Tim Urban
Writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, author of What's Our Problem?
Where to hear and read about Tim Urban1 episode or test
Tim Urban is the writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why and the author of What's Our Problem?, whose voice came from six years of pressure-free blogging. The thing most worth learning from him is to use his own delight as the filter at every stage, from which facts to keep to when a draft is done.
I'll research for three hours and get seven minutes of dopamine hits.
Tim Urban Breaks Down His Viral TED Talk
Tim Urban: the story and the lessons
1How Tim Urban found his voice
Urban's voice came from six years of blogging with no pressure. He wrote about 300 posts on a blog he used to procrastinate, with no plan to become a writer. Lists like 25 Things That Annoy Me turned up there, and the cartoons only appeared near the end.
He found both by trying things and seeing what readers liked. Readers liked the cartoons right away. "I wasn't trying to be a writer. I was just having fun."
The early blog was a funny email to friends, made public. Urban would email six friends a funny story about his day, and the blog did the same thing in public. He says the core of his writing hasn't changed, he still hangs out with readers and talks.
It broke every school-paper rule: no research, no format. A funny idea, like how weird it is that we all own dogs, became about three paragraphs in 20 minutes. The 300 posts showed him some readers loved his voice, which gave him the confidence to keep it.
Writing for the snootiest critic made his book drafts stiffer. While drafting his book he explained an idea as a long tweet to his subscribers and found it better than the book version. A book makes it easy to imagine the New York Times reviewing it.
His fix is to remember that his readers are friends in his head, and to explain it as if he were having fun on Twitter.
Urban resets his voice by imagining he is blogging in 2006. When his writing turns flat and matter of fact, he asks how he would explain the thing to a friend if it were 2006. He also reads playful colloquial writers like Bill Bryson, Scott Alexander and Allie Brosh, or rereads his own fun old posts.
A few drinks and a break help too. He tells himself it isn't a college paper.
Urban decides how much of himself goes into each piece. He describes a spectrum from dry academic writing, through op-eds, to Hunter S. Thompson, and says no point on it is better. His procrastination post has him all over it, while his AI post still shows his freakout and where his mind ended up.
He also picks his moments for silliness. Serious or emotional pieces, or pieces about someone else, need a quieter tone.
Urban avoids the stock connectors every writer reaches for. He limits words like however, because and after all, and prefers prose that is colloquial and sounds like him. The model is music: film scorers who found their own sound got the big movies, while copyists got smaller projects.
He points to the Beatles, who started with excellent derivative music and turned truly original in the mid to late 1960s. He would rather be weirder and less flowing than polished and generic.
2How Urban researches and decides what stays
Urban boils research down to the moments that gave him a jolt. He treats a piece as a dense version of a long, mostly dull research journey. Three hours of research may give him only seven minutes of dopamine hits, and those are what he keeps.
He likes Julian Shapiro's phrase, dopamine hit density. His model is a stand-up special, a decade of the funniest thoughts squeezed into one hour. Raymond Chandler held himself to one moment of insight per 250-word page.
Urban uses his own reaction to a fact as the filter. He assumes his readers are like him in intelligence, education and curiosity. A chimp's habitat of 8 square miles against a hunter-gatherer's 500 made the cut, while the common ancestor's population of 300,000 left him cold.
Walking on two legs using a quarter of the energy of walking on all fours also made it in, because it explains why humans walked long distances. It may still be cut in round two.
Urban packs his big-picture book with surprising details. His current book covers all of human history and the future. He found that pure zoom-out leaves readers asking why they should listen, so he keeps the arc but fills it with specific facts.
He learned this as a reader. David McCullough's John Adams turned a painting into a person through details like Adams telling himself in his diary to stop chasing girls in college.
Urban cuts dry material or mentions it in passing. He lets curiosity guide research. If it feels interesting, he is in a good place. If it stays dry, he either learns more or accepts it isn't interesting and cuts it.
Lucy looked like a routine fossil until he saw she walked upright before she was smart. "don't include it just for the sake of being a perfectionist, just cut it out or mention it quickly and move on."
3Writing What's Our Problem? and the TED Talk
A blog series on tribalism outgrew itself and became a book. The Story of Us was meant as a blog post on why society is so tribal. It built from new frameworks to history and then to examples.
Chapter 11 of 12 applied the ideas to current politics and ran longer than the other ten chapters combined. A 100,000-word chapter couldn't be a post, and calling it a book raised the standard, so he reworked the first ten chapters into What's Our Problem?
Urban posted early chapters and mined the criticism that came back. The first ten chapters went through a gauntlet of hundreds of comments before the book was finished. He weeded out the tribal ad hominem attacks and kept the substantive ones, such as missing the forest for the trees, inconsistency or bias.
Each valid point showed him where the argument was broken before print. Sometimes the critic is wrong, but sometimes he thinks, "Damn it. You know what?"
Urban recruited his most thorough critic as a draft reader. One commenter, Jacob Aziza, wrote long, on-point remarks that annoyed Urban. Urban messaged him and asked him to read the draft, and he came back with extremely detailed comments.
