Building Your Personal Monopoly with Write of Passage Founder David Perell
David Perell is a writer, teacher, and podcaster. David’s online course, Write of Passage, teaches a step-by-step method for publishing quality content and distributing your ideas and has been taken by 500+ students from over 40 countries. David is also the host of the North Star Podcast where he has conducted 100 interviews exploring the methods and principles of successful creators, artists, and entrepreneurs.
David is truly prolific with a superpower for taking decisive and relentless action. However, relentless doesn't mean brute force. David deeply understands his key strengths and is constantly seeking opportunities to further develop and leverage those strengths.
For the sixth edition of Forcing Function Hour, David joins Chris to discuss how to build your personal monopoly.
See below for the audio recording, resources mentioned, topics, and conversation transcript.
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Links and resources we mentioned during our conversation:
The Forcing Function links:
Experiment Without Limits (peak performance workbook, free download)
Performance Assessment (quiz to reveal your greatest opportunity for growth)
To check out our previous Forcing Function Hour episodes, click here.
Topics:
(06:16) The spectrum of explicit and implicit personal monopolies
(15:05) The wisdom of crowds
(24:38) Intellectual honesty vs conviction
(33:15) Monopolies in a relativistic society
(40:26) The productivity of your curiosity
(44:20) Q&A
Podcast Transcript:
Note: transcript edited slightly for clarity.
Chris (00:05): Welcome to Forcing Function Hour, a conversation series exploring the boundaries of peak performance. Join me, Chris Sparks, as I interview elite performers to reveal principles, systems, and strategies for achieving a competitive edge in business. If you are an executive or investor ready to take yourself to the next level, download my workbook at experimentwithoutlimits.com. For all episodes and show notes, go to forcingfunctionhour.com.
Now, I mean most of you guys here know David, I don't think he needs introduction, but I'm going to do it anyway. Some of you guys might know him from his writing course, Write of Passage, where he's taught hundreds of students how to write, build an audience, and thus accelerate their career. You might also know him from his North Star podcast where he talks with high performers. There's some amazing guests on there. The Tyler Cohen episode recently was fantastic. Highly recommend. And finally you might have seen some of his long-form essays on his blog, perell.com/blog. If you haven't, highly recommend. This man is prolific and some of his expression of ideas is unparalleled.
So I always like to say, you know, how we met. So Dave and I met in New York City before all this went down. We actually lived about three blocks away from each other. I believe it was originally at a Building a Second Brain meetup. Those of you who were here last time know Tiago Forte, and I think the meetup that we did, it was just the three of us. You know, Alex Hardy was the third, and what began talking about you know, progressive summarization, personal knowledge management kind of spiraled over into a number of topics. David and I started working together. We put on an event with Tiago called "The Creative Process," which I think is really instrumental to our conversation today, how you can solicit feedback in order to accelerate your own creative process. We put together an annual review/retreat. I think we both believe that reflection, bringing in friends to uncover your blind spots, is instrumental to accelerating your progress. And we had a lot of fun, when nightlife was a thing, going to AnjunaDeep, going to Output (RIP). David has much better dance moves than you would suspect. I recommend you see those in person sometime.
So what's David's superpower? I think he put it really well in his episode with Tyler Cowen, is, I think of him as being relentless at taking action. I think he has the fastest speed of anyone I know of going from conversation to action. Or, "I think this is a good idea," to "now I'm doing it." Where, as we say, "Oh, I think having a course manager is a good idea," the next time we talk, you know, one week later, "Oh, I hired a course manager and he's already running the course." Or we have a deep conversation on a topic where we kind of flesh it out, and I wake up the next morning and David has a tweetstorm about it that is like taking the world by storm. So you know, really impressive, and part of what I'm interested in today is kind of deconstructing this David Perell production function. Of, you know, as David says, being prolific is the fastest way to improve your craft. So what is that anatomy of being prolific?
And of course, you know, as advertised, we're gonna talk about personal monopolies. I think this is a really core idea to what makes David successful. So how can you reveal unique abilities, how you can develop them into compounding advantages, and how do you frame them, creating a personal brand that brings you opportunities that advances your career?
These are some of the things that we're gonna talk about, and more. So without further ado, I'm gonna give you guys some logistical stuff for today. Chat is open. Anything we say resonates, disagree, agree, want more details on, you know, please use the chat. Remember to add "to all attendees," so everyone sees it.
The timeline for today: David and I are gonna be talking for about forty minutes, and then we're going to hand it off for Q&A, so we're going to be wrapping at about fifteen after the hour, seventy-five minutes total. If you have to leave early, no sweat. We're going to be posting this recording and transcript online, so if you have to leave early, you can catch the end of it later.
As far as how the Q&A's going to be working, I'll be asking those questions on your behalf, and I'm going to be taking those questions from the Q&A section. So if you have a question, don't type it in chat. Use the Q&A. And the cool thing about that feature is that you can upvote others' questions. So whichever questions you guys want to see, if you upvote them, get to the top, those are the ones that I'm going to ask David. I think that's all for now. You know, let's hand it off. So, first, David, thank you so much for being here. Total honor. I think let's kick things off, set the tone as far as, what is a personal monopoly? What does this mean to you, where does this concept originate?
David (04:08): Yeah, well, first thanks for the introduction. And it's great to see all of you here. So a personal monopoly is an idea that comes from Jerry Garcia, the famous musician, who said, "You want to be the only person who does what you do." And at first that sounds very daunting, but it came from a time after college when I was working at an advertising agency, and I was doing sales decks and stuff, and I was like, "Oh my goodness, my job is going to be automated away and my whole career is gonna be hopeless and I'm gonna end up without any ability to have any kind of pricing power in the work that I do." And I don't know why, but even when I was twenty-two years old I had this intuition that the trajectory that I was on, and if I was building any sort of skill that could be taught that was basically legible enough that other people could copy it, that that could really hurt my career.
