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David Perell Profile picture
@david_perell
Feb 3, 2021 • 19 tweets • 7 min read • Read on X
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With Jeff Bezos stepping down as CEO, here’s a thread of the best things I’ve learned from him.

1. Be willing to change your mind.

As Bezos famously said: "Anybody who doesn’t change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world we live in.”
2. There are two kinds of decisions.

One-way door decisions are irreversible, so make them slowly. Two-way door decisions are the opposite. Since you can go back on them, you should make them quickly. Image
3. Encourage good writing

Amazon’s built a writing-first culture where employees review six-page memos at the start of important meetings. Writing takes longer in the short-term but saves time in the long-term. The memos are structured like a dissertation defense.

Here's how. Image
4. Think analytically

Bezos thought analytically about everything, even women. Early in his career, he took ballroom dance classes to increase his exposure to what he called n+ women. Later, he called this “women flow.”

Source: The Everything Store
5. Balance the efficiency you need to execute with the wandering you need to innovate.

Here's Bezos. Image
6. Jeff Bezos is a serious micro-manager

Source: The Steve Yegge Google Platforms rant which is one of the best things ever written about Amazon.

gist.github.com/chitchcock/128… Image
7. Keep things simple, even when your ideas are grand.

Amazon's principles are crisp and repeated often. That’s why he worked in an office building called “Day 1." True to his belief in simplicity, here's his rough original vision for Amazon Web Services.

Source: Steve Yegge Image
8. If you do something ambitious, smart people will doubt you.

In 1997, Jeff Bezos spoke to a group of students at Harvard Business School. Now, he says: "If you want to be innovative, you have to be willing to be misunderstood, and criticized.”

(h/t @awealthofcs) Image
9. Find structural advantages

Barnes & Noble thought they could out-compete Amazon because they had deeper pockets. But because Amazon only charged sales tax in Nevada and Washington, Barnes & Nobel had to offer deeper discounts to compete on price.
10. Be customer-driven

There are negative book reviews on Amazon — even though publishers haven't historically wanted them because of Bezos' empathy for customers. He said: “We don’t make money when we sell something. We make money when we help someone make a purchase decision.”
11. You will either fight to charge more or charge less.

Here's Bezos: “There are two kinds of retailers: there are those folks who work to figure how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure how to charge less, and we are going to be the second, full-stop.”
12. Start the product development process by writing a press release.

By writing a press release for each new product, employees have to compress their pitch down to its essence. Then, work backward from the customer's perspective and public perception.

13. Bezos focused on three core advantages: customer-centricity, long-term thinking, and a genuine love for invention.

This Harry Potter story is my favorite example because it shows how Amazon was willing to lose money in exchange for customer loyalty.

perell.com/essay/amazon/ Image
14. Build a flywheel

Jeff Bezos saw how flywheels could create compounding advantages for his company, long before they became common knowledge in the business world. Here's Amazon's flywheel in action, as drawn by @maxolson and explained by Bezos himself. ImageImage
15. Follow a long-term vision, but know that things are going to change

“At Amazon, we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.”

(h/t @BalesFootball)
16. Sometimes, the best way to predict the future is to bet on things that won't change.

In Amazon's case, Bezos knows that customers will still want fast delivery, vast selection, and low prices ten years from now. Image
17. Consider the regret minimization framework for hard decisions

"You want to have minimized the number of regrets you have. That's what should drive people. Not how much money they have. It's regrets that I think haunt people at the end of their life."

18. When the right opportunity comes, it's okay to sacrifice the short-term for the long-term.

Understanding the nature of software economics (with high fixed costs and low marginal costs), shaped Bezos' strategy for Amazon Web Services.

(h/t @benthompson) ImageImage
Brunello Cucinelli’s approach is the opposite of Amazon’s.

He's the founder of a $450 million fashion brand, which is valued at more than €1.6 billion.

Here’s how he built one of the largest clothing companies in the world.

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More from @david_perell

David Perell Profile picture
Oct 3
Announcing: Writing Examples

Today is launch day! We built this website to celebrate great writing.

