This episode of My First Million features hosts Sam Parr and Shaan Puri discussing a three-step framework for improving writing skills to grow a business. They break down the importance of writing as a tool for persuasion, thinking clearly, and generating new ideas, while sharing personal anecdotes and specific techniques like “copywork” and the “swipe file.”
Topics: Writing, Copywriting, Business Growth, Newsletters, Communication, Productivity, Entrepreneurship
The Importance of Writing [00:00]
Shaan Puri: What I’m about to say will win you the respect of your friends, a lifetime full of happiness, a villa in the Bahamas, and maybe a really good hair day, too. I don’t know if it’s going to do any of those things, who’s to say? But here’s what it will do: it’ll definitely make you a better writer. That’s my promise. You will be a better writer in the next 60 minutes.
Sam Parr: This week, somebody asked us a question. They said, “Hey, I really love you guys’ writing. I don’t know why. I have trouble with writing, and I would love if you guys just did an episode with the 80/20.” So, what is the just the stuff I need to know to help me be a better writer? So, me and Sam sat down, and we wrote down all of our secrets about how we’ve used writing to grow our careers.
Shaan Puri: But by the way, by the way, I wouldn’t even say we’re necessarily great writers. I would say that you and I are really good writers, but what we’ve been great at is getting results from it. Would you agree?
Sam Parr: Yeah, that’s right. I don’t think I don’t look at my stuff and I’m like, “Wow, this is beautiful prose.” But I do feel confident that if I needed to, I can use my writing to either, you know, grow an audience, or sell a product, or convince people of something. I feel confident in that after, you know, trying for 15 years. And both of us have done it, right? So the credibility here, you know, before you ever listen to any advice, you should ask yourself, “Why should I listen to this person?” Well, both me and Sam have built and sold newsletter businesses for tens of millions of dollars. We’ve tweeted our way, you know, just typing little short sentences to, you know, a million-person audience between the two of us. You know, I’ve sold maybe $20 million worth of product online in the e-commerce world just through email. We both have taught writing courses or in some form or fashion. I used to charge $1,000 a seat for my class, and it was the highest-rated class on Maven. But here today, you get the quick version for free. We’re charging you nothing. Except for, there is one thing they got to do. What’s what do they have to do? This is free, right, Sam?
Sam Parr: It’s totally free, except for one thing. You have to subscribe. So whether you’re listening on Apple, on Spotify, wherever you’re listening, or if you’re already on YouTube, you just got to click that button. We spend all this time doing this, and unlike the rest of the YouTube world, where everything is completely free, we’re mostly free. All we want in exchange is a subscribe on YouTube. That’s all we want.
Shaan Puri: We can’t check if you do it. We call it the gentleman’s agreement. It’s just an honor code amongst two legendary individuals, us and you. And we just trust that you’re going to do it. All right, so let’s let’s jump in. How does somebody become a better writer? How can we teach them in the next, I don’t know, 45 minutes to become, you know, twice as good or three times as good at writing? I believe that that is possible if they actually do these things. Where do you want to start, Sam?
Why You Should Care About Writing [02:38]
Sam Parr: So let’s start with before you guys start writing. And so someone asked us, “Why write?” or someone asked us, “How do you get better at writing?” I actually want to change it to, “Why you should even care about being a better writer?” And so there’s a few bullet points that we have. So the first being is this is the most self-serving thing, but I want to say it up front. It’s persuasion in the most scalable way. The reason I got into writing was I was selling street meat, hot dogs on the side of the road, and I was selling one-to-one, and I got pretty good at it. But then I realized, this is really hard. And so I learned about copywriting, and I figured, “Look, now I can write something and it can scale to an infinite amount of people. I never have to change it, and I can convince people to do something.” Now, we’re not just talking about copywriting, we’re talking about all types of writing. So I can convince someone to feel a certain way, whether I’m writing a short story or I’m writing a blog post. I can convince someone to join my company. I used copywriting on Tinder when I wanted to convince a girl to give me a chance to go on a date with me. We’re talking about all types of writing, but at the end of the day, we’re always typically trying to persuade someone to do something. So it’s persuasion in the most scalable way. And that’s one of the reasons, one of the most important self-serving reasons why I think people should care about writing. What else?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, that’s that’s the first one. The second one is is more internal and wholesome, right? Some people are like, “Ah, I don’t know if I want to do persuasion.” Truth is, you do. Any anything you’re anything you’re trying to make happen, you’re usually going to need to persuade either people to come join your company, customers, partners, whatever it is. The second one is to write clearly, you must think clearly. And the reverse is true, too. If you want to be a great thinker, you want to have clarity of thought, writing is an essential tool for that. So writing is a forcing function for you to be able to think clearly. Um, you can’t hide behind bad writing. Bad bad writing will show bad thinking. Uh, whereas if you have great thinking and you write, it’ll come through. And so writing is this, uh, it’s a truth-teller potion. It will reveal how clear your thinking is. And the the trick is, most people think about it as in writing is a way for me to communicate my ideas to you. And they think that, “Oh, writing is the bottleneck.” They’re like, “Ah, I’m just not a good writer.” Nobody ever says, “I’m not a great thinker.” But the truth is, if you actually get down to it, people who struggle with writing, it’s because they don’t have the idea clear in their mind. And so writing helps you clear up the fog in your brain and get crystal clear clarity on what are you actually trying to say? What are the ideas? But it also works to not just communicate ideas, but to generate them. I think Paul Graham said this, and I it’s so true. He goes, “People think that writing is only about communicating the ideas you already have, but actually, the truth is when you sit down to write, you will generate new ideas.” Writing is an incredible idea generator. And so it’s like, you know, starting a little fire in your brain, and uh, you know, those sparks can lead to new thoughts and new ideas that are quite powerful. And if you’re not writing regularly, you’re missing out on some of those ideas.
Sam Parr: And I think that when we say writing, I’m particularly referring to longer form. It could be shorter form, a handful of sentences, a tweet, whatever. But oftentimes, it’s longer form. And the reason why I prefer that when I’m running out my ideas is you can’t really hide a bad idea or you can’t hide bad thinking in long writing. You know where where you can hide bad thinking? In a PowerPoint. Now, that doesn’t mean that your ideas in long writing are going to be good, but you just can’t hide it. You can’t hide that it’s bad. And so that’s why I prefer mapping it all out. And then the third point of writing creates new ideas. Uh, I think like you said, Paul Graham said it best. He has this great blog post he wrote in 2005. He said something like, “Um, 80% of your writing will be bad, and then you’ll have to cut cut it down to the 20% that’s good.” And when you start writing, you’ll probably generate 50% more new ideas. And so it’s a really great forcing function where it gives you the lanes of the road and you have to stay within those lanes. And oftentimes, you can change your opinion as you go, and you could evolve your idea and your thinking.