And so I ended up getting fired after seven months, and I was like, "Damn, what am I going to do with my life?" And that was a really awful evening. And next couple weeks. And I just started thinking, "How can I turn my youth into an advantage?" That was one of the first big questions I asked. And ultimately that led to an idea called the personal monopoly, which is trying to get back to that question of how do you become the only person who does what you do, so that you can go up to somebody and say, "I'm not one of many, I'm one of one."
Chris (05:49): So talk to me a little bit more about that journey, right? You got fired, you had this existential crisis moment of "what am I going to do with my life? Am I going to become irrelevant?" You know, with any experiment there's presumably failed experiments, where you learn a little bit more but you haven't quite found the right path. Maybe talk about some of those missteps that you had along the way.
David (06:16): Yeah. "Missteps" is a tricky word, because I think that with personal monopolies, like, the way that humans develop is not in a linear way, and one of the problems with how people hear "personal monopolies" is they think of them as very explicit, almost like the way that brands are built. And personal monopolies exist on a spectrum. They exist on a spectrum from implicit to explicit. And explicit personal monopolies are how people normally think about them, of, "Okay, I'm going to be the person known at this intersection: I'm funny, I know a lot about engineering, and I'm a good marketer based in San Francisco. That's my personal monopoly." And that's how most people think about them. But the really interesting personal monopolies in my opinion . . . And no one is better than the other. Some people are just explicit, some people are implicit. But I think that the subtlety of the idea really comes out in the implicit personal monopolies, in that anything that you struggle with now and find a solution to is something that later on you can teach others to do those things, and either build a business or build a career doing that thing. And the missteps that you have now become the seeds of your personal monopoly later.
So for example, I started creating YouTube videos after I was laid off, and I did that for three months, and after a hundred-and-fourteen days in a row making a four- to eight-minute YouTube video, I had a grand total of thirty-two subscribers. And that didn't go well. It was really embarrassing, and quite unmotivating to have spent all that time working on something day in and day out in the real cold of winter . . . I remember going into New York City some days and my hands, it felt like my fingers were gonna fall off as I was shooting video, it was so cold. And worked really hard, didn't succeed. But from that, what happened was I used what I learned then about being prolific to then launch what I do now, in terms of being prolific with writing.
And I think you see this a lot. Like you see this in the economy, right? Like in the late '90s, there was a company called Global Crossings. And Global Crossings laid the pipes where internet waves traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, and connected America with Europe and Africa. And the company went totally bankrupt after the dot-com crash. But then afterwards, come the early 21st Century, one of the reasons that we have what we have is because of companies like that. You see this all the time with bubbles, when if you really begin to study financial bubbles, what you realize is people always think of bubbles as a bad thing, but actually a lot of innovation comes from bubbles, and it is the bubbles that end up creating the sort of excess and waste that then later on allows us to go into this deployment phase of technology, where we build on top of the technologies that we built in the early phase.
And so I think that there's an analogy here where missteps, where what seems like a misstep in one place, can actually give you what you need to succeed later on.
Chris (09:50): I love that, where the seeds of past experiments that might not have paid off become one of these unique intersections, where because you have this experience, regardless of you know, short-term results that no one else had, this becomes a compounding advantage. And so you know, a part—You mentioned a kind of frustrating, embarrassing part was you're putting in a lot of work, but you weren't seeing that feedback, you weren't getting that external validation from that. But clearly the things you had done at that time come in huge right now, for what you're doing. But it might not have been obvious except in hindsight. So if someone isn't seeing that external validation yet, how do they know that they're onto something? How do they know that they're on the right track?
David (10:47): Yeah. So one of the ways to know that you're on the right track is through conversation. When you repeatedly say something, and just when you talk, you are in a constant controlled experiment. That is what talking is. And what you're doing is you're looking at how other people are reacting to what you're saying. And those reactions you could basically throw an acronym called "CRIBS." Confusing, Repeated, Insightful, Boring, and Surprising. So those are five baseline emotional responses that people react with. And what's great is whenever you see that somebody is confused, well, you just restate what you're trying to say. If you're repeating something, well, somebody's going to say, "Get to the point." You just sort of take that out. If something's insightful, you're like, "Okay, wait, this is actually really insightful, I should probably focus more on this." If something is boring you do exactly the opposite. You say, "I'm gonna stop focusing on this." And if something is surprising, that means that you're teaching other people about the world and helping them develop a more perfect model of how the world works.
And if you—We're in conversations every day. And so if you actually take conversations seriously, which almost nobody does, and you say, "Okay, when things are insightful and surprising, I'm gonna double down on those things, and when things are confusing, repeated, or boring, I'm not gonna do those things," you end up sort of stumbling your way into interestingness, and it ends up becoming a formula for developing and finding interesting ideas.
Chris (12:35): So talk to me about the time before you created the first cohort of Write of Passage. I remember we were in the hot seat at the annual review in upstate New York, and at the time it felt like you were a little bit stuck. You know, trying to stumble around a business model where you were seeing some early success and validation around content and brand strategy, but not feeling alive around this idea of creating an agency. You know, it's like this consulting wasn't all that exciting. What was going through your head at that time, and how did you start to land on this idea of creating Write of Passage as a more product-based thing?
David (13:18): Yeah. So, what I found is, well, taking a step back. If you have knowledge and you want to make more money with your knowledge, have more impact with your knowledge, you want to productize that knowledge and turn it into an artifact that can scale without your involvement. And the problem with consulting is that you get paid by the hour. And I remember this client, his name was Paul, and he was in Australia. And I remember telling him the same things that I had told this other guy, Brad, in Washington DC. And all these people. I was saying the same stuff to people, over and over again. It was extremely boring to me. And like, my filter for interestingness is extremely high, and I just get bored of saying the same things over and over again. And so I just said, "Okay, there's the same general principles that I'm spilling out here, but there's a really interesting tension here. Not only is the in-person experience taxing for me, but it is giving my clients a worse product than I could otherwise deliver if I turned my knowledge into some kind of product that I repeatedly refine."
And I also knew that that was a much more profitable way to do business online, and what I said was, "What are the general principles that I'm sharing with others? There's this clear latent demand to write online. And how can I turn that into a product?"
