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Ladies and gentlemen, Paris Show!
Hello boys and girls ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show.
And this is one of my favorite types of episodes.
Of course I'm speaking to world class performers of all different disciplines all the time.
But one of my favorite people to ask for advice is Seth Goedan.
And this is a walk in talk which means Seth and I were walking and talking while we recorded this.
And I had many burning questions I wanted to ask.
He did not fail to deliver a lot of sage advice, tactical, practical wisdom.
And what Mark and I say, the guy is a gem. He delivers every time.
Who is Seth Goedan? You might ask.
Seth Goedan is the author of 21 International Best Sellers that have changed the way people think about work.
His books have been translated into 38 languages.
And Seth's books include tribes, purple cow, linchpin, the dip, and this is marketing.
Seth writes one of the most popular marketing blogs in the world.
8500, 8500 plus daily blog posts, just to put that into perspective.
And two of his TED talks are among the most popular of all time.
He is the founder of the Alt MBA, the social media pioneer, Squidoo, and Yoyo Dine,
one of the first internet companies. His latest book is The Song of Significance, a new manifesto for teams.
You can find him at Seth Goedan.com and you can find Seth's blog at Seth's. blog.
So you can go to both of those for a lot of resources.
And I'm going to just reiterate why we did this format the way we did it.
Because there's too much sitting in the world. It's not good for you. We weren't evolved to do it.
And I am trying to counteract the trend, the impulse, all the incentives to do podcasts in a fixed location.
This isn't good for my health. And it's certainly not good for your health to force you to consume it that way.
So I'm at least experimenting with being out and about doing something that we are designed to do.
And that is walk. So without further ado, please enjoy my wider engine conversation where I ask for a lot of help from Seth Goedan.
All right, here we are. So thank you again for taking the time.
And the subject, as opposed to relates to time, attention, all these good things,
which is how to make Tim Ferriss's incredibly long form writing shorter,
or how those two things fundamentally are different in terms of long and short.
I texted you asking if there's any secret sauce, any tips or tricks for writing short blog posts,
because I consider you the undisputed king of consistently good short blog posts.
And that kind of uncoorked all of this. So here we are.
And I suppose where I might want to start with our initial text thread.
And one of the points that at least as I read it seemed to resonate was treating blog posts more as a question than an answer or a provocation rather than a prescription.
Could you expand on that a little bit?
Because I think it relates also to the posts that you so kindly proofread where I may have misinterpreted how best to think about that.
I would be delighted to dive in. There are so many places to start. I'm going to start with this.
You are a gifted and generous writer, and you have been since I began tracking what you do.
And blogging is inherently a generous act because it's hard in 2024 to justify it as a financial endeavor.
You're doing it to illuminate.
And what does it mean to write in this form?
A short story attributed to Ernie's Hemingway. Probably not.
For sale, baby shoes never worn. Six words, it's perfect. In six words, your heart breaks.
That's not scalable, practical, repeatable.
You can't sign up to write six word short stories that break people's hearts every day.
Because that level of condensing, that level of being able to get at the heart.
None of the words had more than seven letters. None of the words have more than two syllables. That's magic, right?
We can't repeatedly do that.
So when we look at the form of a blog, we say, well, you know, Seth's blog posts have 100,000 words in them.
All I have to do is take my idea and make it shorter.
And when we try to do that, resistance kicks in. Press fields resistance.
And we say, both, I need to clarify this sentence and add a parenthetical to that sentence,
or else I will be misunderstood.
So this first sentence in this paragraph, which is rich and detailed and recursive and layered, goes like this.
Growth agents have a place in medicine, parentheses, some types of hypopipalyticarianism,
wasting syndrome, diseases, surgical care, etc.
And some sports effectively require them at higher levels.
But there are always trade-offs when you turn on the dials on complex hormonal cascades and feedback loops.
Everything in that is true. And someone could study that sentence in college for a month.
Because there's layers below layers below layers.
