier, you get to have more opportunities to go through the learning Loop more opportunities for Value to compound over a longer period of Time Versus sequencing them later. If you spend nine months in the code gave building out version 1.0 of your software and then launch to nobody that's nine months where you could have, you know had developed a newsletter with thousands.
People subscribing to it and then nine months after that with relatively little additional work done and the newsletter had like people ready to buy your thing on the first day. So that is the first thing I would suggest is like rethink the mindset of becoming a software person who writes and think more about like becoming the expert and then writing the software that that sort of like encodes your expertise in the software product. I think that
you like writing deeply about how you understand whatever your problem domain is will make your software product decisions better and I think that a company that brings us into sharp relief is base camp and base camp to products as well but if you had look at their Jason freed recently did a 30-minute video of just taking you through product decisions for hey which is this new upstart email client and it's a fascinating fascinating document just unlike great product thinking
NG and a lot of that is like great thinking of the job to be done of email and how people use email in terms of like workflows and what the like what situations that fits into their life and a lot of people if they like just start from a software perspective of okay I need to write a workflow engine for throw on my own products under the bus and appointment management for dental offices it's like okay well
Going to need to have like some way to create customers for this and some way to like create appointments and I'll need some calendar grid and yada yada yada, if I were to re-sequence the order of operations in that company and say, okay. No first. I'm going to thoroughly dive into the the challenges that dental offices have with regards to a point management and what that does in their business and that would like cause me to you know, think much more deeply I'm like, what is the sociology around changing an appointment time?
What are the sort of events that cause customers to cancel? How do you get ahead of those events and how to Dentists get appointments in the first place something I had no understanding of when the first day that appointment reminder open for business which would have been the useful thing to know and and so like building a software that that you know, you've put in your brain push ups and have a theory of Mind of how the user will use. It will tend to create better software and also give you more marketing assets.
To start marketing and selling the software and a 1 so that is some of the things that I would suggest on folks that are going from the that transition from writing about something to building a software product that instantiates. It also say like the level of work you have to do to create the minimum viable saleable software product is relatively High relative to the level of work. They need to do to create the minimum viable syllable word product and
the interviews with industry experts become a totally sellable ebook in under weeks of work and it would be extremely difficult to have a modern SAS app that was baked enough for production use within weeks of work and yet you can get people to pay you $50 for interviews or for any book that describes your method or any of a number of other artifacts that are primarily writing and that both the
Like money money is a nice thing to have it allows you to buy things that are useful and accelerating the success of your business also rent cool thing. And it also trains people to pay you money with regards to the subject that you have. So the second time you ask them for much more money, you're not getting them over the penny Gap again. It's like well I paid this person $50 for an e-book which I read about the subject. They seem to know what they're talking about in that ebook. Now, I will do the additional work of pushing them through
yeah whatever the process is that my company for green lighting and new software product versus like do I really want to have a discussion with like security team on getting this approved is that worth my time do you want to put the set this software trial through its Paces etc etc you're sort of like pre answering sales objections via producing written artifacts they can actually buy versus going directly into selling them a software-based artifact
what is you know you had a thread about zero down a couple months
ago what is a small software business that you admire and talk about how they use online writing and content to actually grow and validate the business would be really interesting to get an example of some of the things that you're saying and it'd be even better if it's a company that we haven't heard of because I think that that proves the point well that want to you like to say that the amount of money that's flowing through capitalism would Astound you and I think that the reason why I love that is it
So the inverse of how a lot of us grew up. Oh, there are six main jobs that you're going to go into it could be Investment Banking management consulting accounting yada yada yada, but I think that what I've taken from you quite a bit is actually the number of options available to you is way bigger than you think and give us an example of what you mean by
that so somebody who is not me coined the term again again a colleague of mine is straight, but he's left to other Adventures point.