Chris (15:05): I find this really interesting, being in the consulting world myself, this 'saying the same thing over and over' as a way to identify this intersection. Let's unpack that a little bit. First is saying the same thing. So this is clearly something that someone is going to you as an expert, and because you're saying the same thing, you have that solution pretty well dialed in. But the fact that you're saying it over and over in itself is both proof that the problem exists, but also that people have difficulty solving it themselves. And you know, the way I like to refer to it is, what is the thing that for others it just looks like we're just running up the wall? You know, if you're doing the impossible, but for you is relatively second nature. And I find that nature of scaling allowing quality to be really interesting, because you know, I think in your own words the quality bar for Write of Passage, the first time, go around, could have been much better. But that because you had all of that feedback in place, and you were really incentivized to improve it, right, where every little improvement was scaled out by every future person who was going to take the course, it quickly got much, much better each time that you gave it.
So, I'm curious about this . . . I think it's really a skill. It might also be a habit of cultivating feedback. Right? A lot of times it can be difficult to hear things that we need to improve on, or someone tells us something that we're really good at and we deny it. Right? "That's not something that I want to do," or "Oh, that's not that interesting." I'm really interested in how you get others to give you feedback, and how you're able to incorporate that feedback, you know, not only into your business, but into your life.
David (17:03): Yeah. So if you talk to investors, one of the things that they'll talk about is a phenomenon called the wisdom of crowds. And this comes from an old event in Spain, where there was a bullfighting match, and what happened was afterwards of course the bulls die, and the bulls were sort of like hanging, and they brought a bunch of people, and they were like, "guess the weight of the bull." And all these people would guess, "Oh, eight hundred seventy six pounds." "Four hundred seventy two." "One thousand three hundred seventy four." And the guesses were all over the place. All over the place. But then what they did was they tallied the average of all the guesses. Of all the guesses of how much this bull weighed. The average guess was correct to within one pound. Incredible.
And so what we find is this is called the wisdom of crowds, where if we get a lot of people looking at something, they can make fairly accurate estimates of what's going on, but each individual estimate might be wildly off. But there's certain characteristics that you need for these estimates to be really accurate. And one of the biggest ones is that you need them to be honest and disaggregated. And so I'll touch both of those.
'Honest' means that you want people to be telling you exactly what they think, and one of the best ways to do that is to not get offended by things. You will learn the most in life from the people who offend you. It is just a fact of life. And most people, if others say something offensive, they close down, they shut down, they really don't like that person. And we've now created a culture where people get offended very easily, and that . . . Then when that happens, if you say something to somebody and they get offended, they get angry, you're never going to give them honest feedback again. So one of the things I try to do is I try to take honest feedback and begin to investigate it and never get offended by things. So there's the honesty component.
But then, as we saw in the wisdom of crowds, with the bulls, there's also a component of being disaggregated. So a lot of individual conversations. And to use the investing metaphor again, what you see is that the wisdom of crowds can flip into the madness of crowds when a bunch of people have their ideas together and the ideas get aggregated. So if people are trying to guess the bull and you can see everybody else's answers, what you'll get is these spiraling effects where some people will see that some people have given a really high number or a really low number, and they'll change what they think to match the people, whereas the bull exercise worked because nobody else knew what the other people were saying. And so when you get feedback, try to get the individual feedback as much as you can, and then take the average of all that individual feedback and have it work for you.
Now, I'm going to say the exact opposite thing that I just said, which I also think is true. You also want to receive feedback from people that is extremely opinionated and that has you saying, "Oh my goodness, I might be living my entire life the wrong way." That's something that I often do. I always ask for the most opinionated feedback I can get. And I would much rather . . . Like all these people hate on the advice industry. They're like, "Oh you're, you know, this advice is too opinionated, it wouldn't work for everyone, it's just an n of one, and it's just too extreme." And people are like, "That's a bad thing." I think that's the greatest thing. I love it when people give me really strong feedback, not because I follow what they're saying, but because it forces me to take a stand. Do I believe in what they're saying, or am I gonna double down on my principles and what I believe about the world? And so I think if you can sort of ride this tension of really strong feedback and then tapping into the wisdom of crowds by having ideas that are disaggregated and taking that average from really honest signals, you'll be able to use feedback to improve your performance.
Chris (21:49): I'd love to know, what's the most opinionated feedback that you've received recently?
David (21:55): Yeah. Well, I have one that comes to mind. But I had somebody who I really admire tell me last July that Write of Passage was a terrible idea, and that the online education business was just a bad business because you only make money a couple times a year, that people really didn't want to learn how to write online. And I remember sitting in this lunch saying, "Wow, that's really tough to hear, this is really what I believe in and I'm putting a lot of work into this, and it might not pay off." And I said, "Well, to hell with it, I'm gonna do it." And it gave me a lot more conviction in what I do now, and really hurt at the time. Still stings to say. But I'm really happy he gave me that feedback, because it allowed me to understand what the downsides of the business that I'm in are, but it also made me believe how much conviction I have in the work that I'm doing.
Chris (22:57): Yeah. It's a very interesting notion of negative feedback strengthening our conviction level. I mean, this is very common in the psychological literature. When people hear arguments against their position at least one at a time, they tend to knock them out one at a time, because, "Oh, that argument didn't convince me, that argument didn't convince me." Their position actually gets stronger. But what you described is a bit different, is you take it on as if, "What if everything that I believe to be true, all these assumptions that I have, have they all been validated? Is everything that I'm doing wrong?" And actually use this as an opportunity to reflect and say, well, "How could this person be right? What is their perspective? Is there something that they're seeing that I'm not?"
And I think interesting to the wisdom of crowds example, but I think the somewhat impractical in a way, is with the bull vote, everyone had one vote, and all votes were weighted equal, but presumably there were some people in the crowd who knew a little bit more about bulls, or had attended some of these fairs before and had maybe heard the announcer announce last year's bull type of thing. And so just as humans, we tend to weight some feedback more than others. Our natural biases, right, the most recent feedback, or maybe when we're in a weakened emotional state, or right after we have a big success we're able to, you know, disregard negative feedback a little bit more. I'm curious about you know, how do you decide which feedback . . . You changed your mind, you do something differently, and which feedback is just noise?
