The Writer Who Sold 15 Million Books | with Mark Manson | How I Write Podcast

whenever I write I always try to imagine myself in a bar or a restaurant what would I say out loud if you can make the reader see the scene that's when it comes alive my blog went from maybe 100,000 monthly readers to like 2 and2 million what's the lesson from that I had studied a lot of copyrighting which turns out is extremely useful for any writer I didn't realize that someone could write with that level of descriptiveness and it blew my head off you have a 100 great ideas but that doesn't mean you have a book tell me about how you met Will Smith he wanted to do a memoir and he had known that for a while would you just hang out of the house it is really hard to get more than an hour with Will Smith at any given time yeah you were one of the guys who B me into online reading which then got me into online writing and it was cuz I read your dating blog in college and actually the thing that got me really excited was oh my goodness I don't know how to talk to girls yeah here's a Blog and I can actually learn how to do that so it's just crazy to be here almost a decade later and I realized that last night as I was prepping for this it's funny actually how many I don't want to call you guys like Alum but like how many podcasters YouTubers authors Tech Founders that I run into and they're like yeah I read your [ __ ] in college I was like I was all over your dating stuff when I was 19 and now they're third and crushing it dude I would just like go to my room and I'd be like you can learn this stuff like I don't know why but that was a crazy concept to me that I could learn practical skills by reading and I know that that sounds ridiculous but if you think of that and compare it to school school was all about literature I was like I'm not interested in this and it was all about trying to memorize things I was like I'm not interested in this but your blog was super practical and I was like yes this is a problem that I have and I realized that I could read to solve my problems which was like a brain explosion yeah that that's honestly that was the Epiphany for me about five years before that when I found Neil Strauss as the game yeah it just it's funny because I don't actually think most the advice in that book is good I think most of it's pretty bad but just the concept that you can actively improve and intentionally improve your social skills the same way you improve a basketball shot or uh it was just such a profound realization it's absolutely lifechanging tell me about this idea that you like writing about implementation rather than Theory um it's funny because I feel like I've gone back and forth over the years and it's it's it's tough because in my market which is personal development personal growth you can't really succeed with one and and not the other like you can read and understand all the things all the time like you can learn a million things about how to have a better life but if you're still sitting on your couch playing video games all day like it none of it really matters so you need to get out into the world and actually try to do stuff but if you're just going out and doing stuff and don't have the theoretical knowledge or framework to to interpret and process your experiences then that's also not really going to work and so there it's kind of this weird marriage between the two and I think earlier in my career I was very FOC I thought the theories and the Frameworks were bad and so a lot of that a lot of my effort at that time was improving upon those and I think as time has gone on or at least I'd say the last three or four years I'm much more focused on okay how do you actually make this stuff work like how do you actually get somebody from Reading 10 books and understanding everything in them to actually get off the couch and go do a thing and that's in a lot of ways that's a more complicated issue you read a lot of philosophy when you were in high school seemed like you were like at All-Star level reading difficulty in high school what was that philosophy and what were you trying to work through I tried I don't know if I like successfully processed everything I was reading but I generally found School boring and I also so I grew up in a in a pretty conservative and religious part of the country but yeah I mean my my family is not they're great people not super strong communicators and and and bad with emotions right so I grew up in that environment just in a family of like people who didn't really share how they felt or process how they felt and um and then the wider culture around me was very very conservative very Christian um which I didn't fit into I realized at a pretty early age that didn't fit into that and so I think the combination of that and the combination of my family environment it just made me very introspective and very curious about motivations and why do people do the things they do you know I would see my parents behave one way at church and then they'd come home and behave a completely different way and I was like that's weird yeah know why are you doing that and and trying to figure those sorts of things out and then I think there was just this craving for intellectual Challenge and so I I got very interested in philosophy at an early age I read a lot of n uh I got it to like Anon L who was like the Church of of Satan guy from the 60s yeah it it's that's a whole I don't necessarily recommend it but at the time it was really exciting and felt like super um uh interesting um I read all an Rand stuff in high school uh it was pretty pretty impactful at that time um and it it I don't know how much of it stuck I think it just kind of it got me exposure to a lot of that stuff at an early age what was the first book that you were just like wow reading is something I really enjoy and I might actually want to start writing I think those are two very different things oh interesting yeah very very different things I didn't really want to become a writer till I was like 28 27 28 um I really fell in love with reading probably like Middle School I remember I read Stephen King's it okay and I remember when I started I think it was sixth grade maybe I remember when I started it cuz it's 1100 bers and I remember when I started it I I thought this was it was just completely insurmountable and I finished it in a few months and I remember just being so blown away that it had given me that many like days and hours of enjoyment over that amount amount of time so I read a lot of Stephen King I read a lot of Michael kon's books in in middle school and like early High School uh and just really loved it it reading was always it's funny my Amazon account goes all the way back to I think 1998 so it's it's every once in a while I'll like dig into my prior orders like I can go back and see the books I ordered in high school and uh that's always fun that was back when Jeff Bezos was packing books himself yeah it's funny I read Bezos is um or the biography the I forget what the the everything store that's so good yeah I read that like a year or two ago and it was funny I was reading about all the things they were doing in the 90s I was like wait a second I was like one of those first two million customers or something like high school Mark like sitting on on his computer in his bedroom uh ordering books I remember I I memorized my parents credit card number um and I would buy initially I bought music I I memorized it so I could buy CDs that had the parental warning label without them knowing and uh and then I would always be like oh I bought this CD and I'd like pay him back but then they figured out I was doing that and they got mad so I was like and after that I figured out if I ordered books they wouldn't get mad so I could order as many books as I want you're a big 9inch Nails guy yeah yeah I was big 9h Nails Marilyn Manson Marilyn Manson actually got me into the philosophy okay so he was the the entry point because his message was very much like if you grow all basically all the disgruntled kids like me in Middle America he was like you don't have to believe the [ __ ] you're taught growing up you can go read other things here some things you can go read and that's that was kind of how I got started so the writing Big Bang so to speak seems to be David Foster Wallace as supposedly fun thing never do again so tell me about your experience reading that so first of all I wrote for a long time before I ever considered it a career or to to me it was just a hobby and that was online writing yeah I mean initially when I was say in college or whatever and this is I I think the reason for this is I got bad grades in writing all through school yeah me too yeah I was so bad at writing I couldn't spell it was terrible for me it was grammar I would just like mess up all the grammar dude in second grade God bless her but miss stroy didn't let me go to recess cuz I couldn't spell because four straight weeks I got it wrong on the spelling test b e c a u s e and it was the most fun year because we were redoing the school so we had all these modules and being able to go through the modules made it so fun to play tag yeah and so we didn't do kickball that year we did tag and I still it's been 20 years or something and I'm still so mad that I missed those things on the spelling test well because you couldn't spell yeah I uh so I used to write on forums a lot when I was young and I was that obnoxious guy who know if somebody disagreed with me I would write three pages explaining bullet point by bullet point why they were wrong and that was just like my idea of a fun thing to do on a Saturday and then when I started my internet businesses I started blogging because that's how you got traffic back then so you had the blog and it never even occurred to me that that was actually the better career path until I was maybe like two years in and then it was around that time that I I was first exposed to David Foster Wallace I was first exposed to his uh this is water commencement spee loved it still to this day one of my favorite things ever read it a bunch of times I was like God this guy's so wise like I