The petiole Evans Law and which is funny like no endorsement applied. But I think he's probably right on this I said that the number of software businesses in the world is larger than you think even after you've taken into effect patio limbs law taken into account patio lands Law And so there's tens of thousands of
Extremely healthy software / SAS businesses, which you've never heard of and which most people will never hear of and they will like the business will be born. It will successfully satisfy customers. It will grow for years. It will get sold and at no point will it ever be legible to someone who is not a customer or employee of it? And
You know stripe as sort of a privilege Vantage points on this some people who are investors or business brokers have privilege Vantage points on this. I've been obsessed with this topic for many many years just like take this from faith that when when you think of like, yeah legible examples even legible examples from yours truly of somebody who has
You know a firm that has done that writing to bootstrap a business thing and done well by doing that the best informed person that that could tell you about examples like that is only scratching the surface of how many people who have used that tactic successfully that said base camp is often thrown out is a as an example here and I think far too many people say well, you know base camp is internet famous. And so that isn't a replicable strategy.
base camp is internet famous because they like you know had no blog that they had a Blog they continue writing for that plug for a while and internet-famous is just the past tense of wrote A Blog for 10 years the convertkit is another example convertkit is a company by Nathan Berry which does email marketing for writers think they have different definitions of writers but that would probably say writers creators
Etc and they
that was an outgrowth of Nathan's own efforts doing he wrote a series of ebooks for the design Community ebooks and other information oriented products for the design community and then he wrote one book about the business of doing training products at called Authority and set that you know the marketing and sales engine behind training products tend to be heavily email oriented and so Authority talked a lot about like the Tactical
of email and then he was like huh you know I should really like build the email service that would exist if somebody was making email service specifically for people who were following this Playbook that I just wrote and so that eventually became convertkit and could rootkit is doing fabulous as well and yet like convertkit is in some quarters internet-famous there are companies that are less than or not famous
I'll throw out an example more aware more aware rakes that it makes essentially an Erp for kitchen countertop installers which is a section of the the US economy and and if you've never installed a new countertop in your kitchen you might be under estimating price points but suffice it to say that a lot of money happens in you know middle class homes around kitchen remodeling sunu and
so there is a large heavily distributed industry of mostly mom-and-pop businesses that have some extremely like difficult planning and Resource Management questions around like you know if you don't buy the right amount of granite at the store and it is not cut into the right amount of shapes you're going to get to the kitchen and be extremely sad because like you know physics and math will impose upon you the impossibility of delivering the kitchen table you've contracted to deliver and so should
couldn't use more software than you have previously and so more aware is that software and they do quite well for themselves and for anything that you can think of that is like I don't think that kitchen kitchen countertop installation is like the platonic minimum of the size of business that you need to be to support software business now and there are multiple competing viable software businesses in like Cemetery management not funeral
It's an entirely separate industry just like laying out Cemetery has and ensuring that you like that somebody can manage the sales process for them the maintenance process for them, etc. Etc. And throw a dart board threw a dart board throw a dart at the dartboard of the academy if it hits a business that has a W-2 employee in it at like that business will at scale consume billions of dollars of software and there are many many many.
Fractal ecosystems upon ecosystems of companies that are selling into these businesses and so it is a wonderful wonderful time to be alive in
software. That's a wonderful answer. Thank you. You've lived in Japan for a long time. Now, what is the number one thing that you would like to export from Japanese culture in terms of tacit knowledge of what we can learn from whether it's Japanese craftsmanship engineering culture Elegance. Music. What is it?
