Thread by @artpi

I am taking @david_perell 's Write Of Passage course about writing online. This is an ongoing thread with my experience 🧵👇

writeofpassage.school

@david_perell Unlike many online courses I’ve taken, this one focuses HEAVILY on the community and making friends. I thought these were the usual promises, but we have 2-3 Zoom calls per week, forum and opportunities to collaborate. This was a very pleasant surprise!

@david_perell For a long time, I have been wondering how to start pitching guest posts and this will be a very good opportunity to meet folks starting their online presence! I am already starting to make friends in the course. I like the insistence of 100% video cams on!

@david_perell „WordPress has a great built-in connection with MailChimp” - Thank you @david_perell, I built it myself 🙂. The serendipity here blows my mind! This was my "20% time" project!

@david_perell I LOVE the recognition that even If we skip the assignment, we should come to the session. Guilt is not helpful in education! Also, love „Think about writing before you sit in front of the computer"

@david_perell "Stop trying to be original!" - great content is remixing, distilling, and adding perspective to the existing pieces.
It seems to me like trying to be original focuses on showing off YOU too much.
Your audience could probably use tried & tested advice, not forced originality

@david_perell Serendipity strikes again: As an Evernote junkie that has published white papers about using Evernote, this writing process seems tailor-made for me.
Thank you @madeincosmos for pushing me into signing up!

@david_perell @madeincosmos It's obvious and heard it before, but hit me hard today: Writing is a great filter/quality enhancer for your thoughts. It's about having interesting ideas and working on them so you are articulate. It's NOT about learning how to write, but helping how to present ideas.

@david_perell @madeincosmos "Your blog is how your brain evolves" is how David put it.

@david_perell @madeincosmos The course focuses more on collecting ideas and managing them than on actual writing.
It's about slow-simmering these ideas in a stew of great insights until they are ready AND the time is right to share them

@david_perell @madeincosmos The focus on the "long now" (piszek.com/2019/10/12/lon…) is something I have been pursuing recently and I love the break from immediacy.
It's also a different perspective than the usual "blog every day" advice.
Bloggin every day helps, but you also need ideas system or you are lost

@david_perell @madeincosmos "Aim to raise the quality of the audience" - you want to cast a wide net to make target folk aware you exist.
But that wide net is to get to "your people" and I define quality by "people I can have the most interesting conversations with"

@david_perell @madeincosmos "Design a system for the worst version of yourself" - reminds me of “We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”
Write Of Passage is a writing system that makes it easy to work on chunks of work BEFORE actually sitting and writing

@david_perell @madeincosmos The insight is that:
- Working in chunks is interruption-proof
- Chunks can be worked on in different states of mind
- Early feedback is easier to incorporate
Write of Passage is more of a "Bottom Up" process vs traditional empty page "Top Down" process

@david_perell @madeincosmos In case you didn't figure it out, my Twitter threads are me trying to work on chunks of ideas in public :)

@david_perell @madeincosmos

https://twitter.com/artpi/status/1195994381209292800

@david_perell @madeincosmos

https://twitter.com/artpi/status/1196083204610043904

@david_perell @madeincosmos ^^ These above are again my attempts at fixing the thread here.
Now that I am back home, the zoom calls happen at 2am my time. This is not perfect, but staying up last night was worth it.

@david_perell @madeincosmos I realized something about @david_perell use of @evernote instead of Google while writing:
a) It's FINITE. There is no risk of going into a deep hole
b) With google, it's easy to procrasti-research™. When you pull Evernote notes, you are committing - "Enough is enough".

@david_perell @madeincosmos @evernote Thanks to this phase separation, you can be divergent with your research and convergent with your writing. This is how I picture this:

@david_perell @madeincosmos @evernote Recap: the writing process here is to re-use your half-baked ides into the actual writing.

Tweets are excellent writing prompts!
I have set up IFTTT to copy my own drips from the fountain of enlightenment (AKA Tweets) to Evernote:

@david_perell @madeincosmos @evernote We talked a lot about how 'having to do research' becomes a crutch and a procrastination tool. You already spent ENOUGH TIME consuming content - write your thoughts and fill holes with research, not the other way around.

@david_perell @madeincosmos @evernote You sometimes may need a spark to get your epiphany: Consuming content to spark creativity is like putting a Mentos into Coke. You need only a small bit to get it flowing. A pellet of mentos is dead weight.

@david_perell @madeincosmos @evernote Yesterday the course has ended and it was an amazing ride, courtesy of @fortelabs , @david_perell and @will_mannon .
I will try to gather my thoughts here, although my immediate takeaway is: I haven't seen this in online education yet and the format is a gamechanger.

@david_perell @madeincosmos @evernote @fortelabs @will_mannon The crescendo was about "Personal Monopoly" - your 'brand' on the web. Writing is only one tool that lets you define it. You want
- Unusual pairing
- Left+Right brain skills
- Something experiential
- "Something that feels limitless to you, but specific to somebody else"

@david_perell @madeincosmos @evernote @fortelabs @will_mannon Writing helps with your personal monopoly, because it's Open-Sourcing your knowledge, all while trying to build a moat. You want to be the only person with the overlap of skill and THE goto person.

@david_perell @madeincosmos @evernote @fortelabs @will_mannon A few insights about why 'blog every day/week' works:
- You have to show up enough times to get the average ideas out of the way
- quantity leads to quality
- cadence is to create a bias for action
In addition to the 'don't break the chain' that works for @made_in_cosmos