Days spent not writing are the enemy of productivity.
“Write every single day. Make it a routine. Even if it’s a small amount, I assure you if you write every day it will pile up and you’ll get things done.” - @tylercowen
Simple copy editing tip:
"In your last pass, change the font to something unfamiliar. Then change the font size. When you're familiar with a piece, your eyes gulp whole passages and miss typos. New fonts focus your eyes on each letter."
It's like a dance, and words are the music that create the atmosphere.
The easiest way to add rhythm to your writing is to vary sentence length. Short sentences speed things up, and long sentences slooooooowwwwww things down.
1. Teaching will become an extremely lucrative profession. Salaries will follow a power law. The best teachers will make millions of dollars per year and teach thousands of students every year. In fact, this is already happening.
2. Mass market courses will have Hollywood-level production budgets.
People who teach mass-market subjects like statistics and economics will attract millions of students. Teaching at scale will give them the financial resources to invest in high-end graphics and production.
3. Classes will be big and small.
The education industry is obsessed with the "average class size metric." People think that smaller is always better. Not true. You want scale when you're delivering lectures so you can invest in production. At other times, you want small groups.
When a culture is tight-knit, people don't need to be told what to do explicitly. They just copy what everybody else does, which allows them to be entrepreneurial.
But weak cultures need many precise rules to keep people in check.
(Source: Airbnb)
Christensen's Disruptive Innovation Framework
Innovators win market share when they serve a segment of the market that is over-served by incumbents.
Startups offer the exact level of product or service they need and use this wedge to expand market share.
It's hard to meet people as passionate about learning as you are.
But when you publish your ideas, you attract people who think like you.
The more niche the topic, the easier it is to attract people on your intellectual wavelength.
2. Writing helps you understand yourself.
All of us have unprocessed feelings and emotions. Writing is the best way to identify what's making you uncomfortable. By writing, you gain clarity in your life.
The increased clarity you receive reduces stress and anxiety in your life.
If you're feeling stuck in your professional life, start writing online.
Here's how it can accelerate your career:
1. Building a Network:
Writing shrinks the world.
Historically, if you wanted to break into an industry, you had to move to its hub. Not anymore. By writing online, you can build a network from your couch.
Meet people online. Then travel to build relationships in person.
2. Building Expertise:
Quality writing begins with clear thinking.
Once you write about a topic, you can speak about it more clearly, which will help you crush job interviews and establish yourself as an authority.
Learn about topics that interest you and share what you learn.
The 20th century had two iconic dystopian novelists: George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.
Everybody knows Orwell's book: 1984. He outlined a dystopian future where censorship comes from banned books and ideas. Without access to truth, people would be passive and easily manipulated.
Orwell's vision became the standard.
Growing up, my book fairs had a "banned books" section. We were rightly encouraged to read them and explore suppressed ideas.
The lesson: In a world of information scarcity, banning information is the most effective form of thought control.