Urban's view is that a thoughtful critic spending time on you is doing you a service. "And the book is better because of him."
Urban wrote his TED Talk by speaking it aloud. He started with bullets, and the first spoken version ran double the length. He paced and spoke to an imagined audience, wrote down what he said, revised, and said it again to catch what sounded weird.
He memorized it word for word but wishes he had memorized it even better. He calls TED the Super Bowl of talks: an exact length, one take, and it lives online forever.
Urban's funniest TED line worked because it was true. The Google Earth line about getting a better feel for India first appeared in a blog post, then went into the talk. He really spent hours scrolling India and sometimes found he was still in the southern third.
He doesn't invent funnier stories. "Every single thing in that talk and in the blog post is true."
4Urban's working process and habits
Urban names which kind of stuck he is in before pushing on. He finds three different causes: the section is daunting and needs more research, he knows the material but not the order, or the sentences are boring. Each calls for a different fix.
Long projects cause more of this than short ones. He won't settle for a flat chronology of and then this happened, and wants varied tone throughout.
Urban rewrites any section he dreads, because readers feel it. He was told while preparing his TED Talk that the part you hate rehearsing will be the worst part of the talk. He applies the same test to writing, and does not just cut the dreaded part but changes it.
His best writing is the stretch where he ignores thirst, hunger and the bathroom for an hour because he is itching to get to the next thing. "If I'm fighting through a section, it's like, that's not going to be fun writing."
Urban writes first and draws last, marking drawings in bold brackets. As he writes, he types a bold bracketed description of each drawing. It reminds him what to draw and lets feedback readers picture it.
He says he is not good at drawing, so each blank page raises the question of how to draw the idea. He powers through the drawings like the gym, about six a day.
Urban sees most procrastination as self-defeating, except extra research. Working while fresh makes the rest of his day happier and leaves time to dig deep. He says only the extra reading and mulling are productive, and he would never rush out an idea unthought.
He worries that if his habit were 50% worse it might ruin his life, so he thinks it is worth working on. When the monkey invents tasks like cleaning the apartment, his fix is to see it and name it.
Urban's final read is a reader's read, and he trusts his taste. He aims to write what he would love to be sent. Near the end he reads the draft as a reader and fixes whatever is dull, unclear or bad, since he often forgets details and it feels fresh.
If he enjoys the piece, he knows others will. The last pass or two is purely technical, down to tiny word changes.
Urban writes in TextEdit and Word with his own formatting code. He uses bold, caps, color and indents to give himself about 20 classifications he reads at a glance. Other outliners frustrated him when he just wanted to move a block.
He moves to Word for editing and track changes. Word's weak autosave has cost him work, including during his last book, and losing even two sentences is excruciating because the wording can't be replicated.
Tim Urban Breaks Down His Viral TED Talk
Tim Urban explains that his distinct voice came from six years of low-pressure blogging, and that his best writing happens when he is having fun and sounds like himself. The technique worth hearing is how he treats research as a hunt for dopamine hits, keeps only the best, and uses his own delight as the filter at every stage.
Urban's voice came from six years of blogging with no pressure. He wrote about 300 posts on a blog he used to procrastinate, with no plan to become a writer. Lists like 25 Things That Annoy Me turned up there, and the cartoons only appeared near the end.
He found both by trying things and seeing what readers liked. Readers liked the cartoons right away. "I wasn't trying to be a writer. I was just having fun."
The early blog was a funny email to friends, made public. Urban would email six friends a funny story about his day, and the blog did the same thing in public. He says the core of his writing hasn't changed, he still hangs out with readers and talks.
It broke every school-paper rule: no research, no format. A funny idea, like how weird it is that we all own dogs, became about three paragraphs in 20 minutes. The 300 posts showed him some readers loved his voice, which gave him the confidence to keep it.
Writing for the snootiest critic made his book drafts stiffer. While drafting his book he explained an idea as a long tweet to his subscribers and found it better than the book version. A book makes it easy to imagine the New York Times reviewing it.
His fix is to remember that his readers are friends in his head, and to explain it as if he were having fun on Twitter.
Urban resets his voice by imagining he is blogging in 2006. When his writing turns flat and matter of fact, he asks how he would explain the thing to a friend if it were 2006. He also reads playful colloquial writers like Bill Bryson, Scott Alexander and Allie Brosh, or rereads his own fun old posts.
A few drinks and a break help too. He tells himself it isn't a college paper.
Urban decides how much of himself goes into each piece. He describes a spectrum from dry academic writing, through op-eds, to Hunter S. Thompson, and says no point on it is better. His procrastination post has him all over it, while his AI post still shows his freakout and where his mind ended up.
He also picks his moments for silliness. Serious or emotional pieces, or pieces about someone else, need a quieter tone.
Urban avoids the stock connectors every writer reaches for. He limits words like however, because and after all, and prefers prose that is colloquial and sounds like him. The model is music: film scorers who found their own sound got the big movies, while copyists got smaller projects.
He points to the Beatles, who started with excellent derivative music and turned truly original in the mid to late 1960s. He would rather be weirder and less flowing than polished and generic.