have to go read his stuff and so I got online did a little bit of research and uh people raved about his non-fiction essays and I was like wow that's cool I I write non fiction essays I'll check it out and I bought a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again the title piece of that book is the story behind it is actually pretty funny so Wallace was like a pretty depressive guy and he was just kind of this like I don't know like a turd and a punch bowl everywhere he went and his his editors like they the there I think caral cruises or something like approached Harper's magazine they wanted they wanted a piece done on like their new Cruise Line and the editors thought it'd be really funny to send David on the cruise line because they're like yeah this is like the one guy who's going to hate every second of it but he's so smart and we just want to see what he's going to write and so he he wrote a whole piece about it and that that piece was so unbelievably insightful observant thoughtful funny like he he would go on the I remember there's one part of that essay where he's talking about the dining room seating arrangement yeah and he compared it to the Cold War geopolitics of the Balkans and it made sense and it was funny and I was like this guy is just on a completely different level totally different level and I think I read I mean at this point I think I've read all of his non-fiction multiple what I love about David frostell because I also love that essay is the way that he can take the most specific things and just take them to the furthest end yeah like in that piece he has he goes on this rant about how if you leave the room for 29 minutes no one touches your room no one does anything but if you leave for 31 minutes they somehow know that they can clean your room and you'll come back and everything will be perfectly done the pillows will be perfectly folded the towels all in the perfect place the chocolate on your bed and he'll spend you know like 800 words of extreme descriptiveness about how do they do this and you can just tell he's going crazy in his brain and I had the same thing I didn't realize that someone could write with that level of descriptiveness and it blew my head off yeah it it was incredibly inspiring and so that book was the moment that I was like I want to do this I want to be able to give people this feeling uh and and I at that point too the way my business my online business was going was uh the blog was doing well and everything else was doing terribly so I was like apparently the only thing I'm good at is blogging so I might as well take a stab at just being a lighter for was that a hard shift for you no it felt amazing actually like it because the the marketing side and the sales side and the business strategy side like that that those things never came naturally to me and I was constantly trying to learn them and understand them and get good enough at them whereas the writing came completely natural you know like writing a blog post for my business back then was the fun part that was the play everything else was the work and I think I I was making the same mistake that a lot of people make which is not realizing that the thing that feels like play is actually the thing you should be doing all the time amen whereas I was like well no it's it's the work that's what's going to make me money and I think once I shifted once I actually took that leap and I was like you know what I'm just going to focus us really really hard on becoming the best writer I can uh that the results immediately you know my audience immediately like 3x or something in the next few months and I was like oh okay this this makes sense now when you thought about what you were going to write about did you focus on hey this sounds interesting I'm just going to write about whatever or were you like this is my strategy I'm going to focus on this did you have any feelings like of this is what I'm supposed to write about and trying to fight that what was that like for you um to me there's kind of like a VIN diagram in my head of one circle is what the audience wants to hear one circle is what I'm excited to write about and then I guess one circle is what's good for the brand yeah for lack of a better word and I try to look for the intersection of all those things obviously it's a moving Target over time but I always if I if I ever sacrifice the other two for one it's always writing something for me like I I've always made sure that every once in a while maybe a couple times a year if there's one thing that's just like I really need to talk about and I know nobody's going to care and I know people are gonna be like what the [ __ ] Mark why why are you doing just let let one of those go a year what's an example of that um every once in a while these days you I usually put it on like Twitter or something but every once in a while like I'll write about video games and I know nobody cares about video games or I'll write about music no nobody in my audience it's so funny because I I love heavy metal and I'd say two three times over the last five years I've like written a long thing about heavy metal music and it it just gets crickets but then there's like the 10 people on my fan base who are huge metal heads and they're like oh my God this is so cool but yeah I I just think it's it's good as a creative person you need to to like let that out occasionally like don't let it build up too much I feel like you're so perceptive with the brand stuff it's interesting that you said earlier that hey the marketing stuff didn't come naturally to me because when I look at the Arc of your career you've been in so many different lanes you've been the internet blogger guy then you were were writing about how to pick up women and then you sort of went into stoicism meets you know the F-word and writing books about that now you're working on a movie like I just feel like you've been in so many different places for a writer in such a short amount of time yeah and that requires intentionality and really deliberate thought yeah I mean I would love to say every bit of that was intentional and and premeditated but a lot of it is just kind of you see an opportunity show up and you're like well [ __ ] it let's just let's see where this goes yeah and then you kind of try to make sense of it afterwards like well all right this thing turned out a little bit weird but if we put orange on it and put [ __ ] in the title then it makes sense speak like then the audience will be able to understand what it is and that cool Splash thing in yeah but all that stuff happens on accident like that Splat uh so Harper sent me the cover for subtle art and originally it was just an asteris and I was like this is so boring and so I actually put it in Photoshop and I started like testing a bunch of different things there because I I told him I was like we need something like iconic like like something easily identifiable that's like mine and of course the people at Harper don't think about that stuff they're they've got 20 other book covers to worry about so I put it in Photoshop started messing with it and I I found that Splat I was like oh this is perfect and I think I was on an airplane and you know 8 years later it's it's literally on everything I do now because it's just become associated with me so it's like I feel like a lot of brand like smart brand decisions is just a matter of trying stuff seeing what works and then just doing it again when you talk about what works you said I was testing things were you testing like hey let me show my friends see what they think were you running AB test were you just like playing around in your living room being like Oh that looks cool that looks cooler I'm going go with that it was I think I tried three or four different variations I think I found like three versions I liked but the Splat was my favorite and then I sent that to like my agent my editor maybe showed it to my team and everybody was like the Splats it and I was like okay yeah that's how I feel too so yeah it's some combo of personal taste and it it's kind of like con concentric circles you know it's like in in the center you've got to be super excited about it like don't let anything if you're not excited about something don't show it the single person I love that you've got to be excited about it first then there's kind of a a small circle of trusted confidence around right so your partner your best friend maybe a couple employees who you trust uh your agent your editor right you get their opinion then maybe you you show it to couple fans friends of friends send it to my dad or something like if you need a few more opinions and then you kind of audience test it what was the transition from internet Fame to mainstream Fame like uh really just getting recognized on the street actually it's funny because internet Fame is weird because you're basically not famous except in very specific groups right right so it's I would be just an anonymous person for eight months and then I'd go to a conference and I'd get mobbed Y and I'm like this is super weird and stressful whereas being like mainstream famous you're just moderately recognizable everywhere you go you know so you'll get like stopped at a restaurant or on the street once a week or something and it's very polite it's very nice uh because I think there's like mainstream Fame there there's more of an understanding of like you have your own life and and I'm not going to bother you whereas I think when you're kind of Internet famous uh all the other people who are doing things on the internet feel like you know like what's your blog strategy you know what are your top three tips to grow an audience on Twitter I'm like I don't know dude like I'm just trying to get a sandwich yeah yeah yeah but also your writing back then when you were internet famous was so personal I mean that was the thing that I think really captivated me mhm I felt like we were just hanging out yeah it was really cool yeah I didn't really realize that Ryan could do that it was so friendly yeah that's something I feel like a a certain level of Fame and success kind of steals that from you