The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 376: David Perell - Why You Should Write

Episode Date: July 26, 2020

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Text LEARNERS to 44222 @RyanHawk12 Full notes at www.LearningLeader.com Episode #376: David Perell - Why You Should Write Notes: The importance of writing -- Why everyone should write… "Having a website with articles you've published is like having a personal agent who finds career opportunities for you 24/7." "Writing crystallizes ideas in ways thinking on its own will never accomplish." — Morgan Housel "The person who writes sets the strategy. If you want to lead, write." "Writing is a 'proof of work' mechanism" It shows the world that you've thought deeply about a topic Networking - The old way vs the new way Old -- Go to conferences, happy hours, networking events New -- Publish your work online. You attract the type of people you want... Bill James analytical approach. His book only sold 550 copies, but one of them was to Billy Beane (General Manager of the Oakland A's). And the "Moneyball" revolution was created... The Venn Diagram of Specificity Learn how to create this for your business How to built a career? Do things that are unique, in demand, but the world doesn't have yet Your first draft is what is top of mind -- "Rewriting is rethinking." It's the process to make our ideas better. Writing and re-writing will make you a more thoughtful person and will create clarity. Writing is an element of teaching. Expertise is like a ladder -- Be like an investigative reporter about a topic that fascinates you The benefits of learning in public: "It is the best way to build a network." It's a forcing function. It forces your brain to always be on. "Want a great spouse? Deserve one." - Charlie Munger Publishing your work online (podcast, essays, book) is the greatest networking tool in the world. I've met amazing people because they've benefitted from my work (head coach Atlanta Falcons, Brooklyn Nets, Ohio State basketball coach, SVP of Fortune 50 companies). Community and connection —- community becomes the byproduct when you're going through something challenging together (ie: Navy SEALs). "The strength of a community is hard to quantify, which makes it hard to advertise. But like good music, you measure it by how it moves your spirits and how you feel in its presence." Competition is for Losers: Avoid competition. Stop copying what everybody else is doing. If you work at a for-profit company, work on problems that would not otherwise be solved. If you're at a non-profit, fix unpopular problems. Life is easier when you don't compete. (Hint: don't start another bottled water company). Personal Monopoly: Corporations reward conformity, but the Internet rewards people who are unique. If you work in a creative field, strive to be the only person who does what you do. Find your own style, then run with it. Create intellectual real estate for yourself. (Jerry Garcia -- Be the only person who does what you do) The Map Is Not the Territory: Reality will never match the elegance of theory. All models have inconsistencies, but some are still useful. Some maps are useful because they're inaccurate. If you want to find an edge, look for what the map leaves out. There are two kinds of companies: 1) Product-First Audiences: Build a product, then an audience. Attract customers with paid advertisements. 2) Audience-First Products: Build an audience, then a product. Attract customers with differentiated content. Take Action -- "Taking action will teach you more about yourself in a month than years of contemplation ever will." Making something easier expands the market... But making it harder gets you the clients you really want. Twitter is the town-square of the internet. It can be the best learning tool in the world if you use it right: Mute politics Unfollow people who make you angry Understand your opponent's opinion better than they do Production: Make tweets useful. It forces you to focus on ideas that are timeless. It forces you to have constant epiphanies. Have "spiky" ideas -- They pierce society. Have a point of view Sustained excellence = Obsession - Doing great work is hard. You need to love it. "I can't live without creating." Vision - Set a goal that scares you and march toward it. Have ambition A keen understanding of what one is good at - Self-awareness.

The world progresses. All of human civilization progresses when we stand on each other's shoulders and we learn and we share our ideas and we help others. That is how we get better. And what's arrogant is to not contribute to the march of human knowledge because you just don't feel like sharing your ideas. You don't feel like actually contributing with all the hard work that you've done to learn and not help others. I believe that we have a duty and we have a responsibility. if we know something to then go tell other people what we know and how the world can improve. Because that is how the world gets better. We are opening up applications to our learning leader circle. We do this once per year. Think back to the great conversation I had with the legendary Jim Collins episode 216. He said, Ryan, before you get too caught up in your why, in your what, you need to be very intentional about your who. who will be your friends who will be your mentor who will you help who will you choose to surround

yourself with that will be the single greatest determining factor in your long-term success think about that I'd ask you the same question who are you choosing to surround yourself with to help you grow to push you to challenge you and to be there when you need help this is a chance to surround yourself with other growth-oriented leaders looking to challenge themselves and grow to become more effective both personally and professionally. We've added specific curriculum elements so that by the end of the year you'll have tangible outcomes to measure your growth and be a more effective leader. These groups are intentionally curated and kept small. And time and again, the thing that people say they love most about these groups is the relationships they're able to build

with one another very quickly. If you'd like to apply, go to learning leader circle.com. That's learning leader circle.com to apply. Welcome to the learning leader show presented by Brixie and Meyer. I am Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text learners to 44222 in order to join tens of thousands of learning leaders from all over the world. Receive mindful Monday updates. What I'm reading, writing, watching, thinking about. Also give you more details about how much my book, Welcome to Management, will help you become a more effective leader. Text, learners to 4422. Now on tonight's featured leader, the great David Perel, known as the writing guy.

He's built his business through publishing thought-provoking essays on his website, porell.com. He runs an online school called Write of Passage. A few of the topics, sweet. discussed, why you should write every day and publish your work often. And then how to create a proper Venn diagram for your career. And then David shares the best networking tool for 2020 and beyond. Ladies and gentlemen, I promise this one will make you think it's David Perel. David Perel, man, it's good to have you here on the Learning Leader Show. Welcome, man.

