I'm Going to Steal Something for Christmas
No, I’m not a grinch. Although I am green with envy. That’s because I discovered an amazingly talented writer/blogger last week and have been consuming his work like me at a candy store after a particularly green Christmas. I’ll let you sort out what that analogy means.
His name is David Perell and I highly recommend you check out some of his essays.
But why am I talking about another writer? Because I’m going to steal one of his ideas this week.
Of course, I won’t steal steal his work. I’m highly against that and have it happen to my own work more often than not. And that’s not even accounting for the vast expanse of the internet I’m unaware of.
But as one of my favorite quotes goes,
“There’s nothing new under the sun.”
In a world with billions of blog posts, the chance you make anything truly unique is remarkably slim. That’s why many successful bloggers include little tidbits of their personal lives in between their overarching points.
There’s only one you.
Even if the story has happened to other people before, it didn’t happen to anyone else the way it happened to you. It’s your story the way you experienced it. If you can share it in a succinct and relevant way in your essays, it makes your essay more unique, too.
The same goes for movies, lectures, business pitches, and almost any other form of communication.
People care about stories—if they are short and relevant and useful.
I also believe in another adage, one that I coined myself but probably existed in a multitude of areas long before.
“Learn from the best, forget the rest.”
That’s why in many of my endeavors with new subjects and projects over the years, I follow a similar approach:
I make a list of who is the most successful in that subject
I collect a giant list of what they did well
Then I analyse how they did it
Firstly, I try to count how many aspects are similar. I also try to look for the not-so-obvious. The subterranean structure of the pretty surface we see up above.
The rules of 3 in humor. The time-saving tools of professionals. The real reasons things go viral on any platform or topic.
The more the better.
It leaves the unknown.
I know I miss out on many of them, and it certainly has the giant result of me missing out on the statistically far larger number of non-sucessful cases.
This latter point is the deadly sin of survivorship bias, where we tend to focus on the evidence in front of us, and not the unknown unknowns, to pseudo-quote an infamous politician.
Probably the most memorable example of this is when engineers in WWII were about to add a lot of extra armor on airplanes coming back from battles. They identified certain patterns where bullet holes were found in all of the planes that returned.
The US military finished their studies and recommended plating up all of the highlighted areas in this picture:
Then a statistician named Abraham Wald pointed out something—that in hindsight— should’ve been glaringly obvious.
These were the planes that survived.
As in, these planes survived because those bullets holes weren’t enough to bring the planes down.
It was the absent spots, the untouched armor on the planes that returned which would’ve taken down the non-surviving planes. They had a collection of planes that didn’t crash, and a collection of bullet holes that didn’t make them crash.
Abraham looked beneath the surface and flipped it around. They plated up the absent-bullet-hole areas.
I try to keep this in mind whenever learning. What’s beneath the surface, what’s the opposite of the information I’m finding and how can I find it.
That’s how I like to learn, as much as possible.
It’s no different for writing.
There’s one thing I don’t do very often, and I’m going to change that up now.
I read and listen to an insane amount of short-form content every day
I jot down hundreds to thousands of ideas to learn/write about every year
I end up writing about a very tiny percentage of them
From time to time, I then analyse the articles I have written, to see how I can improve, how they can get more views, and what works/didn’t work
I’ve been survivor biasing myself.
A) There is the obvious problem of a feedback loop of 1.
What I might think was a bad paragraph, joke, line, whatever, might not be what everyone else thinks. To help solve that, I’ve been engaging with other writers in recent months, talking about our pain points and solutions and all the joyful complexities of writing online.
B) I’ve been leaving a vast swath of amazingly interesting information in the place it matters least to anyone else—somewhere in the deep archival cockles of my brain.
That’s what I’d like to solve next.
It’s always great to learn more.
And all that learning certainly adds value to my writing; to come up with far-stretched analogies and similarities across a wide variety of subjects. Someone transformed this concept into a phrase called “idea sex.”
I enjoyed that idea. I thought it was useful. So, I wrote about it and credited the creator.
I wouldn’t call that stealing, but it’s along the same lines of what I’m about to do.
For David Parell, I’m going to “steal” his idea of sharing his most interesting discoveries from the past year.
He titled it, simply, “Coolest Things I Learned in 2020”
He didn’t even put the word “the” for some reason.
But this gentleman, from what I can tell, appears to be on more or less the same mission as I am. He writes for a living on a wide variety of subjects. He explores topics, curates knowledge, and then chooses a few small aspects of those to deep dive on and executes it in a far better way than I currently do into beautifully crafted essays.
What he doesn’t write about, he stores, and then curates it, and then shares the most interesting things he discovers in his daily life.
He flips the script.
He found another way to extract value for other people out of the 90% of his free time—the time where he spends learning rather than writing.
So, I’m currently constructing a similar styled list of the coolest/most interesting things I have learned this year. And it’s going to take me a while to do it, because I have an insane amount of notes jotted down.
But I hope in the end it will be enjoyable for other people. (Hint: That’s you.) To leverage the thousands of hours I spend all year learning about topics across a wide spectrum of ADHD rattled interests.
I won’t copy his title or his learnings or his words.
But I will take his conceptual idea and apply it to my own work—and credit him back to hopefully bring a few more readers to his interesting words.
And if that idea sounds like a good idea to you, you reader you, I’ll try to include a weekly wrap up of the top things I learned too.
Because as they say in Mandarin Chinese every lunar new year, 恭禧你 (Gong Xi Ni), which translates to, “Congratulations to you!”
I always thought this was a bit dark for a jovial New Year’s song. I took it to mean, “Congratulations to you (for surviving another year)!” ¹
Which then left me wondering, what do they say to those who didn’t survive to the New Year?
That’s the thing about these biases, they’re all around us if you take the time to poke beneath the surface just a bit.
Maybe the ostriches had it right all along.²
J.J. Pryor
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Notes:
It wasn’t until later on when I thought to peak beneath the surface and realized it was a half-sentence, with the original adding “發財” (Fa Cai). Thus changing the meaning to roughly be “Congratulations to a prosperous New Year.” I then poked even further beneath the surface and found out the original song had nothing to do with the New Year, but was created to celebrate the defeat of Japan and the liberation of China. It was later on co-opted to New Year because of similar sounding terms. So, it looks like the reality of the catchy song was even darker than I originally thought, in some ways.
Ostriches don’t actually bury their heads in the sand. It was likely someone seeing them from far away and their head feathers blended in with the surroundings (they lay flat on the ground when scared/worried).
The picture at the top—I took this last year during Christmas while camping down south in Taiwan. That’s a Taiwan deer that unfortunately was stuck in between us and our path back. It did have a little incident with the fence after a few minutes but fortunately escaped and ran off after. They’re dwarf deers called Taiwan serow (I think), very cute but skittish.
Man, I love your stuff, JJ. What you learned each week would be very cool.