The “Before You Write” Framework [04:23]
Shaan Parr: And we’ve all seen Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint from Amazon. He realized that Amazon PowerPoint was this thing that sort of the most charismatic, loudest voice in the room, or somebody with good slide design skills, could kind of like create an illusion of good thinking by using PowerPoint. And actually, uh, he forced everybody instead to write long long-form memos, basically narratives. And he’s like, “In the long-form written word, there’s no place to hide. There’s no way to use design or good presentation skills to, uh, to make it seem like this is more well-thought-through than it is. It either is or it isn’t. You’ll you’ll find out.” So, I think it works inside of companies as well as it does out externally to your customers and potential customers. So, all right, now let’s get down to the actual tactics. So, that’s the that’s the theory. Now, how do you actually do it? So for me, all the work begins before I’ve typed a single word. And I say I always say, “You want to begin with the end in mind.” What I mean by this is, I before I write anything, I first decide what is the reaction I want. I learned this from a guy named Chris Quigley. I don’t know if you know Chris Quigley, but he was a, um, just this character. He came to town in San Francisco from from the UK, and he was a he host he had an ad agency. And his ad agency did one specific thing: they would make videos go viral. And I remember talking to Chris, and I was like, “Wow, it would be awesome to do a viral video. That sounds like kind of like a lottery ticket thing. Like, what if my YouTube video just went viral and got millions of views? How crazy would that be?” And I asked him, I go, “What’s your hit rate? Like, you know, out of every 100 videos you do, how many go viral? One, two, three videos out of 100?” And he’s like, “No, if we do 10 videos, eight or nine will go viral.” Really? And I was like, “What?” He’s like, “Well, for two reasons.” And he said, “Number one, we have a large blog audience. So we we can guarantee the first like 100,000 views, like it will get seen. It won’t just get lost in the abyss of the internet of content. Like whatever we have, it’ll get seen.” He’s like, “But that doesn’t make you go viral. That just makes sure it gets a chance.” He goes, “The second thing is, we always work backwards from an emotion.” He goes, “People will only share or act if they feel something at the end.” So he he created this thing that he had like LOL, WTF, OMG, uh, aw, like, you know, something so cute, uh, heartwarming. And so he’s like, “These are the only emotions that you can tap into. There’s like seven or eight emotions that people can can tap into.” And he would work backwards. He would say, “We don’t write a script until we first pick the emotion. We’re going for wow, or we’re going for WTF, outrage.” Oh, WTF outrage, uh, you know, I’ll give you an example of one that I just saw yesterday. Elon Musk tweeted out this thing that was uh, some hidden like language in a bill, like a bill that’s going through Senate right now, that was like, “If the next president gets elected and they decide to stop spending on the war in Ukraine, they could be up for impeachment because of the way this bill is written.” And and he was like, “Oh my god, the Democrats are baking this in to the bill. They’re trying to pass this on page 140. They’re trying to slip this right under your nose without telling anybody, and they’re going to try to impeach Trump if he got elected and tried to stop the tried to, you know, if he got peace in the in the in the Ukraine and stopped the spending, he could be up for impeachment.” And of course, the post goes super viral because it’s outrage. It’s outrage from the Democrats, it’s outrage from the Republicans. That is engineered to go viral. And so similarly, the Chris used to have a search engine. He used to be able to he created a tool internally for them where they could just search by emotion, and it would show them YouTube videos that are targeting that emotion, and they would use it when they would brainstorm. And so I stole this, and I would start with I ask myself three questions: What is the reaction I want? That’s always an emotion. The next one is, what is the action I want? So what do I want them to do after they read this? Like, click the buy button, click the share button, forward this to a friend, sign my petition, whatever it is. Who knows what it is. But what’s the reaction, what’s the action, and the last thing I say is, at the end of this, if they could just remember one line, or one takeaway, one sentence, what would it be? What would I pick out of the whole thing that I just wrote? Because people remember sentences, not books. And so you have to think about that. So though I always begin with the end in mind, I decide those before I ever write a word. Do you do something similar?
Sam Parr: I do the exact same thing. And typically, I start with a headline, and I start with the subheadline. So if you share on Facebook, the headline’s the big text, the subheadline is the 180-character thing underneath that. Oftentimes, I go back and I re- and I change the headline a ton. But that one sentence, what I call the subheadline, that doesn’t change. And that one sentence is what helps like clarify what I’m going to write. So I actually don’t do outlines. So there’s a lot of things that I think you’re taught in fifth grade that I think are really stupid. One of them is an outline. I I guess I I guess it’s okay to teach that, but I don’t use outlines anymore. And my outline instead is that one subheadline. Um, that’s what I use.
Shaan Puri: In fact, you you brought up a good point, which is to be a great writer in the world, like as an adult on the internet, The internet world, yeah. The internet world, you have to unlearn pretty much everything you learned in school. So in school, you learned like what do they what do they reward in school? They’re like, uh, minimum of this word count. So they’re trying to get you you must write at least this length, and they’re trying to get you to like, so people are writing long words and double-spacing their thing and trying to like add a bunch of filler and fluff. Well, you got to do the exact opposite when you write on the internet. You want to be concise, you want to be quick, you want to eliminate a bunch of the fluff. Shorter is better on the internet in terms of adding just extra cruft. But when you’re in school, they almost force you and teach you to write these long-form things. They also want you to write with fancy fancy vocabulary. So you’re you get bonus points if you use, you know, ameliorate rather than, you know, heal or help or whatever. And and so you you’re rewarded for using fancy words, but the reality is, you want to be writing at a a very like accessible language if you want uh reading level if you want to do well on the internet. So, you know, both you and I, we target kind of like fifth to eighth grade reading levels, and you can use these tools, these checkers, like Hemingway is an app that you can use where you could put in your text and it’ll tell you, “You’re writing at a 12th-grade level,” or “You’re writing at a fifth-grade level,” and the lower the better is better on the internet.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and then the in the in the second half of this episode, let’s go through all those like tips and tricks. Um, in terms of in terms of writing, my process is I I do copywork, and then I draft, then I incubate, and then I edit. So what that means is copywork, it’s the same way, it’s this old technique that people have learned how to write. Um, we don’t do it anymore, but I found it to be the most effective way. I I sat myself in a room for like two hours a day and did this for like eight months in order to learn how to write. And copywork is basically when you take write writing that you love. It could be a a full book, it could be a script for SNL, if you want to learn how to write comedy, it could be a blogger that you like. When I’m writing an important piece, I’ll just write maybe for 10 minutes. I literally take my pen and by hand, I copy someone else’s writing that I really like, and that helps me get into the flow.
