Julian Shapiro: belief

Transcript context

…Sure. This actually goes back to your question about Twitter. What can one do to build an audience on Twitter? It often comes down to writing things that are novel. Novel is what powers click bait in most cases. The other way is via curiosity gap, where you raise a question you don't answer, but the other half is novelty is what gets people to click into a thread and read it. Novelty, I define, as new idea, so something I haven't heard of before, that's also significant, so it's not some trivial fact about Kim Kardashian, and it's something that I wouldn't have easily intuited on my own. When you have those ingredients, it's new, it's significant, and you wouldn't have easily thought of it on your own, that's when you trigger that dopamine hit reaction, I'm not being scientifically accurate here, but you're going to get that dopamine hit like, "Whoa! That's super cool." The more you have readers pausing going, "Whoa! That was interesting," the more novel your writing is. My whole approach to writing is write something out, and then point out all the points of novelty. I do that by actually having 20 friends read something I've written and highlight the sentences that made them go, "Whoa." And then I have this visualized map in a given blog post, where are the areas that people go, "That's really interesting," and then I can see all the white space between the interesting parts. I go in and I condense that white space. I chop it down so that the frequency of novelties as high as possible. This is how you get a blog post that just has this phenomenal momentum that gets the read to completion rate to be very high. The question is, what exactly does novelty look like? I've identified about five different categories for it, and this is the backbone of how I write in many cases. The first category of novelty is what I call counterintuitive information. You tell people something and they go, "Oh wow. I never realized that the world worked that way," or different categories and you tell people counter-narrative information. That's where people respond, "Wow. That's not how I was told the world worked." Whereas counterintuitive novelty is, "That's not how I would've thought the world worked," counter-narrative novelty is, "That's not what I've been told. I've been lied to. Now you're telling me the truth." That also triggers a dopamine hit. Third category of novelty is just pure shock and awe like, "That's crazy. I would've never believed that's true." For example, there's a volcano that's going to erupt the next 15 years that's going to swallow this whole island. Wow, that's shocking. Holy moly. Next category is what a lot of popular Twitter users do is what I call elegant articulation, where you're taking an idea... Naval does this, Naval on Twitter, the founder of AngelList. He'll say something that's a complicated rich thought and boil it down into a very concise sentence. And then the reader goes, "Wow, that's beautiful. this, Naval on Twitter, the founder of AngelList. He'll say something that's a complicated rich thought and boil it down into a very concise sentence. And then the reader goes, "Wow, that's beautiful. I couldn't have said that any better myself." That also triggers that dopamine reaction. There's a few more, but the point I want to get at here is all of these are formats for identifying the types of things you could say to get people to go, "Whoa." That's what I think of as novelty. Something I've found to kind of identify something that I've written is going to be interesting is I just read it myself and I feel what I feel when I'm reading it the first time. Often I find that if I'm like, "Oh wow, this is really good and really exciting," I've learned to trust that feeling wherever that comes from. That's just like another way of knowing if your thing is interesting is like, are you excited about it? Are you interested in it as you're reading it? And that fades after you read it like 10 times and kind of edit and edit, but that's just a small tip I've learned, just kind of trust your own gut feeling when you're excited about something that you're writing about.…

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