10 key insights from Lenny Rachitsky on building a successful newsletter:
1. What do people ask you about that you don't have a great answer to? Viral essays are hiding inside this question. If people keep asking you the same question and nobody's written the answer, take on the challenge yourself.
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"Redemption comes from a character who has incurred a moral debt through their actions then making good on that moral debt by performing some deed or service or act of heroism that will ameliorate the bad. That seems simple enough. But in the arid secular plains of modernity and its accompanying moral relativism, what is even good? What is even bad? How can there be redemption in the absence of a functioning moral schema?"
The direction language models indeed prompt you to follow (pun intended) often leads you somewhere boring — to the land of averages
Writing is a tool to reach beyond consensus. Write and write and write until you transcend the cliches and step into undiscovered territory
-Ava talking to David Perell
I believe an essay is the most flexible written medium, and it calls for a fusion of genres: the soul of a memoirist, the pen of a poet, and the rigor of an academic. By learning to shape a thesis, your essays will become more than gripping stories with beautiful sentences, they will help you and your reader make sense of the world.