Hey everybody,
I’ll be speaking at Bloomberg in Washington D.C on Friday at 10:30 am.
I’ll be talking about why Twitter is such a powerful force in the financial industry, and why amateur and professional finance writers are seeing so much success.
If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you there. You can find the event details here.
My online course, Write of Passage is live!
Writing online is the fastest way to accelerate your career.
Unfortunately, many people don’t invest in their writing skills after they leave school. A couple years ago, I was squarely in that camp and wanted to learn how to write. I wasn’t satisfied with any of the solutions to this problem, so I created my own. Write of Passage presents a modern approach to writing.
The course is intense, and by the end of it, you will have a collection of published articles, a way to distribute them, a personal website, and a repeatable system for sharing your ideas. These assets will be the foundation of your online presence for decades to come.
If you want to learn more, I’m hosting a live Q&A session tomorrow night. You can register here.
On that note, it was great to see how fast so many Monday Musings subscribers enrolled in the course. I appreciate your support and look forward to writing together.
Many of you asked for book recommendations about writing, and I responded with unconventional advice: Skip the usual books and learn copywriting.
Copywriters are masters of the written word. They write with clarity and simplicity, which is exactly what readers on the internet are looking for. They write in specifics, not generalities. When they do, they get straight to the point. By writing in a persuasive, outcome-oriented (instead of academic) style, copywriters inspire action.
Copywriters rewrite and rewrite, and only hit publish once they’ve said what they wanted to say in the fewest possible words. There’s no fluff. In short, most people should emulate copyrighters instead of famous novelists.
The Boron Letters are an excellent place to start.
Write of Passage is divided into seven sections:
The Age of Leverage
Make Your Serendipity Vehicle
Create Your Online Home
Set Up Your Distribution System
Learn to Write Clearly and Persuasively
Connect with Anyone
Build Your Personal Monopoly
On that note, I have some links for you to explore:
If you’re curious about Write of Passage, I’m hosting two live Q&A sessions:
April 2nd at 7:30pm EST. You can register here.
April 16th at 7:30pm EST. You can register here.
The course begins on Wednesday, May 1st, and I hope you’ll join me.
Fresh Ideas
North Star Podcast: Erika Nardini
Erika Nardini is the CEO of Barstool Sports.
Barstool Sports is one of a kind. They cover sports and pop culture through a uniquely Barstool lens. Part media company, part subscription service, part e-commerce company, they produce blogs, videos, and podcasts.
We discussed:
Memes on the internet
Social Media Influencers
The future of sports
Barstool’s hiring philosophy
Why Influencers are the new publishers
Listen here: Website | iTunes | Spotify
Coolest Things I Learned This Week
What Did Gutenberg’s Printing Press Actually Change?
Book prices fell. The raw price of books fell by 2.4 percent a year for over a hundred years after Gutenberg.
In places where there was an increase in competition among printers, prices fell swiftly and dramatically. Competition works. When an additional printing firm entered a given city market, book prices there fell by 25%.
The ability to print books affected religious debates as well, like the spread of Protestant ideas after Martin Luther circulated his 95 theses criticizing the Catholic Church in 1517.
Falling Home Construction
Adjusted for population growth, new home construction is lower now than it was at the depths of every pre-2008 recession of the last 60 years. And a big trend of the last few decades is the rise of single-occupant homes. So, if anything, you’d think we’d need to be making more homes than the past.
Fred Smith and FedEx
This is incredible:
“In the early days of FedEx, Fred Smith (the founder of FedEx) had to go to great lengths to keep the company afloat.
In one instance, after a crucial business loan was denied, Smith took the company's last $5,000 to Las Vegas and won $27,000 gambling on blackjack to cover the company's $24,000 fuel bill. It kept FedEx alive for one more week.”
A 4-Part Hiring Theory
I came up with this theory over the weekend. It has four parts:
Recruiting is hard, but very important.
The best employees are 10-100x better than average ones.
The best employees want to work on hard and interesting problems.
The harder the challenge, the easier it is to build a billion-dollar company.
With that said, the paragraph below adds some important nuance.
Hell of a Story
On September 24th, 1980, a man wearing cowboy boots and carrying two brown suitcases entered Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas. One suitcase held $777,000 in cash; the other was empty. After converting the money into chips, the man approached a craps table on the casino floor and put everything on the backline. This meant he was betting against the woman rolling the dice. If she lost, he’d double his money. If she won, he’d lose everything. Scarcely aware of the amount riding on her dice, the woman rolled three times: 6, 9, 7.
“Pay the backline,” said the dealer. And just like that, the man won over $1.5 million. He calmly filled the empty suitcase with his winnings, exited Binion’s into the desert afternoon, and drove off. It was the largest amount ever bet on a dice roll in America.
Source: Morgan Housel
Amen!
— — —
Hadn’t Considered This
Some scientists believe that driverless cars will not work unless they learn to be irrational.
If such cars stop reliably whenever a pedestrian appears in front of them, pedestrian crossings will be unnecessary, and jaywalkers will be able to march into the road, forcing a driverless car to stop suddenly, a great discomfort to its occupants. To prevent this, driverless cars may have to learn to be angry, and occasionally maliciously fail to stop in time and strike the pedestrian on the shins.
If you are wholly predictable, people learn to hack you.
Source: Rory Sutherland
Silicon Valley
Photo of the Week
In our podcast, Erika and I discussed the importance of thinking like an Internet native.
Barstool is built for the modern media environment, where regular people can become their own media companies and attract a global audience. By publishing content on such a consistent basis, they’ve built a deep bond with their audience.
Yep… there are striking parallels to Write of Passage.
Don’t forget to sign up for the live Q&A call on April 2 or the other Q&A call on April 16.
See you next week,
David Perell