Shaan Parr: So we we what we said was, before you’ve written a word, you like most people just sit down and they start trying to write. Well, we’ve told you is do two different things instead. Begin with the end in mind, you know, the what is the action, the reaction you want, and what’s the what would be the headline that would grab somebody. And then the second thing Sam’s saying is, you don’t just jump in like a, you know, if you’re going to go to a workout, you don’t just go start sprinting right away. You warm up. I do warm-up sets. Yeah. And you do the same thing before you write a word of your own. You start by writing, but not your own words. You take some writing that you really like, that maybe you want to almost like through osmosis, just steal their little writing juju. It’s going to go into your brain, you’ll start to talk like them, write like them if you do this. And you literally write word for word exactly what they said. It’s even more effective if you handwrite it, but at worst, type it. But you want to don’t don’t think, don’t add your own stuff, don’t improve it. Just literally write word for word and do it for like even 10-15 minutes. I still do this today. This is not like advice that I tell other people to do that I don’t do. I still do this today. And Sam, you don’t know this, I use one of your posts as one of my I have like three go-tos. One of yours is one that I use for my copywork. It’s this one where you I forgot the name of the blog, but it’s I always search for it with the same headline, which is, “Uh, let me be perfectly clear. You’re reading this because I want because I want you to.” Uh, and you’re like, “I have engineered the start of this to and you’re and you basically talk about how you’ve mesmerized them. You’re like, every word of this was chosen, every sentence to lead you to the next sentence.” And I love that. It’s the we call it the slippery slope. And so you uh I use one of yours whenever I want to write like in a really persuasive copy-ready way. If I want to write more like business serious, then I have a different one. I use this one that the the CEO of Slack did where he wrote an internal memo that I really like called, “We don’t sell saddles here.” But you literally just write a word for it. So that’s your warm-up. So again, two things before you ever write your own stuff.
Sam Parr: It’s exactly like playing music, okay? So if you’re whether when you’re a beginner playing music, you just play other people’s songs and then you steal a little bit, you’re like, “Oh, I like the I like this genre, this genre, this genre. I’m going to combine it to my own thing.” Same way where you’re writing a new song, you kind of warm up, maybe playing the Beatles, and then eventually you’re like, “All right, I’m in the mood to write something beautiful. This is what I’m going to do.” You take someone’s recipe and you make their recipe before you go make your own thing. You play a cover before you write your own songs. Same way. You do copywork before you write your own stuff.
The Drafting and Incubation Phase [17:07]
Shaan Parr: The second step is actually where a lot of people get screwed up. So it’s the drafting step. And the reason people get screwed up here is because they’re afraid to look stupid. And the drafting step is actually where you’re supposed to look stupid. And so whenever I draft something, I just bang it out as fast as I can, and it sounds really dumb. And I accept that it sounds dumb. And I and here’s why. Because after the drafting set is the incubation period. You know like, um, have you ever heard of like the phrase like “shower thoughts” where you like think of silly things in the shower? I actually I think there’s like some science behind this. I think I forget what what it’s called, but it’s like when you’re out riding a bike, you’re going for a walk, where you’re just sitting things. I think it’s called passive thinking. You actually get great breakthroughs. And so what I like to do is I draft my first thing, that it doesn’t take very long, and I know that it’s bad, but I don’t show anyone. Then I go for a walk or I’ll just sit. Sometimes that will take 48 hours, sometimes that will take one hour, sometimes 10 minutes, sometimes a week. I just let it sit. And then I do nothing. Now, here’s where the the last part and the most important part is. Uh, Ogilvy, one of my favorite writers. What’s his first name? David. David Ogilvy. He’s got this great line. He goes, “I’m a lousy writer, but I’m a good editor.” And this is where greatness happens happens. Stephen King calls it “killing your darlings.” He says when the the editing phase is where all the great stuff happens. And this is actually where the gold happens. And a lot of people don’t do this process. What they do is they write their draft thinking that’s the final bit, and they get afraid and nervous and they never write it. And they don’t actually incubate and they don’t actually edit. Do you do these things?
Sam Parr: 100%. You I learned this from you, uh, the incubate part. So I used to draft and then try to edit in the same session, because I knew editing is where the value is, right? Great writing is great editing. Let’s be perfectly clear. Great writing is great editing. However, the mistake I was making before was I would write and then I would immediately try to edit and power through, and I didn’t have that break, that gap to actually go back and improve my ideas passively. Just load the problem in my brain and go do something else. Go for a walk, go for a run, go for a workout, go shower, go cook some food, chop some vegetables. Doesn’t matter what it is, but I give myself actually like at least 90 minutes away from it. Sometimes six hours away from it. And then when I come back, I look at it and it’s just so obvious to me. Oh, strike this, you delete this, move this to the top, that’s actually the best part. Oh, you know what I should say here? I should say this. Oh, that analogy I was missing, here it is. And so you immediately it starts to come together when I do that that part, right? And I also realize I need to shift my time ratio, because like you like you said, I used to be a overthinker drafter where I would overthink how much I need to how much time to spend on the draft phase. So I try to make a good draft, bad idea. You actually just want to have a wait, like quick and dirty draft, like a brain dump draft. And so I used to try to make a good draft that would take me way too long and I get fatigued and I’d feel bad about it and I’d be like, “I hate this. This is stupid. Should I even do this?” And all the doubts creep in. And then I would try to edit right away. Now, short draft and then high energy edit after I have that incubation period. So this is um 100% what I do and it is extremely effective.
