The opener of David Perell’s The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online:
Writing online is the fastest way to accelerate your career.
It’s the best way to learn faster, build your resume, and find peers and collaborators who can create job and business opportunities for you.
Content builds on itself. It multiplies and compounds.
Day and night, your content searches the world for people and opportunities. Projects, mentors, speaking gigs, job offers, pitches, investment opportunities, interview requests, podcast appearances, and invitations to special events. It all starts with sharing ideas online.
The whole thing is loaded with good advice I agree with. I like the bit about how you don’t have to have a mass of essays on day one. There are different types of useful content building, including curation. I’m personally a fan of the links-with-commentary approach to blogging, which many of the biggest and best blogs do and yet I still feel is underutilized.
Some solid mythbusting too:
Most online writing advice falls into two schools of thought.
One school encourages people to write anything and everything. It doesn’t matter what – they’ll tell you to put your head down, hit the keyboard, and ignore everything else. The other school sells hacks: always publish on Sunday at 6:08 pm, hire a freelancer to upvote your Reddit posts, and only write about what’s trending in the news.
Both strategies completely miss the point of writing. Focus only on publishing a lot of words, and you won’t build a distribution advantage; focus only on distribution and the quality of your work will suffer.
Writing online, on a platform you own, really is kindling for opportunity.
This pairs nicely with Max Böck’s Make Free Stuff:
Despite what web3 claims, it’s possible to “own” your content without a proof of it on the blockchain (see: IndieWeb). It’s also possible to create things just for the sake of putting them out into the world.
The best growth hack is still to build something people enjoy, then attaching no strings to it. You’d be surprised how far that can get you.