I don't know it's funny I've heard I forget where I heard like I I think a some comedy documentary it was a bunch of comedians sitting around talking about that how when you're starting out everybody in the audience knows you're one of them you're just a normal dude who's like stuck in traffic and his car broke down and and it's all very believable right and they were talking about how like yeah once you're like Jerry Seinfeld you can't really complain about your car breaking down because everybody knows you don't drive yourself anywhere and you know or it's there's a relatability that you have to fight for exactly and so it's up my golf stream and you know I SL for class let me just tell you about the worst thing about first class everyone's like dude no one wants to hear no nobody wants to hear it and so that's something that I I lament sometimes because I I recognize that my personal life is no longer that relatable and for most people and and I don't really get to talk about it as much what was the moment when you realized that your first book was going to be huge it took a couple years years oh wow um so first of all it was a slow burn leading up so it LO it came out it had it had a decent launch it debuted number six on the New York Times I think hung around for a couple weeks and then fell off and it fell off for a few months and it blew up on Audible first became number one on Audible and then that start started to transfer over to hard cover sales so it was around like month four or five it came back onto the New York Times list and started climbing and that whole time I was just like oh this is really cool I wonder how long it's going to last and then over the next six months it hit number one and then it stayed at number one for like a year straight jez and every week I was like oh this is cool I wonder how long this is going to last and then like three years went by I think actually it was it was still on the list like a week or two ago and I mean obviously it's it's finally kind of come down the other side of that but yeah it was like two years that I finally realized I'm like oh this is going to last like this is going to last a long time I think up until that point I was just kind of like oh cool I caught another lucky Break um it hit number one in India wow that's really lucky like wonder how long that's going to last and I it just it took a long I think it was such a the the gap between my previous life and expectations for the book and like what it actually hit was just so vast that it it took multiple years of evidence accumulation for my understanding of it to actually catch up with reality when you were working on the audio book what did you have in mind cuz I listen to audiobook but what I've heard is it's so personable and friendly and it just feels like you're talking to a friend I'm so I'm laughing because the audio book was a complete afterthought what first of all shout out to Roger Wayne wherever you are um still never met him I need to like buy him a beer or something so back then this was keep in mind I submitted that draft in 2015 so Audible and 2015 is not what it is today audiobooks are massive today like they they went through this huge growth curve and I was very fortunate that I rode a lot of that growth curve so back in 2015 nobody really thought a whole lot about audiobooks and there was zero pressure for me to read it myself zero expectation authors didn't really read their own books back then and so the only thought or decision that went into that was Harper sent me an email with audio clips of three different narrators and they said which one do you like best and I listened to all three and they all sounded cheesy as [ __ ] and I was like I don't like any of them whoever does this book it needs to be like very dry dead pan needs to sound like kind of like a Tipsy dude at a bar yeah and they're like okay so they left they came back with like four other options went through them it's like I don't like these either they're like okay left came back like five options finally get to like the end of that list and it's this guy Roger Wayne I listen I click on the Audio I listen to maybe 5 Seconds of him reading something I'm like Ah that's the guy use him and they're like great glad glad we figured it out didn't think about it for six months book comes out or the book got announced and all the pre-orders are going on and I started getting emails from fans and they're they started asking me hey I'm really excited about your new book I pre-ordered the audio book but I looked and it's narrated by the romance novel guy I was like what and so I go to audible I find Roger Wayne's name I click on it and his entire back catalog is nothing but romance novels I was like what the [ __ ] I was like oh [ __ ] what have I done anyway he crushed it like HD it out of the park nailed it so hard I I like like I said never met him thank you Roger Wayne wherever you are um yeah completely but it's funny because it's maybe it's better I didn't know I didn't look at anybody's back history like I just listen to the voice and I was like that's the voice I hear in my head that's who we're going with yeah and how was your writing different for the audible original versus the books how did you think about that project for love is not enough yeah my audible book love is not enough it it's based on I basically coached people through relationship problems over the course of six months we recorded all the conversations and then I we took the conversations and I kind of built a book around it so the conversations are the implementation part right it's woman comes in she's G on a few more dates with the guy that we talked about last time it's gone horribly they've broken up we talk about it and then we kind of cut away to my to the theory right where I explain this is what boundaries are this is why this didn't work this is why she feels this way um so it's kind of that flipping back and forth it I'm very satisfied with how that came out but the amount of work that went into I vastly underestimated how much time and work it would take to go into it I think we we overestimated how much the conversations by themselves could carry it m and therefore before I underestimated how much of actual writing I would have to do over the top of it right um so yeah it was a very complicated project what's the lesson from that the lesson from that I guess was uh don't underestimate a new medium which I've done consistently uh or crushing it on YouTube yeah well that's another medium I've I've underestimated the the difficulty of um just looking back I you know in my head I was like you know if I just have a lot of conversations with these people there's going to be a lot of great moments that come up which is true but just because you have a lot of Great Moments doesn't mean you have a book it's the same way like writing a book you have a 100 great ideas but that doesn't mean you have a book like you still have to make those ideas make sense and organize them in a cohesive way that everything flows and it impacts the reader significantly that that's really hard and I think in some ways the fact that it was organic conversation and with completely different people and having to like find what the common threads between everything was um definitely worked a lot of muscles I wasn't really used to working let's follow the organization the structure route so you start in scrier so tell me about that process and why you use that Tool uh I started using scrier when I wrote subtle art and I think I was just I think like most writers you know you get stuck one day and you're like you know what I need I need a new piece of software of course that's going to solve all my problems of course you need a tool you know my writing's not good cuz I using the wrong laptop drinking the wrong T of Cofe exactly uh so I think like a lot of writers I started doing research on what was out there and I found scrier and it looked super super cool and I think too I think every time time you write a book there's always this phase very early on at the very towards the very beginning that's it's like I just said you have 100 grade ideas but you don't necessarily have a book and so you have to figure out okay which which of these ideas is going to survive and how do we put them together and I like scribner's organizational structure like it's it seems very designed to be able to to move around the structure of a book very easily so if you have if one day you wake up and you realize like Oh chapter 6 should actually be chapter 2 but this one story should stay in chapter 6 and it scri or that becomes extremely easy whereas in word or Google Docs you'll spend three hours cutting and copying and pasting and moving stuff around so I found that very useful for the early stages of a book once you get later in the process I find scri are less useful just because the the formatting tools aren't super great they're not they're not as good as word or or Google Docs um so if you want to like refine something and make it look really nice on the page and make it flow super well um I don't find it as useful for that so I I do scrier for kind of first draft or or organizational stage of the book and then once I've got everything roughly in order and I just want to refine and and polish and revise then I move everything over to a word doc and the whole publishing industry still operates on Word documents for better or worse uh so you you kind of need to end up in a Word document eventually anyway yeah so that I just make I make the switch over at that point what do you feel is the Lynch pin for your writing do you feel like it's a really good oneliner you think it's like a really good opening sentence a concluding sentence you think it's like the right structure and the right flow good transitions I don't know I mean there might be a lch pen I don't know if I know what it is I guess I would say it's it is the quality of the idea I have found that if an idea is very strong it's easy like the stronger the idea the easier it is to write totally and the weaker the idea the harder it is to write and that includes any story you produce