David (24:38): Yeah. Well it depends. But I think that it's worth valuing the people who are close to you and their feedback very highly. You know, people always say, "Oh, you shouldn't care what other people think." I think that that's absolute nonsense. Having people in your life who you trust to give you feedback is one of the most useful things that you can have, and provided that you do trust them and that you do think that they're looking out for you at some level, you should absolutely listen to what they have to say. But what that does is it allows you to . . . You can almost think of like a moat, right? Where you have your castle, and then there's like a big waterway, and then on the other side of the moat you just don't care what other people are saying. I think that that's something that I think is worth doing at like eighty percent level. And then having the people in your castle be people who you really trust. That is then when you can have good conversations and actually get to the root of what you're struggling with or the root of how you're thinking about things. Then you can often find opportunities to really change what you're doing.
The other thing, though, is there's definitely a tension between marketing and intellectual honesty, which is really difficult. And conviction and intellectual honesty. Where intellectual honesty is sort of in the philosophical mode of discourse trying to say, basically, "I believe this. Now what's the opposite? How do I sort of synthesize these?" And always going through that exercise of, "I'm right. I'm wrong. How do we figure these out? I'm right. I'm wrong." And trying to find all these different perspectives. Whereas conviction is the opposite. Conviction is like, "I've already worked this out. Now I'm gonna go for it with all my might."
And the answer of how you square those two things is writing. Where what writing does, and this is one of the reasons I advocate it so strongly is . . . Like at the beginning of this year, I wrote an annual review, and I wrote a plan with goals for this year, and I knew that I had spent enough time on that thing that I'd already worked out a lot of the dialectical back and forth that sends people into paralysis. And because I'd worked that out, gotten it on paper, now that I had it written down I could charge forward with conviction. And that's one of the reasons why I advocate writing so much, is because it is a proof of work to yourself that you've done the hard work of thinking through feedback.
Chris (27:30): It's something that I talk a lot about with my clients, and I refer to it as the improvement loop, with the three steps being planning, experimentation, and reflection. You know, we talk about feedback loops all the time, David, and this concept that the speed of your improvement in anything, your writing, your career, et cetera, is proportional to the tightness of this loop. You know, how quickly can you decide what you're going to do? Frame an experiment that allows you to collect feedback? You know, see if this idea or this course of action has traction, and then reflect. What did you learn? What would you differently next time, if you were in the same situation? And what you describe with your annual review, and what I've found similar, is that if you take the time to reflect and really solidify what you're working on, that saves you a ton of time during the year because you don't have all of these daily existential angst type questions of, you know, "Am I really doing the right thing? Am I wasting my time?" type stuff. You do the hard work up front, and that allows you to sprint with more conviction during the year.
And maybe some of this negative feedback which might deflate some of that conviction in a non-helpful way, right? You address it. But you've already had all these objections with yourself and overcome them. And so when someone else comes in with it from left field, you already have an answer prepared, it doesn't take you off the course. Is that similar to the experience that you've had with reviews?
David (29:08): Yeah. You know, when I was a kid, there'd be two types of road trips that we did. And when I was really young, the road trip was "okay, let's look at the map." So we'd always go to AAA, me and my dad, and we'd buy one of those maps. And you'd take it out, you'd sort of open it, and it was really big, and then as you were driving, you would figure out, "Okay, we've gotta take Highway 87, now we've gotta get off on this road, it sort of bends around there, oh, we're gonna stop at Cleveland." You know, all these sorts of things.
And then what happened was there was a huge innovation where my dad learned about MapQuest. And MapQuest was the biggest deal at the time, 'cause you could go and you could enter your destination, and then you'd have all the directions there, and you'd never have to open the map midway. So like we'd never have to pull over or stop or anything. And what you're saying is like a MapQuest strategy, rather than the AAA map strategy. And what you realize is once you have MapQuest, you can just race to your end goal. And there's a lot of wisdom in that, where the working hard is important, of course, and I think I work as hard as anyone I've ever met. But I think that orientation is more important than how hard you work, and if you have—and this is why Chris is useful as a partner—is if you have somebody who you work on your orientation with in life, then you move from AAA map life to MapQuest life, and then you don't have to stop and check. You can just keep going over as you're going. And there's a lot of benefit in that.
You know, there's reasons why companies, they all write strategy memos. There's reasons why people who set ten-year visions, twenty-five-year visions, who make that future clear for themselves, it is easier for them to just keep going.
But then there's also another point about orientation, here. It's also just much more motivating, where one of the things that you have when you set a goal of who you are and what you want to achieve, like with Write of Passage, I have a ten-year goal to eventually launch companies through Write of Passage and take the writers who I'm working with to build audiences and having them launch small startups. And what's interesting is having a bolder vision for your future makes the present better, in that it gives Write of Passage students, makes them more committed. And it then . . . Probably fifteen to twenty percent of Write of Passage students who join now, join because they want to be part of that vision. And then for myself, it makes decisions very clear, 'cause I can say that's either driving me to that vision, or it's not driving me to that vision.
And then you get to a place where you're well-oriented and you just charge, and a couple times a year you just pause to reflect.
Chris (32:25): I love that. And this notion of orientation is so powerful. So the concept of a vector, right? That you both have the speed at which a particle is moving, but also the direction. Which of the three hundred and sixty degrees is the particle heading? And that way too many think about how they can accelerate their speed, versus a slight correction to the direction, I mean it's a magnitude of difference. Where something I like to say is, you know, "The best way to waste time is to sprint as fast as you can in the wrong direction." Right? Imagine your family vacation, and you put in the—say you're trying to go to Maine, and you put in Florida. And it doesn't matter how good the map is, like, you're heading in the opposite direction.
David (33:14): Mm-hmm.
Chris (33:15): So that taking a little bit of extra time to really solidify that north star saves you a lot of time in the long run. And I think there's actually three dimensions to this. It's not just a two-by-two. They exist in three dimensional space, with the third dimension being how direct is the path that you're taking towards this north star? Where . . . I like to say there are lots of paths to the top of the mountain, but not all of them will take you as long. Think about taking a hike. You can take the gentle route, the super scenic route, or you can just like scale right up the side, and maybe you get there in a third of the time. And a lot of this is, you know, what is the type of journey that you're looking to have?
