2:40 – What [[Tyler Cowen]] considers his compounding advantage.
Start early and keep going for many years. Many stop learning and self-improvement as they get older.
Why do people stop learning and self-improvement? Starting early you give up a normal childhood, which isn’t necessarily bad but many don’t want to do it. Once you reach a certain age (e.g. 45) you can take paths that have high income but low growth / learning (e.g. [[Consulting]])**, so why go the extra mile? **
5:56 – Why being born as an intelligent person is not as important as developing knowledge. #intelligence #knowledge
A good lesson is there are many smarter people than you. Figuring out you’re pretty smart, but not that smart is actually a good combination.
8:23 – How [[Tyler Cowen]] maximizes the value of his [[consumption]] and minimizes the drawbacks.
A lot of the value of [[consumption]] is [[memory]] or [[anticipation]]. You can cut consumption of bad things by 2/3, but still get most of the benefit (e.g. eating dessert).
9:19 – What draws [[Tyler Cowen]] to the people he likes spending time with, and what he likes best about their friendship.
Advantages of people in [[Silicon Valley]]:** super smart but not necessarily highly educated so they don’t just believe what everyone else does. **They think outside the box. They’re thinkers as well as people that have had to do things and pass [[reality]] tests. The only test most academics face is "can I publish this piece?"
12:33 – Why [[Tyler Cowen]] feels that the way he has lived his life has meant has not given anything up.
15:35 – How the fundamentals of productivity came intuitively to [[Tyler Cowen]].
He writes every day, with the exception of 10-15 days a year. If you write every day, you don’t have to worry about how much you’ve written, it’s going to add up. The regularity also pushes you along a learning curve so you’ll get more done. #writing
One thing he does is lay out arguments of views he disagrees with. You understand them better, sympathize with them more, and sometimes you change your mind. It makes you stupider to repeat views you agree with / are familiar with. #writing #Thinking
17:41 – Why [[Tyler Cowen]] writes in his particular style not by choice, but by necessity.
There’s a beauty / clarity choice in [[writing]]. He’s not good at the beautiful prose type of writing. He focuses on clarity.
22:19 – Why the things in [[Tyler Cowen]]’s life that bind his [[output]] aren’t what you think.
Big binding factors: [[ideas]], time spent writing / thinking, and time spent talking to people (which helps him come up with ideas).
24:06 – How to develop new [[ideas]] while staying focused on the subject and not getting tangled.
Just keep [[writing]] and re-writing. A book will typically be reworked 10 times. Effort and application – there are no tricks.
27:36 – Why [[Tyler Cowen]] sees [[art]] as one of the most important and beneficial things you can spend your [[time]] and [[money]] on.
You make your home special, learn other cultures, learn other points of review, develop judgement skills useful in other areas.
32:41 – What writers can learn about inspiration and consistency from [[musicians]] and [[visual artists]].
Many [[artists]] tend to work in bursts. That’s not how he writes. Some writers are like that.
The half-life of ideas is very short. Be selfish, maximize your personal learning and your impact now. Don’t worry about [[legacy]]. Take [[Gary Becker]] – one of the top [[economics]] Nobel laureates. Nobody reads him now.
37:16 – Why [[Peter Thiel]] has impacted [[Tyler Cowen]] so deeply and why Tyler believes he’s one of the greatest thinkers of our time.
He understands the [[humanities]] so well. [[Tyler Cowen]] sees him as a top thinker in this area.
He has the best [[bullshit]] detector of anyone he’s ever spoken with. He gets when people are bluffing. He’s probably the best selector of [[talent]], and to do that well you need to have a deep understanding of things that at least correlate with the [[humanities]]. #Hiring
He takes the [[humanities]] seriously, and takes a deeply [[moral]] perspective. This is looked down upon and discouraged in a lot of [[academia]]. He takes [[religion]] seriously, takes input from a variety of sources, has real-world experience with companies, fluency in two languages ([[English]] and [[German]]).
40:30 – How [[Tyler Cowen]] is able to extract more from his [[reading]] than other people do.
He has [[hyperlexia]]
Talks about [[Norway]], some major figures there and why he has read up on major figures in the country.