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. So as I told you before, I've been following your work for years. And it's been fascinating for me to see the growth of both your production as well as your business. And I want to start this conversation a little bit differently than I normally do because I think the skills that you are teaching need to be heard by people who are working within corporate America. perhaps at a Fortune 500 company and a mid-level management role. And that is the importance of becoming an effective writer. Because as a leader, communication is so critical for success. We write so many emails.

We open up meetings with a five-minute story. We're in town hall sessions. And developing your mind in the form of writing and speaking is vital, I believe, for your success as a leader. So can you first share why it is so important for people in general, and specifically leaders, to become more effective writers? The person who writes sets the strategy. And that is because strategy is generally written down.

And if you are the person to do that writing, you are effectively going to be the leader. it doesn't mean that you might end up being the leader. It is that you are actually setting the strategy. There's a book called The Power Broker, and it's about Robert Moses. Robert Moses basically built modern New York City. He was in power for 44 years, was never elected to government once, and weaseled himself into the tentacles of New York City government.

And the reason he was able to do that was early in his career when he was working for the state government of New York, he was actually writing the laws. And so he knew the laws better than anybody else, which then allowed him to when he wanted to go up in power, it was easy because he knew exactly where to go. Likewise, in an organization, if you are the person who has set the strategy for the company, you have written the strategy deck, you have actually outlined the next three, six months or years for the company. then the company is oriented around your vision, and then you are by definition a leader. And there's another side aspect from a career building perspective that you've written about

and that it's helped me personally is the fact that I believe that in writing is a piece of this, but I believe that publishing your work in public for others to read, to judge, to criticize or to like, is the number one tool for networking and building relationships there is today. And I know you've talked a lot about this. I want you to share more about why having the guts and the willingness to share what you believe in public on the internet is useful for anybody, regardless of what your job is right now. Yeah, of course. So let's talk about networking.

networking before the internet look like going to a lot of bars after work and it looked like going to conferences and then going to fancy schools that cost a lot of money and that is traditionally how we think of networking. You go out to the world and you are going to go travel and you're going to go try to talk to a lot of people

and it's going to be exhausting and you're going to throw back a lot of drinks and at some point you're going to get enough business cards in your pocket and the conversion rate on those business cards might be 5% and 5% of all the people that you talk to after spending all of these hours traveling away from your family, then you will end up meeting people.

Online networking is the opposite. The world comes to you. And especially in a time when travel is difficult and travel won't be the same for many years and conferences, you want the world to come to you. So how do you do that? Well, when you write online, you become a lighthouse for like-minded people.

You become a magnet to attract people who are like you. So what ends up happening is other people come to you. And what's great is the internet becomes its own filtering mechanism. So the internet, I think of as the best matching tool ever created. It matches buyers and sellers on Craigslist. It matches travelers and home renters on Airbnb. It matches drivers and riders with Uber. And to not take advantage of that is,

a fool's errand. So what you want to do is you want to put your ideas out into the world. And what you see when you write online in public is that people then come to you and they say, hey, I'm pretty interested in the same things that you have. And what's unique about writing is writing is a proof of work mechanism. So this is an idea from the cryptocurrency world where the way that a blockchain and Bitcoin is validated is what's called proof of work. Enough energy has been expended, therefore we trust what is on the blockchain. Likewise, everybody knows that writing is difficult. Nobody sits down to write and goes, oh, geez, this is easy. This is like a picnic. It never is. It is hard. But if you have written 7,000, 10,000, even six articles on a subject,

you have shown the world that you have thought about that topic deeper than other people. And this is the same thing with a book. This is why books are amazing business. cards for people because writing proves to the world that you've thought about a topic. And then when it goes out into the world, it attracts like-minded people. And you know, I'm reminded of a story. There's a guy named Bill James. And Bill James was transformative in changing the game of baseball. 1970s, he came out with a book about statistics in baseball with this awfully boring title. And he put an ad in something like Sporting World or Sports Illustrated. And he said, hey, I just published this book, and he got 250 sales from the book. Then one year later, 1978, put out

another ad, got 350. Through that, he ended up attracting the attention of investment bankers. He ended up attracting the attention of statisticians, PhD mathematicians, and a guy named Billy Bean, who was sitting in Oakland, who was the general manager for the Oakland days. And this book about statistics that only like 550 people had published ended up getting into Billy Bean's office, this then led into the money ball phenomenon, which the Oakland days used to figure out how they could get the most bang for their buck and build a baseball team without spending New York Yankees amount of money. Then that led into the statistics revolution. And the idea here is what I call the paradox of specificity. On the internet,

the temptation is to do what you normally do. Let's make these mass marks. market shows. Let's not write books like the baseball abstract about statistics. But what you find online is because you end up being a magnet for like-minded people, the more specific you go, the more specific the thing that you focus on, actually the more vast your horizons become because you attract such incredible people like the general manager of the Oakland days. So I'm glad you brought this up. I was going to get to it later. But let's just go here now, David is the fact that this show is about leadership, which is a very broad, not specific topic. And I love my favorite.

It's titled learning leader because my favorite coaches and people I've been around who have been in leadership positions were ones who always seem to have their head in a book, who never thought they had it all figured out. And I deemed them learning leaders. So there's a little bit of niching, but still not much. And when I publish my first book, it's called Welcome to Management. It's about making that leap from individual contributor to manager, that first one, because it is more of a niche down topic.

But this is something I battle and struggle with. And I think there's something that you've got to handle on, especially at such a young age, I'm impressed by is what's the process for someone? Because when you say that, I think in theory it sounds, yes, that's right. I want to do that. But then when I sit down to put it in a practice, it's much harder. what is the process to get more specific when you're living in this broad topic of, let's say, in my case, leadership.