it's a very complicated question I'll say yes the person with the East Asian studies degree I'll have to give the disclaimer that there is no one Japanese culture any more than there is one American culture and that the degree of homogeneity of Japan's culture is largely overstated that said there it's also not the case that there is no such thing as an American culture so some
add themes I think that exists in pockets in the United States and exist at more than pockets in Japan is a level of earnestness and optimism with respect to Once work I think Society is broadly a healthy attitude for society to have and one that I wish we've replicated more broadly and I think Silicon Valley gets close to close to this in a lot of places although the sort of like learned cynicism of the u.s. educated classes has
to infect Silicon Valley in some ways but I'll give you an anecdote after the anecdote aside representative of the whole but once met a man at a mall and ogaki ogaki in the town that I lived in and he was there at a crafts fair on the mall and his craft was sharpening scissors not making scissors that's a different company he was just the scissor sharpening guy and he had spent 40 Years of his life getting darn good at sharpening scissors and and he talked to me
me for 45 minutes about the craft of sharpening scissors his argument for why no household should have less than three pairs of Scissors because you can keep scissors and like different states of sharpening and it's like clearly like you would never use a fabric scissors on paper well you wouldn't want a Sharp Cuts I'm not using using the right words but like you would want one pair of scissors for shark cuts on paper and one pair of scissors for more rough cuts on paper like clearly would not use these that these two things that's wrong
Place why would you do that and just like the level of passion he had about sharpening scissors defeats the level of passion. Most people have not just for most things but probably for anything and a culture that has created a space where someone can say without a trace of irony. I have devoted my career to being the best possible sharpener of scissors is doing something right and
like not ironic Embrace of just loving what you do is
that feels like a free lunch that the u.s. And various other places could import from Japan and there are many
Cultural socio-political etc. Etc. Reasons why when someone says I non ironically love what I do for a living why sophisticated people in positions of authority would say, oh, that's just what's capitalist want you to believe but like
Loving what you do is super power both with respect to increasing your ability to do what you do well and also them get results out of what you want to do. Well get better at what you want to do well and just being like happier with life such that all else being equal.
Choose to love the thing that you do like that is a choice available to you, which interestingly is not the same advice as choose to do it you love I think the advice choose to do what you love is generally bad advice because that will cause more people to want to be like professional World of Warcraft players and the market demand for World of Warcraft players is like lower relative to the market demand for whatever heck my job title is right now, so I'm all all else being equal. I'm happy that I saw suffer for a living and don't play World of Warcraft for a living.
So talk about
That so within selling software for a living. I don't imagine that when you were 5 years old and maybe you went off to your first day of kindergarten that you when somebody asks what you wanted to do and all your friends said I would be a baseball player. I want to be a ballerina. I want to be a firefighter. I can't imagine that you said I want to tell and be the foremost World expert on how to sell Niche subscription is a software service software.
Alex how did that love evolved from from from being a kid to then now developing a love for the craft and the the dedication that you bring to your writing into your work at stripe.
So it would have been a singularly and interestingly calibrated five-year-old to say I want to be a niche software sales expert I was in interestingly calibrated five-year-old. My actual answer was I wanted to be the commissioner of weights and measures.
but the choosing The Road Less Traveled since 1987 so I sort of not to make this too much as they tell stories from years past hour but I fell backwards into the thing that I'm doing right now the sort of like continuing to travel up that gradient of what do we find yourself doing at find the parts of it that you like and double down more on those
Art's that you like and the parts that you know are in that fund intersection of the things that you like things that you're good at things that people want from you and things that they as a world as willing to pay for and but continue to travel up that gradient has worked reasonably well for me over the years and there is a someone who is in a career situation for plus or minus six years where I was
Enjoying what I was doing and it was sort of like intellectually aware and any given Monday morning. I'm going to do something that I affirmatively dislike today and that's kind of on me because I could, you know, make a choice to not do this and we're not have to do this for next Monday morning, but avoided making that choice for again six years of my life Life's Too Short, you know make make obvious.