Shaan Parr: And once you get good and once you find a process, sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and I think of an idea and I just write that sentence in my phone and then I just forget about it. But then I see something else in the world and I’m like, “Oh, that reminds me of this concept I was I was thinking about.” Wake up. Figure it out. Yeah. I figured out the CTA. Is it weird if I sign off with “Sayonara, suckers”? Yeah. Wait, what do you think about “I love you” at the end? Would that be a thing? But I I actually do. Like, well, I’ll have like a a do you have like a notes app or a a notes folder in your phone where it’s like, you just have like a sentence and you’re like, “That’s a beautiful sentence.” I’m just I don’t I don’t know where I’m going to use that, but that was a beautiful sentence. Or a lot of times I get it from podcasters or YouTubers. I’m like, you hear you hear how he phrased that? That word was that was a sharp phrase. That cut to me.
Sam Parr: One of the things we didn’t say in the before phase is having a swipe file. So classic thing that all writers have and all marketers have, which is a swipe file. It’s basically a stash. Whenever you see something dope, something that’s well done, something that’s good, you just stash it away so that when it comes time for you to make one, you can be like, “I need to make a landing page.” And you would go and you’d look at your stash of great landing pages you’ve seen, and you would have so much inspiration right there ready for you at your fingertips because you did the work beforehand. And so that’s another one of the before is you got to have a swipe file. I have one for phrases, for headlines, for connecting words, for sign for hellos and goodbyes, because for some reason, whenever I write my newsletter, I knew what I wanted to say, but the start always was so awkward. It was like a, “Hello, you know, hello there, friends.” And I was like, “God, this sucks.” And then I started keeping a a a file of like, anytime I liked an liked an opener or a closer. So I have one openers file, one closers file, and I have a whole bunch in there that I can use to riff off of because that for whatever reason, that was my my blocker when I would write.
Shaan Parr: I I’ll just hear a beautiful phrase and I’ll write it down. So like I went to this guy’s website and uh he was talking about the best like speaker system or something, and he started off the paragraph with, “Well folks, it doesn’t get any better than this.” And I was like, “Oh, and beautiful. That’s mine.” And like I I just have this whole bank of like these things of people saying like cute phrases and I’m like, “Oh, that’s a beaut like I just felt an emotion when I read that.” Basically, you have to think every people are scrolling through thousands of articles every day, and I if I see a line that grabs my attention, I know that’s good, that’s mine, that’s mine. And I just have this whole bank of these. So let’s move on to um some more tips about talking about the actual writing part because I think that what you’re taught in school, we’re basically going to say do the opposite of a lot of right? Here’s the mistakes. Common mistakes. Mistake number one, they start with a bunch of intro context background fluff. Uh, you wrote a the tip is actually, don’t bury the lead. So the first sentence should punch. So try putting the most important sentence at the top. Try putting the most provocative statement at the top. Try putting the promise at the top or the the bait, the hook at the top. So as an example, you have one here that when when you were building the hustle, one of the things you tried to do was these viral blog posts. You were like, “I’m going to write these blog posts. If I can get a million views on those blog posts, then, you know, some percentage of them will subscribe, and that’s how I’ll grow my subscriber base.” Right. And I remember reading this, which was first sentence, “I spent the last 30 days eating nothing but Soylent, a new age powered powdered meal replacement. Why would I do something so stupid? I’ll explain. But first, if you’re not familiar with Soylent, here’s the gist.” A great opener, right? Because rather than saying, you know, um, you know, the last few days have been, uh, you know, really tough for me because I’ve been doing this new experiment. To give you background who I am, I’m Steve, I’m a programmer here at this company, and you know, I’m blah blah blah, boring, right? So instead, I spent the last 30 days eating nothing but Soylent. Why would I do something so stupid? Let me explain. Curiosity has been created, and now I want to know.
Sam Parr: Yeah, typically when you’re thinking about the lead, so I found it helps with a few things. One, if you’re new, what I tell people is, let me see your opener, cut it in like like cut almost all of it except for like the last couple sentences, and that’s typically a good trick. And the reason why I say that is when you’re taught in school how to write, have you ever heard of like a a thesis statement where you have like a opening paragraph with the thesis at the bottom, point one, point two, point three, and then a closer? Yeah. I’m like, just tell me your thesis statement right off the right off like just just say that. Just punch me in the face with that. That should be your that should be your opening line. Another thing is I like to think of um have you ever been to England and have you ever noticed they have signs that say “Mind the gap”? I guess that’s like when you’re I always say, “Mind the curiosity gap.” So mind so what the curiosity gap means, I’m going to I’m going to punch you in the face to grab your attention because that gets you to fall down the slippery slope. And the more that you fall down that slope, the further you’re going to continue to read. And so I want to grab your attention, but I don’t want to tell you exactly everything, but I want to grab your attention by not burying the lead and I’m going to get you to fall down this slope a little further.
Shaan Parr: Yeah, that’s a simple test is take your hand, cover up all of the text except for the first two sentences. Read those first two sentences and be like, “What if I didn’t know me, if I didn’t care about me, if I didn’t if I didn’t have to read this, would I want to read would I need to read the next sentence? Not what I need to read the whole thing, what I need to read the next sentence.” If it’s yes, you’ve created a curiosity gap. Then you drag your hand down. You reveal that next sentence. You say, “If I read this sentence, would I need to read the next sentence?” Right? Would I want to know what what’s the next sentence? And then by the third or fourth time you’ve done that, now they’re in. Now they’re invested. Now you have a little more leeway to let it breathe and and and and create and create a little bit of background because they’re they’re have they’re invested in getting to the end of the of the outcome. But like the reason this sounds so brutal where you’re going to cover up I say I’m going to cover up 85, 90% of the text. Yes. Because the reality is that’s actually how the reader’s eyes work. 80, 90% of people are only ever going to read the headline. And if the headline’s no good, they’re never going to get to any of the other stuff. And so some people are resistant to write a juicy headline, but the reality is if it’s not juicy enough, they’ll never get to that those great ideas that you have inside. You’re sort of doing your own ideas a disservice. And so you want to find that line between like without completely whoring yourself out or making a false promise, still find a way to make it juicy enough where you created that curiosity gap where I have to read the next sentence, and that’s it.