Also talks about prepping for [[Margaret Atwood]]
45:44 – How understanding most other people’s [[intelligence]] is higher than his in most fields gave [[Tyler Cowen]] an edge over other thinkers.
49:00 – Why [[Tyler Cowen]] sees a new visibility of [[talent]] in people and how he is using this visibility.
He’s bullish on [[Craig Palsson]], @marketpower on [[Twitter]]. He wants to be out there, determined, focus, and caring about getting things right. The emphasis on [[writing]] is commonly a big plus – it’s a sign of clear thinking.
[[David Perell]] sees his advantage as someone that takes action quickly. [[Tyler Cowen]] adds that successful people have an honest "what am I good at" [[metarationality]].
55:24 – How [[Tyler Cowen]] constructs his [[interviews]] to maximize the freedom of his guests to speak freely on what they love.
His interview style likely doesn’t apply to most others, unless you read a lot.
He doesn’t [[probe]], because people repeat a lot and get defensive.
1:00:03 – How to develop skills as a teacher and where [[Tyler Cowen]] believes the strengths of a good teacher lie. #Teaching
Student evaluations aren’t that helpful.
He gets better by just teaching a lot.
1:03:34 – Why the novelty and beauty of visiting other cultures excites [[Tyler Cowen]] so much. #travel
1:07:18 – How [[Tyler Cowen]] makes the most out of his travels. #travel
It wasn’t until he saw a large number of places did he start to love [[travel]]. The first place he went outside of the US was Oxford, England. He didn’t get much out of it, didn’t really enjoy it that much.
As you get older and more successful, it’s harder to get critical [[feedback]] from people. Hang out with critical people and hope you can get benefits. It’s hard to do this. If you are around people that are above you in the hierarchy, you should be critical too. #aging
He hasn’t seen anyone better than [[Patrick Collison]] at quickly learning new [[concepts]], by an order of magnitude.
1:13:32 – Why sitting in a suboptimal seat at a concert may give you worse sound but a better understanding of the [[music]]. #concerts #[[live music]]
Mentions going to [[The Village Vanguard]] randomly, because you know whatever is there will be good.
1:16:55 – Why knowledge workers are often not motivated to improve their [[skills]]. #[[knowledge work]]
Some of it is a fault in the market, because it’s hard to recognize talent. That’s why [[Tyler Cowen]] is writing a new book on spotting talent. You can do things to improve, but there is not always a return because the market doesn’t recognize it. If you’re better at spotting [[talent]], it makes more sense to invest in it.
You need a somewhat long [[time-horizon]]
You don’t really need [[discipline]]. It can be a form of entertainment or [[procrastination]] to improve your skills. Discipline and [[Conscientiousness]] are more ambiguous than we realize.
"The more you know, the more you can order things into coherent thoughts." Learning begets [[learning]]. True of reading, true of travel, true of food. #chunking #Thinking #skills
1:20:48 – Why [[Tyler Cowen]] still responds to every [[Email]] and loves it.
He finds time for this because of what he doesn’t do: he hardly watches [[TV]], **his social life is basically the same as his intellectual life **- his social life is geared towards thinking, discussing, exploring ideas. With no TV, you end up with a lot of [[time]]. #[[unproductive internet activities]]
Isn’t [[email]] a low leverage use of his time? **He learns a lot from people that email him, and has filtered his audience so it’s mostly smart people. **He does this by being "sufficiently weird". He’s not even sure it’s highly leveraged. He met [[Patrick Collison]] that way. He doesn’t care if it’s highly leveraged if he’s learning from it. #[[Audience Building]]
Author:: [[David Perrell]] and [[Patrick MacKenzie]]
Tags:: #marketing #writing #[[Audience Building]]
Overview: [[David Perrell]] and [[Patrick MacKenzie]] discuss various topics related to writing and promoting yourself online.