It’s 100% free. Each article deconstructs a piece of writing from an iconic writer. The goal is to give you X-Ray vision into what makes sentences and paragraphs come alive (so that you can improve at your craft).

Every example has an analysis of why the writing works. Analytical often means dry. But instead of going technical, we’ve gone technicolor. There are text-explainers, summary graphics, and videos that come together to make the writing instruction lively and multi-dimensional.

It’s a place where you can discover how great writing comes together. Where we lift up the hood and see the mechanics in action. It isn’t about giving you a set of rules to follow. It’s about showing the diversity of ways writers approach their craft, so you can develop your own style.

What are some of the articles about? You’ll learn how to describe a party like F. Scott Fitzgerald, how to tell a story like George Orwell, how to write a speech like John F. Kennedy. There are other articles inspired by the likes of John Steinbeck, James Clear, Winston Churchill, Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens, Steven Pressfield, and Jerry Seinfeld.

Writing Examples is a crusade against the sterility of contemporary writing. So much of the advice you read says the same thing: “Be direct. Cut the fluff. Get to the point. Stick to short sentences.” And yeah, sure, this advice has merit. It’s useful in certain cases, but the problem is writers take these rules to be universal, which has homogenized writing styles. Even in my own writing, there’ve been so many times where I’ve stripped away my own voice in the name of “correctness.” I regret that.

The truth is, there is no one way to write well, just as there is no one way to speak well. The way you speak in a boardroom is different from the way you speak on a first date, which is different from the way you speak with your childhood best friends. Writing is similar.

Writing Examples is the opposite of Grammarly. It celebrates the wild, wacky, and the weird because it’s the bedrock of personality. The site’s explicit purpose is to inject some High Noon Chutzpah back into the world of writing. To teach you how to write with distinctly human fingerprints in a world that’s about to be flooded with AI-generated content.

Forget playing it safe. That’s the most dangerous thing you can do in a world of instant writing. I want you to write with personality. I want you to play with punctuation. I want you to ditch the corporatized hogwash. I want to expand your sense of what great writing can be. And I want you to have fun doing it.

But there’s more to the mission. Writing Examples is a protest against today’s Internet, where people spend the majority of their time reading ad-polluted articles and doom-scrolling the same few social media sites. Remember when we used to surf the Internet? When every site was its own wave to ride? Now, we’re like phone-addicted zombies, we mindlessly scroll Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram until we feel bad about ourselves — only to repeat the cycle a few hours later.

Writing Examples is different. Heartfelt writing deserves a heartfelt presentation, so every element of the site has been designed from scratch. Energetically, we wanted to honor the gravitas of classic writing without the sleepiness of a drab old library shelf.  We said no to ads. We said no to pop-ups. No hijacking your attention. None of the flat white backgrounds that make the Internet feel so homogenous. And we said no to anything that feels like your 5th-grade English class.

Writing Examples isn’t about what’s trending. It’s about learning from the great writers of times past, most of whom you know, many of whom you probably haven’t taken the time to read.

The ultimate goal is to make Writing Examples a one-stop shop to learn about any kind of writing you can think of.

Now, I dare you to dive into the site and get to work.
Here's the full site

WritingExamples.comImage
How to Title a Book (@JamesClear)

Atomic Habits has sold 20 million copies and was the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in 2021 and 2023.

It’s found a permanent place on the recommended shelf of just about every airport bookstore, and its success indicates that people do judge books by their covers. Is it any coincidence that it has the perfect cover for a self-improvement book?

Let’s start with the title. It achieves what Hollywood writers call “Fresh Familiar.” People know about habits, but the phrase “Atomic Habits” promises an unfamiliar twist. The title is short too. It’s easy to say and easy to remember, which makes it easy to share in conversation.

The phrase isn’t just fresh and familiar though. It’s also the ultimate distillation of what the book is about. The word ‘atomic’ has three meanings:

1. Tiny: Like an atom, because the big changes people want come out of many small actions.

2. The fundamental unit in a larger system: Habits are the building blocks of your life.

3. A source of immense energy: Habits may be small, but when you combine them, they have serious power — like an atomic bomb.