And unfortunately, the blog reader in general is not ready to consume that level of condensation.
And so we shouldn't even try.
Because that's not what a blog is good at.
What a blog is good at is what Scott McLeod taught us about comics.
Scott McLeod's book about comics, which is a must read.
I have read it or understanding comics is the one that I read it.
Yes, understanding comics. Thank you.
The key lesson is this.
Comics work because something happens between the panels.
Right.
In panel one, Superman sees a problem in panel two.
Superman is with the villain.
We don't see how Superman got from panel one to panel two.
That happened in our brain.
So the reason bad comics and bad graphic novels are bad is because the creator didn't understand that.
That our brain do the leaping.
They just decided to add a lot of pictures to a story that would be better in words.
So what a blog post does is it says, here's a sketch over here.
And now I'm over there.
You figure out how I got from here to there.
And by you figuring it out, the reader, you will grow.
You will explore.
You will be a voice in this dialogue.
It is not just me talking.
So when you ask me to review your writing, some people are tempted to proofread.
And they don't really mean proofread.
They mean copy edit.
And copy editing means fix the errors.
And what I'm trying to do when I'm editing a friend's work is say,
are they even asking the right question?
Because they can fix their own errors.
They don't need my help to do that.
And so here, what I'm trying to say is, what is this post for?
And what it's for, I think, is to help someone who's not paying attention to realize
that there are seven things they might want to think about.
And seven is a lot.
So what I pitched back to is, this is actually seven blog posts in a series.
And what the first one says is, you know, there's some things you're not thinking about
that you might want to think about.
And the idea, if I just say to somebody,
biceps or temporary baseball helmet sizes are forever, they visualize that immediately.
And then they're like, hmm, what?
And then they want to think about what you meant by that.
It's a high coup.
It's a puzzle.
It's a shadow.
Where's the light and what is being reflected?
So now you've gotten permission to tell me in a paragraph or two what you meant.
And then I can, you get to say, ta ta ta na na na.
And I say, ta ta ta.
And that is the form.
That is what blogs are good at.
But, and I'm going to end my rant now, that the downside is you will be misunderstood.
And that is why there are no comments on my blog because people who misunderstood a post
would then respond by making me feel bad.
So I would overwrite and overwrite so they wouldn't do that anymore.
And then it wasn't a blog anymore, so I had to stop.
And basically what I'm saying is if you don't get it, ask a friend.
And if they don't get it either come back tomorrow and we can discuss a new thing.
And I think the king of this is actually the magic of XKCD, which is a blog in graphic form.
Yes, outstanding.
I agree on that.
And as you're talking, see things come to mind for me.
And maybe as a backdrop, the impetus for a lot of this, for me at least, is number one,
to get back into writing and to experiment with a new form, a new style, an approach to writing.
And number two is to explore ideas, to explore ideas in various ways, to clarify my own thinking.
Which ended up happening in this short piece, the no biological free lunch piece that you proofread.
Yeah, I suppose my question, not copy edited, which is certainly a very different thing.
In this particular case, if you were writing this, would you be inclined to make it a series,
or would you make each of these a standalone piece?
In other words, of those seven bullets, as you're thinking through, not just the word count, right?
This is my mistake, right?
Basically said, okay, instead of writing a 5,000 word blog post, I'm going to make it less than 1,000,
I'm going to try to still somehow get all of the concepts into this shorter form.
It seems like there's a conceptual constraint that makes things powerful.
But would you take those seven, make them into an interrelated series?
Would you make them all kind of independent after you introduce them in this one piece?
How would you think about divvying this up conceptually for yourself?
And I should also just add one more thing, which is, yeah, fundamental to all of these observations and questions,
and goals, and dreams of mine, is how do I make this sustainable for me?
Which is part of the feedback you gave in the comments on the draft of this blog post,
was a paraphrasing.
But if you try to just make the 5,000 word thing, 1,000 words, it's going to be exhausting for you,
and most likely also exhausting for your readers, which I agree with.
Is it about genre?
