# Seeing with Fresh Eyes: Meaning, Space, Data, Truth, Edward Tufte https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/seeing-with-fresh-eyes > ==Nonfiction meetings should begin with a silent reading of a briefing paper, narrative document, technical report - not a slide deck and bullet points. A document (paper or electronic) should be 2 to 6 pages long, written in sentences, with appropriate images and data displays. Do not send out your stuff in advance, people won't read it.== > Give people the document as they arrive or sign in, saying 'Read this, then we'll talk about it.' ==Meetings with several topics may have several silent reading periods. Study hall is serious, 20% to 50% of total meeting time. Audience members read 2 or 3 times faster than you can talk.== The document is in hand, everyone in the audience reads with their own eyes, at their own pace, their own choice of what to read closely. ==In slide presentations, viewers have no control over pace and sequence as the presenter clicks through a deck - viewers must sit in the dark waiting for the diamonds in the swamp.== > Presenters, you have not lost control, you prepared the document in the first place. Study hall is a wonderful time for presenters: people showed up, they're all reading your stuff, and they're not looking at you. If someone in study hall pecks at their email instead of reading, gently glare at them; the purpose of gathering together in meetings is total concentration on the content at hand. ==Document-based presentations naturally handle questions by answering them further down in the document. Your job is to provide intellectual leadership, which is why you are making the presentation.== > Decks are easier to prepare than documents, however. ==Documents require coherence, thinking, sentences.== But convenience in preparing decks harms the content and the audience. Optimizing presenter convenience is selfish, lazy, and worst of all, replaces thinking. Steve Jobs saying: > I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking. People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint. > Jeff Bezos on Amazon meetings: > We have study hall at the beginning of our meetings. Staff meetings at Amazon begin with 30 minutes of silent reading. The traditional corporate meeting starts with a presentation. Somebody gets up in the front of the room and presents a PowerPoint presentation, some type of slide show. In our view you get very little information, you get bullet points. This is easy for the presenter, but difficult for the audience. And so instead, all our meetings are structured around a 6 page narrative memo. > ==This presentation method, beginning with a document and study hall, has a practical guarantee: meetings will be smarter and more efficient, the audience more active, and meetings 10% to 20% shorter. None ever wished them longer.== # Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Virginia Tufte https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vt > In Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Virginia Tufte presents — and comments on — more than a thousand excellent sentences chosen from the works of authors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The sentences come from an extensive search to identify some of the ways professional writers use the generous resources of the English language. > [...] > Chapter One: Short Sentences > The streets were calm with Sunday. Aimee Bneder > War remains the decisive human failure. John Kenneth Galbraith # Writing is Thinking, Steven Sinofsky https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/writing-is-thinking-an-annotated-twitter-thread-2a75fe07fade > It is really incredible the amount of pushback I see from companies, startups to big, about writing. In particular around the notion that writing is the antithesis of agile. Writing ossifies and cements decision or plans that should change, it is said. ==My view is that agility comes from planning. Without plans, activities are just brownian motion. And you can’t have plans, especially shared plans, without writing.== > ==Writing takes practice. The only way to get more comfortable and more efficient art writing is to write more.== # The Purpose Of Writing, Sven Schnieders https://limitlesscuriosity.com/the-purpose-of-writing > ==I, like many other people, have discovered that it is almost impossible to think seriously without writing. Writing clarifies and sharpens your thoughts in a way that is superior to merely articulating them in a conversation.== It allows you to look at your ideas more objectively, almost as if they were from another person. You can then examine them and think about if what you have written down is really true. > ==However, more often than discovering that your ideas are wrong, you will discover something different: that you do not know what you think.