Being a Great Blogger

Or "How to have novel insights" + a little on writing.

This was written before I discovered Paul Graham’s essay on the best essay. I would recommend reading that and maybe using this as a complement.

I tried using a slightly different style for this post. I’ve been experimenting with exploring new ideas by asking questions and following them to interesting answers instead of just re-formulating what I know. I would love feedback on what you like and dislike about it!

Here my question was “What makes a great blog writer,” and I spent a lot of time reading Andy Matuschak and Paul Graham’s writings on this subject. This is an attempt to condense all of these ideas together into a manifesto for myself.

Assume that anything brilliant is derivative and anything stupid is original.

Write things that people want to read

Pretty clearly, the only way to be successful is to write what people want to read. There are two steps here, finding something that people want to read and writing about it.

So what do people want to read?

Taylor Swift, fashion, and self-help are popular but that’s not the kind of content I want to be reading or writing. I’m in love with the currency of ideas. I want to write about cool ideas, and preferably as novel as they can get. Thankfully there’s a (arguably too small) market for that as well.

How do you get new (or niche) ideas? I don’t have a perfect solution, but I can share some things I’ve been experimenting with.

Something important to realize is that there’s no easy shortcut. New ideas are contrarian. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be new. This means that you need to be willing to question everything relentlessly and to keep breaking your model of the world. You don’t just wake up and decide to think of contrarian ideas. If you don’t already have the positive momentum going, you’ll need to put in the effort to turn yourself into the right kind of person.

If there’s one thing you need, it’s curiosity. Tugging at open threads is the definition of curiosity, and the most curious people I know can’t help but do it.

New question then, how do you become curious? Don’t fall into the fatalist thinking that you can never regain the curiosity that tends to get driven out as you grow up. I went through several years (my “dark age”) where I really wasn’t that curious, and I’ve been able to make a comeback in recent months.

I actually don’t think it’s that hard. Spend some time intentionally bringing some rabbit holes that’ll expand your model of the world¹ closer to you, and you’ll find yourself falling down new ones without even trying.²

It helps to be exposed to curious people as much as possible, whether through your friends or even just the content you consume. If you let them, they’ll usually pull you along with them. (If you’re looking for some cool friends, reach out to me through Substack DMs or the other ways on my about and I can introduce you to a fantastic online community of the most curious people I’ve ever met.)

It also helps to read widely. When you’re reading non-fiction, make sure to actually think critically and read rebuttals of everything (in fact, I would love to write a collaborative rebuttal of a popular book if there’s any you have in mind). If you enjoy fiction, definitely don’t fall into the trap of only reading “productive” things. The best fiction authors are top-tier original thinkers and some of the most curious people in the world. For sci-fi and fantasy especially, going to first principles and tugging on an interesting thread is literally the job description.

I also find that reading widely helps you build mental models organically. Mental model has become an annoying buzzword in self-help recently, but I think what you want is to acquire frameworks of thinking that make broken models of the world more obvious.

In the town near our house there's a shop with a sign warning that the door is hard to close. The sign has been there for several years. To the people in the shop it must seem like this mysterious natural phenomenon that the door sticks, and all they can do is put up a sign warning customers about it. But any carpenter looking at this situation would think "why don't you just plane off the part that sticks?"

Once you're good at programming, all the missing software in the world starts to become as obvious as a sticking door to a carpenter.
- Paul Graham

Replace programming with anything else, and that’s the fundamental idea. Insights from one domain often haven’t transferred to another, and that leaves lots of potential for a prepared and lucky mind.

The key issue is forgetting. For this to work optimally, you want your brain to stay primed with the knowledge you’ve come across. There’s nothing I can recommend more than spaced repetition for this. Skim through this essay for more on that. Over 20 years, it only takes about 5 minutes to remember an atomic unit of information using spaced repetition!

Note-taking is also good practice, but for novel insights, you specifically want to be using some style similar to evergreen notes. I highly urge you to check out those two links, but in short, taking evergreen notes helps you develop a library of your ideas. This requires getting over the notion that you should only take notes on what you consume. Take notes on yourself!

Everything counts. From fleeting insights to random thoughts to interesting ideas. Writing helps crystallize your thoughts, and there’s something about dealing with your thoughts physically and for a sustained period of time that helps you pull on those threads better and find connections that you wouldn’t have found otherwise.

As you do this, I also think you directly train your brain to notice good ideas when they appear and to write them down instantly, which is what we wanted in the first place. Again, everything counts. Your ideas won’t be good at the beginning, and that’s part of the process. See more on ideal note-taking in this footnote.³

Backtracking all the way back to the beginning, the only thing left once you have an idea about something people want to read is to write it.

I’m not a very good writer, so I don’t have much to say here. I can only recommend Julian Shapiro’s excellent guide to non-fiction writing. Spend about an hour or so going through that in-depth, and modify the advice to create a system for yourself.

1. Things like political theory, how your computer works, how AI works, philosophy, etc. Even why the sky is blue is a nice place to start.

2. That becomes a problem itself that I’m still trying to figure out how to handle.

3. Ideally (after a certain point) you’re constantly pushing the frontiers of your knowledge on various topics, and ideas are constantly linking together. Often while writing one note, you’ll notice other holes in the map, and start to fill those in. Eventually, you create something like a rough map of your brain.