How would you workshop this if you and I were just having a chat at lunch saying, Dave, I need some help with this, man. What do you think? What's kind of the process to get there? Yeah. So just think of a Venn diagram. So I'm going to talk about modern specificity versus how people have normally thought about specificity.

And one is tyrannical in nature. and another is quite liberating. So what I would say to you is you're focused on a podcast. That's a kind of specificity with your Venn diagram. You're focused on people who are in corporate America, generally working for Fortune 500 companies. And then within that bucket, you could then get more specific with one or two.

Maybe you're focused on men, women. Maybe you're focused on people who also like sports. And maybe there's a certain style of person who you like to have on the podcast. maybe you are really interested in how people get from middle management to upper management. So that's then from people who are roughly 40 to 65 years old, or maybe you're interested in people earlier in their careers. So even within leadership, you certainly aren't doing leadership for football. You certainly aren't doing leadership for government.

So there is a specificity already within your show. Now, the way that we are taught to think about specificity, which just sounds awful, is go build a bunch of skills that other people already have and go learn, you know, be the $8 millionth person to learn SEO, go be the $10 millionth person to go learn Excel. I'm going to learn this one thing and just know it, know it, know it. Now, fine, that's not the worst thing in the world if you love what it is. But look, if there is a skill that is so clearly defined, that everyone knows it and there's a hundred different ways to learn it, it's generally not going to be a skill on its own that's going to then make you wealthy. The way to really build skills that are going to make you wealthy is to do things that are unique, that are in strong demand by the world, but that the world in some way, shape, or form can't deliver yet. And what you want to do is find your own Venn diagram of skills and interests,

that nobody else has. And then your specificity becomes a choice of your intuition. And it's an inside out specificity rather than an outside in specificity. So your specificity becomes, for me, like writing online, which I'm really interested in, learning online, which I'm really interested, being what I call a citizen of the internet, online courses. Like all these things have sort of emerged. Whereas the way that I was taught to build skills is go think about what skills do I need to build. Okay, I need to go take this SEO course. I need to take that Excel course. But then I have a bunch of these cookie cutter skills. The benefit comes from what I call decorrelating, from being one of a kind and to being what Jerry Garcia said, you want to be the

only person who does what you do. And if you can do that and find your own overlap of skills, then what you have is something that looks broad to you. So it's liberating and it feels like this expansive farm that you can just run forever and you can just explore and go on an infinite adventure. But then to other people, they can just say, oh, this is a specific idea that they have. David is the online writing guy. And that then works out really well. And I'm going to talk one more quote about online writing and why it's important. I know we're bouncing a bit, but it's important for me to get this out because I want to hear your voice on a few of these topics is you've said having a website with articles you've published is like having a personal

agent who finds career opportunities for you 24-7. And I think so even if we're shift looking at that person in corporate America, maybe even publishing, creating your own website or publishing on LinkedIn, whatever maybe, then people can get an understanding what you think. But then if you look internally, look at yourself to say, well, how am I developing my own thoughts or ideas or strategies? a Morgan Housel quote, which she's coming on the show soon, is writing crystallizes ideas in ways thinking on its own will never accomplish. And I know this from having to get 60,000 words to my editor McGraw-Hill to publish my book with a deadline, nothing. And I mean, and you know this better than anybody, nothing forced and created more clarity and pain than writing a paragraph or two

or a page and then looking at it and saying, wait a second, I actually don't know what I'm talking about. Writing forced me to get crystal clear on what I actually knew, what I believed, and in some cases, forced me back into the research to write a better page. And I think that's why even if you don't publish, which I think you should be, even if you don't, you should still write on a regular basis just for yourself to crystallize your own thoughts and beliefs. Yeah, absolutely. What I found is that what's scary is everyone talks about, oh, you're sloppy first draft. Just get it out.

It's going to suck. And you should know that. The realization that you have when you take that idea seriously is that that kind of sloppiness is how you're thinking ordinarily is. Because what comes out in your first draft is just the things that are top of mind. And so what haunting idea this is that when you come out with your first draft and it's awful and people are like, this is what you came out with. I would never read this.

This is what your normal thinking is. And so once we have this realization and we say, okay, if writing is thinking and rewriting is rethinking, then it is actually through writing that we go through the process of making our ideas better. And what ends up happening is there's a certain amount of storage that can be held in your brain with ideas. And what happens is when you put something into writing, your brain doesn't need to try to remember these things. It can move on to higher order levels of thinking. and then you can begin to scan. You could say, nope, I didn't mean that.

I didn't quite mean that. I didn't quite mean that. And there's a paper about the printing press and how it changed society. And it's discussing what happened between 1650 and 1750. And what these authors discovered was that writing wasn't transformative for society only in the way that people say that you had the printing press. so that the marginal cost of distributing an idea was so much lower, it was actually had to do with the concrete nature of writing that once you have a piece of writing, instead of grappling with the entire idea, you can break it down and you can say, nope, I didn't like this sentence,

I didn't like that sentence, and I didn't like that sentence. And then once things are written down, then we can deal with ideas on a sentence by sentence, idea by idea basis, instead of dealing with the entire thing. And this is why, like if you take, for example, a supply chain process, say, it's all there. What you can do is rather than saying, our supply chain sucks, which doesn't help anybody. It's actually sort of knocks the life out of you as an idea. You can go into Clause 13, section B, footnote C, and you can say, you know what, this one thing is what we don't like. And so it allows you to segment the world, break it down, and actually deal with specifics. And to go back to this paper, the authors argue that that ability to contend with ideas at such a concrete and specific level is why society became so much more productive and innovative after the invention of the printing press.