== Sure, you have some vague idea, and you believe that there is a chain of reasoning that leads to a certain conclusion. But what you will discover is that this chain of reasoning is mostly not existent. At best, it has many holes and maybe leads not where you think it does. This discovery is, of course, very unpleasant and sometimes even painful. In a sense, you have lied to yourself by thinking you have thought through this specific topic when, in reality, you have only copied the opinion of someone else. > This process requires an immense amount of honesty because nobody likes to feel stupid. Either you do not know what you think, in which case you feel stupid. Or it turns out that what you believed to be your opinion does not really make sense, is logically inconsistent, and mostly copied from someone else, in which case you feel stupid as well. ==However, the reward for all this exhausting work is clarity and simplicity.== You now possess a chain of reasoning where you have looked as carefully as you can for holes and problems. ==The next step is to let others examine your reasoning—publishing.== # What Makes an Effective Executive, Peter F. Drucker https://hbr.org/2004/06/what-makes-an-effective-executive > What made them all effective is that they followed the same eight practices: > They asked, “What needs to be done?” > They asked, “What is right for the enterprise?” > They developed action plans. > They took responsibility for decisions. > They took responsibility for communicating. > They were focused on opportunities rather than problems. > They ran productive meetings. > They thought and said “we” rather than “I.” > ==Good follow-up is just as important as the meeting itself.== The great master of follow-up was Alfred Sloan, the most effective business executive I have ever known. Sloan, who headed General Motors from the 1920s until the 1950s, spent most of his six working days a week in meetings—three days a week in formal committee meetings with a set membership, the other three days in ad hoc meetings with individual GM executives or with a small group of executives. At the beginning of a formal meeting, Sloan announced the meeting’s purpose. He then listened. He never took notes and he rarely spoke except to clarify a confusing point. At the end he summed up, thanked the participants, and left. Then he immediately wrote a short memo addressed to one attendee of the meeting. In that note, he summarized the discussion and its conclusions and spelled out any work assignment decided upon in the meeting (including a decision to hold another meeting on the subject or to study an issue). He specified the deadline and the executive who was to be accountable for the assignment. He sent a copy of the memo to everyone who’d been present at the meeting. ==It was through these memos—each a small masterpiece—that Sloan made himself into an outstandingly effective executive.== # The Economist Style Guide, Ann Wroe, The Economist http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/style_guide_12.pdf > On only two scores can The Economist hope to outdo its rivals consistently. ==One is the quality of its analysis; the other is the quality of its writing.== > The first requirement of The Economist is that it should be readily understandable. ==Clarity of writing usually follows clarity of thought. So think what you want to say, then say it as simply as possible.== Keep in mind George Orwell’s six elementary rules: > 1 Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. > 2 Never use a long word where a short one will do. > 3 If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out. > 4 Never use the passive where you can use the active. > 5 Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. > 6 Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. > Readers are primarily interested in what you have to say. By the way in which you say it, you may encourage them either to read on or to give up. # Berkshire Hathaway Letters to the Shareholders, Warren E. Buffett https://berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html # Amazon Letters to the Shareholders, Jeffrey P. Bezos https://ir.aboutamazon.com/annual-reports-proxies-and-shareholder-letters/default.aspx # How Amazon Innovates, Greg Satell https://medium.com/s/story/how-amazon-innovates-67747090c4d2 > Good writing is good thinking, even for the world’s most powerful tech company > ==At the heart of how Amazon innovates is its six-page memo, which is required at the start of every new initiative.== What makes it effective isn’t so much the structure of the document itself, but how it is used to embed a fanatical focus on the customer from day one. It’s something that is impressed upon Amazon employees early in their careers. > ==The first step in developing Prime Now was to write a press release.== Landry’s document was not only a description of the service, but how hypothetical customers would react to it. How did the service affect them? What surprised them about it? What concerns did they want addressed? The exercise forced her to internalize how Amazon’s customers would think and feel about Prime Now from the very start. > ==Next, she wrote a series of FAQs anticipating concerns for both customers and for various stakeholders within the firm, like the CFO, operations people, and the leadership of the Prime program.