Privacy is like virginity. Once you give it up, there’s no undoing. This is why I’ve been content consuming what others produce all these years. At least that’s what I told myself.
At the end of the last decade, I finally understood why I can no longer lurk in the shadows. I need to write. There’s a slew of reasons, but the most compelling is survival.
- Anonymity begets mediocrity
- Build a trust battery grid
- Stake your reputation in public
- Prepare for opportunities
- Write to learn
- Run towards my fear
- Work in public
Anonymity begets mediocrity
The world is increasingly more networked. As direct channels are formed between us, the cost to reach the masses is now affordable to anyone on the Internet. Before the Internet, you’d have to buy a radio or TV ad to reach millions. Now, you can just throw a chair off your balcony.
With more people gaining reach, there’s a risk of the rest of us who are anonymous getting marginalized. As civilization becomes more complex, we evolved from hunter-gatherers to a networked civilization. A vertex (a dot) with a low degree (small number of connections) doesn't cut it any more.
The last Chartstravaganza of the decade! … civilization advances
— Plan Maestro (@PlanMaestro) December 29, 2019
(@necsi) pic.twitter.com/gFBhQd7MAQ
Anonymity doesn't mean completely unknown. No one's completely alone. You at least have your family, neighbors, baristas, friends, and coworkers. But outside of these circles if you’re unknown, well, welcome to the club.
But there’s a cost to anonymity. Imagine you’re trying to pick a restaurant to visit in a foreign neighborhood. You pull up yelp and sort by most reviewed. Do you know what restaurants are on the last page? Heck, there isn’t even an option to sort by least reviewed. This is how the world chooses who to work with on new opportunities. The Pareto principle dictates the bulk of the opportunities go to the top few. The rest of us are left with breadcrumbs.
So, don’t be the restaurant on the last page. Start writing to build up your network.
Build a trust battery grid
I first heard of the trust battery in Shane Parrish’s interview with Tobi Lutke, Shopify CEO and founder. Tobi described the trust battery as a concept to represent the gradient of trust between two people. You start out with say a 50% trust and the battery charges from there as you deliver on your promises. Once the battery is fully charged, you gain full autonomy. But like a real battery, as you fail to keep on your commitments the battery starts to drain.
When you start writing, you’re planting your flag on the Internet. Staking a piece of the influence pie. But pie is the wrong word because influence is not a zero-sum game. No one needs to lose influence for you to gain influence. You gain influence as you gain readers. And your trust battery for each reader starts at maybe 20%.
As your reach widens and as you continue to deliver, you start to build a trust battery grid. This trust battery grid creates a form of prestige. Not unlike the prestige of attending ivy leagues or working at FAANG. In fact, I’d venture to say the prestige gained from a trust battery grid is more valuable and highly prized because no one else has the prestige you gained. It’s one-of-a-kind, bespoke prestige. You’re known for being you. Not as a Stanford dropout. Not as an ex-Googler. But uniquely you.
That’s not to say the prestige from top schools and companies don’t matter. They matter a lot. According to Will Larson, companies still largely start sourcing hires from FAANG and elite schools. But if you don’t have those credentials, you need to think differently.
Stake your reputation in public
So, how do you think differently? Simple. Just share your opinions publicly. Your opinions are what readers come for. Not your quoting of others'. Exploit your uniqueness to the fullest.
I find David Sacks' piece on creating category leadership in SaaS applicable to individuals as well. Fortunately, all 7.8 billion of us are born with a unique mind. It should come naturally for us to just be ourselves. Think from your point of view. If you're able to provide a unique point of view, then you'd have defined a whole new category because no one else sees it like you do.
It makes intuitive sense that the startup that defines a new SaaS category will be perceived as the early category leader. It will thus be the beneficiary of investors, talent and customers all seeking to coalesce around an early leader.
- David Sacks
Naval Ravikant distills this down to an eight-word truism.
No one can compete with you on being you.
— Naval (@naval) November 13, 2016
Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.
If you're able to develop a unique insight consistently, you then become the only source of such insights. It's hard work. You'll have to read broadly and deeply to come into such insights. But that's how you provide value. Don't worry about being right 100% of the time. They are after all just opinions. Most opinions implicitly come with what Nassim Taleb calls "boctaoe" - but of course there are obvious exceptions.
Andrew Chen at a16z has some wonderful tips on writing. My takeaway is: Just. Write. Every. Week.
In fact, it's okay if you get things wrong. So long as you're willing to change your mind when new facts are presented to you. Staking your reputation on your opinions and your readiness to be proven wrong are what gains you respect. This creates a flywheel effect that further cements your reputation as a learner.
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
- John Maynard Keynes
Prepare for opportunities
People often to refer to luck as unexpected opportunities that happen to fall in your lap. This is true to some extent in the sense that you couldn't have known when the opportunity would come.
Truth of the matter is paratus fortuna iuvat. Luck favors the prepared.
Back in 2008, during the global financial crisis, Goldman Sachs offered Warren Buffett a deal to invest $5B in preferred stock with a 10% dividend and another $5B in warrants to buy the common stock at $115 per share. He basically got the warrants for free. Why did Goldman seek out Buffett specifically? Because Buffett's reputation means a vote of confidence so influential it carries more weight than everyone except for the US government. Was he just lucky with Goldman? Not at all. When Goldman called, he negotiated for the free warrants because he knew what his investment meant. Buffett spent a lifetime preparing for exactly this sort of opportunities. Sure. In order to play, you needed to have capital at hand. But Buffett wasn't the only one with that kind of capital. It was his reputation that Goldman needed.
