3 Things I am applying to My Writing Goals So Far + Examples
What I'm Up To (Publishing), What I Reflected On (January 2023 Writing Retrospective), and What's Occupying My Mind (My LinkedIn Post)- all part of Allen's Friday Flights
Welcome to my Friday Flights!
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this is Gen Z speak for “wow that’s a lot of things going on this week, and you had a lot of thoughts, but had no time to think and unravel it.”
Enjoy my friday flights today. They are about writing.
Cheers!
Past Publications
What I’m Up To
TL;DR: Optimize Writing Processes
The Things
There were multiple mass shootings during Lunar New Year, the first being in Monterey Park California. They were perpetuated by elderly Asian Males. :(
Turns out I can’t count - I’m now at Day 21 on Ship 30 for 30. Last week was Day 14.
HI Ashley, Jean-Baptiste, Christoph, and Faizon.
I was a mentor for a moment to someone on the student board for CSULB BAP&AS. It’s been a long while since I did anything like that.
This is the best Japanese BBQ in Southern California. Please invite me.
I made a chocolate cake using a store bought mix. I subbed water for creamy oat milk, added an extra egg, and used coffee powder. You professional bakers judge me but it worked!
What I Reflected On
TL;DR: How to optimize writing by being oddly specific on what question I want to answer.
3 Things I am applying to My Writing Goals So Far
My goal this year is to optimize the way I write online.
I learned a few things across various courses, most recently Ship30for30. Here are the 3 most practical things I’ve learned from the writing courses around “writing optimization” and how I’m applying those learnings today:
Minimize Blank Pages
Being Specific and Niche > Being Broad and Appeasing
Do that in 45 minutes
Minimize Blank Pages
Blank pages are the enemy - and the way I get around it is to already have an abundant amount of context-less information that I can then apply a situation to. What does that mean? It means I have a lot of “sticky note” ideas, trailing thoughts, unfinished thoughts, and stand-alone paragraphs littering my Notion.
They look like this:
I try to have every thought I come up, even the thoughts I delete from posts or written pieces, in my Notion. If there’s one thing to hoard digitally, hoard your thoughts and stick them in Notion so that you can use a search engine and find them again later.
And yes I stuff all the untitled pieces in their own untitled page.
The irony isn’t that this is writing-writing, this thinking before writing.
Being Specific and Niche > Being Broad and Appeasing
When I finally publish content online, I usually try to address it the only one specific type of individual online, whom I know is severely out numbered.
What do I mean by this
Okay you get the point.
You see how oddly specific you can get? The more “modifiers” to the core subject or theme, the more ways you can take it. Add in a bountiful amount of modifiers sprinkled randomly to any theme or question, and you’ll find your brain thinks limitlessly.
The more broad and appealing your content is, as it turns out, the more useless it is for everyone.
It’s a paradox.
The more niche and focused it is, and I mean oddly niche that you are speaking to someone at what feels like a “I know that person” level, the better your content is likely to perform and be relatable.
By the way, thinking like this, and then shifting to a speaker’s point of view, is a great way to come up with questions to ask at events so that you look smart.
Framing is key.
Do that in 45 minutes
Every content piece that is posted online on Twitter or LinkedIn, I time myself 45 minutes for. My morning run gives me a head start where I think about everything and let loose.
Sometimes I will leverage existing unpublished thoughts, and spend the time crafting the story.
Other times, I just go for it. It won’t be great, but the thought gets out there so that next time I can revisit it and iterate on it.
Aspiration
I’d like to one day synthesize all my learnings from the following courses & Books:
Building an Audience Online (Morning Brew, Alex Lieberman)
Ship30for30 (Dickie Bush & Nicolas Cole)
Second Brain (Tiago Forte)
Show Your Work (Austin Kleon)
And combine them into a series of posts, or even a Notion, that helps people get started. Maybe. We shall see.
What I do know is this: It begins with a series of atomic essays. See the next section.
What’s On My Mind
TL;DR: My LinkedIn writing is different this week, in a great way.
LinkedIn Post Retrospective for January 2023
This week I upgraded the way I wrote hooks and formatted content for LinkedIn. I’d say Twitter, but I still do not like Twitter as much as I try.
What’s going on with me on LinkedIn?
I’m writing atomic essays, which are essentially flushed out stand-alone thoughts on niche topics I’m interested in. I’ve doing it for 30 days, starting on the 7th of January. The first 14 days of doing it felt like a shotgun approach of seeing what’s stick.
I wasn’t a fan of it at first, but I have come to appreciate how they got me of my comfort zone and had me trying different styles, takes, and POVs.
This week I applied my cumulative learnings and merged them with another topic area that’s interesting me: finance.
How?
Hooks, Formats, and Threads.
Shoutout to Stanley Y. for his learnings and hook collection.
What’s a hook?
Hooks are enticing headlines that get you to “see more” or “Read more” on a digital post. I’m told that it’s only click-bait if you fail to deliver your promise.
Example of hooks:
I spent 100 hours reading X book about Y topic. Here’s what I learned.
The top [number] of mistakes I’ve made as a [role/thing], and how to avoid them
How [this small thing] ended up being [this big thing]. Here’s the story.
The challenge is in 3 parts:
LinkedIn allows for 3 short sentences. Twitter allows for 4 short sentences.
Writing a hook that isn’t click-baity (Click bait means you fail to deliver)
To whom am I answering an oddly specific question on.
The secret behind a hook it’s that its actually oddly specific question you would ask to someone on a panel who is a subject matter expert. The more specific a question (more parameters), the easier it is to think of an endless amount of thoughts to answer it.
If I asked you right now to tell me a joke, or to tell me fun fact about yourself, you’ll find that you immediately hit panic mode as you have intense decision paralysis.
However, if I told you to tell me a knock knock joke, or tell me your favorite joke from childhood, then chances are, you’ll think of it pretty easily. Side note, I hate the prompt “tell us a fun fact”, so here’s my substitute: “Tell us the most proud thing you think you did last week.”
What’s with format?
I never want to read a wall of thoughts.
So instead, I elect to do bullet points and bolded headers. On LinkedIn I do my best to make content as skimmable as possible. If you skim enough and you like it, chances are you’ll continue reading.
The challenge is the sequence of the headers.
aka what order are my paragraphs in.
I tend to default to chronological, factual based. Turns out that’s not always an effective way to grab a readers attention, and tell the story you want to tell. So now I’ve adapted a reverse en medias res, which is to say I start with the beginning and the end in about 2-3 sentences.
I then show you the middle, the journey, in the post.
By the way, I just 1-3-1ed you.
I did 1 short sentence, 3 sentences, and another short sentence. That is also a format conducive to LinkedIn writing, as well as writing here. You should see this sia song I wrote during one of the Ship30for30 classes using 1-3-1.
Who am I kidding, ChatGPT wrote it. ;)
What’s a thread?
Thread writing, which is common on Twitter, is when you use a series of tweets to articulate the story. This is helpful when you have a lot of ideas that support each other.
On LinkedIn, it looks like long-form writing. This is served by using intentional bolded headers that group the small sections.
A common thread structure carries a structure that looks like this:
VALUE PROPOSITION HOOK
3 SENTENCE SETUP
SUPPORT 1
SUPPORT 2
SUPPORT 3
VALUE PROPOSITION AGAIN
CALL TO ACTION
Bonus
Here are some examples of my writing in practice
Link in caption.
Summary:
Week of 1/23/2023 Writing: