Julie Zhuo: preference

Transcript context

…That's exactly how I feel a lot of times. When I go back to my own pieces, like, "Oh yeah. Okay. That's what I wanted to remember." On the writing, something I wanted to ask about is you've kind of slowed down for a good reason. You have a startup to run and you've started doing more tweeting than news lettering and blogging. How do you think about that? Just, is that intentional? How do you think about, I don't know, Twitter versus newsletters and other things? Yeah, it was very much. This is another New Year's resolution that came up later. Right? One of the things that I recognize about myself is I kind of have a tendency to ramble, and I've gotten this feedback as well in 360s where I'm not always the clearest communicator. I can be a pretty good storyteller and I am clearer in writing often than I am in person, but this was another area that I wanted to get better at. Right? I wanted to get better at in the moment communicating more clearly and being just a little bit sharper, a little bit crisper in the points that I had to make. I remember I work with a number of colleagues who are just so good at this. Right? There will be some really complex topic, this big product thing that we're trying to figure out, and in the moment, they would go and they would say, "Okay, I see. This is what the problem is. The problem is one, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, two, blah, blah, blah, three. Right?" Everybody like, "Yeah, that's amazing. That's so crystal clear." This huge thing we're all talking past each other there now became boiled to something so sharp and so beautiful. Right? I always had so much respect and admiration for the people who could do that, and that wasn't me, but I was like, "Okay, well, as anything, if I have a thing I like and want and admire and respect, I could at least get better at it. Maybe I'll never be at that level, but I can work towards it." And one of the ways I saw of working towards that is, well, let's just change it up. I'd been doing long-form, which again, works really well for these stories and this kind of more meandering prose, but what if I just push myself to communicate in a much shorter form which is going to force me to really strip away all that ornamentation and focus on the core idea. And I was like, "I'm just going to go and publish threads on Twitter for a year." Again, same thing. Write once a week a little thread and just take whatever is the advice I needed to give myself and then boil that down to a tweet form. So, also, it has helped me. It has helped me to get better at enumerating things. I think more naturally now sometimes. It's like 1, 2, 3, and that has helped me as well in just, again, the day job and the way that I communicate. Still a long ways to go. But I think Twitter is really great at that. It's really great at trying to boil it down to the essence of what it is that one wants to communicate. I love that you use these tools to help work on a very specific skill that you're hoping to develop. So, you said that worked. Is that something you'd recommend to folks that are working on something like this and have a challenge there too?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.