== Landry had to imagine what questions each would have, how her team would resolve issues, and then explain things in clear, concise language. > ==All of this happens before the first meeting is held, a single line of code is written, or an early prototype is built, because the company strongly believes that until you internalize the customer’s perspective, nothing else really matters.== That’s key to how the company operates. > ==Landry also stressed the importance of brevity. “Keeping things concise and to the point forces you to think things through in a way that you wouldn’t otherwise. You can’t hide behind complexity, you actually have to work through it,” she said. Or, as another Amazon leader put it, “Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to remove.”== > ==Moreover, writing a memo isn’t a solo effort; it’s a collaborative process.== Typically, executives spend a week or more sharing the document with colleagues, getting feedback, honing, and tweaking it until every conceivable facet is deeply thought through. # The Silent Meeting Manifesto v1, David Gasca https://medium.com/@gascasf/the-silent-meeting-manifesto-v1-189e9e3487eb > ==“Silent Meetings” are meetings where most of the time is spent thinking and discussing the topics at hand.== > Before your meeting create a basic agenda that includes: > Meeting goals (What do you want the meeting to achieve?) > Meeting non-goals (What is not in scope for the meeting?) > Meeting process (For a 30 minute meeting it could be, “Read doc silently for 20 minutes and then discuss for 10 minutes”) > Assigned facilitator (Who is facilitating the discussion?) > Assigned note-taker (This is optional but it’s often nice to have if it’s a very large meeting) # Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon, Colin Bryar, Bill Carr https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250267597/working-backwards > ==Communicating: Narratives and the Six-Pager.== The eerie silence at the beginning of Amazon meetings. The ban on PowerPoint and the shift to narratives. How narratives produce clear thinking and stimulate valuable discussion. How to write an effective six-pager. The payoff: the “narrative information multiplier”. > ==Working Backwards: Start with the Desired Customer Experience.== Start with the customer and work backwards—harder than it sounds, but a clear path to innovating and delighting customers. A useful Working Backwards tool: writing the press release and FAQ before you build the product. # What Working At Stripe Has Been Like, Patrick McKenzie https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/3/18/two-years-at-stripe > ==Stripe is a celebration of the written word which happens to be incorporated in the state of Delaware.== > ==We produce prodigious amounts of it internally, most of it widely visible within the company.== My favorite job perk might be that library; it includes everything from a crackling memo about current state of book publishing (relevant to our interests) to experiment writeups about using machine learning to counter credit card fraud (relevant to our interests) to market analyses of SaaS adoption in Japanese businesses (relevant to our interests). > ==I think I once had the typical engineer’s disdain for Strategy Memos (TM), but if you think of it as less a Strategy Memo (TM) and more a pull request for a very complicated program which directs the activities of dozens or hundreds of people, it gets a lot easier to stomach.== # GitLab Handbook, GitLab https://about.gitlab.com/handbook > ==The GitLab team handbook is the central repository for how we run the company.== Printed, it consists of over 2,000 pages of text. As part of our value of being transparent the handbook is open to the world, and we welcome feedback. # Managing 185 people in 40 countries. How they do it, Frederic Filloux https://mondaynote.com/managing-185-people-in-40-countries-how-they-do-it-eb97288ecb9 # Our New World, Mary Meeker, BOND https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6842117/Our-New-World.pdf > ==Companies that focus on effective written communication and documentation (dubbed the ‘Amazon way’) – where plans are shared in written form for editing – either synchronous / asynchronous – have had an easier time shifting to distributed work.== Many observe this form of communication can lead to more insightful input and decision making. # Remote work and the importance of writing, The Economist https://www.economist.com/business/2022/01/15/remote-work-and-the-importance-of-writing > ==The written word will flourish in the post-pandemic workplace== > A workplace dominated by time on screens may seem bound to favour newer, faster and more visual ways of transmitting information. ==But an old form of communication—writing—is also flourishing. And not just dashed-off emails and entries on virtual whiteboards, but slow, time-intensive writing. The strengths of the written word have not been diminished by the pandemic era. In some ways they are ideally suited to it.