Sam Parr: What I what I used to say was, it ain’t clickbait if it you’re actually getting something like it bait means it’s fake. So as long as I can say the truth, but I say it in a sensational or clicky way, we used to say clicky, it ain’t bait if I actually deliver on the promise. So I have to pay it off. If you don’t pay it off, then then it’s bad. But if you’re paying it off, and you’re paying it off soon, it can’t be paid off like, you know, 10 minutes later, you have to you have to be able to do that. All right, next one is write like you talk. So so many times people are like, “I can’t really like I’m not good at I’m not a good writer.” And again, I’m not a good writer is actually code for I’m not a good thinker. And the way you test this is, cool, forget about writing it down, just tell me. Like explain it to me. Either they just say it out loud and I’m like, “Great, you wrote it. Just write that down now.” Like write down literally what you just said. You don’t have to have like this second character, this Shakespeare inside you that writes in a completely different style and communicates completely differently than you actually talk. You don’t need that. You actually want them to be very similar. It’s actually the most engaging type of writing is when you feel like the author is just talking to you, having a conversation with you specifically. And so write like you talk is a good good method, but it also reveals if you can’t even talk about it, you’re not ready to write it yet. You got to first be able to like explain it just in plain language yourself.
Shaan Parr: What I tell my team, so they’ll like write this huge thing and ask me to read it and I’m like, “I don’t really want to read this. Just tell me what it means.” And they’ll say in one sentence, I go, “Okay, cool, that’s your first sentence.” Um, and that’s probably all you you need to say for this thing. Uh, but like there’s a few ways to figure out what not to do. One is you go to people’s uh LinkedIn. If they use the word “utilize,” that’s probably not good. Have you ever heard someone say they “utilize” or they did like what are other like LinkedIn jargon? LinkedIn’s like That’s that’s so good. We should make a LinkedIn hit list of just uh bullshit words that nobody ever says, but people think it’s okay to write.
Sam Parr: Yeah, it’s like, “Dude, I’ve never heard you use that word utilize.” The the second thing to remember is there’s informal is or rather, informal can be professional. A lot of times people think informal is the opposite of professional, and I actually say that’s that’s nonsense. And I’m going to actually show examples of of how that’s not true in a few minutes. But another good line that I think about is uh it was Stephen King. He says, “Any word you have to hunt in the thesaurus is the wrong word. There’s no exceptions to this rule.” Uh, and so like if you have to like look up like what a word means, you don’t use it. You want to use words that most everyone uses. And I’m going to again, I’m going to show you examples of really complicated stuff explained in a really simple way. Like here’s a really good example of writing like you talk. So one of my favorite pieces of writing is Louis CK. So Louis CK about 10 or 15 years ago, he used to release his own specials like on his website. And if you Google Louis CK, “Nevell Madora” or something like that, you’ll see my friend Nevell wrote a blog post about some of his stuff because it’s it’s actually not up anymore. But he’s got this great uh line in one of his bits. He says, or one of his landing pages, he goes, “Please, please don’t torrent this special. If you want to share it, direct people here. It’s so easy just to drop $5. We don’t make you join anything. We let you download any file you want. It costs a shitload of money to make these specials and I do it myself. I love offering it to you directly for so cheap and so easily, and I would like for that to continue being a good idea.” That’s a great simple way just to say don’t steal. Uh and and and and that makes me feel. I’m like, “All right, you’re right. This is I should abide by this. You are exactly right. There was no jargon, simple language.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, 100% agree. I also think that uh you know, this also works for choosing what to write about. So for example, sometimes people will write about shit that they would never talk to you about. We had this problem early on at the Milk Road. So when we did the Milk Road, I was the initial writer, so I created the initial voice. And Milk Road was a a newsletter that we built in the crypto space, and we went from zero subscribers and never have written a daily newsletter before to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and sold it for millions of dollars. That in one year. So that was the the success outcome. So how did we actually do it? And more importantly, how did I train other people to write it instead of me? Because I didn’t want to wake up every morning and stress about sending this email out at 5:00 a.m. to, you know, a couple hundred thousand people. That that was not the idea of a good life for me. So I was like, “Let me see if I can train people to do this.” One of the hacks to training people to do this was I I was like, “God, I feel like they’re writing this both with too much extra fluff and jargon, and secondly, they’re writing about stuff that’s kind of boring. So like the topic is boring.” I’m like, “What’s happening?” I was like, and I told them, I was like, “I feel like you would never just tell me about this. Like if I was just talking to you, if I was your your friend and you were like, “Oh, did you hear what happened today?” Which is what a news what a new what the news is trying to tell you, right? Hey, did you hear what happened today? This crazy thing happened, this interesting thing happened, this big event happened. I was like, “You’re writing about stuff that wouldn’t even make that filter. You wouldn’t even tell me about it.” So why are you doing this? So when I had them do, I was like, “Forget writing a draft and having me be the editor. Instead, I want you to send me a voice memo, no more than 60 seconds in the morning, which is basically, “Oh, did you hear what happened today? Uh, this guy said this thing and people are freaking out because of blah blah blah.” And this announcement was made and people think it’s going to be a big deal and the price is going to go up because that would mean this. And as soon as they started doing that, I was like, “Yep, that sounds perfect. Just write that down.” And it just was such a good filter. And so one way to think about what to write about and how to write it is do this little kind of voice memo test. So can you just if you were just to tell your friend about this, you know, “Hey, I have this idea, blah blah blah” or, “You know, I noticed this thing, I found it really interesting because blah blah blah.” And if you can’t, if it’s not interesting to your friend, guess what? It’s not going to be interesting to a stranger, right? Like you have to be able to to explain it in a way that’s simple and use that as a filter. If you would never talk about it, don’t write about it.
Shaan Parr: Well, and the the tip that I used to give, so at when I sold the Hustle, we had close to 2 million subscribers, I believe. And for new writers, they would they like would kick ass in their audition. And then they would get nervous, like when they’re I’m like, “Yeah, 2 million, a lot of people, I get it.” But here’s the tip. Write to me, write to Sam. Just literally, you are only writing to one human being. It’s just coincidence that many others might read it, but just only write to one one person. Direct it to that one person, and that’s the way to go. Uh and so it makes it a lot easier. Uh let’s go to let’s go to uh write simply. What I found is around you can go as low as fourth grade, but around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade reading level is the way that you want to write. Now, to give you guys perspective, I think usanews.com, USA News, the newspaper, I believe that’s at a fourth-grade reading level. New York Times, which is highly regarded by a lot of people, that’s at a seventh-grade reading level. And I actually went and put Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett writes about insurance companies, a very complicated topic. I went and put his stuff through Hemingway app as well. Same thing, sixth, seventh, eighth-grade reading level, and it teaches you how to write at that level. And there’s tactics on how to do that, like don’t use adverbs, keep sentences short, but Hemingway app is an awesome way to um Check. Yeah, to check, to do it for you.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I think that’s a great one. Um, another one that you wrote in here is about storytelling. And so I think storytelling is now like kind of in the more advanced uh a little more advanced category of how to be a great writer is being able to use use the art of storytelling. Uh do you want to give an example of that uh or how do you want to talk about storytelling here?
