Will Larson: preference

Transcript context

…That's incredible, especially because you've had intense jobs for all of those years or most of those years. Very high pressure, fast growing hypergrowth companies. Somehow you find time to work. So first, let me just double click slash co-sign your advice here around paying attention to what gives you energy and working on things that you're actually curious about. This is exactly the advice I give to people. A lot of people start this full-time writer, creator life, and they're like, "What do people want? What do people want me to write about? What's popular? What's going to inspire go viral?" And that's easy to do a couple times, but then you end up creating this job for yourself that you don't want. You don't want to be spending all your days writing about AI if you're not that excited by AI or whatever's hot these days. What I find is important is almost like 80, 90% of what you write has to be stuff you're excited about. And then maybe there's a bit of, "Here's what I know people really want. Here's what I know is going to do really well." Because otherwise you just burn out. You create a job for yourself that you don't want. Why would you do that? Yeah. I just a hundred percent agree with that. I think the other thing is that everyone converges on the same thing that they think people want. So it's crypto two years ago. It's like AI right now or it's counter AI. AI is going to ruin the world. It's hard to say something very novel because, one, everyone is trying to say something about it. Two, it's almost certainly not what you're that knowledgeable about where if you just stick in your lane, I think the biggest risk to writers is quitting. A little bit like the 40-year career idea. The biggest risk to content creation of any sort is quitting soon because you get burned out. The biggest risk is not that you grow too slow initially. There's always this sense that you've missed the wave. It's too late to join Substack. The top writers are already there. You'll never be a top writer. It's too late to podcast. There's too many podcasts. You'll never make it. It's too late to join Medium. You'll never make it. There's too many Medium writers. But it is just not true. If you just keep writing good stuff, you'll build an audience over time and you can take that audience from platform to platform. What really matters is finding something you can actually keep doing for the next decade. That's way harder than doing it for one year. We have the same exact advice on this. This is exactly the things I tell everyone. When I joined Substack, I thought it was too late. I was like, "Man, it's over." And when I started this podcast like, "Oh man, there's a billion podcasts. How is it ever going to work?" So I so agree, and I also so agree on the fact that this whole thing is such a... It's a long game. There's a lot of people. I always say it's easy to start a newsletter, hard to keep it up. Nobody actually keeps it up because people are going to come and go. The thing that really separates success from failure is just people that can keep at it. There's not an end game to this. It's an infinite game and it's about being able to sustain that over the long term.…

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