Write of Passage

Message from what readers get: career, money or prestige. Lulu Cheng Meservey worked through her four-heading plan live for the course and its podcast: business objective, who must take what action, what they must believe, and where they already spend attention. For Write of Passage, readers must believe it improves their career, earns money or brings prestige.

She warns nobody cares about your passion or technology, only how it improves their life. Quote: "Nobody cares, nobody caress about your new hobby"

How I Write▶ 1:00:39

Assign five pieces in five weeks to push people to publish. The core course requires five pieces of writing in five weeks so participants actually ship. The Runway program runs 12 weeks as two five-week sprints with a break, and participants publish weekly.

Ana Lorena Fabrega said the five weeks felt like a full-time job spent capturing ideas.

How I Write

Treat writing as the way you become an expert. Perell teaches that writing is the process through which you learn a subject, so you only need curiosity to start. This reframing got Ana Lorena Fabrega, a self-described writing hater, to start writing.

Schools tell kids to write only about what they already know, which paralyzes them. Quote: "I'm going to learn I don't need to be an expert yet"

How I Write▶ 6:50

Unlearn school habits: write simply and tell personal stories. Ana dropped the jargon and padding school rewarded and wrote as she spoke to her students, and readers said that simplicity is what resonated. Perell also pushed her to lead with classroom stories rather than research; her first article, about loving teaching and quitting, became the intro of The Learning Game.

Perell's aim is to get people playing with writing like kids. Quote: "people don't remember the facts and the figures they remember the stories"

How I Write▶ 15:10

Use quotes as training wheels, then rely on them less. Perell estimates 20 to 30 percent of his early pieces were quotes because he did not trust his own ideas. He sees that as a fine way to start and expects writers to need fewer over time.

Quote: "I almost think of quotes as like training wheels for the writing process"

How I Write▶ 21:17

Give writers time to find a voice that sounds like them. Perell contrasted Ana's stiff first Fab Fridays pitch, promising research and powerful ideas in easy to digest ways, with his foreword calling her writing bubbly and imaginative.

He cites Miles Davis on how long it takes to play like yourself. Quote: "sometimes it takes a long time to be able to write like yourself"

How I Write▶ 38:57

The bigger the audience, the simpler the message must be. Perell used this rule when deciding the core things his bootcamp should deliver, citing Napoleon on clear battlefield directives.

Quote: "the bigger the group The simpler it needs to be"

How I Write▶ 47:54

The first cohort was taught from Perell's bedroom. Perell ran the very first cohort from his bedroom. Packy McCormick, later of Not Boring, was a student in it.

How I Write

Build a personal monopoly by combining a few things you care about. Packy McCormick took the personal monopoly idea from the course. Knowing he could not out-Thompson Ben Thompson, he counter-positioned with jokes, pop culture and odd topics, pairing a pop culture reference with a business idea in each of his first ten essays.

One early essay compared creative destruction to the Mickey Mouse Club. Quote: "what if I counter position against him?"

How I Write▶ 13:16

Assign five pieces in five weeks to push people to publish. The core course requires five pieces of writing in five weeks so participants actually ship. The Runway program runs 12 weeks as two five-week sprints with a break, and participants publish weekly.

Ana Lorena Fabrega said the five weeks felt like a full-time job spent capturing ideas.

How I Write

Lead the homepage with a bold, concrete promise and a number. Sam Parr reviewed the homepage and found its strongest line, 38 people from the last cohort calling it life-changing, buried at the bottom.

How I Write

A cold email to Tyler Cowen led to the grant that launched it. David Perell cold emailed Tyler Cowen, and a year after they met he received a $20,000 grant that launched Write of Passage.

Perell was 22 and rode a five-dollar Megabus to DC for the interview.

How I Write