#11: This will make you the best writer on earth
AI is more dangerous than nukes, teaching money to kids and a primer on writing.
Disclaimer: This edition was written by our community member, Varun Choraria.
Hi,
I hope all readers of this newsletter are well. Our main story this week concerns one of the most essential skills of the 21st century- writing. But the very act of writing is skewed inherently- how do you choose which platform to write, how often you should, what topics you need to write on, and so forth. I make the effort to present a mental model around this, that we can stress-test together as a community. Oh, you’ll find a small surprise at the end, so be sure to read the entire newsletter!
Enjoy the long read ahead :)
Week in Review: Highlights of our community
In #general, Harkirat posted a very interesting question- ‘How do you teach personal finance and money management to kids? Do you use any products?’ One of the reasons we as generalists can tackle this is to understand why the parents want to teach the kids personal finance in the first place (understanding the jobs-to-be-done).
Do they want their kids (3-5 years) to understand that you need to wait to buy the things you want?
Or maybe for their kids aged 6-10 years, do they want to help them understand the choice-making that goes behind every purchase?
Or for children aged 11-13, do parents want them to understand compound interest?
Multiple possibilities, many products :) What do you think? Share your thoughts on the thread in #general!
In #random, Rishi shared a story on why AI could be more dangerous than nukes.
Here is an excerpt:
An AI that could guess what's happening on the scene just by listening to the audio. It was consistently better than humans at doing this. An AI that can predict human behaviour with training only watching sitcoms. Imagine typing a descriptive sentence of scene and having an artificial intelligence generate a convincing photo realistic image just from your text input!
To take an example the field of Computer Vision, every year there's a contest where teams compete to see who can give the right categories out of a thousand different categories when given an image. In 2011 before people were using neural-nets, the winning team got an error rate of 26%, which doesn't sound too good when you think that humans are at 5% on this task. But fast-forward it just 5 years and we are now at 3% using deep learning and much more computational power. Actually better than humans on this task.
On Writing- a few thoughts for a short primer
Maybe this is why people aren’t reading your articles
When you start scrolling through an article, how long do you usually read it for? Studies show that an average of 55% of people will read an article for less than fifteen seconds. You have fifteen seconds, usually less, to convince your reader to stay put while you impart your pearls of wisdom into the fertile soils of their mind.
Your introduction is your moment. It’s your only chance to draw people in. You could have the most jaw-dropping, ground-breaking, life-changing article the world has seen since Hemingway, but if your introduction is boring, nobody’s going to read your work.
Here’s a better mental model on editing
A common misconception is that editing just happens at the sentence level. But a quick polish and spellcheck are not enough to transform a piece from a first draft to a final. First drafts often contain story-level issues because no matter how carefully you planned your story before writing it, it’s hard to nail a narrative on the first try. So when it comes to editing, you should shore up the plotholes before you worry about commas.
Just like you revisit the map to find your way back home, outlining after you draft will help you navigate through the editing process to get to a final draft.
The business of writing
90% of readers access my work for free. 10% of readers access my work via a paid channel.
When you think about writing in these terms, you treat readers with empathy. Instead of jamming stuff in their faces, you think about how you can solve their problems and instruct them through your words.
100 readers can make you 6-figures.
Think about writing in 5-year blocks. Build your writing business slowly. Make money from more than just writing.
The part where writers stuff up:
They set up all those tools and then nothing happens. That’s because the tools have several levels of learning.
Level 1 = you can use the tool.
Level 2 = you can find the hidden features of the tool.
Level 3 = you can use the tool in ways it hasn’t been used before.
Level 4 = you can stand out a little in the way you use the tool.
Mastery = you can help others use the tool and have them be successful.
A lot of writers stay at level one and try and turn writing into a business from there. It doesn’t work. Learning the writing tools means mastering them, so the value of your writing skills can help you earn a living.
And lastly, here’s the little surprise-
Sahil Lavingia + David Perell- webinar notes on how to grow a business by writing:
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