Moments perhaps earlier than that then I did and you know, if not next Monday's new day, you know, if you're if you're not loving what you're doing right now either figure out the parts of what you're doing right now that you can love or figure out ways to to alter your situation such that you can be doing things that you enjoy more or that you can make yourself. Enjoy more. I think people underestimate the ability that they have to change their particular just like change the way that they
look about things and one of the interesting Parts about strike culture is like stripe hires for people who are ambitious some stripe is for people who are optimists and being around a lot of ambitious Optimus tends to make you both more ambitious and we're optimistic and you know one would think that once level of like resting state level of optimism resting States level of ambition is like relatively constant over the course of your life and having
15 plus years of experience on the Sensei actually no I think one is surprisingly able to just become more ambitious or to just say you know starting out I think I'm going to be more ambitious than it was previously and so the Silicon Valley Valley rational set would say like self modify recompile your own code to be more X like recompile your own code to you know like what you do more is an option available and solution sets and like
we should do that and if you find yourself doing something that's like no just fundamentally incompatible the thing that I think that I do for work is not something that I will ever love and like consider changing that last
question you once said and I think this ties everything that we've discussed together and I've taken this to heart that the amount of luck that you have in life is how much value you create times how many people you tell about it why don't you wrap this conversation up in
a bowtie by explaining what you mean by
that let me give a shout out to the texting podcast which first articulated idea to me and their idea their framing for it was the luck surface area by the way texting made their own luck by putting a name on that piece of advice and then by getting into my ears such that I just told you about the texting podcast and like 99% of you've probably not heard about it observation out the way the it is too easy to like hide your lamp under a bushel
whatever the cliche is to add think that you know I'm just going to do the best work possible and I will naturally be rewarded for that and the the world was not set up to reward people just for doing great work there's an incentive structure around you there are decision makers around that will largely not be apprised of the value you're creating unless you make it your mission to also apprise them of that the value of that at the same time you know
being up
professional like social-media influencer in the topic of influencing people as seems to be like a way to under create value versus actually doing something which produces value for the world's and then promoting the fact of that value creation versus just promoting the fact of promotion unless you're a PR professional I don't know and so the
you sort of have to
balance both ends of this and you also have to kind of this is another thing where recalibrate your own understanding and I am a very modest person I was raised in an environment where one is heavily discouraged from tooting once on horn etc etc I think I've talked to a lot of people from various various personal and professional backgrounds where that's the case and I come from a community where self-promotion quote-unquote is heavily discouraged
Self-promotion is kind of like self cooking if you don't do it and you pay somebody to do it.
And you know, you are family with somebody who's going to do it for you. Then you're going to go hungry so I can understand that. You probably need to consider that to be one of one of your professional skills that you probably need to get good at doing it. And there's good ways to do it. There is less code ways to do it, but that's something which is ultimately going to fall on you then similarly like you're going to probably if you are employed by someone you're going to need to own your own career advancement versus expecting like
To decide based on your contributions excetera that to you are ready for that next step. Hopefully they will be doing that too. But have a written record available at which is ready to show them the Great Value that you've created have actually produced that great value and be advancing that favorite. Sorry be advancing in that conversation forward periodically, and so yeah probably take ownership over your own.
Own your own outcomes over the various different facets of creating the value that you'll create in the world optimized for creating more value of an optimized for doing it over a very long Arc of your career and things will knock on wood 10 to work out for you.
Patrick Mackenzie, that was fantastic. Thank you very much. That was just a wealth of incredible knowledge. It's it's always a treat to chat with you.
Thanks very much for having me and if I can ever help anybody on anything. My email address is Patrick kept calcium is Ka LZ U mu s.com are started using hey, it's a new emails and recently. So if you email patio 11 at a.com, hey heyy.com, that will reach me. I always loved
any help from folks so hit me up
hey again it's David here one more time before you leave I want to tell you about my online writing school called rite of passage now it's nothing like the boring writing classes you took in school it's made for Curious people just like you who want to write more think better and use the internet to spark incredible friendships and don't tell your English teacher I said this but there's no talks of adverbs or conjunctions none of that boring stuff right of passage is
more practical than that see I've taken everything I've learned from interviewing some of the world's most effective people on this podcast and I've asked them how they write and then I distilled those lessons into a powerful set of principles for helping you write better if you want to start writing online rite of passage is the best place to begin that's all for today and thanks so much for listening