Okay. I want to shift towards teaching because I've found that teaching has become another one of the greatest tools in addition to writing and writing is a form of teaching as you know. But teaching is become a fantastic learning tool for me. When I, whether get up on a stage, now doing them more on Zoom or I'm running a leadership circle meeting, which are the groups that I run, and I have an opening monologue, and I want to be useful and I want to add value to the lives of the people who are taking in the message, the work leading up to me delivering that point, even if it's 10 minutes, regardless of the length, that work, so much learning and clarity happens. And this is also why I push people in general, people listen and watch the show, especially the leaders, to force yourself into teaching positions.

Lead the training. Give guest lectures at your local university. Volunteer to speak anywhere, right? Because it forces you to get clear on what you believe and forces you to have an understanding of a topic at a deeper level. And you now, your primary job is running a school for 100. hundreds and hundreds of people to teach them to write, I'd love to hear your thought process on how teaching has been helpful for you. Yeah. So, well, first of all, I think that writing is an element of teaching. And the biggest misconception that people have is that in order to write about something,

in order to teach something, you need to be an expert on it. And it's not only wrong, but it is unhelpful. And for both the teacher and the student. So, for example, you are trying to build this podcast. And let's say that you had a goal in the next year to build a, we'll call it an informational show. And you want to make it really big. And you're like, okay, who should I go contact? And somebody who just says, oh, I want to go find an expert on this, they might say,

oh, go talk to Joe Rogan. and Joe Rogan will have all the answers. The fact of the matter is, Joe Rogan will have some answers for you, but probably won't be that helpful. The person who you should talk to is somebody who two years ago was where you are now, because they have just walked over the stones that you're about to walk over. And so going to learn from an expert is valuable in that it's inspiring, but it's not valuable in that it's tactically useful. So when you need to be inspired, go to the very best in the world.

But when you need to know what you tactically need to do, go to the people who just solve the problems. And this happens all over society. That idea holds true. Now, to report on teaching, what you realize is it becomes hard to teach things when you've known about something for a long time. And so what I encourage people to do with writing is to write before their experts. The way that expertise works is it's like a ladder. And it's like a ladder where there's like 10 rungs. And so Joe Rogan is on rung 10, but say you're on rung four. There is

somebody on rung six who you might be interested in. And then there's other people on rungs two and three who would be very interested in what you have to say. And so what you should do is the traditional idea of publishing is I'm going to spend my whole life learning about something and only when I'm a full on expert with all the credentials, am I actually going to write about it? Rather, what you want to do is you want to, in writing is teaching, be like an investigative reporter. Be like a reporter who's out in the field. You are experiencing this in real time and you are writing about exactly what you're learning about because the people who are, one, two, three steps behind you on that ladder, they will value what it is that you have to say. And as you teach, not only do you help other people to know what they need to do, but you begin

to clarify your principles. You begin to say, you know what, that stuff doesn't actually matter that much. This stuff thought it was important, surprisingly wasn't, but this is the thing that matters. And once you're forced to teach other people, you realize the things that you're really want to be teaching yourself too. I think that stems off of the value of learning in public as well. And I found one of the things that has caused this, my show to catch on with people over the last five years is the fact that the emails I received say,

we like the fact that we feel like we're learning together. We sense the genuine curiosity. We sense the diversity of the people that are on the show, that you may have a PhD in Astrofee. physics and then the next day you'll have an all-star in the MBA and there's wide variety of their life experiences but if you prepare that you can hang with both equally and we sense and feel the learning and I think if you have if you if you try to push away the fear of being embarrassed or looking stupid in public because you don't know what the person's talking about there's a huge

advantage in that. I feel like that's something you do. I see Tiago's that way as well, your business partner that you work with and others in your orbit have some Jack Butcher seems to be that way. There are those who are not afraid to sometimes look stupid in public because, hey, this is an experiment. I'm learning. And I think others could benefit from this regardless, again, of your job, whether you work in corporate America or not, of being someone who's open and able to learn, write, share in public for others to be there along with them. Yeah. There's a lot of things that you just said.

And the benefits of learning in public, this is one of those, Peter Thiel, he's very famous in his interview questions. He was the first money in Facebook, founded PayPal. And in his interview questions, he asked, what is something that you know to be true that other people would call crazy. And he calls us a secret. And he thinks that all great companies are built on secrets. But I think that going beyond that,

transformative ideas and projects are built on secrets too. And one of the secrets that I think is that learning in public is the best way to build a network. It's the best way to learn faster. and it is the best way to build the kind of audience that's going to help you move up in your career, whether that's starting your own business or moving up at the company that you're working for, out of middle management to maybe becoming an executive. And the reason why this is, is, first of all, you have a forcing function.

You have an incentive, something that deliberately helps you when you learn more. So I always say I'm a professional noticer. But that's just because I try to write five tweets a day. I try to publish roughly about an article a week. And so my brain is always on. And it's like a cheat code because in the boring moments, I can, those boring moments become potential fodder for future articles and the exciting moments do too.

But what you actually realize when you become a writer is that there's actually more insight in the same mundane ideas where most people turn off their brain, that's when I turn my brain on. Because it is the mundane that actually holds the wealth of what it means to be human. And then what you realize is once you start learning in public, you attract all these other people who are on the same process with you. So say that you're trying to go learn online education. Well, what's amazing is now I have CEOs of different online education companies reaching out to me, asking me to be an advisor, asking me, hey, I would love to talk to you about this idea, about that idea. And what you realize is when you're actually at the frontier and you're doing something interesting, other people want to start talking to you. I had Mike Shanahan's team.

He's working on something. I had his team that is trying to help him build an online course. basically reach out to me and say, hey, we'd love to work with you. This is a Super Bowl winning football coach reaching out to me this week saying, hey, we'd love to chat. I mean, how cool is that? And that's just because I don't hoard my ideas. When I learn something, when I have an epiphany, the first thing I do is I share it.