That list doubles as a summary of the book: If you (1) make tiny changes and (2) layer them together like units in a larger system, then (3) you will achieve powerful results.

When somebody is thinking about buying a self-help book, they'll ask two questions: “How will my life improve?” and “Will this method work for me?” The sentence at the bottom, right above James’s name, answers these questions. Every salesperson knows that you can build trust by proactively speaking to people's objections. Calling this method “easy” lowers the barrier to entry, and calling it “proven” gives people the security that others have already been successful with it. All this analysis happens subconsciously.

Then, there’s the typography. Font size dictates the sequence that people will read the cover. They’ll read the big words first, then the smaller ones. This one works because everything reinforces itself. Each layer expands on the one before it. As the font gets smaller, the sentences get longer and more concrete, which clarify the promise of the book.

Writing a best-selling book begins with clear and distinct packaging, and the cover of Atomic Habits is as good as it gets.Image
Read 11 tweets
David Perell Profile picture
Sep 25
The Sam Altman Interview

You know him as the CEO of OpenAI — but he's also an avid writer.

We spoke not once but twice about how Sam captures ideas, clarifies his thinking, edits his writing, decides what to work on, and uses ChatGPT.

Timestamps:

1:47 Will LLMs change how we write?
8:39 How does Sam use ChatGPT?
11:26 How Sam became less anxious
17:24 Sam once dreamed of being a novelist
18:37 Lessons from Peter Thiel
21:35 Lessons from Paul Graham
26:02 The book Sam Altman wants to write
28:37 Advice for startup founders
30:20 How Y Combinator shapes OpenAI
35:55 How Sam chose to work on AGI
37:35 Writing strategy memos at OpenAI
41:34 Why isn’t ChatGPT a better storyteller?
44:20 Sam's obsessive note-taking method
47:12 Will AI put writers out of work?
If you'd rather listen to the episode, you can do that here...

Apple:

Spotify: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how…
open.spotify.com/episode/4zskFs…
Image
If YouTube is your jam, you can watch the full thing there

Read 7 tweets
David Perell Profile picture
Jul 17
Harry Dry is the best copywriter I know.

He's built a 130,000-person newsletter teaching people how to do it, and by the end of this interview, you'll be at least a Green Belt in copywriting.

Some of his rules for writing:

1) A great sentence is a good sentence made shorter.

2) Writing great copy begins with having something to say in the first place.

3) Copy is like food. How it looks matters.

4) Since the look of copy matters so much, don't write copy in Google Docs. Write it in Figma (so you can write and design at the same time).

5) Kaplan's Law of Words: Any word that isn't working for you is working against you.

6) You know a paragraph is ready to ship when there's nothing left to remove. It's like a Jenga tower. The entire thing should collapse if you remove something.

7) Make a promise in the title so the reader knows exactly what they're going to get if they click. Then, deliver on the promise.

8) The three laws of copywriting: (1) Make it concrete, (2) make it visual, and (3) make it falsifiable.

9) Make it concrete: Don't be abstract. For an example, say you're writing about habits. Don't talk about "productive routines." That's abstract. Write about "waking up at 6am to write" instead. It's concrete — and much more vibrant.

10) Make it visual: People see in pictures. This is why instead of memorizing card numbers directly, world memory champions memorize cards by turning them into pictures and then back to cards.

11) Make it falsifiable: When you write a sentence that's true or false, you put your head on the chopping block, which makes people sit up in their seat.

12) When has a falsifiable statement resonated? Galileo got sentenced to a decade of house arrest for saying that the earth spins around the sun. That's a falsifiable sentence. But nobody would've done anything if he'd said that the earth has a harmonious connection with a celestial object.

13) Write with the delete key. Using fewer words lets you be more impactful with the words you keep.

14) The job of a sales page is to make a bold claim at the top. Then spend the rest of the page backing up what you've said... with a ridiculous amount of proof.

15) If your competitor could've written the sentence, cut it.

16) Good copy is differentiated. Here's an example: Elon Musk shouldn't write "The Cybertruck is the world's best truck." Ford or Dodge can write that sentence. But only Elon can write: "The Cybertruck is tougher than an F-150 and faster than a Porsche."