But I think many people out there are taking oblique paths towards their goal when usually there is a more direct path towards what they are looking to achieve, and having a really clear idea of this vision, what they want to be different in the world because of their existence in it, will usually help to identify a more clear path.
I think this is a really good transition back to this personal monopoly idea, where we live in a relativistic society. You know, Twitter, other social media, we're so exposed to people who presumably are doing things so easily and having results that we'd love to have, and it causes us to undervalue our own strengths. And I'm really curious, because for you, with someone with you know, a lot of focus, how do you manage to stay in your lane? Right? I know that you're extremely intellectually curious, there's a lot of things you love exploring. How do you stick to your strengths? How do you continue to leverage your own personal monopoly?
David (35:11): Yeah, it's so funny that you ask that question. I almost blurted with laughter. Like, internally I do not stick to my lane at all. Like, I feel like this is my biggest weakness in life. That I just don't stick to my lane. But I think that there's something really interesting here, and this is the essence of a personal monopoly. What you just said and what I feel do not align at all. And so there is actually a tremendous amount of wisdom in here, in that what you do is you get very sensitive to what you're good at, and the places where you are really extreme. And so for me, I just . . . Like, I love ideas. Like, I love ideas as much as anyone I've ever met. Like they make me so excited. I don't want to do things, because I just want to be around ideas, and I also just love making things with ideas. Like, whenever we have family over . . . So, you know, it's like a four-hour dinner on Thanksgiving. Every time, I go upstairs for like twenty minutes. And I just make a couple drawings or I'll fire off a couple tweets or I'll write a couple paragraphs of an essay.
I woke up this morning a little early, wrote for an hour and a half. 'Cause there's no other option. Right? Like, I'm trying to think, "I have a window today from one to three where . . . How am I gonna use that time to just be creative?" Like, I just . . . I love it. Like there's nothing else that I want to do life besides internalize ideas, meet interesting people so I can smash ideas with them, and then basically create what I come up with. And I just want to do that over and over again.
So like, Chris is seeing that and he's like, "God, you're so centered and all these things." I am a hurricane of madness with no Weather Channel to tell me where I'm going. What I was interested in yesterday was this idea called 'planting a flag.' What I'm interested in today, whatever that ends up becoming, will be so different. And it drives me insane, and I tell myself, "You gotta be more focused and disciplined," every single day. And it never happens.
But the wisdom here is that if you find the thing that you're both really good at and that you really enjoy . . . The things that we're actually good at are like extremely narrow. They're extremely narrow, right? Like my "what I'm good at" is like being super intellectually curious, knowing how to communicate that well, meeting really high-level interesting people, and then taking action really fast, and then somehow there's a kind of marketing that mostly comes through Twitter that I'm really, really good at. Like, that's what I'm good at. Like, there it is, ladies and gentlemen. Five things. And that feels to me limitless. It's fun, it psyches me up, makes me happy to live. To other people it's like, "Jeez, you're focused." And I can tell you, I am not at all.
Chris (37:12): And I find that so interesting, how obviously the external perception versus the internal perception, right? Where above the water, you know, we're ducks just calmly swimming around, but below the surface we're just madly paddling trying to figure things out. And what you describe as a source of frustration . . . How do you exist as someone who's so intellectually promiscuous in a world of information overload, where you of all people know the benefits of continually doubling down on your strengths? And in a way, your awareness of those costs allow you to stay in your lane, as you put it, despite all temptation to the otherwise.
On the other hand, you've really found ways to leverage your own unique ability, your love for ideas. You incorporate that into your newsletter and to your conversations with high performers from, you know, all types of industries and backgrounds. And this curiosity, it seems like you've almost weaponized it. And I think that's a really interesting dimension as well, as you know, even something that we might think is a distraction or something to be limited can be a strength if it's something that we're just so uniquely drawn to. And I love this notion, in a Christopher Alexander sense, of feeling alive. That you wake up in the morning, and exploring new ideas is something that just makes you feel alive. I mean, that's a cool thing, when you're introspecting, to think about, is what are the activities that you do that make you feel most excited? And I would love to explore that a little bit more.
So, walk me through, you know, the most . . . Maybe even if it's this morning. The last time that an idea popped into your mind. Maybe it was a connection between two things you haven't thought about before. "Maybe this is something I could try," "maybe this is like . . . Oh, I wonder if I stir the pot on Twitter how people will react" . . . Like, what is that first thing that you do once that thought pops into your head?
David (40:26): Yeah. Hold that question. There's a story that I just wanna tell. 'Cause, you know, you were talking about staying in your lane, and you were talking about your curiosity, and one of the worst things that you can do in life, I think, is to worry too much about the productivity of your curiosity. And often our intuition knows something about where we want to be that our rational mind can't fathom. And when it comes to not worrying about the productivity of your curiosity, I'm gonna share my favorite story about Peter Thiel, one of the most successful investors in the world. First money in Facebook, founded Palantir, founded PayPal. And there's this guy named Michael Gibson, worked for Peter Thiel. First day at work, he goes and he's like, "I'm gonna go to the corner office to meet the boss man." And he walks in, and there's seven people in the office. Looks like a really serious meeting. Everyone is talking, high-level. And there's all these old people in there, and everyone's got a book in their hand. What are they looking at?
And every person . . . I mean this is an investor, and every person . . . Thiel had flown in seven academics to read a chapter in Leo Strauss's City and Man for the entire day. Just to study that and dissect it from every angle. How in the world does that have to do with investing? It either really has to do with investing at some level or has nothing to do with investing at all. And you know what? It just doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter.
And for me, I've wanted to cultivate a life where what I could be curious in just like Thiel there, it just didn't matter. And I think that normally with the way that we think about careers is, they're so specialized. But specialization isn't like hyper-specialization, that is of somebody else's volition, that is very legible, like "you do search-engine optimization, I'm gonna do spreadsheets and study accounting," something like that. That's how we think of most careers. But now there's an ability to actually shape and mold a career in the mirror image of who you are and how you're designed to be on this planet.