Urban boils research down to the moments that gave him a jolt. He treats a piece as a dense version of a long, mostly dull research journey. Three hours of research may give him only seven minutes of dopamine hits, and those are what he keeps.
He likes Julian Shapiro's phrase, dopamine hit density. His model is a stand-up special, a decade of the funniest thoughts squeezed into one hour. Raymond Chandler held himself to one moment of insight per 250-word page.
Urban uses his own reaction to a fact as the filter. He assumes his readers are like him in intelligence, education and curiosity. A chimp's habitat of 8 square miles against a hunter-gatherer's 500 made the cut, while the common ancestor's population of 300,000 left him cold.
Walking on two legs using a quarter of the energy of walking on all fours also made it in, because it explains why humans walked long distances. It may still be cut in round two.
Urban packs his big-picture book with surprising details. His current book covers all of human history and the future. He found that pure zoom-out leaves readers asking why they should listen, so he keeps the arc but fills it with specific facts.
He learned this as a reader. David McCullough's John Adams turned a painting into a person through details like Adams telling himself in his diary to stop chasing girls in college.
Urban cuts dry material or mentions it in passing. He lets curiosity guide research. If it feels interesting, he is in a good place. If it stays dry, he either learns more or accepts it isn't interesting and cuts it.
Lucy looked like a routine fossil until he saw she walked upright before she was smart. "don't include it just for the sake of being a perfectionist, just cut it out or mention it quickly and move on."
A blog series on tribalism outgrew itself and became a book. The Story of Us was meant as a blog post on why society is so tribal. It built from new frameworks to history and then to examples.
Chapter 11 of 12 applied the ideas to current politics and ran longer than the other ten chapters combined. A 100,000-word chapter couldn't be a post, and calling it a book raised the standard, so he reworked the first ten chapters into What's Our Problem?
Urban posted early chapters and mined the criticism that came back. The first ten chapters went through a gauntlet of hundreds of comments before the book was finished. He weeded out the tribal ad hominem attacks and kept the substantive ones, such as missing the forest for the trees, inconsistency or bias.
Each valid point showed him where the argument was broken before print. Sometimes the critic is wrong, but sometimes he thinks, "Damn it. You know what?"
Urban recruited his most thorough critic as a draft reader. One commenter, Jacob Aziza, wrote long, on-point remarks that annoyed Urban. Urban messaged him and asked him to read the draft, and he came back with extremely detailed comments.
Urban's view is that a thoughtful critic spending time on you is doing you a service. "And the book is better because of him."
Urban wrote his TED Talk by speaking it aloud. He started with bullets, and the first spoken version ran double the length. He paced and spoke to an imagined audience, wrote down what he said, revised, and said it again to catch what sounded weird.
He memorized it word for word but wishes he had memorized it even better. He calls TED the Super Bowl of talks: an exact length, one take, and it lives online forever.
Urban's funniest TED line worked because it was true. The Google Earth line about getting a better feel for India first appeared in a blog post, then went into the talk. He really spent hours scrolling India and sometimes found he was still in the southern third.
He doesn't invent funnier stories. "Every single thing in that talk and in the blog post is true."
Urban names which kind of stuck he is in before pushing on. He finds three different causes: the section is daunting and needs more research, he knows the material but not the order, or the sentences are boring. Each calls for a different fix.
Long projects cause more of this than short ones. He won't settle for a flat chronology of and then this happened, and wants varied tone throughout.
Urban rewrites any section he dreads, because readers feel it. He was told while preparing his TED Talk that the part you hate rehearsing will be the worst part of the talk. He applies the same test to writing, and does not just cut the dreaded part but changes it.
His best writing is the stretch where he ignores thirst, hunger and the bathroom for an hour because he is itching to get to the next thing. "If I'm fighting through a section, it's like, that's not going to be fun writing."
Urban writes first and draws last, marking drawings in bold brackets. As he writes, he types a bold bracketed description of each drawing. It reminds him what to draw and lets feedback readers picture it.
He says he is not good at drawing, so each blank page raises the question of how to draw the idea. He powers through the drawings like the gym, about six a day.
Urban sees most procrastination as self-defeating, except extra research. Working while fresh makes the rest of his day happier and leaves time to dig deep. He says only the extra reading and mulling are productive, and he would never rush out an idea unthought.
He worries that if his habit were 50% worse it might ruin his life, so he thinks it is worth working on. When the monkey invents tasks like cleaning the apartment, his fix is to see it and name it.
Urban's final read is a reader's read, and he trusts his taste. He aims to write what he would love to be sent. Near the end he reads the draft as a reader and fixes whatever is dull, unclear or bad, since he often forgets details and it feels fresh.
If he enjoys the piece, he knows others will. The last pass or two is purely technical, down to tiny word changes.
Urban writes in TextEdit and Word with his own formatting code. He uses bold, caps, color and indents to give himself about 20 classifications he reads at a glance. Other outliners frustrated him when he just wanted to move a block.
He moves to Word for editing and track changes. Word's weak autosave has cost him work, including during his last book, and losing even two sentences is excruciating because the wording can't be replicated.