Shaan Parr: So, here’s an example of storytelling. So, about 10 years ago, there was this company called Hint, Hint Water. It’s you see it’s like a beverage that you guys see in the stores. It’s called um and the the lady named Cara, she had this great story. She went and gave this talk uh at one of my events, and there was at the very end, there was one question that someone asked her, and I heard that story and of the 60-minute talk, I was like, “Oh, that’s a that’s a hit,” because that just made me feel something. So the headline was, “Getting called sweetie helped this entrepreneur create a multi-million dollar business.” “Sweetie,” the executive said, and I just dropped the phone for a minute. Last week at Pizza and 40s, Cara Golden, the founder of Hint, told me a story that fired me up. The setup goes like this. And it explains the story about how she was drinking 10 Cokes a day. She was on the phone with an executive of Coca-Cola, and she said, “I’m going to create a new version of water that just has a a a little bit of fruit in it and no sugar.” An executive at Coco says, “Listen, sweetie, America’s love sweet. This is never going to work.” By the way, that’s a great example of working backwards from an emotion. Even if you didn’t consciously do it in this case, you you knew that story would hit because it has outrage. It has a WTF or OMG type of reaction of like, “That asshole.” But let me fill you in on the results. So I wrote the blog post not in order to promote Hint. I wrote the blog post because I thought this was just a cool story of a this entrepreneur getting like it was a sexist moment and she was getting hated on, whatever. Hint saw the article. They ended up spending millions of dollars to promote this article, and at the very bottom of the article, and it’s it says something like, “This conversation inspired Golden, now 17 later 17 years later to found Hint, and they do 100 million in sales. Uh, here’s the flavors they have.” This article made them tens of millions of dollars in sales. We used to get so much traffic to this article because they ended up promoting it. I wasn’t selling Hint water. I was just telling a cool story about the founder, and in exchange, it made all these people want to buy this stuff. And if in fact, if you Google Hint Water Sweetie article, you’ll see articles written about this article about how it was a huge success. And this was sort of an accident. I just wrote something cool and they actually were like, “Oh, let’s promote this.” But it worked wonderfully because it was a story that grabbed your attention.
Sam Parr: You want to say a few words on on on how to how to write a great story? I have a couple of tips. You you do it. So a couple of tips on on writing a great story or telling a great story. So go look at the greatest storytellers ever. Uh one of them is uh Aaron Sorkin. He’s known for writing great dialogue. He wrote, you know, the the Social Network movie, he wrote uh what is it, West Wing, he wrote the Newsroom, great writer, famous writer, famous Hollywood writer. He says, “I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.” So what he says is, a story is just two things. Somebody has an intention. Somebody wants something, and there’s an obstacle in their way. By the way, that line, “I worship at blank altar.” At the altar of blank. Yeah, so good. Yeah. That that is going into my bank. To your bank. Uh that’s funny. Uh all right, so uh so intention and obstacle. Intention is some character wants something and then there’s an obstacle in their way. The more they want it, like their daughter was just taken hostage, huge huge intention, obstacle, they don’t know by who or where they are and all they have to go on is this one five-second call that they were on or whatever, right? Like obstacle, they they have no way to find them and they’re just a dad. How are they going to ever, you know, get their daughter back? And so intention and obstacle is the core element of any good story. So somebody wants something. In the in the case that you just said, not only does Cara want to make her business successful, she wants to be taken seriously as a female entrepreneur. Obstacle, Coke executive, men men are pigs, nobody believes in her, right? That’s a core that’s a core of a story. And so any story, if you can’t, they always say like in a movie, you should be able to pause at any moment of any story and say, “What does that character want and what’s in their way?” And if you can’t pause and name that right now, you have failed as a storyteller because the audience you you think they’re you’re going to tell them later what they they want. No, no, you’ve lost their attention. The the initial stakes, and if you watch any movie, they establish this, right? And even like silly rom-coms, it’ll be uh she wakes up, she’s got her assistant and chauffeur driving her to work. She’s clearly high-powered, but her but she’s alone and she’s doesn’t have a relationship, right? Like that’ll be it’ll be obvious to her. She’ll see somebody out the window while she’s driving to work in her chauffeur limousine and it’s this girl in love with her boyfriend and she looks at it kind of longingly and then she just goes back to her her, you know, palm pilot or whatever before back to work. And so you know what the character wants and you know what’s in her way. She’s she doesn’t have somebody because she has to find the right guy and she’s so busy with work. And so everything is always this intention and obstacle. The second thing is you have to establish like how do you make a story better or worse? Stakes is the next thing. So what is that stake? Uh what do you have to lose if this doesn’t go well? And stakes doesn’t have like stakes initially, the beginner version of stakes is life or death. But the true art, and some if you like some of the stories that I’ve told on this podcast, the true art is when you can establish high stakes emotions in a low stakes environment. So if I can tell you how I was feeling and if I can get you to believe that I thought everything was on the line just with some little interaction I was having with the like this person in the grocery store line and how I didn’t want them to win because fuck them and they can’t cut they cut in front of me, but I’m not going to I’m not going to cut in front of them, but I need them to know that it wasn’t okay, but I don’t know how to do it without being an asshole myself. And if I can establish the stakes that this matters to me, I can get you to care about the outcome of it, but it can be in a low stakes situation. Now you’re really cooking with gas if you can do something like that. Because otherwise you’re limited to just life or death stories.