== > ==Writing is not always the best way to communicate in the workplace. Video is more memorable; a phone call is quicker; even PowerPoint has its place. But for the structured thought it demands, and the ease with which it can be shared and edited, the written word is made for remote work.== # How leaders achieve Inbox Zero, Gaurav Vohra https://blog.superhuman.com/how-leaders-achieve-inbox-zero > ==Write for mobile== > ==We send 3 times as many emails from our laptops than our phones. However, we open our email app 8 times more on our phones than on our laptops.== > In fact, we check our phones 58 times a day — and over half of these happen during work hours. # Five Writing Tips, Alex Danco https://alexdanco.com/2019/10/05/five-writing-tips > Never start with a blank page. Start with anything. It could be an outline, it could be starting with quotes or excerpts from what other people have said about your topic or even an adjacent one. It could be “I want to make this point, and here’s why.” It could be “here are three people who I hope get something out of this, and why.” ==It doesn’t even have to be text: one trick I use pretty often is grabbing screenshots of tweets== and throwing them into my Evernote doc. You can get rid of all of this later, although you may decide you want to keep it after all. > Why do this? Because it’s easier to write sentences 2, 3 and 4 of a paragraph you’ve already started than the opening sentence. And it’s easier to write pages 2, 3 and 4 of an essay when you’ve already written the first page. You use a different part of your brain when you’re in the middle of making a point versus when you’re trying to start one. > By throwing in external stuff, like other people’s quotes or tweets, you can short circuit this to your advantage. Start with something, write the middle, then go back and delete that prompt if you feel you need to, and write your own. > A related hint: if you find yourself stuck and you can’t find a way to move forward, try rearranging what you’ve already written. It’ll reset that point you were in the middle of making, and give you a fresh start at trying to re-complete your thought, but with different lead-in material. Sometimes that’s all it takes. Just copy the section you’re working on into a new page, rearrange a bunch of the sentences, maybe delete some of the useless ones (there’s always some). And before you know it, you’re back writing fluidly again. # Alex Danco: Funding the Future, David Perell https://perell.com/podcast/alex-danco-funding-the-future > 34:30 Why Alex writes 5,000 words a week. ==How writing in public can help in ways that just thinking does not.== # Alex Danco: Amazon, Cities, and Disruption, David Perell https://perell.com/podcast/alex-danco > 1:22:05 So I think when people asked me about writing, I basically only have one piece of actual advice, which is the parable of the pottery teacher. It goes something like this. A pottery teacher has two students. He takes them in on a Monday. They both want to learn how to make pots. So he goes to the first student, he says, "Your assignment this week is: You are going to make by the end of the week, I want you to make one perfect pot. You make one pot that is exactly perfect." And then he goes to the second student, and he says, "Your job is not to make a good pot. Your jobs is just make as many pots as possible. Don't worry about making them good. Just make as many of them as you can." Then he leaves him alone. On Friday, he comes back. What has happened? Well, not only has the second student made 500 pots; every single one of them is better than the one pot that the first student has been laboring on. Why? It's because you learn by doing. The way that you learn how to make a perfect pot is just to make a lot of pots. Right? Not to spend so much time obsessively trying to craft this one thing – you're just going to make this ugly, weird monstrosity of an attempt at perfection. And you're going to achieve none of it. Right? Same thing with writing. The way to learn how to write is to write. There's nothing stopping you from doing it. It costs you nothing except your time. Just go write. That is how you get better. ==That honestly, it's like the only real piece of advice I have – is just write more.== > The added benefit, I think is I think some people when they they contemplate starting a blog or starting a newsletter or something like that to say, Okay, what will the ROI on this be? ==I think when people try to think about the return on investment on their writing, they overestimate how much return they will get in the short term. And they underestimate how much they will get in the long term.== People will write something and they will think, "Oh, this is this brilliant piece that I've written." And then in the short term, you get something that is less than what you had hoped. And you think, oh, that's disappointing. Well, the world has moved on now, no one will ever see this ever again. Yeah, but someone's gonna see it in like three years, and they're going to see it in the context of everything else you've written, it'd be like, oh, that guy's cool. I want him on my podcast. Or, "Oh, this is really interesting. I want him to work for Social Capital." Or whatever it is, right? ==It's like the value is in the body of work that you have accumulated and the maturity of thought that comes with it that is going to be greater or independent than any one thing. People overvalue individual pieces of writing that they have done and they undervalue having just a body of work, even if a lot of bad, right, that's fine. It's going to be bad at first! Just do it.