Writing still matters
A couple weeks ago, Alex Danco announced he was joining a16z as their Editor At Large. He wrote a great post about it and why good writing still matters.
I liked a few lines in particular.
Winning, for bloggers, means writing the reference take on a good topic...most of the audience of any successful post does not actually read it. They are told it by someone who did read it.
What a great observation. It applies to almost any written work. When something is good enough that your readers do the marketing and distribution for you, that’s winning.
Think of history’s greatest authors and written works—the Bible, Shakespeare’s plays, Aristotle, etc. Have you actually read these works? I’ve read only a small fraction. Yet I know them and see them everywhere.
Today, there’s an amazing idea-sharing format that’s swallowed a lot of the “smart people discourse” on the internet, which is podcasting…they are not enough on their own.
When you read an important idea and put in the work to understand it, you gain the subconscious competence and legitimacy to talk about it: you are transformed into someone with more power.
These two quotes are a good reminder-to-self. I am full participant/consumer of the current “smart people discourse” format. But most people on podcasts talk about things they read or learned by experience. Reading is active, listening is passive. Reading is harder than listening, but it’s a higher cognitive leverage activity. If it feels too easy, it probably is.