Shaan Parr: The best example you have done of that, you’re very good at this, is um I I distinctly remember the story of you doing a shirtless workout on your driveway and your HOA being like, “No, we we can’t have this.” And you’re like, “We’re going to petty court. We’re going to HOA.” Like I just that was a beautiful story. I should let this go. Oh, I can fight to the death as a matter of principle here because, you know, what are you trying to say? And what does this mean, right? And if it means something to me that I can make it mean something to you. So that sort of thing. So Larry David’s great at this too. Like whenever I watch that show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, like they’re making a story out of something so silly and small. Uh you know, like And it’s it’s 10 times more likable when it’s something relatable or small, but it still carries the emotional impact. And if you could do that, you have an infinite supply of stories. He notices that people don’t talk people don’t talk to someone if they’re wearing a maga hat, and so he starts wearing a maga hat all the time. He’s like, “I don’t want anyone to talk to me. I’m just going to wear this hat.” Yeah. Uh that that’s a a really good example of a high stakes uh high stakes and a low stakes environment. where like it doesn’t really matter, but it’s very funny. Um and then let’s talk about uh really tactical stuff. So short sentences. Um I’m a firm believer in short sentences. And so the I’ll give you I’ll explain why, but Warren Buffett owns, you know, runs Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire owns dozens and dozens of companies. Arguably the most complicated one is Geico. Insurance companies are very, very, very hard to understand. However, I don’t remember if the Hustle did analysis on this or someone else did, but he writes these famous annual shareholder letters every single year. He’s a very good writer. And listen to this. From uh 1974 to 2013, someone analyzed this, and the letters per sorry, the words per sentence dropped from 17 to 13. If you look at like we actually did an analysis on this. Every year, it gets shorter and shorter and shorter. And the reading level dropped from a 10th grade to a fourth grade reading level. So the richer he got and the more complicated his businesses got, the simpler the writing got because he just got better at explaining it in a really easy to understand way. And he’s probably once kind of somewhat the average show to be able to understand this. And so short, simple sentences are key even in complicated environments. And here’s a really good example. So if you go to hey.com, so hey.com is an alternative to Gmail. It’s a it’s a service that makes you pay though, so it’s even they they’ve raised the stakes there, so you have to pay for their email. There’s a letter from the CEO, and that’s one of my favorite uh like tactics by the way on a sales page, is letter from a CEO. And he says, “Hey everyone, I’m Jason, CEO of 37 Signals. Email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn’t. Email’s a treasure.” And he goes on to explain why uh email is awesome and why it should be more special than it is, and it’s the most simple language to explain email, and I love it. And there’s lots of examples of simple language and and simple ways to explain complicated things. And if you’re able to do that, oftentimes, it will have shorter sentences, less words, and it it’s significantly more uh effective than longer stuff.
Sam Parr: Related to that, it doesn’t have to be only one length. So there’s this great graphic that’s gone viral many times. You’ve probably seen it. Great writing has rhythm. So there’s a an example. So I’ll just read this out loud. He goes, “This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. This writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences, and I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I’m certain that the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the symbols, and sounds that say, “Listen to this, this is important.” So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create sound that pleases the reader’s ears. Don’t just write words, write music. I love that thing. It is amazing. And so you want to have short by default, but then, like he says, when the reader is rested and ready, use a long sentence to great effect. And so that’s like a advanced move when it comes to writing. Most people’s problem is everything every sentence is too long. And so you start with short sentences, but then you figure out how to vary it so that your writing sings.
Shaan Parr: Whenever I uh sometimes when I write something that I get really into, I am almost I almost feel like uh I’m like I channel like my inner Eminem or like some rapper or something where I’m like, “What type of rhythm can get people flowing?” Like I need to have a rhythm that gets people to fall down this. And like there’s small tactics, like anytime you want to use a comma, use a period and then start the next sentence with and or but. Um, or there’s other things like put your internal dialogue like um or like or or the reader’s internal dialogue like, “So why would I do this? You’re asking yourself right now.” Right. Or, “Who the hell is this person talking to me through my computer screen, telling me what to do, and why on earth should I trust them?” Like you can do these little things to change the rhythm and grab people’s attention.
Sam Parr: Yeah, 100% agree. Uh that’s a that’s a great way of putting it. I also think that uh you know, this also works for choosing what to write about. So for example, sometimes people will write about shit that they would never talk to you about. We had this problem early on at the Milk Road. So when we did the Milk Road, I was the initial writer, so I created the initial voice. And Milk Road was a a newsletter that we built in the crypto space, and we went from zero subscribers and never have written a daily newsletter before to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and sold it for millions of dollars. That in one year. So that was the the success outcome. So how did we actually do it? And more importantly, how did I train other people to write it instead of me? Because I didn’t want to wake up every morning and stress about sending this email out at 5:00 a.m. to, you know, a couple hundred thousand people. That that was not the idea of a good life for me. So I was like, “Let me see if I can train people to do this.” One of the hacks to training people to do this was I I was like, “God, I feel like they’re writing this both with too much extra fluff and jargon, and secondly, they’re writing about stuff that’s kind of boring. So like the topic is boring.” I’m like, “What’s happening?” I was like, and I told them, I was like, “I feel like you would never just tell me about this. Like if I was just talking to you, if I was your your friend and you were like, “Oh, did you hear what happened today?” Which is what a news what a new what the news is trying to tell you, right? Hey, did you hear what happened today? This crazy thing happened, this interesting thing happened, this big event happened. I was like, “You’re writing about stuff that wouldn’t even make that filter. You wouldn’t even tell me about it.” So why are you doing this? So when I had them do, I was like, “Forget writing a draft and having me be the editor. Instead, I want you to send me a voice memo, no more than 60 seconds in the morning, which is basically, “Oh, did you hear what happened today? Uh, this guy said this thing and people are freaking out because of blah blah blah.” And this announcement was made and people think it’s going to be a big deal and the price is going to go up because that would mean this. And as soon as they started doing that, I was like, “Yep, that sounds perfect. Just write that down.” And it just was such a good filter. And so one way to think about what to write about and how to write it is do this little kind of voice memo test. So can you just if you were just to tell your friend about this, you know, “Hey, I have this idea, blah blah blah” or, “You know, I noticed this thing, I found it really interesting because blah blah blah.” And if you can’t, if it’s not interesting to your friend, guess what? It’s not going to be interesting to a stranger, right? Like you have to be able to to explain it in a way that’s simple and use that as a filter. If you would never talk about it, don’t write about it.
Shaan Parr: Well, and the the tip that I used to give, so at when I sold the Hustle, we had close to 2 million subscribers, I believe. And for new writers, they would they like would kick ass in their audition. And then they would get nervous, like when they’re I’m like, “Yeah, 2 million, a lot of people, I get it.” But here’s the tip. Write to me, write to Sam. Just literally, you are only writing to one human being. It’s just coincidence that many others might read it, but just only write to one one person. Direct it to that one person, and that’s the way to go. Uh and so it makes it a lot easier. Uh let’s go to let’s go to uh write simply. What I found is around you can go as low as fourth grade, but around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade reading level is the way that you want to write. Now, to give you guys perspective, I think usanews.com, USA News, the newspaper, I believe that’s at a fourth-grade reading level. New York Times, which is highly regarded by a lot of people, that’s at a seventh-grade reading level. And I actually went and put Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett writes about insurance companies, a very complicated topic. I went and put his stuff through Hemingway app as well. Same thing, sixth, seventh, eighth-grade reading level, and it teaches you how to write at that level. And there’s tactics on how to do that, like don’t use adverbs, keep sentences short, but Hemingway app is an awesome way to um Check. Yeah, to check, to do it for you.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I think that’s a great one. Um, another one that you wrote in here is about storytelling. And so I think storytelling is now like kind of in the more advanced uh a little more advanced category of how to be a great writer is being able to use use the art of storytelling. Uh do you want to give an example of that uh or how do you want to talk about storytelling here?
