Kevin Yien: belief

Transcript context

…I have a friend who's a very good writer and a poet and helped me develop my writing early on, Vanessa, and she said exactly the same thing. Just to become a better writer, read beautiful writing, and it just kind of infuses you or your brain. In your experience, is there anything you read, anything you found really effective? Anything that you think influenced the way you write or think that people can check out? I explicitly do not mean read a bunch of other PM artifacts. You're not going to become a better writer by reading PRDs or whatever it is or support articles. It needs to be writing that compels. That's the theme I would go back to because that's what you're trying to do at the end of the day. And when I say compels, I mean it pushes you to action. Because if you read something and you're like, "Oh, that's interesting," that's not enough. You need to be able to give someone something that then allows them to do something differently. And so the things for me that have been best... Obviously there's all the Paul Graham essays, I think his writing is very succinct, very clear, that's not novel. I learned a lot by finding specific voices back in the day on Twitter, and it wasn't always what they were posting on Twitter, but if they wrote an essay or a post, that would be their crispus thinking. And so you can use these broadcast channels to find where their golden nuggets are, but then spend time with those instead and don't worry about all the additional noise that comes with it. Paul Graham actually, you mentioned him, he has a great piece on how to become a good, that we'll link to, where basically his advice is, write the way you talk. Just keep it really simple and really regular. And so we'll link to that. Is there anything else along these lines of writing that you'd recommend for folks that are like, "Okay, I need to become a great writer. How do I do this? "?…

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