17) Some days, the writing comes easily. Some days, it takes sweat. The reader doesn't care if you wrote for two minutes, two hours, or two days. The ink looks the same.

18) Great copy reads like your customer wrote it. Talk to them.

That's just an introduction to the copywriting philosophy of @harrydry.

I've shared the full interview below. I recommend you watch this one because we pull from so many visual references and do a lot of screen sharing. If you'd rather watch on YouTube, I've shared the link in the reply tweets.
If you'd rather tune in on YouTube, here's the full link.

Here are the audio links to Apple and Spotify, even though I strongly recommend watching this one relative to other How I Write episodes.

Apple:

Spotify: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lea…
open.spotify.com/episode/3g1AjY…
Image
Read 5 tweets
David Perell Profile picture
Mar 27
Neil Strauss once got a call from the FBI.

They wanted to learn about seduction (he's written a lot about it).

He's published ten New York Times bestsellers and ghostwritten for celebrities like Kevin Hart and Rick Rubin.

15 things he taught me about writing:

1. A desire for universal praise kills your voice. Great writers always work keeping very specific role models in mind. They want to live unto — write up to — their heroes.

2. In your first draft, be vulnerable. Then edit so that your vulnerability is interesting to other people.

3. Notice, process, share: Writing starts with the eye (where you notice), moves to the mind (where you process), and ends with the fingertips (where you share).

4. Write with uncommon honesty. Edit with uncommon brutality.

5. None of Neil Strauss’ books would exist without him brain dumping interesting experiences into a doc in the first 24 hours. How many ideas have you lost because you didn't write them down?

6. The first paragraph, the first page, and the first chapter are crucial because they establish the vibe and tempo you have to adhere to…till the last word.

7. Don’t rush your main idea. It probably came to you in bits and pieces over time, so don’t hit the reader in the face with it. Take them to the main idea via stories. You don't need to say everything at the beginning.

8. Your writing develops a vital zing when you realize no one cares. Your job is to make them care. Start with this attitude and your brain will subconsciously erase unnecessary set ups and cut to the chase.

9. Create systems to protect you from your lower self. For example, a part of your animal brain wants to scroll Twitter for 10 hours and bathe in the glow of the timeline. But great writers side with their higher self over the lower. Neil uses an app called Freedom to keep distractions at bay.

10. There's a point where you stop telling the book or the essay what you want it to be, and it starts telling you what it wants to be. Don’t ignore this message.

11. The first draft is for you. Be uninhibited and let your ideas flow like lava.

12. The second draft is for the reader. Make what matters to you matter to the reader. Ask questions like: "Where are they bored? Where are they confused?"

13. The third draft is for the haters. Clean up your prose. Get the facts straight. Take the bullets out of the gun. Then... ship.

14. When we begin a book–or any artwork or creative endeavor–the goal is not to execute a plan. It’s to surrender to the art itself. To let the art create itself, with you as a conduit.

15. Writers need a sacred space. A place or a time of the day that’s sealed off from the outside world, with no distractions…where you can enter undisturbed flow states.

I've shared the full conversation with @neilstrauss below.

If you'd rather listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple, check out the replies.
Listen to the episode below...

Apple:

Spotify: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/nei…
open.spotify.com/episode/0OkUE9…
Image
Here's the full episode on YouTube

Read 4 tweets
David Perell Profile picture
Mar 20
25 million people, every single year, download Shaan Puri’s podcast. What has Shaan figured out about storytelling?

He spilled the beans in our new chat. Here's how he does it:

1. A story is a five second moment of change. A story is not a sequence of events; it's about transformation. Weave in U-turns and unexpected flips.

2. Write like you talk. Natural, conversational, led by stories.

3. A formula for a great story: Intention + Obstacle. At all moments, the listener should know what the hero wants and what's stopping them from getting there. This one's from Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The Social Network.

4. Work backwards from the emotion you're trying to create in the reader. Then let the structure follow.

5. Aim for strong reactions. If you can get the reader to widen their eyes, raise their eyebrows, and/or burst out laughing, they will share your work.