So my blog is a long-running series. It has been a series of 8,500 daily posts.
So if I was starting today, I have to figure out what is the genre of my work.
If you think about David Letterman's TV show, he needed to have a series called Stupid Petrics,
because the show wasn't stupid petrics, but there was a regular recurring stupid pet trick.
The show was a series of David Letterman shows.
So if you are a genre, as you re-enter blogging, there is a post from Tim on a regular basis,
and all of them are about the things we put into our body and performance, then you're fine.
If that's not the case, then the question is, when the reader shows up,
do you need to do a lot of throat clearing to get them back on track for what you are writing about today?
And so, since you're starting with largely a blank slate, I said,
well, if the first 7 of these are in this series, then you only have to clear your throat once on the 8th day,
and say, okay, now we're talking about this, and you could do one of those, or six of those, or 12 of those.
But people do better if they understand that they're going to see Dune not read the Power Broker.
Those are different genres, and you need to give them a hint as to what they're going to get.
I like the idea of recognizing that my tendency is to have should have be generous with myself.
Be comprehensive. It's going to say over complicate, but let's be nice.
Try to be comprehensive. I would rather, as we talked about earlier, I'm walking by tennis courts right now,
and I remember taking a tennis lesson, and I kept hitting the ball into the net.
And the coach said to me, he's like, you can do anything. Now, next step, you can hit the ball straight up in the air,
you can hit a home run. The one thing you cannot do is hit it into the net.
And I was like, okay, I got it. And I kind of feel like I need to give myself some marching orders like that for writing to counterbalance some of my tendencies.
So I like the idea of writing self-sustaining, independent pieces to restrict myself from the desire to say,
you know what, I'm not going to overwrite this, but it's going to be part one and a twelve parts here, which is maybe a workaround for tricking myself.
I'm going to interrupt you for a little bit. Please do.
You are extraordinarily skilled at not over complicating your writing or your narrow tips. That's how you got this far,
that there's very little that you have published where you were the primary researcher and the breakthrough creator of the original science.
What you've done is helped people simplify, understand. What's happening here is resistance.
You are adding parentheticals to protect yourself.
100%.
So what I'm pushing you to do is to come up with boundaries so that you can say, I did a good job and ship the work.
Now that could involve having very, like the rules of Haiku, very significant rules where you must have a tagline, a come online that's less than 18 words.
And you're allowed to have two footnote links, but the rest of it has to be a narrative that you would say to somebody on the telephone.
And instead of typing them, you are just recording each one and letting someone on your team type them.
If that would be the model, you would have to let go of it because you only have a five minute phone call.
You're going to say it as clearly as you can. You can add two links when you're done. And it's done. You've got to ship it.
But that's not letting the reader down because you've announced to them that that's what this is.
The genre matters.
I asked you one question related to how you know when you're done.
And I'd love for you to answer that again because I suspect I'll have some followed questions.
And either before or after that, I would love to know for yourself what type of rules you have imposed or constraints slash boundaries when you have had your better streaks of writing.
Let's just say.
I will do the first part first because it's easier. You asked, how do you decide or know when a post is done? And I texted back.
I don't. That's the point. And then I wrote, imagine how hard it would be to have a conversation or even a text threat.
If we had to think through whether our turn to talk was over before we stop talking.
Right. So my model, my ritual is I write blog posts in advance and then the night before I review them, I rewrite them, I delete them.
So if I get the stomach flu, there's still going to be a blog post tomorrow.
And when I rewrite a blog post, the rule is you wait, get points if you make it shorter.
You don't get points if you make it longer.
And if I can't boil it down more than it already is.
And it's not deliberately deceptive. It's done because the purpose is tell people something they already sort of know in a way that they will do.
In a way that they would be grateful for the chance to forward to other people.
Do you say that one more time, Seth? That seems important.
If I can show up with something in your bones, you know to be true or interesting or worth thinking about.
But I can say it in a way that would benefit you if you could share it with your friends and colleagues.