And then finally, once people know that you are somebody who has thought about this topic, And I specifically don't say an expert. I'm saying somebody who's thought about this topic a lot. And you have proven that to the world. People are much more likely to reach out to you because they respect your writing. They are thankful for what you've done. And think about how that changes the terms. So I always say, if I really want to meet somebody, what most people do is they email them, email them, email them.

I figure out how they can email me. And so I've had some lunches. with actually multiple even billionaires, CEOs of very big companies where they have reached out to me and it totally changes the terms of the conversation. And this goes back to don't go network by finding others. Have other people find you. And all of this comes from learning in public. That's that secret that I was talking about.

Create a reason for them. It's just like the quote, it might have been Charlie Munger. but how to get a great spouse, deserve one, right? And I think it's the same way when it comes to you want to work at a company, then find a way to get their attention, do something so great. And I'm with you when I've seen some of the people reach out because of my book or podcast that head coached the Atlanta Falcons recently saying, this could really help our team.

Is there something we can do? You know, I mean, and I played football growing up in college and after that, To see this intersection now of my now second part of my career where I'm not playing sports anymore, but it could intersect. And there's others like that, that is fantastic. And so whenever someone's saying like, well, I'm trying to figure out how to get more sales or how to do things, I said, let's try to rethink this. What are you doing that's creating a reason for them to want to call you?

Are you even doing anything? Right. And have some sort of strategy and mindset towards I want a reason for people to come to me. And then we can do that. And I think you've written about this. I may be mispronouncing or miss saying what it's called, but essentially I've borrowed this from you as I've created and I want to create an audience first business where you build the audience first and you give away everything for free, almost, just about everything. And then about 1% of this audience says, I want more. And they're and they're the ones who give you money, and that's the business.

99% of your audience will consume everything for free forever, and that's great. But as the audience grows, that 1% becomes bigger and bigger. And it feels like that's how you've built, right, of passage. And I want to talk a lot about that, too, because I've seen the growth of that. But that seems to me your style, that's what I'm trying to do. What I've been trying to do for the past five years is you build the audience first, and then the product or products come after the, audience has been built and that's more of an audience first style.

Man, you said a lot of stuff in there so well. These are, you are probably forcing me to say longer monologues than anybody. But I think it's because I've been consuming your work for years and it's really helped me out. And so I'm very grateful for that. So that's why I was looking forward to this conversation.

I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah. You really hit the nail on the head there. So I really first just want to double down on the idea. The Munger quote that you said is really good. And that's exactly what you want. To be competent enough in something that other people can't help but reach out to you.

I mean, if you're really good at something that other people aren't really good at, the world is open to you. It's as simple as that. Like, you get good at something. Other people are good at it. And that thing is in demand. there will be people flying to you and you'll be able to meet whoever the heck you want. So that is a hell of a lot more enjoyable, sustainable, healthy than trying to run around from

conference to conference, from Vegas to Cannes to going to Tokyo to then popping down to a conference in Buenos Aires. I mean, that is exhausting. And it's much better. to build a skill, tell the world about it, advertise that skill. And I always say, it is your job to find other people, not their job to find you. And now that find isn't something like, I'm going to go and I'm going to knock on their door. It is if you are good at something, if you have a perspective, if you have a belief, you have a duty and an obligation to tell the world that you are good at that thing. Because people always say that, oh, this is, arrogant to go share my ideas, but it's not arrogant. What's arrogant is to think that other people

are going to start knocking on your door if they don't know about you. What's arrogant is that the world progresses, all of human civilization progresses when we stand on each other's shoulders and we learn and we share our ideas and we help others. That is how we get better. And what's arrogant is to not contribute to the march of human knowledge because you just don't feel like sharing your ideas. You don't feel like actually contributing with all the hard work that you've done to learn and not help others. I believe that we have a duty and we have a responsibility if we know something to then go tell other people what we know and how the world can improve. Because that is how the world gets better. I had Adam Grant on the show.

great writer, shareer of ideas. And I said, you know, I struggle with this. I feel like I'm a self promoter. And he said, you're not promoting yourself. You're promoting your work. And always think of it that way. And if you feel like, and if you believe in your work and you believe it helps other people, then you should have no problem promoting that like crazy.

If you truly believe in what you're producing helps others. Don't think of it as promoting yourself because you're really not. You're promoting the work, the ideas. The usefulness of everything, not the fact that, hey, just shine the light on me because I'm awesome. No, it's this work, this deep intellectual curiosity that has brought out some useful things that are helpful for other people. You've got to get that out, man. You've got to push that. And I think that is something that has helped me to think of it that way and not as a self-promoter, but as a promoter of the work.

Totally. Very well said. in right of passage i've listened to a recent podcast of yours and you focused on the aspect of community and connection and something you said was community becomes the byproduct when you're going through something challenging together and it brought me right back to when i was going from my eighth grade to my freshman year in high school and we had these insane summer workouts leading up to the season that, you know, everybody's puking. It's horrible. It's hot. It's just rough. You know, Midwest. I'm in Ohio in the summers. And the coaches just, they had a military background

just crushed us. But when we got to Friday nights and it was time to play under the lights, we felt invincible. Of course. Together. Because we went through, this is, this is why the military is the way they are, because we went through something so hard for an extended period of time. And I look to my left and I looked to my right and I knew those guys were with me right and we weren't as talented as everybody but we won more games than we should have won despite our lack of talent and you've taken that and I try to do the same with with the groups that I run as well but in your cohorts with the right of passage so I love for you to share your philosophy and mindset around community and connection and why that has been one of the secrets probably of the success of what you do

Yeah, I love that football story, man. I mean, I really, I experienced something similar in high school. We, I played golf at a pretty high level and I wanted to go pro and all that. And that was just the dream. And so our junior year, we lost the league tournament and we finished in second place. And, you know, golf is at one-on-one. So everyone, we wanted to win. And so our senior year, there were four guys.