And I think that this is one of the problems with, actually, the decline of religion in the West in particular, is there's not these words now for destiny, for vocation, for God's design for you. And when we've lost that . . . like we've now sort of descended into like, "Special Snowflake," but it doesn't have the seriousness of, "treat who you are biologically . . . take that seriously." Because that's the kind of thinking that then gets you into taking your curiosity seriously, and not questioning it too much, and trying to be unique in a personal monopoly-fashion in terms of how you deploy your talents.
Like, everyone has some kind of personal monopoly. Everyone. And yet people hear this idea, and they're like, "How could I possibly do that?" And to me that is evidence of some deep-rooted issues that stem from conformity, that stem from always trying to follow these pre-ordained paths and to look to other people for answers instead of trusting our intuition and the wisdom within it.
Chris (44:20): I think that's a really good way to transition over to the Q&A. There's some really good questions coming in that I think we've touched on, but I think would be really cool to expand on, and maybe see if we can make them more actionable for takeaways.
First of all, we've got a pseudo-anonymous question coming in about personal monopolies. So, David, how would you go about . . . Say you're starting over, you don't have your own skills, you're still kind of in the early stages. How would you go about finding your personal monopoly, when it seems like there's someone out there for just about everything?
David (44:54): Yeah, there's just not at all. That idea is just dead bang-on wrong. And I don't mean to offend you, but you are absolutely wrong about that. But hopefully that is very empowering for yourself. I mean, I can think of things all the time . . . I was helping a friend last night who wants to build a personal monopoly on digital security. Helping individuals basically arm themselves to make sure that they don't get hacked. There's no person who comes to mind who is really focused on that. I have another friend who is trying to be the go-to expert for beef liver. Beef liver! And why it's so healthy. There's an infinite number of personal monopolies.
Okay, get this one. I love this one. So I had a student who was a financial adviser, only for FedEx pilots, because the economics of flying cargo, especially for FedEx, have all of these unique characteristics, so he just works with FedEx pilots and just is the financial advisor for some crazy percentage of them.
There are so many personal monopolies that are open to you. Now, the question is, how do you find them? The temptation here is to go rent a cabin in the woods and go to that cabin for the entire weekend, and write down a pros/cons list of what your personal monopoly is gonna be, and then draw all these little Venn diagrams. Sorry, that's not gonna help you. It's just not gonna help you. The way that you work on your personal monopoly is you take relentless action, you work hard, you make things, you do things, you say 'yes' to projects, you hang out with super-interesting people, the most interesting that you can, you read great books, find all the free information that's available online, you work on stuff, and you figure out what you like doing, what you don't like doing, and you listen to what other people say, and they'll tell you what you're good at and what you're not good at, and slowly but surely one day you're going to say, "Wait, I have a personal monopoly."
But it is not like this rational,God's design contemplation. Get that out of your head. Take action and think about this concept as you do, and it will emerge.
Chris (47:12): Yeah. The cultural notion of you're sitting in the bathtub and you just have this epiphany and a light bulb comes above your head, it's like, "Eureka! I've got it! I know what I'm going to do with my life!"
David (47:24): Right. The apple falls on your head. That's actually how it happens.
Chris (47:28): And as you describe, it's a constant iterative, explorative process of trying things, seeing what sticks, expanding upon what's most interesting and impactful, and it's almost fractal in that way, in that you continually drill down. And what I love about some of those examples is people from the outside, it's like, "Wow, that's so ridiculously specific. How can you create a career around that?" But if there's something that you are the world expert in, if you get specific enough, you can create your own category where you're the only person who has that unique intersection. I think you say it's, you know, skills, experience, personality, where like you are the only one. Like, if that problem exists and it's something worth paying for, it's like you can make a career out of literally anything.
And you know, the original Kevin Kelly idea of a thousand true fans is now a hundred true fans, and if you get really specific and painful enough, it might be one or ten true fans. And so that's a really cool way of thinking about it, is like not putting pressure on yourself, although this is something that I need to come up with, but that it's an ongoing lifetime experience to continually take in feedback and you know, iterate, course correct, that orientation towards your north star.
David (48:47): Yeah. A quick comment. Personal monopolies are also dynamic. Like, my personal monopoly today won't be the same as it is in two years. And the problem is, people think of personal monopolies like they think of company brands. Like, Coca-Cola's brand of opening happiness is the same that it was a hundred years ago, of that really positive vision of, "You're gonna drink the coke, you're gonna be refreshed." I mean there used to be cocaine in the drink, so it was like made to just be incredible for people. And there's no cocaine in it now, but it still has that same vibes of happiness and refreshment. But like, honestly if you're the same in twenty years, you're not growing fast enough. And individual and company is totally different. And drop that metaphor. It's not helpful.
Chris (49:40): Nice. I'm gonna go to Hemang next. I love this question. "How do you keep room for creativity in this world of information overload? Is there a system that you follow that allows you to carve out time for original thoughts?" As you're blocking off ninety minutes for writing, reading really difficult, challenging books . . . How are you able to maintain this fuel which allows you to drill down and leverage your monopoly, in this world where I know you're also tweeting dozens of times a day, consuming lots of other ideas, how do you keep those separate and kind of maintain that space for thinking?
David (50:20): Yeah. So the first, there's no question, the premise of the question, that you don't make time for creativity. Usually. So I actually think that this depends, now that I think about it, on if you work for yourself or work for somebody else. If you work for somebody else, just get into making projects and reading interesting things. But I actually just think that that's the answer. Like, do things that force you to be creative. If you challenge yourself and you work on projects that are in that flow state, slightly outside of what comes easy to you, but still manageable in terms of your skills, then that's what creativity is. If you're consuming . . . Then sort of going through the cycle of consumption, conversation, production, consumption, conversation, production. Like . . . I mean, right now am I making space for creativity? I don't know. What I do know is I have an Otter transcript going of every single word that I'm saying, and I'm gonna scroll through it after, and I'm gonna say, "Hey, did I say anything interesting?"