That's a great blog post.
Benefit you in what possible senses?
I will give you a trivial one first, which is more than once I have blogged about how stupid it is that there's a pull down menu when you're checking out of a shop.
And there's all 50 states listed.
That isn't helping anybody.
We have AI that can speak English. It knows how to turn NY into New York.
And we do this because 40 years ago, or whenever the web was young, 25 years ago,
it was a hack that made life slightly easier for certain programmers.
And it's just been sticking around ever since.
There are people like me at really vexins.
And if I say this and you are one of those vexing people,
now you can forward it to your webmaster and say,
see, see, I said we shouldn't do this.
And so I just gave you a useful thing to share.
That's trivial, but that's sort of the idea.
The thing is that if you have a brother or son or colleague or daughter or sister
who would benefit from the insight that you think I'm onto,
you're going to afford it to them.
And you're going to have a connection with them because I opened the door and made it possible for you to do it.
Every once in a while, I do post something about Claude AI that you didn't know about.
And you go, oh great, I use Claude. Thank you very much.
But that's not really the service my blog offered.
The service my blog offers is not, I'm breaking news.
It's I am trying to illuminate things that already resonate with people.
Not to add too many parentheticals to this conversation, but what is Claude AI?
Claude.ai.
I can't believe I know something you don't know.
Claude.ai is significantly better than chat GPT at certain functions.
And I think part of it is because it doesn't read the web, or it says it doesn't read the web,
so it's not easily distracted.
But I'm launching a software project in six weeks.
And the business plan took more than a year and a whole bunch of contributors.
It's 40 pages long.
And I uploaded the business plan to Claude.
And I said, please review this.
Highlight contradictions, paradoxes, and obvious errors.
And in less than 10 seconds, it wrote me a page and a half MBA quality memo that nailed it.
It just nailed it, nailed it, nailed it.
And I was like, okay, you got me.
That's great.
That's great.
So I use Claude.ai every day to read other people's writing, my writing, critique it, give me insight.
You could send your post to Claude and it might not have the insight I had, but it would definitely have something to say.
Incredible.
All right. And parentheses, what are some other elements or practices or constraints or film the blank that have helped you with consistency in terms of blog writing?
Because I have attempted and failed a number of times to build up momentum writing shorter posts.
And I think a lot of what we've already discussed will help. Is there anything else that you would add to the, it helped my consistency streak categories?
Well, I would say two things.
First, I think you're talking about consistency in terms of showing up at the ballpark every day.
Cadence.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So I'll do that one second.
The first one, I have never met Larry David, but I'm guessing that there are some days that Larry David is actually a nice thoughtful person.
And there is a character named Larry David as well.
So the person who writes my blog is a character named Seth Godin.
And I am the only person who has ever written my blog. I'm the only person who ever will write my blog.
But when I am doing it, I am playing the character named Seth Godin.
So if it doesn't sound like me, if it's just me authentically being tired or annoyed, I don't publish those.
Because that's not what my character would do.
This is not me exposing some mystical, mythical Seth Godin to the world.
It's me portraying the character Seth Godin because it's a service.
And then the second thing is streaks are usually used against us by software.
And if they make you feel bad, it's not a hopeful thing.
But I write blog posts every single day, whether I use them or not.
And I learned that from Isaac Asimov when I worked with him all those years ago.
If you know that tomorrow morning you have to start typing tonight when you go to sleep or today when you're walking around, you will be noticing things so that you have something to type.
And you know, I have enough in reserve that I don't have to do it every day.
But I do it every day because I eat lunch every day and because I take a shower every day.
So you follow ups. So the first is related to the playing the character of Seth Godin.
It sounds like if I heard you correctly, you're saying you're writing should reflect how you feel in the world at the time that you're writing.
Am I hearing that correctly?
No, it's the opposite of that.
It's the opposite.
There's no should here, first of all.
If someone wants to write a blog that's just the unvarnished version of them in the moment, go for it.