There was Connor, Alec, and Zander, and myself. And the four of us were committed because four scores would get into the tournament. And then you were judged off the top four scores on your team. And we said, we are going to work so hard and we are going to win league senior year. Nothing else mattered. And we banded together. We drove across the state of North Carolina. of Northern California, and we ended up playing in all these different tournaments to start

preparing. We spent hours on the course. I mean, sometimes arriving when there were stars in the sky in the morning, leaving when there were stars in the sky at night. And we were just banded together through that shared goal. And our senior year, we won. And it was one of, what of just for something so inconsequential in the grand scheme of life, it felt so important and it was so meaningful to me to have those guys come together this morning.

Alec texted me who was one of the four guys and Xander who was part of that team is still my just my closest friend. We still do two golf trips a year and we come together and it was because of that. And to your point about community, you know, this is I think what's just wrong about a lot of the venture backed. We're going to build the next Soho House communities. Those aren't communities. They're clubs. And there's a big difference between a club and a community. A community is brotherhood, it's sisterhood, it's fraternity. And it is when people come together and they feel a sacred bond to each other. They feel like they are connected by a shared vision and shared beliefs and shared sweat.

And most of what passes for community now, and I think it's why we have the bowling alone phenomenon, what Robert Putnam just comes out, and he says, look, community is disappearing in America. We're seeing, yes, more people bowling alone, but that is a representation for decline of interaction and participation in churches, decline of participation in social clubs,

decline of participation in all these local communities. We have lost communities. we have lost community in in in America and it's quite concerning and I think you see it in all the way up and how we think about these venture back communities where oh we're going to build a community no you don't build a community you build a shared belief and you build a shared vision and you build shared values and then through whether it's high school football like what you're talking about whether it's through high school golf like what I'm talking about or the way that Navy SEALs and Marines come together from those brutal experiences

where they push each other as hard as they can go. But you know what, at the end, then they have community. Community is a byproduct, a vision. It is not something that you get in advance. And we have forgotten this in America. How have you taken what you've learned from that and implemented it in, because there are a lot of online courses that do not have a live component. yours is primarily the live component is a huge part of it, if not everything.

And that is where, and then there's the exercises that you do, which then create some of the shared, I guess, values and the hard work people are doing and sharing it with each other. And then as you said, the community is the result of the hard work done together. And you said, one of your students shared this today. And then maybe you can expand on this. He said, he said, the strength of a community is, hard to quantify, which makes it hard to advertise. But like good music, you measure it by how it

moves your spirits and how you feel in its presence. I love that. Thank you. Yeah. So another definition of community is a community is a place where people pull you back once you disappear. And that's what you want to build. And the reason why there's so little competition in building communities is because we, We have followed this path of reducing friction throughout society. Okay, Netflix, how do we not go to the movies? How can we just watch Netflix and have all these limitless options? How do we, on Grubhub, how can we just order from every single restaurant and just at the

top of the button, some delivery guy or gal is going to show up at our door in 45 minutes with our beautiful pizza or burrito? And we've seen throughout society the lowering of friction as if that's an unequivocal good. And it isn't. Friction is what ties communities. And as we've built right of passage, what you do when you build values, values are the things that you do, despite other people telling you that you shouldn't do them. And one of our biggest pieces of feedback in write of passage is there's too much going on. You push us too hard.

there's too many assignments. We're busy professionals. We can't do it. And we have consciously made a decision to take that feedback from people to say, you need to be doing less and you need to streamline this. And we've said, hell no, we're going to make this harder. We're going to raise the price. We're going to make this more intense, more hours. You're going to learn more and you're going to have to give more of you to do this properly. And you know what? It turns off a lot of people. But the people who actually get through this, you can't go through right of passage, do the assignments and not have an identity shift. It just, it can't happen. And you see this everywhere. Well, we've made things so easy because easy is what expands the market. Easy is what allows your total addressable

market size of potential customers to be way bigger. So of course, there is an economic incentive to just make things easier and easier and easier. And what we're here to do is follow in the footsteps of something like tough mudder where you crawl underwater and you get shocks on your body electrocuted in a very small way to get through this experience. And that's what builds people together. I did a Spartan race earlier this year. I finished the race soaking wet because I had to swim through dirty,

muddy water. I had to climb up these monkey bars. I had to climb up a 20 foot rope and fall back down it. I crossed the finish line jumping over fire with blood all over my hands. I'd go straight to the to the first aid room. And you know what? I signed up on my way out for two more of those because I was with eight people. I had blood all over my hand. But that blood wasn't a river of pain. It was a river of satisfaction, and that's what builds community. From a credibility perspective, can you share some of the numbers and the growth, both of the number of people as well as the price increases? I've seen these over the years.

Like I said, I followed it for years now since the very first class. And it's like tripled in price or maybe more. Yeah, about tripled. So we started, and we're going to keep raising it. We started at around, I think it was 600, the first time that we raised. taught live, right? And cohort style. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So we also think of this like a product. Like most, so Columbia or Harvard or any university, they don't come out every year. Like these are all the improvements that we've made. Whereas like if you look at like an iOS update or an Android update,

the companies will say, we've made all these improvements. We think of our school like a product where every single new cohort, we add a lot of things, make a lot of improvements. improvements and iterations. And then each one is fairly different. And so whenever we announced that, we think, okay, what kind of price increase can we command? And the first one was, yeah, like 600, then we did 800, then we did 1,200. And then we just jumped from 1,200 to 2,000. And despite an $800 price increase, we got way more people in the course. And so we have seen some kind of lack of price sensitivity, but also the level of commitment for students also goes way up when we raise prices. And so we're going to keep raising prices because it's actually better for students,

too, in that this is a hard experience. So we have found that once they have invested enough, where it's like, wow, this is a scary investment. I mean, I get emails from people saying, I've been saving up for your course for the last year, and I'm scared to do this. And I say, great, that is exactly what you need to go be a successful student because you have enough on the line where you're going to give it your all. Do you ever feel scared that somebody has saved money for a year to get you? Oh, absolutely. I was going to say, I know I would. Oh, yeah.