to back up that idea and I think as as writers it's very easy to convince ourselves like well I worked so hard on this section it must be a really good section and it's like well no you probably work really hard on it because it's the worst section interesting and that that is a lesson that it's taken me a long time to figure out but looking back I really do think it's if if the idea is not strong there's no amount of quality writing is going to save it you could probably get a bad idea to like a mediocre passage but you're never going to make it a great passage whereas if you have a great idea it's almost hard to [ __ ] it up yeah yeah I've noticed that the stuff that I write best is e is either the stuff that took the least amount of work to write and it just flowed or took the most amount of work and I did a bunch of research I spent years thinking about it and I literally know more about that than anybody else like that happened for me I wrote a piece about Peter teal and how his investing framework was based on Christian ideas yeah and I had been researching Peter for years and I just been really interested in him and then I went down the whole Rabbit Hole of this guy named Rene Gerard who's his professor at Stanford and then I got to a super crisp little thesis and structure for it but it was one of those things I just researched and researched and researched and what I always look for is I'd go out to dinner and I'd be like talking through the piece and I find for these longer for pieces when I'm talking about something and every single time people's eyes are opening wow I've never heard that before I'm like all right I'm on to something there like that's when I really have it and I just think the barbell is super interesting because ah this is like mildly difficult it's not really flowing like never works it's always the easy stuff and the stuff I slave the way on yeah that makes sense that that Rings true for me as well what's interesting is you're talking about the structure with the books but early on it seems like when you were writing your articles it was the headline you would find that headline that was like half the work and so let's talk about that because I felt like you would find that and then you would click and Roar and it seems like got a Google doc of different articles that you were thinking through yeah I I think a large part so my career or my blog really took off like 2012 early 2013 was that like the Facebook era when that's when things were really going yeah so Facebook lost its Newsfeed in 2011 and it was we know now that it was highly prioritized izing links to publish content because at the time Facebook strategy was it basically wanted to replace newspapers or it wanted to be the world's homepage right so it it it wanted to be anything you wanted to read that day fa you Facebook wanted it so you could just go to Facebook and everything would be the answer is in the name the news feed yes that's not what intuitively you wouldn't say oh you're going to end up with pictures of babies family update work updates the news feed I think says everything yeah so basically Facebook was trying to cannibalize all the newspapers and magazines all of their trffic and and it worked and so they were the algorithm was highly waiting links to publish content I think I figured that out before most people because I noticed that there were there were a couple there like BuzzFeed started around this time I think they figured it out around the same time there was a a publication called Upworthy course that figured out the same thing and so I was watching them and I'm like what are they doing and I had studied you know so back when I was like working on the marketing and sales and stuff I had studied a lot of copywriting which turns out is extremely useful for any writer uh but I was looking at at Publications like BuzzFeed and upor and I'm like they're just taking copywriting like direct sales copywriting principles and applying them to Facebook's news feet to like generate clicks I like that's really smart and so I started experimenting with the same thing and spending a lot of time on the title and then the image that would pop up underneath the article and I found that if you could have a killer title and a really good image you could go viral pretty easily on Facebook and so I think from that period of like 2012 through early 2015 uh my blog went from maybe 100 ,000 monthly readers to like 2 and a half million just like 25x through the roof and that's where I really refined that that skill of and realizing too that you don't necessarily because before that it was always about the idea it was like okay what's a really cool idea that I could write about for in a thousand or 2,000 words after that it was like okay what are really good titles because if I find the title then I can go find research and and figure out what content's going to like justify that that that title funny thing is that YouTubers do the same thing today they start with the title and thumbnail then they go write the video and how did SEO factor into it I always sucked at SEO is it that you didn't care you weren't good at it no I tried I really tried okay and and I was just bad uh going getting good at going viral on so around the same time Google started looking to social media indicators and started waiting those very heavily in Google's algorithm so any SEO success not any but I'd say like 80 90% of the SEO success that I've generated it just happened as a side effect of being able to go viral on social media for those three or four years that generated all the backlinks it got all the comments it got all the the whatever the mentions and uh that got me rid highly in Google's out well I was talking to our friend Taylor Pearson who was in a writing group with you in New York and I want to hear about this writing group but one of the things I said yeah what what is Mark really really good at MH and he goes that guy has his pulse on the Zeitgeist like no one I've ever met and is really good at inserting himself into that jet stream how do you do that is it natural is it something you think about well that's a really nice C for thanks Taylor um I do feel you know that the the adoption curve like early adopter cross the cows I I have found I've noticed that I am consistently an early adopter on like kind of cultural like social Dimensions right so it's I've consistently found throughout my life that like I will get really into a topic or a platform or a piece of technology and I'll be like oh this is so cool why don't more people use this and then like three years later everybody's using it I'm like oh [ __ ] I should have kept doing that you know and uh I think it's it's taken me a long time to trust my conviction in those things I don't know how much of that is conscious my personality as such I get bored very easily h and I think I see I see patterns very easily like I I see uh so for instance if you take like conventional traditional media right now like conventional Hollywood entertainment I'm so [ __ ] bored with it like like have been bored with it for years now I've been ranting anybody who follows me knows I've been [ __ ] ranting about superhero movies for like five years now telling people stop watching them and in the beginning like 5 years ago I felt like a man an island like a crazy man right uh standing on a street corner like screaming like the end is near and and I feel like that tide is turning right like we're we're watching traditional media just bleed out slowly and all the eyeballs are moving to online content and that felt like a crazy idea a few years ago but it's now I think it's like smart people know that and I think in probably two or three years it's going to be commissional my intuitive tracker on this is you you go to the front Shelf at a bookstore you look at the non-fiction books what percentage of those people started off as bloggers and a few years ago it was like 10% of books now it's up to like 30 yeah it's getting more and more and that's just my my one data point where I track this and then also if I'm at the pool and I see people reading how many of those people started off on the internet and it's going higher and higher and I think we're going to start seeing that in mediums as well we see that in in podcast and in it's crazy it's still like less than half of the United States listens to podcast which is bananas cons not after this episode it's absolutely banana is considering like the cultural clout and and impact that podcasts have and I think the same thing's about to happen with like YouTube and Tik Tok or it's it's starting to happen with YouTube and Tik Tok anyway I think part of it is just I get bored quick and I get excited about new new things easily and so I think that just naturally pushes me towards the edge of that adoption curve in every Dimension and it does good things for me sometimes and then other times it makes me do stupid things like buying a ton of crypto five years ago and and like getting into I don't know like crazy new platforms that don't go anywhere they just die so it's it's you kind of like live by the sword Die By The Sword yeah I feel like the subtle art was your trans ition from talking about dating and relationships into stoicism but really fun mhm is that fair sure you could call it that the internally the way I kind of experienced that transition was the dating stuff got very repetitive because I mean there's only so many articles you can write about like how to have a great first date before you're just repeating yourself and um and what I started to notice with readers and all the emails I got was you know people would email me and they'd be like I've got this this problem you know no girl likes me blah blah blah and I would start talking to them and I realized that yeah the problem isn't you don't know how to text them or don't know how to ask him out like the problem is you have no self-esteem you have no identity you still live with your mom like right no job yeah like no wonder you can't get a date and I started to recognize that there's not really such thing as a dating problem there are personal problems