create this game

Original link: https://weichen.blog/on-creating/

As a weekly newsletter writer, there’s one thing I’ve always been ashamed of: I don’t read other newsletters very much.

More precisely, I don’t use newsletter as my primary source of information. There are two simple reasons: one, I want to have a deeper understanding and thinking about knowledge, and reading books is the best way; Zhou told me what was more important. ¹

Speaking of “creators” people seem to have an expectation: they should update regularly. I have seen readers explain why they subscribe before, and there is a rationale for “updating and stabilizing”. I’ve always been proud of my weekly update, but I’ve come to think about it: what’s the point of a weekly update?

two #

A few days ago, I saw a tool that helps you write tweets. Its advertisement is:

WRITE BETTER HOOKS IN SECONDS

Make Your Tweets Go Viral

Get more impressions, grow a better network and earn more money. It’s that simple.

(ChatGPT’s translation: Create a good introduction in an instant, and let the tweet spread like a virus. The attention surges, the network is wider, and the money is rolling. It’s simple.)

To be honest, it made me very uncomfortable.

Creators don’t care what the audience really gains. They use psychological mechanisms to hook people and keep pushing you new content so that you can’t get rid of it.

I was very proud to tell my friends before that I have accumulated some content in the past two years, and it has become very easy to update every week.

But I realized later that a lot of the time I’m not proud of the quality of the content.

In the nearly 90 issues I wrote in the past, there are only a few articles that I often think of, and even fewer articles that I go back to read and still feel “Well, the writing is not bad.”

An example is that among the several articles I posted on Minority, the Oura Ring article has the highest reading volume, but the half-life is the shortest:

three #

Keeping up to date while maintaining high quality is hard work, even for a team.

Someone did a data analysis and drew the ratings of each season of well-known comedy dramas (from Reddit ):

Morgan Housel commented :

What’s interesting about this is that TV series have to be produced according to a schedule: each season has to have so many episodes, and the length has to be the same.

Musicians, authors, comedians don’t have to. They can take a few years off and come back when they’re ready.

Ryan Holiday reminds creators at Perennial Seller that great work travels through time, and takes time. “Someone said to me, ‘Hey, this project is a business card for me.’ I thought to myself, I know your logic, but who wants a business card with an expiration date on it?” ²

Art cannot be rushed, it must be allowed to develop naturally. ³

four #

Good works come from deep experience, not just talking on paper.

James Clear said of his bestseller Atomic Habits , “What I love most about this book is that in order to write it, I had to live it.” ⁴

I’m a bit worried about bloggers or other content creators becoming academia in the new ivory tower: “we have ideas, so we share them”, but no one puts ideas into practice, and no one sees how hard it is to practice .

Nat Eliason said he does not work as a full-time writer : “The most interesting authors to me are those who are out there doing their own thing, and then use what they do to influence their writing.”

five #

I’m not belittling any behavior, I’m just trying to remind you of what you really want.

Clarify the ultimate purpose. From the outside, an artist’s goal is to create great work, and an athlete’s goal is to win a medal. But looking at the motives behind them, it seems that they are all related to existence itself.

When Alex Honnold finished his nine-year preparation for solo climbing El Capitan, he still didn’t forget his routine that afternoon: “Just because I achieved my dream doesn’t mean I gave up my best self. I want to be a and motivated people.”

Yo-Yo Ma often mentioned the words of cellist Pablo Casals: “I am a person first, the music festival second, and the cellist third.”

Be wary of being defined by the outside world. What we do every day defines us in turn.

Bob Dylan was best known for acoustic (acoustic) folk, but one day he showed up at the Newport Folk Festival with an electronic band. Someone in the audience shouted, “How dare you betray us!”

He later sang in She Belongs to Me :

She’s got everything she needs

She’s an artist, she don’t look back (she’s an artist, she don’t look back)

The outside world is not just the people around you, but also your past.

Adjust gameplay. At different stages, different ways of playing are required.

To become rich, you need to look for risks, and to stay rich, you need to avoid risks; in the workplace, hard power can get you in, but soft power can make you go further.

A friend told me, “Learning an instrument takes a long time of pain before you can appreciate its beauty, at least five years.” It doesn’t take so long to develop the habit of writing, but it also requires repetition. This is why I encourage friends who are just starting to create, to keep updating.

But until when? I can only answer myself. “Make sure to publish regularly, and then pursue quality improvement.” I am still a beginner in writing, but maybe now is the time for me to adjust my strategy.

Six #

I really like what Li Qi, the founder of Zhubai, said in “Talking about newsletter “: “I believe that products that can better meet the above needs and solve the above problems will be born in the future, but it will definitely not look like the current newsletter.”

In the past, I would think: Since you didn’t even think about it, why did you go to such lengths to make this product?

Later, I began to understand: I don’t know until I really do it. When conditions change, whether it is the external environment or yourself, just follow your heart and change the direction .

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When writing this article, I thought of two articles when I first started writing. Although the writing is not very good, the thinking model in it is worth reviewing:

• ends and means
• play your own game

This article is transferred from: https://weichen.blog/on-creating/
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