If you create art/content—songs, YouTube videos, articles, podcasts—think about people who come across your work as 4 categories of reactions:

1) Didn't like it
2) Thought it was solid / fine
3) Really liked it
4) Absolutely loved it

(1/3)
1s and 2s are gone forever. 3s might come back. 4s will subscribe and evangelize your work to everyone they know.

4s are what make your work take off, not 3s. A piece of work that yields 4s at a 20% vs 5% rate probably ends up with probably 10X (or 1,000X) the spread.

(2/3)
The thing is, content that yields a lot of 4s also usually yields a lot of 1s—more 1s is the cost of going for more 4s. Likewise, creators trying to minimize 1s also usually minimize 4s. So it's really two choices: the 1-4 strategy or the 2-3 strategy. 1-4 beats 2-3!

(3/3)
Political media discovered the 1-4 trick in the 1990s and never looked back. For an individual creator, though, it's a happier path to pick your 4s based on who happens to like and jibe with your true self, not based on who you can best manipulate.

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More from @waitbutwhy

22 Nov
My hot sauce hall of fame (thread). In no particular order.
Tabasco. The og. Old faithful. My stuffed animal. If I was only allowed to have one hot sauce for the rest of my life, this is the easy choice. Family Reserve is a fancier and slightly hotter version I highly recommend. Also shoutout to green Tabasco.
Frank's, duh. So not hot it's almost not hot sauce. Just succulent sauce that I might drink a shot of if I'm hungry enough. While Tabasco is polite and just runs with the vibe of the meal, Frank's is a loud fuck who takes over the room.
Read 18 tweets
10 Aug
Some different ways to try to wrap your head around history. Famous people by birth decade, going back to 580 BC: (thread) Image
Visual lifespans: Image
Visuals can help us get a better sense of what was going on in different moments.

Mozart wrote his Requiem the same year the US forefathers were writing the Bill of Rights, and Beethoven had a love-hate relationship with Napoleon. Image
Read 9 tweets
29 Jul
I've gotten a ton of useful reader feedback while posting the Story of Us. But the most common feedback has probably been, "I really wish this were a book."

So we decided to make it a book. 1/
We're going for maximum impact with this thing, and making it both a blog series and a book (inc. audiobook) seems like the best way to do that. But turns out it's not as simple as just putting the existing series into a book. A book is a different animal than a blog series. 2/
So I've spent the past few months rewriting the whole series (with the benefit of lots of reader feedback) into a tighter, crisper, more book-like thing. Book publishing is a long process so in the interest of getting the book out as soon as possible, this became top priority. 3/
Read 4 tweets
25 Jul
Imagine I present to you this boxer:
And I tell you
You might ask
Read 8 tweets
16 Jul
Around the early 1800s there were 128 random strangers on Earth, each of whose genes makes up 1/128 of you. Some prob. knew each other and had no idea they'd share a common descendant. There are 127 critical sex moments in this chart. If just 1 doesn't happen you never exist. 1/5
Of course if you keep going, things quickly get hectic. In the mid-1600s, you've got over 4,000 ancestors roaming the Earth. Some of them probably fucking hated each other. Also, now you're relying on 4,095 times people banged—if only 4,094 had happened, you wouldn't exist. 2/5
Keep going with this and you reach a weird contradiction. How is this explained? "Pedigree collapse," a euphemism for a whole lot of incest. Fun fact: 80% of all people who have ever lived have been born to parents who were second cousins or closer. 3/5
Read 5 tweets
30 Jun
2 kinds of intellectual culture:

Idea Lab: a safe space for people, a dangerous space for ideas.

Echo Chamber: a safe space for a sacred set of ideas and people who express them, a dangerous space for opposing ideas and people who express them.
Idea Labs see argumentation as play. Echo Chambers see it as fighting.

Idea labs inflict humility on you. Echo Chambers breed unearned conviction.

Idea Labs are an intellectual gym. Echo Chambers are an intellectual candy store.
On a macro scale, an Idea Lab is a super brain smarter than any of its members.

An Echo Chamber is a giant that’s dumber than an individual person but very good at bullying.
Read 4 tweets

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