Julian Shapiro: preference

Transcript context

…Cool. First, a little context, you write these super in depth handbooks on a bunch of different topics on growth and writing and muscle building and things like that. First of all, could you just explain what these handbooks are and why you create them? They're forcing functions for me to hold myself accountable and to be thorough when learning something for my own benefit. That's all they are. Basically if I want to go learn growth or writing well or some other topic, I will go ahead and do a ton of research, read everything I can get my hands on, do a ton of experimentation to try to build a set of novel insights that you couldn't find from other people's research hopefully, and then the next stage is try to make it as concise and actionable as possible so that I can reference it for my own selfish benefit. Here's my guidebook for myself on writing better blog posts, for example. And then by the time I've done that work, what usually happens is its only like, I'm going to make up a number here, an extra 30 hours of work to make it palatable and digestible for the public. If I've done all this work privately, why not make it accessible publicly? At that point, it winds up being acquisition fodder for essentially building an audience and distributing my thoughts further. That's why I do that. But the thing that I pride myself on with them is by no means are they thoroughly unique, but in every one there's a lot of original stuff folks on average have never heard of before. And that's what I'm proud of, is coming up with those insights between the lines that make that thing, whatever the topic is, much more approachable. I've succeeded, in my view, if I've made something that people often mistakenly think of as overwhelmingly complex very simple for them to follow. I think that's where the dopamine hit comes from for them. Well, my experience, you definitely hit the nail in my head with the handbooks you put out. It's an interesting middle ground between a newsletter and a book. It's cool to just have a digital way of doing that, of just kind of consolidating a bunch of ideas and going really in depth, but not having to write a book. Well, speaking of the contract there.…

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