== # World-Building and the Early Internet, Alex Danco https://alexdanco.com/2021/06/24/world-building-and-the-early-internet > So coming back to your initial question, which is this idea of this world of Atoms versus this world of Bits or this world of scarcity orientation versus this world of abundance orientation or any number of ways you want to label this. You get to this question: what does it mean to sell? What does selling mean? Because ultimately everything is sales, right? Ultimately sales is what everything boils down to. I remember on... you know what just line has stuck with me. ==It lives rent-free in my head just for months and months and months was aligned as Nick Kokonas on Patrick's podcast. One of the fantastic episodes where his iconic line was just, "Know what you are selling and then go sell it."== > In a world of abundance, what is it that you are selling? And here's where we introduced this concept, which I think we're going to call World Building as a way of thinking about what it is you sell in a world of material plenty and plenty of opportunity and plenty of signal and plenty of stuff coming at you. What is it that you sell that actually works? ==So I would say, this is kind of the initiative for writing this piece that I wrote the other month of this idea of World Building, which says, "Look, the advice that you are given all the time is everyone's job is in sales. Even if you don't know it." Find out what you're selling.== > ==This is good advice. You shouldn't throw that piece of advice out, but what you should actually do is update it to say in this world of abundance on the internet, everyone's job is World Building. Your job isn't just to sell a thing and sell it, sell it, sell it hard. Your job is actually to create a world that is so interesting and so compelling and has a reason for people to go walk in and explore this world that they can go spend time in it, without you even having to be there. There is an understanding of why they want to explore it. They have an understanding of why they want to be there and what's in it for them. And what's there to learn.== > And fundamentally, this frees you of your need to be there all the time. Again, the world of abundance, right? You can't be out there talking to every single person. ==As a brand, you can't be out there speaking to every single customer of yours or potential customer. You have to create a world that's interesting for them that they can go walk into and explore.== # Newsletters, Robin Rendle https://www.robinrendle.com/essays/newsletters > I guess there’s something about newsletters that bugs me, and I can’t put my finger on it. > ==It bothers me that writers can’t create audiences on their own websites, with their own archives, and their own formats. And they certainly can’t get paid in the process. (Although yes, there are exceptions).== > The problem with the web is that when you publish something it just sort of disappears from sight. Writers have to spam all the social networks to remind people that they even exist. > ==Basically my whole political platform is this: RSS is the promised land.== > It’s the perfect way to read the web and to keep up to date with things. So much so that I consider my RSS reader (Reeder.app) to be my favorite web browser, not Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. > ==Hear me out: if RSS was renamed, rebranded, and brought to the surface of the browser then I expect legions of people would adore it. No longer would you have to give all these strangers your email address to sign up for the newsletter.== # John Gruber, Daring Fireball, XOXO Festival https://piped.video/watch?v=ufKFStaFsZs # Stratechery (with Ben Thompson), Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/stratechery-with-ben-thompson > ==I think that the way to think about publishing online is, what are you selling?== I think we do get in the trap of thinking you're selling a single episode or selling a single article, that's actually getting the incentives wrong. ==What I'm selling to my subscribers is consistency and, yes, certainly a quality bar.== > [...] > ==What a lot of people don't understand is, I think a lot of writers give away way too much content on Twitter, and they're out there posting. It's like, why should I read your site when you're just telling me everything you think on Twitter?== > [...] > ==Twitter famously, really started devaluing tweets with links a few years ago, which I think has made the product much worse. That's how we ended up with all these threads, because those spread more. Yeah, which all should be blog posts.