I don't care. I'm not a blog, please.
What I'm saying is I can read a blog post I wrote 14 years ago.
And I might not write the same one today, but it rhymes with the one I would write today.
Because there's a voice that this character has that I am very comfortable with.
I did the first thing that all writers do when I got Chachi PT, which is I asked her to write like me.
And I was pleased to discover it was a parody of me.
And being able to be parodied is a really good sign.
And that's what it is to have this voice is to say I could exaggerate it in six different directions and people could tell I would be parodying it.
But like, you know, the peanuts comic strip, Charles Schultz did it every single day and it's very hard to tell which decade a peanut strip is from.
Totally.
And that's that's what I'm after.
So just to unpack that a little bit more, I know we've talked before or I should say I've asked and listened to you discuss how the authenticity fetishizing that goes on is often not always but often very misplaced and just kind of over values this over sharing.
What are the things that make it?
Set the character set the character.
Is it 80% voice that you've developed such that Chachi PT can imitate you and parody you?
What are the other ingredients that make set the character who writes on set's blog?
You know, I've not ever pushed myself to name them because seeing is forgetting the name of what one sees.
But yeah, I guess I'd highlight a couple things the first one is I try to begin from a place of the benefit of the doubt of there probably aren't bad people there's just situations that cause people to do things that are troubling and a level of optimism to go with it.
I try to reduce ideas to their essence without becoming hyperbolic because the voices of social media amped up the hyperbolic part that's not a simplification that's an exaggeration right I tried to eliminate
parentheticals unless I really have no choice so I will avoid saying something like all tall people are very brave because that's ridiculous but I will not write tall people are brave parentheses except for this person this person this person in this person because now it's not worth reading right so there is an assertion at the beginning that creates attention and then a release
of that tension that lands an idea so the shortest blog post ever wrote which I'm really proud of is first line is you don't need more time so that's an assertion it's controversial people who feel overwhelmed want to challenge it and then delivery is you just need to decide so that flips it upside down takes the blame off the system
and the people who are making you busy and puts it right back on you giving you agency and authority and responsibility to simply decide and then get back to what needs to get done and so in just a few words that's an example of a short
Seth go to blog post and a longer one is one where I will try to teach somebody details about something they didn't know but frame it in a way that they're comfortable with because that's how they might have framed it as well
let me ask a quick question maybe that I've cut back on my caffeine to significantly but you don't need more time you just need to decide what are people deciding well folks who say I'm going to figure out which college I want to apply to soon I just need to do more research I just need to think about I got it right close the open lips get it done make it exactly
that makes a lot of sense just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by LinkedIn jobs when you're hiring for your small business just like mine you obviously want to find quality professionals that are right for the role
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the other bookmarks follow up I had and I'm sure I've asked you this I apologize but I can't remember the answer if we have discussed it what are some other things you picked up from Isaac as I'm off me this guy's a demigod
and he's a lot of people we consider him one what are other things you absorb or observed with Isaac Isaac was in his 70s I was 24 and a half maybe 25 it was one of my first projects it was one of his last ones and we would hang out at his apartment near Lincoln Center and I got to spend time with his wife the thing about Isaac as a mob is the character of Isaac as a mob was a note all
Ego maniac for the time today he would be seen as humble but he published 400 books he invented the modern conception of a robot he wrote seminal work on an enormous number of topics a definitive book about the Bible I mean all over the place but in
person he was humble and funny and as a project partner he was completely hands up and he was a lot of people who were in the same place as the
book about the Bible I mean all over the place but in person he was humble and funny and as a project partner he was completely hands off he spent time with me to make sure I understood the boundaries of what an
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and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and I was going to be a lot of people and
and we sold the rights to Kodak and Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs up and advertised it on the Olympics like the full thing it was fascinating.
Wow. Where were you in your career that that opportunity presented itself where you found that opportunity? What it led up to that? Outside of what you just described.
So before I did that I had only one real job and my job was at Spinnaker Software we invented educational computer games and I built the first brand of illustrated computer adventure games.