that manifest themselves in your dating relationship and so more in more of my content was about those emotional issues and psychological issues lifestyle issues that it reached a point around 2012 that that I was like I'm basically just writing self-help and calling myself a men's dating coach why don't I just call myself a personal development coach or author or whatever and so I made that brand switch in 2013 and it it just immediately opened the floodgates uh to a new audience so to me it was just a continuation and then once I was in the self-help world it's funny because I I had never had much exposure to stoicism uh until after s art but once I was in the self-help world I I myself had been a an ed consumer of selfhelp since my teenage years and I had grown very frustrated and disillusioned with it I found it very impractical and and just like almost narcissistic in a lot of ways and so I I I figured I'm like you know if I'm if I'm in this world I might as well say the things that I've always wished somebody would say but nobody has and that's when I started writing articles like stop trying to be happy um you know Cho such a good title man oh my my body just like swelled with interest for that piece that's such a good title yeah um choose your struggles um you are not special uh I I just like had a whole string of them and it just like people started eating that up I found that my gener it was one of those things that I think most of my generation felt but we didn't really have anybody saying it yeah and so when I started speaking up and saying it everybody was like yes this is what we've all been feeling um and then it was it wasn't until later that uh I started getting all the stoicism comparisons and I was like yeah I have it's fairly stoic interesting tell me about this process of developing your own style that is something that is super distinct about you is that something that you cultivated intentionally or something that just sort of emerged to me writing's not fun if I don't sound like myself and if I if I'm trying to sound like somebody else which occasionally I fall into that like everybody does that's when it starts feeling like work right and I have to almost stop and remind myself like oh yeah you hate this chapter because this isn't you this is you this is you trying to impress somebody so delete that let's let's start again and let's write it as you and I always try to IM when I whenever I write I always try to imagine myself in a bar or a restaurant with a friend and they've just asked me the question that leans into the the how I answer that and it's like how like word for word what would I say out loud and uh it's funny actually one of my onear reviews on like I think the top up the top uploaded onear review on Amazon upo art um Compares me to a a drug uh a drunk guy lecturing lecturing somebody about their light at 2 am in a bar after the lights have come on and I was like yeah that's totally it it's funny cuz that's sort of like your description for the guy who you wanted to read your audio book yeah you cuz you used Tipsy yes and it is funny that I I guess this is something I haven't really thought about before but I'm totally fine being criticized for achieving the thing that I want to achieve like I remember my my favorite um my favorite criticism I've ever gotten in the Press so the the Sunday Times in London trashed my second book and the guy it was like a reviewed by like an 80-year-old guy and and he he wrote Manson is like the local drunk who spent too much time in the philosophy section and I was like yes he gets it he gets it reading philosophy BS I was 14 years old I was like that's exactly who I am and you know he me it pejoratively but I was like no [ __ ] yeah that's exactly and that's why people read me like that's the guy they want to hear from so Miles Davis has a quote a jazz musician he says it takes a long time to be able to play like yourself and I think that's incredibly insightful yeah because I think that you're like intuitively you're like oh just be yourself but when you start off and you're just trying to be yourself it it's contrived it's a little weird it's actually like hard to be yourself and I feel like a lot of the process of getting good at speaking getting good at making YouTube videos getting good at writing is actually trying on other people's masks and trying to figure out what's working here what's not working here and almost by trying on imitating what other people are doing you then find what's actually you and I find that there's a very different version of you being yourself at the beginning and a very different version of you being yourself later on and I find that it's like the masks need to be put on and then you need to have them evaporate and only then can you really be yourself I agree with that I I feel like there's kind of an awkward teenage phase yeah with any creative Pursuit where you have to try to fit in with a a bunch of different crowds and then be dissatisfied with that and before you finally get down to like okay what what's the what's the way of expressing myself that I actually care about because you're gonna get ridiculed no matter which way you go so you might as well get ridiculed for being who you actually areh yeah you've given advice to read books not blogs and I just see this with just students that I work with all the time they're so swept up in the Zeitgeist yeah and they're trying to like live in the Zeitgeist to find new ideas but then they just become the Zeitgeist like through osmosis they just absorb what everybody else is thinking and then they're like David I'm reading a bunch just like what you said but I don't have any cool new ideas and it's like hold on get out of the blogosphere read books stop reading the news like Mami is a great quote if you read what everybody else is reading you'll think what everybody else is thinking I also think it's really good to read outside of your your lane it's a lack of a better term because that's I find that's where actually a lot of the most interesting your mind will naturally start drawing analogies of metaphors for your own subject of work right like I love reading fiction and I love reading things like economics or uh history because it's you can get ideas from those fields that I'll then ask myself like oh what would the psychological version of this be like here's this that Dynamic that plays out across societies and markets how would that play out like within somebody's own mind with aspects of their identity maybe there's a market-based system inside our minds where different aspects of our identity are like trading self-esteem to you know I'm like does that go anywhere and that just takes you into uh something that's actually creative it's those fire metaphor you were talking about David Foster Wallace and the dinner table with with Balkan geopolitics and it's invigorating as a writer to iiz that and it's invigorating as a reader to see it done so well yeah I think people lose sight of they think you know one aspect of reading of the value of reading is yes to learn useful ideas and integrate those ideas into your life but that's not all of what it is like if you read a really good book that just gives you idea one idea two idea three it's not a very good book the best books give you useful ideas but they also give you ideas that you never even considered before they present old ideas in a way that you've never considered before uh they flip things around on you they say hey this thing that you always thought was good is actually kind of bad this thing that you always thought was bad might be a little bit good stop trying to be happy exactly so it's those are the things that make like it just provides such a more enriching reading experience for people there's an essay from the 1970s called that's interesting mm and it's super Niche it's only on a PDF like the font is all messed up you have to like zoom in on your phone like you always have to read it on your laptop but it goes through all the different ways an idea can be interesting and it's basically exactly really what you were sharing it's so good it's just a Timeless class I should find that like one you know like one little formula is take two things actually they're one yeah take something everybody thinks is one thing actually they're two things uh you know I've wondered about that before I've noticed that there are a lot of commonalities like uh behind the ideas that I'm most excited about and ideas that perform the best for me they they dudes seem to be common threads like inversion is like a obvious one um but it'd be nice to see like just a list of them somewhere yeah there's a book called The Elements of eloquence MH and it does this for styles of like patterns of writing and words that have things be memorable and what I did for years was I just had the different styles like for example John F Kennedy says ask not what you can do for your country but what your country can do for you MH and in that same speech he goes we choose to go to the Moon not because it's easy but because it's hard yeah and so you just have all these little patterns and then I was working on a video like a little short film was called You Were Made for More Than This and I really wanted just like a boom bomb ending that would just hit something memorable and so we wrote carve the path that only you can carve live the life that only you can live write the essay that only you can write yeah and it's telling that I can remember it now yeah right like that is there's something with repetition yes which I learned that uh when I was really young I read all of uh I'm going to mispronounce his last name but Chuck p penck knew the fight club guy uh I was a huge fan of his in high school and college and he uses repetition a lot like some would even say he overuses it but he like he always he hits at some point in the book he's going to hit you like he'll just repeat phrases and words and like a bunch of different spots over and over it almost kind of becomes like a like a background noise to the book but there's always at least one moment in the book where it's just land at the exact