Writing like a sprinter

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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

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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

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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

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suggestions but they're not really there's no calls to action. It's not like do these seven things and you will become whatever. It's like here's a point of view and we're just going to leave it out there and then you can think about it. I I like writing that way. How much of your rejection of precedent is something that you consciously cultivate and think about or how much of that is just temperamental in your personality? Well I think it starts with the personality then what ends up happening is you start to you start to like double down on your own stuff. Like for us to write a long book right now, like not an essay based book but like a literally like a you know 30 page chapters or something would be it'd be hard for us to do that. I don't think we're very good at it but also I don't think we would feel like it would

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be us. Right. So uh it starts with with with what's natural. And then I just want to stay within the natural realm. I really think that the the thing I'm trying to get across here is that it's okay to know your limits and work within them and not feel like to become a writer you must write like someone else or you must emulate this style or if you're writing short essays you're not really a writer. Like a real writer would write a long essay or short means you don't have anything to say or what no it's like this is how you communicate, get really good at that and be yourself. Just be yourself with your writing. The thing I've always hated about writing um there go the eyebrows go up. Interesting. Um tell me tell me tell me more. was was was before. Was was when I had to write things I didn't care about