Write of Passage

Write of Passage now aims for one excellent piece, not a weekly habit. Tim Ferriss convinced David Perell that the returns to publishing consistently are falling because of AI and a flood of weekly newsletters. Perell is changing Write of Passage to help students find, publish and share one core idea as the best thing they have written, adding editors and coaching.

The target is a single piece that 10,000 people read. Perell: "the returns to publishing consistently are going down, while the returns to publishing something of quality, real quality, are as high as they've ever been."

How I Write▶ 55:11

Write the core idea as one essay, then distill it to a sentence. Perell's process is to write the core idea in one essay, compress it into one sentence or a one-pager, then get it out into the world.

He ties this to the Greek archigos, meaning author, founder, pioneer and leader, since writing the idea comes first. His examples are Marc Andreessen's manifesto and the American founders' writings.

How I Write▶ 56:41

The old playbook it taught rewarded distribution over quality. The personal-writing playbook was to pick a niche, tweet about it, link to a newsletter and never miss a week. Perell sent a weekly newsletter for 5 years even when unhappy with it, because distribution beat quality, and says his odds with that strategy are far lower now than five years ago.

He defines slop as writing where getting something published matters more than its quality, and argues AI ends slop because quality now has to beat machines that produce information fast.

How I Write

Running the school cut into Perell's own writing. Since starting Write of Passage, Perell writes less than he did from 2018 to 2020, when he wrote 90 minutes every morning in a New York Starbucks. He wants the habit back.

He says Ferriss, who is five for five on his books, has already changed how he thinks about teaching his students.

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AI went from under 10% of the curriculum to its center in six months. When the Write of Passage cohort ended in November, AI was under 10% of the curriculum. Six months later Perell can't imagine teaching it as anything but the linchpin.

His own use of AI rose about 10x in a year. In 2023 he had dismissed a mentor's AI-first push, saying models hallucinate all the time.

How I Write

Use AI as a partner that interviews, critiques and drafts from your stories. Perell speaks ideas aloud on a walk, has AI turn them into an outline, then asks it for the weakest points and missing details.

AI can invent facts: a fake Steinbeck quote went out to 30,000 people, so quotes and exact facts need checking.

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Stake writing on experience, expertise, taste and a spiky point of view. Perell argues an LLM can't know what he learned living in Austin, running about 200 live Zoom sessions, or hearing about the YouTube algorithm over dinner. Taste means cutting most of what gets generated, by human or AI.

He is betting his own work on this, writing an 11,000-word personal story of his change in faith. "I'm interested in the best writing, period."

How I Write

Perell tells students which few words to expand and lets the rest go. In Write of Passage, Perell reviews students' daily emails and often tells them to expand on three specific words and let the rest fall away.

Students often open with "David, we need to talk" and fear both judgment and being ignored. Ava Huang, describing the same approach, finds "this works, this doesn't" feedback more useful than line edits.

How I Write▶ 1:11:21

The course was built in an 11-day sprint with overnight feedback. The course was made with morning interviews, afternoon filming and overnight team feedback. The fast feedback made it faster and far better than it would have been.

How I Write