perfect spot and it's like getting hit in the stomach and you're just like oh damn that landed there's something yeah there is something about the just human psychology repetition Rhythm tell me about this you have this awesome Kora keys from years ago practical writing advice and I just want to go through the different ones the first one you want quality traffic first quantity second MH yeah that that is a common mistake with people who try to build audiences online I think they they worry about they worry about overall numbers too soon without figuring out who they are figuring out what really what their topic is what they have to offer uh even in a lot of cases what they enjoy making what I have found both with myself and just most people is that the thing that you think you're going to love making actually isn't the thing you're going to love making it's man it's something margely related or tangential to the thing you think you're going to love making but you almost always have to take a detour and it's I think also just it's important to learn how to get really really really good at one thing before you start trying to appeal to a lot of people we talked about read books not other bloggers I want to go to the next one writing first design second I think that was more about website today it' be more because everything's so social driven I think today it'd be more writing first or content first brand second right so it's like once you figured out what is that thing that you're really good at delivering to people then start asking yourself okay what's kind of the image or brand or style that I want to have on top of this how do I want to be known in the world what's my tagline [ __ ] like that what's emerging from this is how much of your brand and what you should write about does emerge like you said until you've written a 100 posts you generally have no clue what you enjoy writing about or what people enjoy reading from you you have not developed anything close to decent writing chops and you have no chance at ever monetizing first of all that sentence rips and it is absolutely Flames like that sentence is why you're Mark Manson but second of all it's just killer advice dude it's I can't tell you how many people meet me in person and they're like wow you're so much nicer than I thought G to be like I don't know why but my my writing as an edge to it yeah like it just really cuts through things um maybe it's like bunch of pint up aggression that I don't let out in real life but um yeah that advice so right up under post so that that maybe that cuts because there's a little bit of anger in there because by that point especially in that period like say 2011 through 2016 those conferences I went to that I was famous at I would get mobbed by people everybody's like how do I start a blog how do I build a Blog you know how do I I got a website how do I get people to come to my website and my answer was I would always go to their their website or their blog or today would be a substack and I'd look and they have three posts yeah I'm like why are you even asking me like stop wasting my time you haven't written anything anything H so my answer be write 100 posts and come back and ask me again and I will be happy to spend as much time as you want at first the only people who will care about your blog will be your friends and family if they if even they don't care well then you're way off track yes yeah they kind of have to care so if you can't get them to read more than one post uh it's a really bad sign you're either way off from your your competency like what you you're good at talking about or you're you're trying to be somebody else you're trying to be something else uh and it feels very in congruent so the people who know you see that and they're like this is weird you know um but yeah I think everybody starts with that Core Group you know when I started it was my roommates and a couple buddies yeah like those were I had seven readers and like those seven guys are like the ones who just came back over and over again I remember one month I had 63 page views yeah and I thought I deserved a spot at the Madison Square guard I was like I'm really I've really made it but that was incredible to me that was like two College classrooms that I was speaking to and that was really exciting once you cross that threshold and start reaching people that you've never met in person it it it is so mind-blowing it's absolutely mind-blowing that you're like wait there's 50 people I've never met and they listen to things I say this is what I discovered when I went to music school which is and and once you're there it's unavoidable that the three or four guys who are actually going to make it in the music industry are so good they don't really need to be at music school yeah and the rest of us are just there kind of make our parents happy or something I don't know but it it within a semester it was very clear like I'm not as good as those guys I should probably go somewhere else and do something else what kind of music were you studying uh I was studying uh Jazz performance how does that show up in your writing so it's funny like all these things we've been talking about Rhythm Melody repetition things like that I've always thought of writing in terms of sound so what you were saying about the JFK thing yeah like I'm always thinking about that yeah I'm like I'm always optimizing maybe this is why the audiobooks do so well like I've always optimized my my writing for for being melodic for for flowing for feeling very for sounding really nice um and it's why my grammar kind of sucks and I flirted a little while with trying to kind of be like a public intellectual and I realized that like my brain I'm not detail oriented enough to be excellent at that um I'm very good at consuming like very intellectual content and processing it but my output is it's so optimized for just kind of emotional experience that any time I tried to get like really into the Weeds on a topic it would I'd kind of it wouldn't be detailed or conscientious enough for for all the the Nerds who like wanted to learn everything and and then it it would be too intellectual for all the people who are just like tell us cool [ __ ] Mark and and so it just kind of made nobody Happy Well if you take truth and resonance to their logical extremes they actually begin to contradict each other sometimes so you would think just that's true therefore that resonates but if you actually follow them there's a lot of times where something is super poetic and you'll read it and the emotional pallet of that will just pluck your strings perfectly and you be like yes that is hitting on something I've always felt but I've never been able to articulate if you take those that string of sentences and you try to dissect the logic often it'll actually make no sense whatsoever yeah and I think what you're saying is maybe I sometimes give up a little bit of Truth so I can really go for resonance or something yes and I found that you know when I was researching stories for my books it's there's like a journalistic I would be a terrible journalist because it's just it's like well the truth is like I think so the hero Nota story in subtle art yeah the truth is he actually had a very complicated relationship when he went back to Japan he went to Brazil for a while then he came back to Japan and then he moved all over and he lived with his brother for a while and then he left again then he came back and it was like it was a very convoluted messy thing but the point I was trying to make it felt so impactful if he left Japan right and so I wrote it in a way that made it sound like he left Japan forever and never went back I didn't say that explicitly but it felt that way and sure enough a bunch of readers caught that and that emailed me over the years being like you know he actually went back to Japan I'm like yeah I know but it's so much cooler if it sounds like he it's like so much more impactful you know the reader is just like like oh so yeah what's your editing process like for these books my experience writing books is it's it's almost fractal so there's almost like a mini book experience in and of itself with like the first three chapters which is basically what I've discovered is chapter one is always exciting yeah you're starting You've Got This brilliant idea oh my God we're going to change the world can't wait to start yeah chapter one's easy chapter two maybe yeah know the wheels are rattling a little bit engine's overheating but you're still holding things together what I've noticed is by the time you get to chapter 3 all the flaws and cracks in your original outline are showing themselves things are falling apart wheels are coming off contradictions are showing up and by the time you get to chapter 4 like end of chapter 3 the book is probably terrible and and it's unavoidable and you realize it you're like oh my God my original outline is never going to work and so what I've noticed is that I have to kind of refine those first few chapters change them rewrite them rise them heavily and also simultaneously kind of revamp the the entire book's outline to kind of fix all of those early flaws that have shown up yeah and so there's there's a few rounds of rejigging stuff early on like that and it's that part of the process this has happened every book I've written and that part of the process is by far the least fun because by then you're like 3 four months into it the initial excitement is completely gone you're your everything seems horrible nothing makes sense your original outline is in the garbage can but you haven't made a new one to replace it yet and and like that's like the month that I crawl under my desk and have there been moments where you're like I don't know that I can actually get this thing together I've I've quit on books yeah yeah yeah I've quit on on a couple different books was there a moment from setle art or any of the other books where you were like stuck and something clicked yeah with subtle art it was and it's almost always an organizational thing like what I found is that it's often the idea that you think the book should be