== > [...] > ==I think, actually, one of the biggest mistakes Twitter made—and it's understandable, no one could have seen it at the time—Twitter should have had disappearing tweets from day one.== It should have always been a just in the moment social network. I think it'd be a much better product. # Notes on newsletters, Benedict Evans https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/11/16/notes-on-newsletters > Ben Thompson started a newsletter at roughly the same time that I started mine, back in 2013. ==He decided to charge directly, and send it multiple times a week (which helps the value prop and, again, is easier if it’s driven by newsflow) whereas my business model was to get a job at Andreessen Horowitz, a media company that monetises through venture capital.== # Andyʼs working notes, Andy Matuschak https://notes.andymatuschak.org # Shift Happens, Marcin Wichary https://shifthappens.site https://shifthappens.site/about-me-and-my-book > ==A book about keyboards.== # RBG, R.I.P., David Post https://reason.com/2020/09/18/rbg-r-i-p > Most of what I know about writing I learned from her. The rules are actually pretty simple: Every word matters. Don't make the simple complicated, make the complicated as simple as it can be (but not simpler!). ==You're not finished when you can't think of anything more to add to your document; you're finished when you can't think of anything more that you can remove from it.== She enforced these principles with a combination of a ferocious—almost a terrifying—editorial pen, and enough judicious praise sprinkled about to let you know that she was appreciating your efforts, if not always your end-product. ==And one more rule: While you're at it, make it sing. At least a little; legal prose is not epic poetry or the stuff of operatic librettos, but a well-crafted paragraph can help carry the reader along, and is always a thing of real beauty.== # Music in Writing, Martin Amis, Charlie Rose https://vimeo.com/330962336 > Style. You don’t take an ordinary paragraph, your decorative paragraph, and then give it style, and lots of rumble and wow, you know, and fuzzbox. You don’t do it that way. What you’re trying to do is: Be faithful to your perceptions, and transmit them as faithfully as you can. But in a language… In a… that… You know I just say these sentences again and again in my head, until they sound right. And there is no objective reason why they sound right. They just sound right to me. So it’s euphony, sometimes it’s harshness you want. But it’s… it’s just matching up the perception with the words… in a kind of semi-musical way. Even if it’s atonal. # The Paris Review Interviews, The Paris Review https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews # Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, Robert Caro https://www.robertcaro.com/the-books/working/ > Here’s a book very unlike the others I’ve written—very much shorter, for one thing, as some readers may notice—but its intention is to share some experiences I’ve had while doing the others, and some thoughts I’ve had about what I’ve been trying to do with those books. # Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, Sony Pictures Classics https://piped.video/watch?v=gv3CRojrbeE https://www.sonyclassics.com/film/turneverypage > Turn Every Page explores the remarkable fifty-year relationship between two literary legends, writer Robert Caro and his longtime editor Robert Gottlieb. Now 86, Caro is working to complete the final volume of his masterwork, The Years of Lyndon Johnson; ==Gottlieb, 91, waits to edit it==. # He's edited Caro, le Carré and 'Catch-22,' but doesn't mind if you don't know his name, Robert Gottlieb, Terry Gross https://www.npr.org/2023/01/03/1146641641/robert-gottlieb-caro-power-broker-turn-every-page-lizzie-gottlieb > Robert Gottlieb describes editing as a service job: =="Our job is to serve the word, serve the author, serve the text."== > [...] > =="I thought editors should be unseen and unheard. Do the work. Shut up. Get on with it."== # Movies Watched, June 2022, Khoi Vinh https://www.subtraction.com/2022/12/30/movies-watched-june-2022 > In fact, I’m sure that even audiences who aren’t familiar with these books or these men will still enjoy the rare look at how authors and editors work together, a too little discussed aspect of how the books we all read come to be published. # Writing matters, Jan Feld, Corinna Lines, Libby Ross https://janfeld.weebly.com/uploads/1/1/8/9/118933153/writing_matters.pdf > For papers to have scientific impact, they need to impress our peers in their role as referees, journal editors, and members of conference committees. Does better writing help our papers make it past these gatekeepers? In this study, we estimate the effect of writing quality by comparing how 30 economists judge the quality of papers written by PhD students in economics. Each economist judged five papers in their original version and five different papers that had been language edited. No economist saw both versions of the same paper. ==Our results show that writing matters. Compared to the original versions, economists judge edited versions as higher quality; they are more likely to accept edited versions for a conference; and they believe that edited versions have a better chance of being accepted at a good journal.