4:45You should think about how your writing is framed online if you are looking for it to be used to promote your commercial work. “Blogging” has a poor brand within many high status employers, whereas “memos” and “essays” do not. Try to categorize your writing as these things rather than a blog post. These small changes can make a big difference. Don’t call it a “blog”, don’t put a date on it if it’s not stuff that will decay in importance in 48 hours, choose to write about things that will stay relevant, etc. #blogging #promotion #Portfolio
9:00Try to create a tighter brand for your writing. Find a niche and try to focus on that, although experimenting isn’t that bad an idea, at least at first. Good to also think about your interests that happen to be booming in the economy (for example, [[Patrick MacKenzie]] focused on the intersection of [[marketing]] and [[engineering]]). #branding #niche
13:00Even if absolutely no-one reads your essay, it’s still worth writing it because it produces an asset you can use. For example, you could use it as a proof of work to a future employer and that would make it a tremendous ROI. Don’t feel like you have to have a big audience before [[writing]].
15:00find where people you are writing for hang out. Hang out there, and gradually inject your stuff in there. Gradually, and in an authentic way, introduce your thoughts into people’s with large following’s posts. Some people don’t get annoyed by this – some people with large followings actively signal boost.
23:40Benefits of long-form [[writing]]. A lot of the common advice about writing short-form on the internet comes from people with certain incentives for following that model (e.g. [[BuzzFeed]]). You really need to understand your personal [[goals]] and what the incentive structure are for achieving that goal.
28:30As soon as you put something on a dashboard, people start to change their behaviour based on what’s on that dashboard. So – be careful of what you put on [[dashboards]]. #KPIs #metrics
30:00Discusses the so-called “death of blogs”. [[Patrick MacKenzie]] points out that people that wrote blogs back in 2010 are still around, but now they have moved on to incredible titles, like CEO or Senior Staff Engineer at Google. As a result, they no longer blog or call themselves bloggers. #blogging
37:20 [[Patrick MacKenzie]] is a fan of [[Ramit Sethi]], he is one of his favourite marketers and knows how to do the internet well.
38:00Discussion of recommendations for email lists. Email is something you can own – it’s difficult to take that away from you. There’s also something powerful that someone put up their hand and said “yes, I want to hear, in my inbox, what you are talking about”. It’s also less “risky”, since no-one forwards a newsletter for someone else to dunk on it (unlike what happens on Twitter). #[[Email Lists]] #Independence #control
49:00Culture of [[Stripe]] and how they maintain a high level of craft. Are [[craft]] and [[metrics]] somehow opposed or a different language? Incentives matter – if you incentivize shipping the best version of something, that’s what you get. If you incentivize always meeting deadlines, that’s what you get. #incentives
54:35What does making writing at [[Stripe]] do for the company? 99% of their word count is internal. Some companies in hyper [[Growth]] mode are doubling their number of employees each year. As long as that continues, over half of your staff have less than 1 year experience with the company. Big problem is spinning people up to speed and getting them into the culture – “[[democracy of the dead]]” – people who were there before can have tremendous impact by producing highly leveraged artifacts, like written documents. Writing helps transfer knowledge #[[Corporate Knowledge]] #[[Organizational Memory]] #leverage
1:00:00When should you go to market after building an audience? [[Writing]] and developing an audience first before developing software is valuable because you build a list of people ready to buy. You also learn more about how to build a great product by writing deeply about it. The MVP for sellable word products is much lower bar than [[MVP]] for software. #[[Audience Building]]
1:07:30What is a small software business that you admire? How do they use online writing and content to grow and validate the business? There are tens of thousands of profitable, successful software / SAS business that you’ve never heard of. It will be boring, very successful, and will be sold, and hardly anyone that isn’t a customer or an employee will be aware of it. E.g. Moraware which provides software for kitchen counter installation companies.
1:14:00What is the 1 thing you think the [[US]] should import from Japanese [[culture]]? [[Earnestness]] and [[optimism]] of ones [[work]]. A non-ironic embrace of loving what you do. There’s a lot of [[cynicism]] in the US. “Choose to do what you love” is bad advice. Better advice is “Learn to love what you do”. #Japan #happiness
1:18:30How did you go from being a kid with “I want to be a baseball player” type interests to who you are now – an expert in niche SAS? People underestimate the ability they have to change, particularly the way they think. [[Stripe]] hires for people that are ambitious and optimist. Hanging around people like that makes you more ambitious and optimistic! #Ambition #optimism
1:23:00The amount of luck you have in life is how much value you create times how many people you tell about it. Explain what you mean by that. It’s a mistake to think that if you just do great work, you’ll be recognized for that. It’s a key professional skill and you should probably get good at it. #luck #marketing