I worked with Arthur C. Clark and Ray Bradbury and Michael Criton. I got rights to games. I worked with Byron Price. He had a team of programmers and I had a team of programmers.
We did the Wizard of Oz and I loved it. I could still be doing it to this day but the world changed and I was out on my own after a couple years as a book packageer.
But Peter and I knew each other and the momentum from the interactive game thing led me to Isaac's editor and no one had ever asked for the rights.
The rights were inexpensive and then once I had the rights I found Kodak and Kodak was able to put up the money so we could build this thing and own part of the back end.
So if I zoom out I have a macro level question for you which has been on my mind a lot if you don't mind which is a question of how you choose next chapters or projects because I'm coming up on the 10th anniversary of the podcast next April.
So in a few months and figured that would be a good time is any to pause and reflect on things and think about where I want to go.
Love doing the podcast don't plan on stopping it but there are a lot of trends driving it towards effectively turning podcasts into fixed location television shows and I don't have much desire to do that.
I don't want to be contrary and just for the sake of in contrarian that's its own trap or set of traps but I know you've been very deliberate for instance in choosing not to start a dozen startups and in favor of choosing to spend your time on other things how do you choose or think about kind of next chapters or how what advice might you give me as I contemplate what's next type of question.
You know I think it's very kind of you to say I'm very good at it I don't think I'm good at it but because I'm sort of in public and I do it in a certain way it's noted you know I did five years of a Kimbo was in the top 1% of all podcasts and then I just stopped and I stopped not because I didn't love it I did love it I stopped because if I kept doing it there's something else I wouldn't do instead.
And creating a vacuum is required so that I will do the hard work of filling the vacuum but if I just keep doing the thing then there is no vacuum and sometimes the technology changes that's why spinnaker went away that's why you couldn't keep making vcr games it's why my head start in the CD rom business was worthless because CD rom is one away I liked.
In every time I did this being a pioneer in a new media space because that's for me the fun is spot and then when the technology changes I got to move on but podcast technologies never going to change I mean you're noting there's a change in the production format and that is a change so in my case what I'm trying to do is not maximize my income per hour spent nor am I trying to maximize the size of my audience.
I'm trying to maximize is are the people I'm serving.
Glad that I did that I showed up to solve an interesting problem and to as I build the stack of things on the bookshelf behind me can I point to them and say that was interesting in general said I'm glad I did it.
And you know that's part of limited attention span theater so it's not for everybody but my whole point of view is that life is projects it is not a job.
And when you stop the podcast and create that vacuum did you already have something.
And a warming up in the batting cage that.
Was pending that you need to create that vacuum for did you create the vacuum and wait for something to get pulled it not to strain the metaphor but you can't.
So you're not straining it if there is something pending it's not a vacuum there have been times when something so good came along I did it and then had to remove things so I could do it you know when a few of us started to do which was one of the first social networks I had a completely organized my life because we built the 40th biggest
website in the US was only eight employees so we were busy this is not what I'm talking about I am talking about an actual uncomfortable vacuum where you feel like you're never going to work again where nothing can possibly be worth what you gave up.
And that's hard to do.
Yeah, it is hard to do just to put a put a microscope on that I have as means of backstory done this for periods of time and have found it deeply deeply uncomfortable sometimes fruitful oftentimes not terribly fruitful in part I think because when I create that vacuum I don't know if the best way to embrace the vacuum is to be as good to stare at the wall and watch paint dry or to do something else and my mind just kind of folds in on itself.
You create the vacuum and then what are the next few weeks look like in terms of how you spend your time day to day or week to week.
I think a fundamental difference between you and me there are so many of them but one of them as I am here talking to what the world tango champion former world record holder long time ago yes is the only thing I have a world record in is being part of the largest co author book signing in history in which means
in which me and 400 other people all signed our book at the same time because I am not a high performer I am interesting and being interesting is really important to me but I am not holding myself to the standard you hold yourself in so many ways and so I could imagine that the thing that gives me comfort might not make you happy.