And some of the names in the course. I mean, we have a two-time New York Times bestselling author. We have a senior vice president at one of the biggest Silicon Valley companies right now. now, and we have the CEO of another $100 million email newsletter company in the course. And I have to deliver. And it's great for me too, because at that price point, I can't skimp. I can't do something lazily. And in the earlier cohorts, I was a bit lazy at times.

Now I can't do that. Now I'm spending five to seven hours preparing for each 90 minute live session. And we are optimizing our teaching down to the second. And I'm sort of anticipating where you're going to go in terms of like what we've learned about teaching. So earlier this year, I took a class at, I audited a class at Columbia. And I did it because the entire class was on one philosopher named Mox Weber. And he was somebody who had wanted to study. And I took the class because I said, you know what, a whole semester devoted to one person is the kind of in-depth learning that I really admire. And not only that, but the professor

was a very famous philosopher who came out of the Frankfurt School and very well renowned as a philosopher. And I go in, I'm all excited, and I'm at Columbia, one of the best universities in the world auditing. And the class was absolutely awful. It was awful. It had no vitality, no livelihood. The teacher just wasn't giving it as all. And it was a really just dry discussion. every single time. And I don't think that that teacher has a team who's taking notes, giving him feedback. I mean, after every single session, I have my assistant and my course manager. They review together. We go through every single second. We say, David, you missed that. David, you've got to be pausing here more. Hey, these were all the messages from the chat that we

have to bring in next time. So after every single live session, we spend the next hour debriefing, And we are tweaking seconds. I mean, we are really designing an experience. And through that, then the next time we do it, we have all of these notes. And then we get more and more density, more and more vitality, better and better storytelling from cohort to cohort. And what we find is university teachers who have tenure, if they don't do a good job, they will keep their job and stay employed.

If I don't do a good job, I'm going out of business tomorrow. And that's why the rate of improvement for online education is so much faster than the rate of improvement for universities. One of the other keys to your growth is your willingness to share useful points of view on Twitter. And this is a topic that I brought up. I just believe this. Twitter, it's almost embarrassing to say this, but it is the greatest learning tool of my lifetime. It just is. I follow the people who push me in ways that they share new and unique and differing ideas, articles, points of view, different ways to think about things. They challenge me. They help me find people that I would have never found. And obviously there are negative parts to it. But I believe if you are seeing too much negativity on it, that is your problem. That is your fault. I'm speaking to you, the Twitter, David, but you, the Twitter user. If that is what you're

finding, that's a you problem, not the platform's problem. You have to fix that, curate that feed, do a better job of understanding who you're following, right? And so I know you're a believer in this, but I want to hear, because you've grown, since I started following you, you're a, by the time this comes out, you have over 100,000 followers on Twitter. And at the beginning, I think when I started following, you had under maybe 10. I'm curious that your mindset towards, one, why it's valuable. There's a lot of networking aspects, too, but one, why it's valuable? And two, why do you think your thoughts and ideas have caught on to then skyrocket

your followership quickly? Yeah. So Twitter is the town square of the internet. And if you look at a town square in an actual town, it is where you meet people. It is where you find out about things that you didn't know about. And it is where public discourse happens. And you get the good and the bad of that. And the criticisms of Twitter, I think, are fair in that Twitter should do a much better job of creating public commons and creating incentives for kindness and for intellectual generosity.

And the company hasn't done that. With that said, in any town square, there's parts of the town square that are sketchy that you don't want to go to. Like in New York City, where I lived for a while, you don't want to go to the corners of Washington Square Park at around 2 a.m. in the morning. You just don't. And during the daytime, right by the fountain, Washington Square Park is absolutely lovely. I think it's my favorite place in New York City. And so likewise, with Twitter, you just want to be in the places that are the right areas. And so as a consumer of Twitter, what you want to do is you want to mute politics.

I mean, really, get rid of the political names, get rid of words like the Senate, GOP, Democrat, Republican. Twitter, politics is worth discussing. Twitter is not the place to have those conversations. And so then mute those words and then unfollow people who make you angry. I don't know. It's weird. It's as if like we have this duty to be informed and that you're only informed if you're consuming ideas that piss you off and that bother you and that because they're outside of your sphere of influence. No, it's much better to read things that you disagree with that make you say not this person angers me as if there's some kind of morality in your when you're read with rage.

No, read great essays and great books from people who make you say, you know what, there's something about where this person ends up with that I really don't like. But damn, that was a good point. Wow, I hadn't realized that because I'll tell you when you actually are consuming good information about things that you disagree with, you end up in a really tricky place where you start saying, uh-oh, I am not as certain as I was before. And what's great is once you've gone through that stage, and then you have a belief to go back to Munger, he says, you want to understand your opponent's opinion and their perspective better than they do.

And you do that, not by following people who piss you off on Twitter, but by reading really good books and long-form essays. Now, that's on the consumption side. And I agree with you. Twitter is a phenomenal use of time if you use it right. You're 100% right about that. Now, on the production side,

A couple things to get right about Twitter. One of the things I try to do is I try to make at least 95% of my tweets like tremendously useful. And I try to compress a lot of information. I try to do what I call the screenshot test where have most of my tweets be, make somebody say, whoa, that was so good and so useful that I just need to screenshot that and save it in my phone. I want to have the most screenshots per followers of any tweeter in the world.