You may think Buffett's an outlier. Fine. I present exhibit B. Semil Shah interviewed with 120 companies for a job before he was known. 120 "no"s and he still didn't get a job. But the dude kept on working his ass off. It wasn't until he started writing and helping folks out that he finally got noticed.
A few ppl lately have asked me “how did you get to know people in valley?” my response over email tonight: pic.twitter.com/g5laj9Y2VT
— Semil (@semil) December 8, 2014
Your writing accumulates to form a body of work that builds up your reputation. This body of work also informs anyone about you better than any resume can. Let your work speak for itself. At some point, your reputation precedes you. When that happens, semper paratus.
Look
If you had
One shot
Or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted
In one moment
Would you capture it
Or just let it slip?
- Eminem, Lose Yourself
Write to learn
If my sole goal of writing is to build up a network, I figured I'd probably give up after 2 - 3 posts because it takes a while to see traction. So, there has to be a selfish reason for me to continue writing. I can't think of a better reason than to learn.
Writing forces you to fill in the gaps and reconcile inconsistencies within your mental model. Writing is not the same as taking notes. Taking notes is just offloading short term memory to a device. Writing is explaining. You can't explain what you don't fully understand.
Richard Feynman developed a technique to learn new concepts effectively. The Feynman technique consists of four steps:
- Write the name of the concept
- Explain the concept by writing in layman terms. This will highlight gaps in your knowledge.
- Reread the areas where you struggle to explain and relearn them. Repeat until you easily explain the concept.
- Distill your explanation into its simplest form.
Because the technique requires you to explain in your own words, you have to fully grok the concept to be able to write it down. This is the point when it sticks!
Run towards my fear
This last reason is more personal and may not apply to you. I have always guarded my privacy ferociously. I'd believed that successful but unknown is better than successful and famous. This is why I never had (and still don't have) a Friendster, Myspace, Facebook or Instagram account. I have a Twitter lurker account because Twitter is a rich fountain of pithy insights if you can sift through the animosity. I only signed up for a real Twitter account April last year. But I'm still lurking.
Why do I lurk? Impostor syndrome.
Jeff Atwood calls this "fear of sucking".
Mostly, I think it's the fear that gets us, in all its forms. Fear of not achieving. Fear of not keeping up. Fear of looking dumb. Fear of being inadequate. Fear of being exposed. Fear of failure. The only thing preventing us from being awesome is our own fear of sucking.
- Jeff Atwood
My fear is irrational. I look dumb a lot in front of my coworkers. But I'm afraid of being caught a fraud in public.
So, how did I get over this fear? Survival.
If I don't write, eventually I'll be marginalized in a connected civilization. And that's a threat to my family's survival. That scares me more than anything. And the best way to face fear is to run towards it. Thus, I write or die trying.
Creators often say they're scared of putting themselves out there. What we tell them:
— Sahil Lavingia (@shl) January 16, 2020
Think of the dumb tweets you read last week.
Think of the meh paintings.
Think of the stupid videos.
Can't remember any? Neither will anyone else, about you. Just get started!
Work in public
Producing value is hard. 100x harder than consuming. Because you have to be original. You have to come up with shit. And you have to keep coming up with shit all the time. It takes grit. I have mad respect for people with persistence. My wife told me about a guy she corresponded with, Jeff Jonas, who never missed a single Ironman at the age of 55. Blew my mind.
The thing is grit doesn't come easy for anyone. It looks easy. But it never is. The trick is to have a system to make it work.
Don't focus on building your reach even if that's your goal. Focus on shipping. Ship every week. My plan is to just hit 53 out of 53 weeks in 2020.
Counting blog posts only motivates up to some extent. What I really need is a forcing function. A public commitment that should I fail to deliver will damage my reputation. The best way to do that is to setup a weekly newsletter.
Why a newsletter? It establishes a bidirectional channel with your readers. They are no longer anonymous visitors on Google Analytics. They are people with emails. Some of them you might even recognize. It's easy to break a commitment made to a stranger. Try breaking a commitment made to readers you correspond with. What excuse are you going to come up with to avoid disappointment?
There is actually a psychological principle called consistency that drives us to stick to our commitments.
Consistency is activated by looking for, and asking for, small initial commitments that can be made. In one famous set of studies, researchers found rather unsurprisingly that very few people would be willing to erect an unsightly wooden board on their front lawn to support a Drive Safely campaign in their neighborhood.
However in a similar neighborhood close by, four times as many homeowners indicated that they would be willing to erect this unsightly billboard. Why? Because ten days previously, they had agreed to place a small postcard in the front window of their homes that signaled their support for a Drive Safely campaign. That small card was the initial commitment that led to a 400% increase in a much bigger but still consistent change.
- Influence at Work
So, I figured I can use the same trick on myself. This essay is my voluntary, active, and public initial written commitment to write weekly. Setting up the weekly newsletter will identify you, the readers I'm making this commitment to. This will serve as a forcing function to keep me consistent with my commitment.
Patrick McKenzie said it best: "Don't end the week with nothing."
One down. 52 to go. Gradatim ferociter.