Right for sure I agree with all of that and how does that difference translate to what you would do in the weeks following creating the vacuum after say stopping the podcast because I guess you have activities that you're still carrying forward it's not like you're completely idle your writing so yeah presumably if someone looked at me from the outside I think that they would see that my days aren't that different I am not shipping public work because I don't know if I'm going to be able to do that.
I'm not going to be able to do that because I don't ship junk but I am internally creating lots of mediocre work and basically creating straw people and saying what would this be like and then what would that be like and here's this thing and I sat with my 60 or 80 watt laser cutter and I cut this thing out what do I think of that and that invention cycle is joyful but I can't do it forever because I can't do it forever because I can't do it forever.
I'm not going to be able to do it forever because I also need the satisfaction of shipping the work and not giving into resistance so what I'm doing when I was a book packageer we sold 120 books in 10 years a book a month but I had more than 800 books on my hard drive ready to go not finished but two page five page proposals because the only way to have a finished proposal for me is to have an unfinished one that you didn't ship.
What is it and this is probably a fundamental question I should have asked earlier but what do you get from writing and having written this consistently as you have and do what is the pay off like why do that.
The biggest pay off is simple not in terms of equity stock value but in terms of the noise in my head the biggest benefit is I will be writing tomorrow because it's Friday not because I've written the perfect blog post that every single day something gets published by me because I decided that 24 years ago not because I have.
I have reconsidered each day whether this one is good enough and even if no one read my blog I would still do it and I'm very fortunate that people give me the benefit of the doubt knowing that I am not guaranteeing this is the best thing I ever wrote and there's still willing to look at so that's lovely in terms of my professional practice again back to genre having a
sinecure a platform where for a long time view type blog into Google I was the first match because I just showed up more than just about anybody there's a lot of value to saying this is my lane and you can count on me in this lane and for someone who is this parapetetic as I in their creative pursuits having one of those turned out to be a really useful thing you mentioned a word that I don't recognize but I love the sound of
sinecure what is that yeah it's a safe haven a niche a place to hide a fortress what a great word yeah all right that will know to use sinecure
well I don't take up a ton of time here so this is all incredibly incredibly helpful best part of my day and I know that you're not publishing this as written but I just want to say as for the people who were wondering what's in this magical thing you wrote it includes the line
like Patagonian toothfish has become Chilean sea bass on fashionable menus worldwide right there that's gold Jerry that's his goal and so you need to liberate these things and explain to people what that I know what you're talking about but the fact is that entire species are becoming extinct because somebody figured out a clever way to market an animal that we eat
there's a lot to be said about that one little riff and you have 40 of them in one post thanks man yeah the no biological three lines it's one of those things that I've said so many times to friends and conversation
I was falling like you know what if not for any other reason that I am tired of repeating this gitties burger dress speech to every wayward friend who calls me up about to consume really
I have some of those if you go to set stop log and type advice for authors there are two posts with the same title because that's that I wasn't being clear that I wrote a year and a half apart and they have each
like a dozen or 15 bullet points and now I have a SIG and super human that I can call up if when someone sends me a note a friend or whatever I say I've already thought about this question here you go
I love it. Hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that
provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday easy to sign up easy to cancel it is basically a
half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I found or discovered or have started exploring over that week kind of like my diary of cool things it often includes articles and reading books and reading albums perhaps gadgets gizmos all sorts of tech tricks and
things on they get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you so if that sounds fun again it's very short a
little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about if you'd like to try it out just go to Tim. Blog slash Friday type that into your browser Tim. Blog slash Friday drop in your
email and you'll get the very next one thanks for listening this episode is brought to you by eight sleep temperatures one of the main causes of poor sleep and seat is my personal
nemesis of suffered decades tossing and turning throwing blankets off pulling the back on putting one leg on top and repeating all that ad nauseam but now I am falling sleep in record time why because I'm using a
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