6. Don't write to the faceless masses. Write to one specific person. BuzzFeed writers used to write to "Debbie at her Desk," the bored woman at her desk who wanted a 5-minute distraction.

7. “Likeability” is downstream of vulnerability. The more honestly you share your challenges, the more invested your reader gets. Write your heart out.

8. Don't be the 9,000 IQ guy. Stop competing in imaginary intelligence contests and start telling stories. Big words alienate but tight narratives pull people in.

9. Forget resumes and portfolios. Create a “binge bank” instead. A binge bank is a set of videos or essays that people can binge on. Stack up material so that when people do go down your rabbit hole, they come out the other side a fan.

10. Mere practice gets you nowhere. But intentional practice leads to exponential progress. Always learn from your attempts and make intelligent tweaks on the next try.

11. Comedy is great, but definitely don't make every sentence a joke.

12. Comedy is a pretty easy way to improve your writing. The essence of all comedy is surprise. Study your favorite comedians. Read books like How to Write Funny and The Hidden Tools of Comedy.

13. For better storytelling, Shaan recommends two books: Storyworthy and Building a Storybrand.

14. How to make headlines juicy: use specific and odd numbers, focus on the first three words and the last three words, use "you" whenever possible, and know that longer is typically better than shorter.

15. Your writing should only be as long as it is interesting. An uninteresting 20 second reel will fail; an interesting 30-minute essay will win. But you must be honest while gauging how objectively interesting your piece is…in a world with infinite content.

16. Most people think writing is about transferring information but writing is just as much about transferring emotion. Emotion gets people to take action (like, share, buy…).

The first 40-minutes of this conversation with @ShaanVP is all about storytelling. Then there's an hour more about the genius of Dave Chapelle and how to write with zest.

If you'd rather listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple, check out the replies…
Listen to the podcast here...

Apple:

Spotify: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/3-p…
open.spotify.com/episode/3wqtAD…
Image
You can watch the full thing on YouTube too

Read 6 tweets
David Perell Profile picture
Dec 6, 2023
Ali Abdaal finished first in his class at Cambridge, became a doctor, and then built a YouTube channel with 5 million followers.

Here's what he's taught me about creative work:

1. Get going, get good, get smart—in that order.

2. If you're stuck, embrace the FBR Method: Fast, Bad, Wrong. Ali wrote the first draft of his book in seven days flat. Quantity leads to quality.

3. Prolific over perfect: If you want to get good at something, you have to put in the reps.

4. Be a Guide, not a Guru: Your writer's block will disappear once you stop trying to be the person who knows everything, and start being a friendly guide instead. Tell your story. Share what's worked for you. You don't need to have all the answers.

5. Do the verb instead of being the noun: Your identity can limit you. Make videos instead of being a "YouTuber." Publish essays instead of being a "writer." Labels tie you down. Action frees you up.

6. Work hard to find the work that doesn't feel like work. The more time I spend with Ali, the more I realize that he's always working in a way that doesn't feel like work to him.

7. Search for the work only you can do: Ali couldn't find a competitive edge in academia. As he once said to me: “The only way to win the academic game was just to work really, really hard because at the highest levels of academia, I had no natural advantages.”

8. You can thrive as a communicator without a bunch of new ideas. Interpreting existing ideas in a fresh, distinct, and personal way is more than enough. Just think of your favorite teacher from school. How many of their ideas were original? Same with writing.

9. Be real, not perfect: Ali's videos aren't 100% scripted. He speaks off the cuff, as if he's talking to a friend.

10. If you're stuck on an article, ditch the Google Doc and text a friend about what you're trying to say instead.

11. You don't need to be an expert to share what you've learned along the way. C.S. Lewis once said: “The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago he has forgotten.”

12. Algorithms are designed to put the right things in front of the right people at the right time. Put them to work for you.

I've shared the full conversation with @AliAbdaal below.

If you'd rather listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple, check out the replies.
"I've never had any goal around subscriber count or around views, revenue or anything like that. And all of that stuff has happened as a side effect of showing up and doing the work and controlling what's within my control."

Here's the YouTube link.

Write for one person
Read 6 tweets

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