Excellence demands obsessive depth

Writing quality equals novelty times resonance. Novelty is like we discussed, here are all these things that are giving you dopamine hits where I'm opening your eyes about how the world really works and shocking you and elegantly synthesizing things, times resonance and resonance means I can tell you the most novel thing on the planet. But if I don't wrap it in a way that resonates and really lifts off the page and into your mind and is something you remember, then it's fairly ineffective novelty.

You are one of the best people I've ever worked with at solving problems three through 100, but I need you stuck on problems one and two.

I have 20 friends read something I've written and highlight the sentences that made them go, 'Whoa.' And then I have this visualized map in a given blog post, where are the areas that people go, 'That's really interesting,' and then I can see all the white space between the interesting parts. I go in and I condense that white space.

If you go off to a training to learn a technique for doing, I don't know, some sort of technical dashboard analysis, why don't you go to training to learn how to have difficult conversations?

People that's starting, often they are getting a better storytelling journey. Often totally underestimate how many time actually great storytellers are investing in creating the stories... that's two weeks of work, not eight hours a day, obviously, but two weeks of work, maybe one or two hours a day to really carve that story.