== # The writing class I’d like to teach, Jason Fried https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/the-writing-class-id-like-to-teach-11b259f44a5d > It would be a writing course. Every assignment would be delivered in five versions: A three page version, a one page version, a three paragraph version, a one paragraph version, and a one sentence version. > Along the way you’d trade detail for brevity. Hopefully adding clarity at each point. This is important because I believe editing is an essential skill that is often overlooked and under appreciated. ==The future belongs to the best editors.== # Niall Ferguson, Historian, Tim Ferris https://piped.video/watch?v=WKTKeBChgfY&t=2808 https://tim.blog/2022/11/15/niall-ferguson https://tim.blog/2022/11/16/niall-ferguson-transcript > Niall Ferguson: Absolutely. ==Part of what’s attractive about historical study is reading the letters and diaries of the dead or very, very old and the non-published material. If you inhabit the world of the published, which many historians do, that is to say, they essentially write their books on the basis of things that have been published, whether it’s books or articles, you are really doing research at one remove from reality. I’ve written books like that, and there is a role for them because you are really synthesizing the scholarship of many, many authors and trying to produce a single distilled version of what happened.== > ==But there’s a difference between writing a book based on published material and writing a book based on unpublished material, and it’s a huge difference. I attach much more importance to books that I’ve written based on unpublished material and books that others have written. Why? Because that which is published is essentially filtered. A huge filter has determined what sees the light of day in print.== > ==When you enter an archive, the only filter is that nobody destroyed it and somebody thought to preserve it in at least enough of an orderly form that you can look at it. And this is a radically different world that you enter. It’s not a perfect representation of reality, but it’s a lot closer to reality than the published material.== > And so let me illustrate the point. As I write the biography of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of which came out a few years ago, I’m writing the second volume now, there is, of course, a very well-established narrative about the Vietnam War, about the Cold War, about the opening to China, about the Middle East. It’s all very well established. There are lots of books out there about it. But when you enter the realm of the unpublished correspondence, including transcripts of telephone calls, even the tapes of telephone calls, which were certainly not supposed to see the light of day because the Nixon administration’s the best documented administration of all time thanks to Nixon’s ultimately fatal error of taping everything, the world is a very different one from that world that you thought you understood, thanks to Christopher Hitchens. > I mean, Christopher Hitchens’ book on Kissinger has sold many copies. It contains, I think from memory, 12 footnotes. It refers to that many sources. It is a work of journalism of outrageous superficiality. It’s a polemical hatchet job, and it shouldn’t be treated as history. Hitch was a friend of mine. I miss him. But it’s important to recognize that that’s not a work of history, really. ==Another way of thinking about this is what’s the ratio of words read to words written?== Now I wish, Tim, that that ratio was published on the front of books. So this is a one-to-one book. He read basically one word for every word that he wrote. And this is a 100-to-1 book. And this is a 1,000-to-1 book. And 1,000-to-1, it seems like it’s about right. I mean, most books are really not worth reading because their ratio is close to unity. There may even be books where the ratio’s below unity, that they’ve written actually more words than they’ve read in preparing to write the book. The best history —  > Tim Ferriss: Sounds like the internet in a nutshell. Yeah. > Niall Ferguson: I mean, that’s the blogosphere. It’s like, “Why bother doing research? I have a great opinion.” ==So I’m a very much 1,000-to-1 kind of person. I like to dig deeply and broadly and to enter that realm of the unpublished.== # How I Became a Writer, Paul Auster https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/paul-auster-how-i-became-writer > A rare visit at Paul Auster’s brownstone home in Brooklyn. Auster shares the story of how he became a writer and how he works: “A good day’s work is if I have one typed page at the end of the day, two is amazing, three is a miracle.” Read less ... > New York novelist, Paul Auster, tells the story about how striking out on an autograph from the legendary baseball player Willie Mays led him to become a writer. > ==“After that incident at the age of 7, I always remember to keep a pen in my pocket, because you never know when you might need one.”==