- Spent two hours with Marc Andreessen, who gave me a masterclass on how to think, learn, read, research, and write. Here’s what I learned:
- Read, read, read… then read some more.
- Many of your best ideas will emerge in fits of rage or frustration. Channel the fury. Smash the keyboard. Lean into the passion. Torch the page with your energy.
- Marc doesn’t have much of a formal writing process. He thinks and thinks, and when epiphany strikes, he hammers out an outline as fast as possible to get his ideas on paper. Then, he turns it into a full article.
- Marc’s motto for writing and thinking: “Strong views, weakly held.” Put yourself out there, but stay on the hunt for dissenting opinions from smart and respectful people.
- Online writing tolerates and even encourages stylistic idiosyncrasies that traditional publishing would not accommodate. Lean into them.
- The world is awash in bad content. You need to punch through. Snappy one-liners and genuine conviction are two ways to do that.
- Marc’s been reading online for as long as anybody on the planet, and the biggest thing that’s surprised him is how political the Internet’s become. Something changed between ~2013-2015. The Internet was once an escape from political debates. Now it’s a hotbed of them.
- Writing software is halfway between writing a novel and building a bridge.
- Play around with communication tools. Push the limits. Doesn’t matter what the rules are. When Marc felt constrained by Twitter’s 140-character limit, he started replying to his own tweets and invented the Twitter thread.
- On the quest for good ideas, surround yourself with “lateral thinkers” who can’t help but come up with variant perspectives on everything they see. They won’t always be right, but they’re always challenge your thinking.
- Media formats are cyclical. Nietzsche wrote in aphorisms and Twitter is aphorisms-as-a-service. Hip-hop brought back poetry. Montaigne pioneered the essay format and blogs brought them back into vogue.
- People should write more manifestos.
- Marc’s nomination for the best living American novelist: James Ellroy.
- GPT has revealed how much writing is pure pablum. Bland, lifeless, uninsightful, unoffensive, and not worth the price of the ink it was printed with.
- “With GPT, every writer now has a writing partner who can do an infinite amount of grunt work without complaining.”
- “ChatGPT plagiarism is a complete non-issue. If you can’t out-write a machine, what are you doing writing?”
- Marc writes from the heart. He doesn’t do much editing and likes to provide reading recommendations instead of directly citing his sources.
- The person who writes down the plan in an organization has tremendous power. If you want to find the up-and-comers at a tech company, look into who’s writing the plan. Though they may not be coming up with all the ideas, you’ll know they have the energy, motivation, and skills to organize and communicate ideas in a written form.
Marc uses a barbell approach to consume information. He focuses on what’s happening right now while also reading a lot of things that were written 10+ years ago. The content is either timely or timeless, with almost nothing in between. I’ve shared the full conversation below. If you’d rather listen on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple, check out the replies below. If there was an Olympic category for most insights per minute, @pmarca would be a guaranteed medalist. View Tweet
- Precision meets poetry — that’s how I describe the writing of @noampomsky. She’s grown her newsletter audience to more than 24,000 people and just laid out her writing process in extreme detail. Here’s what she’s taught me about writing well:
- If someone’s much better than you at something they probably try much harder.
- Personal anecdotes breathe life into your writing. First-hand experience gives you credibility as a writer and doubles as a wellspring for some of your deepest wisdom.
- Writing is an altered state of consciousness, analogous to being drunk or deep in a meditative state.
- Good personal writing describes the core truths of the human experience while avoiding self-help jargon.
- When you write from life and not theory, you will be most able to create something that feels unpolluted by all the ideas you’ve consumed.
- Writing is a tool to reach beyond consensus. Write and write and write until you transcend the cliches and step into undiscovered territory.
- Writing is also a tool for knowing, shaping, and owning your story. Ava says: “Instead of relying on someone else to narrativize my life or offer an observation about me, I use writing as a way to assert my own narrative. It’s how I remain more subject than object, how I maintain conviction in my own agency.”
- Creativity is inherently anti-authoritarian. As in: to be successfully creative, you have to shed the part of yourself that desperately wants reassurance. It’s only then that you can escape cliche and escape paradigmatic thinking.
- Chase what feels valuable to you, even if doing so leads to eye-rolling reactions. Ava was told by her parents to pursue programming because “liberal arts is worthless,” only to hear tech bros say that writing is the most valuable skill in the world.
- Writing is the creative residue of all the background rumination you do as you go through life (such as sitting in friends’ living rooms, taking your dog to the park, getting dehydrated during a hike).
- How Ava thinks about writing in public: Weigh the importance of feeling safe with the importance of being known.
Ava on how writing is sometimes not an act, but a state of being: “I’m trying to think of writing less as doing and more as being. A passive state, almost: a way of existing in the world. Something that takes me away from myself, and in doing so draws me deeper inwards.” This is a masterclass in writing from the heart — expressing emotions, creating a sense of intimacy in your writing, and bringing your soul onto the page. Full episode below. View Tweet