organized around is actually should be a chapter and actually one of the chapter ideas is actually the idea that the book should be organized it that it's usually something like that uh and sometimes that can be fixed like I think with subtle art that kind of happened I was able to like take I realized that all the the chapters at the second half of the book should be bunched together at the back half of the book because I think I originally start tried to start subtle art with like chapter four or five and everything just kind of fell apart about 50 pages in and then I realized like oh no actually this should be in the middle of the book and then we should start with these other ideas in the front and then that made it work and then when it clicks like when it when you find the solution it all kind of clicks into place and you have that new outline and then you've got usually you've thrown out maybe half of what you wrote to start out and then the other half is kind of spread out through the outline but once you find that then then you kind of then I go through beginning to end and get that first full draft done see with student writers all the time they'll have a huge bat story and whatever it is that they're saying and you just should cut that bat story and just start with the climax yeah and my question is for introductions do you write that at the end do you write it at the beginning do you ever take out stuff at the beginning in your articles so well the Articles yes it's funny too because I started doing that because a reader pointed out exactly that what' they say I got it this is a long time ago this is probably 2014 or something but uh reader emails can be really helpful sometimes they yeah sometimes they could be you know just an ouch you lied to me but sometimes they're like H it's good yeah I I used to get over the years you know it doesn't happen often but it's I'd say every year or two I get an email that's like really insightful and helpful and I had a guy he emailed me this is probably 2013 2014 and he said I'm a huge fan of your your blog but I can't help but notice if you deleted your first paragraph he's like he like linked all my last four posts or something like if you deleted your first paragraph in all four of these posts all four of these articles get much better and I went and I looked I was like [ __ ] he's RAC deleted him updated him you know and and so now that's something when I write an article or a newsletter that's something I look at um it's like okay is that first paragraph even necessary with the book it's man so again this is why I start with scrier so much stuff gets moved around throughout the process that it's I mean who knows it it nothing even remotely ends up looking like the outline I think part of this too has to do with the nature of the topic of what I write about like human psychology everything [ __ ] relates to everything so so if you're talking about self-esteem and then you want to talk about confidence well you can easily talk about confidence and talk about self-esteem you can talk about relationships first and then confidence then self-esteem or you can do self-esteem confidence relationships like you can make any of those those formats work and it can be absolutely maddening at times trying to figure out you know you have three chapters and you could literally put them in anywhere you want and it'll make sense anyway what's the best way to do it and so uh a lot of stories get moved you know it I think the Bukowski thing that opened subtle art that was in the middle of the book and an early draft and then I was like ah this is such a cool way to open the book it like sets the tone for everything else coming like let's start with that um so yeah it's it's all over the place tell me about how you met Will Smith and what that project was like so meeting Will Smith is not simple no kidding it's not as simple Endeavor as you would expect um will wanted to do he wanted to do a memoir and he had known that for a while he' actually even how did you find that out they reached out to me oh okay so that's the short answer the longer answer is um he had wanted to do a memoir for a while and and since this is a writing podcast this will be interesting to you he had actually tried to write it a few times himself oh wow and what he discovered about himself was that he's really good at like kind of micro story so if you tell him hey will tell me about the time you audition for Fresh Prince he'll tell you this amazing hilarious five minute story but if you ask him hey Will what are the three main themes of your transition from hip-hop into acting and how did those affect your day-to-day life he like kind of has no idea where to start like he does it it's hard for him to zoom out Y and and do the structural organization part so he was having a lot of he was having a lot of trouble with that and he roughly knew kind of what he wanted to say what he wanted the main themes of the book to be but he needed a writer to a help him structure and organize everything and then B he it was very important to him that the book had takeaways and life lessons and things that people could use to kind of help in their own lives so his team reached out to me went through this very long convoluted interview process with a bunch of people on his team after a few months I flew out and met him uh on set of one of his one of his movies hung out with him for three or four days and uh we just really hit it off like we have a very natural chemistry we both we both communicate a lot through humor so I think we like we just instantly vibed in that way and then our personalities are very different and that like I tend to be very cynical and critical of everything and and he he's like he's Mr Everything is Awesome all the time so I think we balance each other well and we could both kind of feel that so I spent three days with him and then he asked me I think the last night at dinner that I was there he asked me he's like so you got anything like got any ideas like we hung out for a few days now going well like what do you think and I at by that point I had actually kind of put together a rough outline in my head and I had some pretty I had some ideas that I had some pretty high conviction on so I told him I was like give me give me tonight I'll meet you for breakfast tomorrow I'll show you an outline ni and he was like oh [ __ ] all right so ran back to my hotel room stayed up to like 2:30 in the morning like putting this outline together and that was the basis of the book like the thing I noticed about him is just his his Charisma and his just very natural understanding of emotion and learning about his life over those few days you could see that he had kind of gone through the full spectrum of emotions in his life he was had a very fearful childhood he was a very angry adolesent um he had a lot of Pride early on that got him in trouble um he struggled with a lot of guilt later on um so it it's he kind of there were there to me there were like these very clear themed emotional based themes of his life in each period And I love the idea of building an arc of his life through these emotions beginning with fear and ending with love because ultimately that's we're all on that Journey at in some shape or form so I showed showed him that at breakfast and he immediately got up and started pumping and screaming oh hell yeah and I was like that was felt so good yeah I was like oh [ __ ] I think I got the job that was felt so cool um but in terms of actually working with him honestly it was the maybe the most enjoyable project I've ever done how would you work together like would you just hang out at the house would you go interview him other people so everything all the above so I did tons of research on my own he he his team actually keeps an archive of like all the press that he's done over the years so they had access to all of his interviews over his entire career I got access to that I got access to like all his home movies I got access to his full family so I spent couple days with Jada I spent bunch of time with the kids I met his mom I went to Philly I saw where he grew up like one of his childhood friends gave me a whole tour of the neighborhood um like everything was and then were you taking notes at that time were you just were you more of a processor what was that like I was taking notes I was also taking a lot of video huh just be like especially like West Philly it's more just like kind of like I went to the church that he went to when he was growing up and took some pictures of it you know because it's like when I write that scene in the book I I want to be able to describe so walk me through I just didn't expect you to say video that's it's interesting so you video so how do you go from video to church or a photo to church to that shows up on a page well because I want to set that setting right so he had a couple impactful experiences as a as a child with his grandmother and those things happened at church so I knew I knew going in I'm like okay the church is it's an important place and it's uh so when I went there the only thing I'm thinking is is just I need to be able to describe this it's really just a paragraph right it's like and I think what I ended up writing was like the cuz he had told me the kind of music that they used to sing like the gospel music so I was like uh the the chorus of such and such is like reverberating off the wooden beams on the ceiling because it was like the ceiling with all these wooden beam like these like kind of cross stitched wooden beams in the ceiling and I knew the name of the pastor and so I just kind of like painted that picture really quick in like a paragraph just so that you know you're you're in this like little black church in West Philly they're singing a gospel song He's standing next to his grandma like I just want to be able to get that moment on the page um but that requires going to West Philly and taking a video of the church right yeah so when Robert Caro was doing his biographies of Lyndon B Johnson and still now he's writing his last one the thing that he does when he does interviews is he'll just