And then I'll turn that into a tweet. And then I'm meeting a friend at 11:30 today, and we're going to go through maybe having a conversation about what I spoke about. Like, I don't know how we couldn't. And then I'm meeting another friend for dinner tonight. We'll probably talk about some of this stuff. And then through that process, like, what I do is I've already written for ninety minutes today. I'll probably tweet a couple more times today. Try to come up with five tweets every single day. And what you just end up in is just a life of creation. Like, there isn't . . . I don't know. It's like the whole idea that you would have moments of your life where you are creative and moments where you aren't creative . . . The app is Otter, by the way . . . Moments of your life that aren't and are, is like, it's so foreign to me. It's like life is creativity. What else could it be? That's what humans are. We create stuff, we're always trying to find new ideas, we're generative. Like, that's the most alive existence of being human. Like, how could you say 'no' to that?
Chris (52:32): A life of creativity. I'm all about this. Michael wants to know, "Hey, David. So, imagine taking the plunge, right? You have a good idea of what this personal monopoly might be, you want to turn it into a product, a service, et cetera. In launching this first cohort of Write of Passage, how did you de-risk it for yourself?” How did you turn the equation in your favor that, 'Hey, this is something that I could put myself out there, that I can ask for sign-ups?' What were those critical steps for you that allowed you to do that first launch?
David (53:04): Yeah. You can basically de-risk any company by following this process: Write about it, build an email list, become an expert at what it is that you do, talk to experts in the field, ask your email list if they'd be interested in paying for the thing, launch the thing. Boom. You just de-risked everything. And what you're doing when you're writing is you are learning about what is going on in a field, and the actual . . . Like there are so many problems in the world. There are so many problems. Like look at the world right now. The number of things that are just wrong is infinite, and my goodness, there are so many things that I would want to start, but I'm working on Write of Passage. And so what you're doing is you're writing about a specific industry. And I'll tell you, if you write about something for two years, you will find so many things that are wrong with it. People will just tell you. People will literally tell you, "I need help with this."
That's . . . Like, I had a friend named Jeremiah Lowin, and Jeremiah runs a data company called Prefect.io. And he did that because he was working at a company, he didn't like the way data was structured, so he went and he called a bunch of people and he said, "If I build this, will you buy it?" And they said, "Yes, I will, and I will give you money for investment." And then thirteen months later, he had the product live. So you can basically simulate that experience and replicate it by writing, where you go, and you go talk to experts, you're sort of writing about the field, and all of a sudden you're like, "Wait! Company A, B, C, D, E, F, and G are all struggling with the same issue. If I go build something, and I validate before that they're willing to pay for it, now I have a product." And so with Write of Passage . . . I mean I don't know how you could ever validate that something's going to be a billion dollar company before . . . But that's not the point. The point is, like, a company that helps you live and make money on your own so that you can have your own sovereignty, and so that you don't have to ever work for anyone else again, and deal with the BS of corporate politics in the world that there is now.
And if you have that, and go through this validation progress, you can absolutely get there. But it takes a lot of hard work, which most people aren't willing to do.
Chris (55:26): Karishma would want to know . . . "So, how do you go about making a career out of what do you identify as your personal monopoly?" Maybe touch on you know, creating that brand, that you know, brings in in-bound opportunities that you'd be interested in. Is there any questions that you can ask yourself to help flesh that out? Any tactical advice?
David (55:46): Yeah. I would think of like a ladder. Okay? So think of a ladder. So the first, the premise of this is, think of the experts in your field. Whatever field it is. Design, painting, ballet, business. Think of the experts in your field. What do they have in common? They all teach. They all teach. They all share their ideas. So start there. Okay? "Uh-oh. I'm not an expert in my field. What idea should I share?" Well, the thing is, I could go learn about business from Jeff Bezos, and as much as I like reading his investor letters, he has almost nothing to tell me about how to build an online education business. He just can't help that much. So what do I look at? I look at the people who are two and three steps ahead of me.
And for example, I hired the former executive director of Seth Godin's school to basically work with me to help Write of Passage, because I know that altMBA, this school, is amazing, has amazing reviews. So I said, "Why don't I bring on the director to work with me?" And so her name is Wes. She's super-talented. And she just looks . . . Her and another guy who is on our team who is named Billy who has built some online education businesses before. All they are is, they're people who are like two and three steps ahead of me, and they just tell me, "Hey, you should look out for this. Hey, this is gonna be a problem. Hey, I've been through this. This is what you should be thinking about." It's amazing.
But what's key is that like the ladder . . . So let me explain the ladder analogy. If the ladder has ten rungs, okay, I might be right now on rung three or four, whereas these people are on rung six or seven. And those are the people who I want on my team. But everyone who has paralysis about writing, they think you need to be on ladder ten, Jeff Bezos level, to say anything of value. And it just isn't true at all. And so once you get up to ladder two, rung two, you can help the people on rung one. Three, then two and one. Four, then three, two. One actually might be too far now.
And so as you learn something, just write for the person who you were six months ago. Give that person all the answers, and you'll end up helping a bunch of other people.
Chris (58:14): I'm writing that one down right there. "Write for the person who you were six months ago." That's a great one. This is something that I think about a lot, and it's like, how do I create a network of people around me who we can mutually accelerate each other? And I think this tendency is so pervasive in society, is just to . . . you know, classic survivor bias, let's look at the total outliers, the Elon Musks, the Jeff Bezoses of the world, and try to copy what they did. No matter that their situation is completely different, that they were starting their career literally three decades ago, but you know, I'm gonna try to do what they did. But the world is dynamic, as you said. And I think I like to use a mathematical analogy here: everyone is looking at the Y-intercept, like, this mentor. I want someone who's done it before, who is already standing on the pinnacle, but the way that you want to build relationships, partnerships, friendships, alliances, is not where somewhere is but where someone is going to be.