And what that forces me to do is it forces me to focus on ideas that are timeless. It forces me to provide a lot of knowledge and wisdom in a very short amount of space. And then for me, it forces me to have constant epiphanies. And then what you want to do is I have a friend named Wes Cow. She is brilliant in the online education space. And she says that you want to have spiky ideas. You want to have ideas that are sharp and that when they're sharp, they can pierce through society. And most people are afraid to have sharp ideas.

They are afraid to not copy what everybody else is thinking, what is politically correct at the time, and they're afraid to actually have beliefs and to stand for them. And Twitter for me, to have those sharp ideas is a constant intellectual exercise of what do I really believe? And I was talking about those secrets earlier. What are the things that I believe to be true that other people have totally missed? And now it's easy to interpret this and saying, oh, you're going to have sharp ideas and that you're just going to bother a lot of people and you're going to have ideas. Like, I avoid the hot charge topics. There's no need to be writing about those. There's so many things to write about beyond that. And so I don't say sharp like write about those topics. That's hot. I'm saying sharp to say sharp to say, say things that mean something, to say things where somebody could very reasonably take the other side of a perspective and make a great argument. And I try to come out and say, these are the things I believe and write about those things that, you know what, they might be wrong, but they're sure as hell going to be interesting and they're going to make you think. And my Twitter is about

helping people, about making people smarter, about celebrating optimism, about celebrating ambition and making people turn on turn on their brains and say, hmm, I've never thought about that before. And you know what? If they disagree with me, that's totally fine. But if I'm making them think differently,

I've done my job. One more question. I know we've got to run, man. But I love people like you who are studying others and ideas, reading a lot, meeting interesting people. I'm curious to get your take on this.

So this whole podcast is a study of excellence. people who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time. And from your perspective and all of your work and your study and your meeting of interesting people, what have you found to be some of the commonalities among people who have sustained excellence? Obsession, vision, and a keen understanding at what people are really good at. So what they're really good at. So I'll take each of those in turn. So the first is obsession.

Doing great work is hard. And you need to love what you do in order to do great work. You will only be a prolific creator, for example, once actually creating gives you more joy than publishing that work and getting all this positive feedback. That is the obsession. Last night, there was 30 minutes before dinner. And I said, I'm going to go downstairs. And I just realized, oh, somebody should start an online course for public speaking.

And in 30 minutes, I came up with a series of tweets saying, this is what your business model should look like. You should start with consulting for online course creators. Here's why. Then I went into an app called Concepts. I drew a Venn diagram of what you should be focusing on. And I went, boom, boom, boom. That is obsession. I can't live without creation.

It is what I do. It is the thing that fuels me and energizes me. The next is some kind of combination of vision and ambition, a belief that you can set a goal and to make that goal concrete and then to march towards that goal and a goal that scares you, a goal that drives you, and a goal that says, wow, I can't believe that I could be so honored as if it's like my calling to do this work. And that goal will drive you and it'll set your sides high. And then the final thing is a very keen understanding of what you're good at and what you're not good at. Very surprisingly, if you ask the average person, what are you good at? They're either going to

say, I don't know or give you a very diluted answer that actually doesn't mean anything at all. Oh, I'm good at leadership. I'm good at communication and I'm kind of funny. That's, that's, that's, that's, that's not going to cut it. What I'm really good at, for example, is I'm very good at inspiring through communication, reaching extremely high level people, and then setting a vision and knowing exactly what I need to do to get there. And all of these things, I'm very good at doing that on the internet using Twitter, email, and writing as my distribution mechanism. Anything outside of that, I basically just try to delegate. And so I know that I'm so good at that and I love doing that.

And honestly, I'm really bad at a lot of things. And so anything outside of that circle of competence and circle of excitement for me, because I also like doing those things a lot, I say, you know what, I'm not going to do that. And so to your question about excellence, what I find is people who are consistently excellence know exactly how to, they have this combination of obsessive traits, setting a vision for themselves and knowing exactly what they're going to double down on because they say, I'm great at this, but also have the humility to say, I'm not good at that. There's somebody else who will execute this better than me and they're not afraid to hand that responsibility over.

Love it. David, thank you so much for being here, man. Where would you send my listeners and viewers to learn more about you online. Yeah, everywhere. Geez. So Twitter at David underscore Perel.R.com. That's P-E-R-E-L-L-1-R-2-Ls. And I have a podcast called the North Star podcast with interviews quite similar to this one. And my course is called Right of Passage. Ryan, thank you very much. Thanks so much for being here, man. I'd love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. I'd love that too. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, man. David Perel is one of those people that makes you think.

He's not afraid to take a position or to share his ideas daily. And those are the types of people that I like to follow. The ones you can tell have put a lot of thought into it, have written and rewritten about that topic, and are willing to share in public. And I would urge you to think about how you can, do that more, how you can put more deep thought into what you're doing on a daily basis. A few of the other takeaways. Do things that are unique in demand, but the world doesn't have

yet. What could that be for you within your business? And then the first draft is what is top of mind. Rewriting is rethinking. It's the process to make our ideas better. This is why all of us should be writing on a regular basis in order to rethink our ideas, get more clarity. When you speak up in a meeting, you want to be clear on what you think and what you believe, and that's why the process of writing and rewriting will help you become a better speaker, a more thoughtful person. And then learning in public is the best way to build a network. Publishing your work creates the opportunity for others to want to come to you. And that's why you should develop the guts to do it on a regular basis.

I have to say thank you so much once again for continuing to spread the word about the learning leader show, telling a friend or two. Because you continue to do that, you give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much. Talk with you soon. Can't wait.