Writing like a sprinter

`0:15:17`

write you know 10,000 words cuz that's what they do in the book publishing industry. Well I listened to your interview with Derek Sivers who's like one of my favorite people and writers and all that. And uh he said it the same way I would say which is write a bunch of essays first essentially then you can sort of compile a book. So I didn't set out to we never set out to write a book necessarily. We never really set out to write a book except Remote. Remote we kind of did. But but It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Rework and Getting Real. Getting Real was actually a book. But some of those things were posted as blog posts first. So it's sort of a collection and then we then we modified and cleaned them up and made it like a singular voice cuz my writing style is different than David's writing style, my business partner and so we kind of wanted to unify the things. But typically we put out a bunch of essays first to sort of establish it without thinking about a book in the future. But eventually it's like we have

`0:16:04`

a books worth of material here. Can we turn this into a book? It's not enough just to collect the essays it's enough to have them first, write them one at a time over many years and then put them together. But your sprinter analogy, I was a sprinter. And uh Finally I a sports analogy I capped out at 400. The 400 meter for me was like it. I could not run the 800. I mean I could run it but I would I was bad. Yeah. So I like it's great the indoor 50, 100, 200, 4 by 1 relay, 4 by 2 relay, all those relays and I could run the 400. But if I tried to run the 800 no matter how hard I tried I would run it poorly. I just am not built that And it's a good way to think about writing cuz like if I can write a 400 or less essentially, 400 meter or less

`0:16:49`

essay I'll do that well. But if I push myself further than that, I mean you could say like maybe you should push yourself. What's wrong with pushing yourself? There's nothing wrong with that except to the point like I don't actually enjoy writing long things. I don't really like that. So I think there's more of a it's more fun to be even though I'm a bit wordy in this moment here but it's more fun to be actually more creatively challenging and intellectually stimulating for me to try to be concise with words in a way where I don't need to add anything more. This is the thing, it's short, you get it and then you fill in the gaps. So I really believe in a lot in asking the reader to to think. I don't want to lay it all out and give them no room to think. Like Rework and our books they typically