Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I started the newsletter saying I'm going to post once a week. You'll have one pinned up post. And I started to do that, but interesting enough, eventually I upped it to two, so I now promise people two posts a week. There's more in depth and more timeless posts about some software engineering topic on Tuesdays, and there's something that's called the scoop, something a bit more timely, where I reflect or analyze what's going on in the market, interesting stuff I'm hearing. And every now and then there's a bonus post. So I'll say two on average, but the second one came a lot later. But initially in the first few months I was like, I have this one post per week, and it needs to be good. And it was interesting, because you would think writing a post a week is not a big deal. It's easy. As you said, let's say you're making 300K just writing one post a week. But it actually was pretty stressful in the beginning, because it turns out to write that post, it takes at least a few days or sometimes even longer. Sometimes it takes a week or two for me to research in terms of talking with people. I chose topics that are not covered, because why would people pay for something that is out there already or well known? Then I need to write [inaudible 00:27:10] a first draft. I get some feedback from people who I trust often, not always, but I often do. And then there's an editing phase where I work with an editor who helps make sure that it's just correct. And all these things add up. Even if I only spend a day researching the stuff, it's a day researching, then I have a draft on day two. Day three I get feedback, on day four it's editing, it's almost a whole week. So I was working on parallel things at the same time, and I was often running against the deadline, I was barely finishing it, which is not what I was expecting initially. The first few months I feel was a bit more stressed, but again, the good thing is I cleared my calendar, so I said I'm not talking with anyone, I'm just doing this. So in that sense it was good. But the one thing I realized, if you look at any journalists who's doing stuff full time, and they're writing, not these clickbait articles, but actually in depth. You look at the Washington Post or New York Times, search for their name, and look up the articles that they write, and they're going to be longer articles. They have like one a month. Seriously. You look at the investigative journalist, they might even have less. And they have a bit of a different level, they have to check with legal and all those things, but my editor is a journalist, so he was actually telling me, even back then, "You actually write a lot of original stuff," because a lot of my emails are about five, 6,000 words, which is considered very long. Yeah. When you said that people listening might be like, one post a week is easy, I think most people are the opposite. They're just like, I can't write anything. I don't have time for any writing. How can you ever write one good thing a week? So I think there's both sides to it. And it's cool that you shared the process. Do you have a specific cadence per post? It's like Monday draft, Tuesday review, Wednesday editor. Is that how you work? I write every post over multiple weeks, most of them. Some of them I might be able to write faster, but what I now have is, nowadays I actually write two articles. So I have the Thursday that is the scoop, which actually is a lot easier for me to write, interestingly enough. And my cadence is, on Monday I finish up the last of the post that goes out on Tuesday. It's just small edits, but it's already done pretty much, so it's just a few small tweaks, and maybe I have some feedback coming in. On Tuesday, I publish this post, and I do some free writing. I write about some other ideas that I have that's going to be future posts. On Wednesday, it's my free day in between, where I... It's interesting, because what I feel is, when I don't have pressure, I tend to not do much stuff, which might just... My mind's saying, "You just need to chill." Maybe that's it. But one thing I miss from the corporate world... And if you're listening and you're in a job and you're thinking, "Gergely's job is so amazing," one thing that I liked and I really miss about working at Uber is, I actually had a schedule. This is weird, I hated it back then, but I needed to do these things, and whenever you have a pressure, you do it. And this works with my newsletter. I put in the second newsletter I think to have a bit more pressure. Because the second part of Wednesday, I'm already starting to write my Thursday newsletter. On Thursday, I write that Thursday newsletter, and on Friday I'm now writing the next newsletter for Tuesday. So almost every day except for Wednesday, I have a strong pressure to write. Which when people ask, "Gergely, how do you write so much?" Because I did the maths, and I wrote four or five books' worth of content just last year. It's because I have these deadlines, and as you said, I also know that thousands of people are paying me, they have expectations of me. And so this is how it's done. If you want to write a book, the easiest way is go to a publisher and sign a contract, not because of the money. In software engineering, you're not going to get much [inaudible 00:30:57] $5,000 or something like that. That's what I was offered initially. But it's the pressure. You absolutely should go to a publisher or have some external... Someone to hold you accountable, and then you'll get it done. And I'll let you in on another secret, or not so secret.…

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