Wes Kao: recommendation

Transcript context

…This is very much along the lines of the whole Amazon six-page memo where Jeff Bezos just realized, "If you can't write it out as a long memo and explain yourself in prose, you don't actually know what you're saying." And it's a really good filter for helping people actually crystallize and know themselves, "Okay, I see. I don't actually know what I'm doing here." And I love this is a microcosm of that. Can you just make a bullet point a real sentence versus a fragment of a sentence? I'm thinking about as a listener being like, "Okay, how do I actually get better at this?" So maybe let's take a tangent. I know that you teach a whole course, you do all this stuff hands-on with people to help them actually build these skills. For someone that hasn't taken the course or isn't taking it, what's a good way to start practicing these skills and know if what you're writing is getting better, is good. Is it find a mentor, find someone that you think is a great writer and have them review stuff? Any tips there? Yeah. So I have a pretty first principles driven approach for this, which is to think about how long does it take me right now to get to the reaction I'm looking for from my recipient? If it takes a bunch of back and forth and a bunch of friction, then that's my baseline. And once you start practicing some of these communication skills, how does that speed up? If you would have had seven different touch points of back and forth, does that shrink to two to three? Not every point of friction is going to be avoidable, but a lot of it is if you get better at communicating. So I like watching for the reaction and how quickly and how enthusiastically I'm able to get that reaction. And for the things that are working, do more of that. For things that are not working, adjust your execution because it might not be that the tactic doesn't work, it might be your execution of it wasn't great. And keep trying, basically. So the advice here is just see how well you're writing/meeting/suggestion goes, how well it does. And if it's not like there's the ideal immediately, "Yes, let's do it." And then there's the, "I don't really understand." There's the spectrum of response. And what I'm hearing is just pay attention to if the speed to getting what you want is increasing in general.…

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