So, what's their X? What's their slope? I think it's a huge part of why I was instantly drawn to building a friendship with you, Dave, is like, "I don't know what David is going to do, but I know that it's going to be big and I know that his slope is going to go vertical at some point." And that is a really powerful way, if you're thinking long-term. You know, I think having a long-time preference is one of our greatest weapons—who do you want around you who you know is going to be doing big things, and how can you mutually accelerate each other? And that ladder analogy of, "Who is a couple rungs ahead of you on this ladder, but perhaps you're a couple rungs ahead of them on a tangential ladder?" And it doesn't need to be transactional, it shouldn't be transactional, but this is how partnerships are created, because the biggest winners don't compete. They get up there together.
I think this is a really good kind of time to bring in Bronson's question. So I remember right before the annual review, you did an exercise where you emailed some of your closest friends and asked for anonymized feedback. And that this was a way of uncovering some of your strengths, and maybe some of the areas for improvement. And Bronson's curious if you could just kind of detail that process of how did you solicit that feedback, and then how did you incorporate it so it became actionable?
David (01:00:46): Yeah. So very simple, actually. I just made a survey, and I just said, "Hey, you can fill out this survey." I went on Typeform and did it. And I just said, "Hey, it's totally anonymous. Here are three questions. I made them very easy to answer. It'll take you ten minutes." And I sent them to my ten closest friends. And I think that what's interesting is I read them, they were about me, so they hit pretty hard, and some of them sting. I have no idea who said what. And then over time you just kind of internalize that that feedback and the stuff that's worth keeping, you keep. And then the stuff that isn't, you end just discarding through forgetting things. But one of the things that you could also do is you could just take a note of, "this was the general feedback, here were the three themes." And you could review that at the end of every year, and just have a feedback category.
Like, I mean I do this in my writing, where whenever I get feedback on my writing, I just have a whole list of things that I have gotten feedback on over and over again, and they're things like, "Okay, but the main point of your paragraph should be at the beginning and the end." I have a tendency to sort of throw it in the middle. There are things like, "Hey, I really like the ideas here, but the structure didn't flow that well. Here's what you can do. You can just start with the thesis." And whenever you start with the thesis instead of the story, your writing ends up being better. Right? Like very particular things I have them say, and I can just always open up the folder.
So I wouldn't overthink it. But I would say make it anonymous, and make it easy for people to participate. Chris, with what you were saying, there's the song with Drake and DJ Khaled. "No new friends, no new friends, no, no new." And I think that one of the things that you're getting at with the slope and the Y intercept is once people get above a certain level on that Y intercept, they become so successful, it's no new friends. You know, like there's a reason that Drake and DJ Khaled came up with that. They don't trust new people who come into their life, because the further up you go, the percentage of people who want to be friends with you for you and the percentage of people who want to be friends with you for what you have, the distribution of those changes for the negative.
And one of the things that you want to do is find what I call a ten club. Ten people who you want to work with later in life, people who you're aligned with on their values, you have shared beliefs about the world, you have shared interests and what you like doing . . . Like Chris and I. We like having these conversations, but we also love electronic music, we have a shared appreciation for art. Like there's a lot of shared interests that we have, and we can sort of be quite polymathic when we speak because the Venn diagram of who we are overlaps so much. And then as we climb up the graph, we can go up together, and we can be at a place where, you know what? Chris knew me when I was twenty-three years old. I knew Chris back when Forcing Function was just like the seed of an idea. And that creates a tremendous amount of trust.
Chris (01:003:55): I think that's a fantastic note to end on, and a really good thing for those who are still with us to think about, is you know, who do you want to be in your ten? And I think the best way to build this type of friendship is to be aware of the value that you can add, and to create relationships where the frame is, you know, we help each other. We help each other get to where we want to go, we add value to each other. And it's really awesome, you know, your group of ten is kind of what I think about as my 'council'—you don't want generalists on your council, you want people who are extremely good at one thing. And you're likely a specialist in something that someone you admire . . . Even if they probably admire you as well, a little, but secretly they would love to know what you think about this topic. And so, it's a really cool thing to continually think about, is you know, what is your specialty? What would your seat on the council be?
You know, David, a whirlwind conversation, had no doubts. Really, really excited to have you here and thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. Any parting thoughts before we wrap up today?
David (01:05:10): Not really. Thank you very much for being here. I think that if you're interested in writing, I have a course. I'm gonna type in the URL now, ageofleverage.com/course. You can see that in the chat. And that's just a free email course where I just talk about a lot of these ideas and share just the very basics of my philosophy of writing. I mean, I really see writing as sort of a way of life, as you can tell. Like, everything I spoke about today was sort of about writing. And I don't think about writing as the act of typing on a keyboard. I think of it as the act of living a wonderful life. So, thank you, Chris. And thank you all for being here.
Chris (01:05:55): Thanks, guys. Yeah, if you haven't taken Write of Passage yet, if you haven't checked out David's email series, Age of Leverage, highly recommend it. I can say from experience that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and the best way to put these ideas into practice is to join a group who you can mutually sharpen each other, and I think Write of Passage, you've done a fantastic job of creating that community, so thank you for that.
You know, with that I'm gonna, we're gonna call things to a close. Just as a reminder, this recording is gonna be sent out via email in two days. So you'll receive an email on Friday. There'll be a link to the full video, audio, and transcript, as well as some show notes. Any links that we had in the chat will be on that page as well. If you have any additional questions, just hit 'reply' to that email, and David I think would be happy to continue the conversation offline. I would mention that, hey, you're going to be added to our monthly newsletter, so keep an eye out for that so you can stay in the loop about future Lunch Hours. We're looking to do these about twice a month, and that the next one we're doing is going to be with Taylor Pearson on September 25th.
With that, guys, thank you so much for joining us, thank you for your wonderful questions, and I look forward to seeing you again next time.
Tasha (01:06:30): Thank you for listening to the Forcing Function Hour. At Forcing Function, we teach performance architecture. We work with a select group of twelve executives and investors to teach them how to multiply their output, perform at their peak, and design a life of freedom and purpose. Make sure to subscribe to Forcing Function Hour for more great episodes, or go to forcingfunctionhour.com to sign up for our newsletter so you can join us live.