sit down and he'll keep asking the question what would I see if I was sitting there what would I see what would I see and he'll just ask it over and over and over again and he says that if you can make the reader see the scene that's when it comes alive yeah yeah I believe that that's really interesting I remember at one point I had will sit down and draw a floor plan of his childhood home oh cool and and then like Mark where the kitchen was where his bedroom was where he was standing when this happened even things down to like where was the couch where was the kitchen table just because my feeling was like I need to be able like I know he can see it in his head I need to be able to see it in this head I I when I worked with him I always talked about it being downloading the data from his brain to mine yeah and there's something link for writing exactly and there's some things you can only get that way right it's like what hey I'm working on this scene about your dad your dad's Workshop what did it look like you probably need a lot of time in order to do that yeah like he probably just had to give you the space cuz that's something I've noticed with these sorts of conversations is you don't even begin to scratch the surface until Hour 2 hour three like even this I feel like now we're in New Territory we've been going for a little while and I bet it was like that with Will Smith Oh 100% And it and that was actually one of the difficulties because it is really hard to get more than an hour with Will Smith at any given time yeah so it was sometimes I just get like 30 or 40 minutes and yeah you don't even get in the new territory in that amount of time I remember actually about a year in I told one one of his managers I was like look like if you can't get me more than an hour it's not even really worth me being here at this point um so I kind of I shadowed him on and off for about two years and you know so I would fly out to wherever he was spend a week with him uh and then I try to get a couple hours of FaceTime a day or something and I'd have my list of questions and just dig into everything and then usually if somebody else was around like if one of the kids was around or J was around I'd like when he was busy doing Will Smith things I would get a couple hours with them and kind of corroborate stuff so it was a lot of upfront work but [Music] um once I sat down the right it was actually very I don't want to say effortless because it was a lot of work but it flowed so easily and it was just fun yeah it was so much fun I it was to me it was like almost the purest form of writing because it first of all I I'm getting the right about like one of the most interesting people in the world it's my favorite actor growing up yeah I pitch with Albert brenaman dude like for Our Generation he was the man there's the scene where he's with Albert and then Yeah by Usher comes on he's sort of teaching him he like and then Albert bman starts going QP throw it away ctip throw it away and my sister and I have probably watched that clip 50 times like even now we'll sort of merch around the house on Thanksgiving or Christmas and we'll just do that like there's so I Robot like there's so much from my childhood that was around Will Smith yeah um but it was great because I got the benefit of writing this super interesting material without the drawback of all the self-doubt you know cuz when you're writing your own stuff you're constantly trying not to evaluate but like constantly judging like oh man is this going to make me look stupid or is that idea lame whereas in this case he basically gave me all of his stories and all of his ideas and I got to curate I got to be like okay these are the best ideas and these are the best stories and we're going to put them together this way and and so it was just fun it was it was a blast what adjectives were you going for when writing that book that were different from the adjectives that you were going for when you write your own books will is very bombastic there an adjective for you I would never use the word bombastic in my own writing in his book I'm sure it's in there a bunch of times he is his personality is larger than than life like he is he thinks like an action hero like everything is huge everything's going to be amazing everything's the best and he loves to get very flowery with his like language I mean he everybody around him jokes about it all the time he exaggerates the hell out of anything he talks about you know it's it's the joke the joke with people around him is like whatever will tells you you got to dial it back like three notches and that's probably around where the truth is um just cuz he gets so excited and he's like oh there's like a thousand people there and it's like well there actually like 80s okay you know um so I I really just went for it in terms of um just enthusiasm and like intensity um I was very fortunate so come back to the you had a question about like how we divided up the work and decided to work together I was very fortunate again I think this is one of the reasons why he everything went so well is he and I sat down very early in the process and I think we were both aware of what we were good at and willing to do and what we were going to be bad at and not really willing to do so I told him I'm like look man like you you're a black dude from Philly a rap star one of the most famous people on the planet like I'm never going to sound like you I'm never going to be able to sound like you I can try but it's I'm going to screw up a budge yeah you know and he was like that's fine if you give me you know if you give me the story I can go in and and put my flavor on it tell me about that how do you do that so we well the the conclusion we came to is uh we did the outline together obviously all the research together and then uh I did the first draft he revised his voice as a second draft and then added like details and little things here and there um and then I did a third P like a Polish pass y on top so and it worked beautifully because it it's there are a lot of stories because he is so charismatic and expressive and and creative with a lot of the things that he he says and writes there are a bunch of things in that book I'm like yeah I would never I would never come up with that yeah that's that's totally a Will Smith thing so he actually this is the thing that a lot of people don't realize he put a lot of work into that like it's most celebrity books this is actually something my agent told me when I we started the project she said most celebrity books uh you're lucky if they even read it um I was like okay thanks thanks for setting setting the stand like now I know where the bar is oh she she was like yeah sad but true um but he he was very involved um throughout the outlining process and then once he had my draft he probably spent um I mean it helped it was during the pandemic but he he probably spent three or four months doing his revision yeah on top of it nice I want to end with this quote that you have which I think is so good writers block is usually because you're putting way too many expectations on yourself remove the expectations and just start writing for fun write as if no one is ever going to read it that's good right yeah yeah I think it what writer block is is my experience is that there is this Fountain of creativity within each of us kind of this stream of ideas that is always there unless you block it with something and I think a lot of us unintentionally or unconsciously block that stream because it's like oh well they're going to think I'm an idiot or I need to make money or I'm trying to build an audience on Instagram you know whatever it is he he gets blocked with all this stuff and then once it gets blocked we're like oh man I don't have any ideas it's like well you you put your limitations what's acceptable is so confined to this tiny little space that like yeah you ran out of ideas but if you remove those confines and and draw like a much wider boundary of like what's an acceptable idea to you then they'll start coming through again and the crazy thing about ideas is that you can start working on this kind of comes back to like what is creativity you can start working on an idea that has nothing to do with your real work and once you worked on it for a few hours you realize like oh actually it totally relates to my real work and I could actually pull this in and like use this as a story or an example in a chapter or whatever it is so it's that ability to just remove judgment and expectation I think is um especially early in any processes is just it's it's an important skill to to hone and develop yeah in WR of Passage we have this idea called right from conversation MH and the premise is that if you get people to go from trying to type something smart to just talk to their friends in conversation things will just emerge that they naturally want to talk about and the metaphor I can't get out of my head is you ever see that video of where the gorilla walks through the video people are like bouncing the basketballs yeah I feel like so often the reason that people can't find good ideas is because they're trying to like count the basketballs while the gorilla is just right there and like the great idea is often so obvious so close and right in front of you that you almost can't even see it because you're trying to look for a good idea and the reason why I write a passage we talk about no right from conversation right from conversation right from conversation is because the things that just naturally come out of your mouth in conversation you're hanging out with friends buddies whatever it is those are the things that then you can bring into your writing and your stuff then flows cuz it's natural it's actually coming from the heart yeah and it's relatable too yeah yeah thanks man this was like the easiest interview ever and a damn good time I'm glad glad to make your life easy thanks for having me man yeah

Channel: David Perell

Views: 10,073

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Id: Gmy_hbllgxc

Length: 89min 43sec (5383 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2023