Shaan Parr: So, here’s an example of storytelling. So, about 10 years ago, there was this company called Hint, Hint Water. It’s you see it’s like a beverage that you guys see in the stores. It’s called um and the the lady named Cara, she had this great story. She went and gave this talk uh at one of my events, and there was at the very end, there was one question that someone asked her, and I heard that story and of the 60-minute talk, I was like, “Oh, that’s a a hit,” because that just made me feel something. So the headline was, “Getting called sweetie helped this entrepreneur create a multi-million dollar business.” “Sweetie,” the executive said, and I just dropped the phone for a minute. Last week at Pizza and 40s, Cara Golden, the founder of Hint, told me a story that fired me up. The setup goes like this. And it explains the story about how she was drinking 10 Cokes a day. She was on the phone with an executive of Coca-Cola, and she said, “I’m going to create a new version of water that just has a a a little bit of fruit in it and no sugar.” An executive at Coco says, “Listen, sweetie, America’s love sweet. This is never going to work.” By the way, that’s a great example of working backwards from an emotion. Even if you didn’t consciously do it in this case, you you knew that story would hit because it has outrage. It has a WTF or OMG type of reaction of like, “That asshole.” But let me fill you in on the results. So I wrote the blog post not in order to promote Hint. I wrote the blog post because I thought this was just a cool story of a this entrepreneur getting like it was a sexist moment and she was getting hated on, whatever. Hint saw the article. They ended up spending millions of dollars to promote this article, and at the very bottom of the article, and it’s it says something like, “This conversation inspired Golden, now 17 later 17 years later to found Hint, and they do 100 million in sales. Uh, here’s the flavors they have.” This article made them tens of millions of dollars in sales. We used to get so much traffic to this article because they ended up promoting it. I wasn’t selling Hint water. I was just telling a cool story about the founder, and in exchange, it made all these people want to buy this stuff. And if in fact, if you Google Hint Water Sweetie article, you’ll see articles written about this article about how it was a huge success. And this was sort of an accident. I just wrote something cool and they actually were like, “Oh, let’s promote this.” But it worked wonderfully because it was a story that grabbed your attention.
Sam Parr: You want to say a few words on on on how to how to write a great story? I have a couple of tips. You you do it. So a couple of tips on on writing a great story or telling a great story. So go look at the greatest storytellers ever. Uh one of them is uh Aaron Sorkin. He’s known for writing great dialogue. He wrote, you know, the the Social Network movie, he wrote uh what is it, West Wing, he wrote the Newsroom, great writer, famous writer, famous Hollywood writer. He says, “I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.” So what he says is, a story is just two things. Somebody has an intention. Somebody wants something, and there’s an obstacle in their way. By the way, that line, “I worship at blank altar.” At the altar of blank. Yeah, so good. Yeah. That that is going into my bank. To your bank. Uh that’s funny. Uh all right, so uh so intention and obstacle. Intention is some character wants something and then there’s an obstacle in their way. The more they want it, like their daughter was just taken hostage, huge huge intention, obstacle, they don’t know by who or where they are and all they have to go on is this one five-second call that they were on or whatever, right? Like obstacle, they they have no way to find them and they’re just a dad. How are they going to ever, you know, get their daughter back? And so intention and obstacle is the core element of any good story. So somebody wants something. In the in the case that you just said, not only does Cara want to make her business successful, she wants to be taken seriously as a female entrepreneur. Obstacle, Coke executive, men men are pigs, nobody believes in her, right? That’s a core that’s a core of a story. And so any story, if you can’t, they always say like in a movie, you should be able to pause at any moment of any story and say, “What does that character want and what’s in their way?” And if you can’t pause and name that right now, you have failed as a storyteller because the audience you you think they’re you’re going to tell them later what they they want. No, no, you’ve lost their attention. The the initial stakes, and if you watch any movie, they establish this, right? And even like silly rom-coms, it’ll be uh she wakes up, she’s got her assistant and chauffeur driving her to work. She’s clearly high-powered, but her but she’s alone and she’s doesn’t have a relationship, right? Like that’ll be it’ll be obvious to her. She’ll see somebody out the window while she’s driving to work in her chauffeur limousine and it’s this girl in love with her boyfriend and she looks at it kind of longingly and then she just goes back to her her, you know, palm pilot or whatever before back to work. And so you know what the character wants and you know what’s in her way. She’s she doesn’t have somebody because she has to find the right guy and she’s so busy with work. And so everything is always this intention and obstacle. The second thing is you have to establish like how do you make a story better or worse? Stakes is the next thing. So what is that stake? Uh what do you have to lose if this doesn’t go well? And stakes doesn’t have like stakes initially, the beginner version of stakes is life or death. But the true art, and some if you like some of the stories that I’ve told on this podcast, the true art is when you can establish high stakes emotions in a low stakes environment. So if I can tell you how I was feeling and if I can get you to believe that I thought everything was on the line just with some little interaction I was having with the like this person in the grocery store line and how I didn’t want them to win because fuck them and they can’t cut they cut in front of me, but I’m not going to I’m not going to cut in front of them, but I need them to know that it wasn’t okay, but I don’t know how to do it without being an asshole myself. And if I can establish the stakes that this matters to me, I can get you to care about the outcome of it, but it can be in a low stakes situation. Now you’re really cooking with gas if you can do something like that. Because otherwise you’re limited to just life or death stories.
Shaan Parr: The best example you have done of that, you’re very good at this, is um I I distinctly remember the story of you doing a shirtless workout on your driveway and your HOA being like, “No, we we can’t have this.” And you’re like, “We’re going to petty court. We’re going to HOA.” Like I just that was a beautiful story. I should let this go. Oh, I can fight to the death as a matter of principle here because, you know, what are you trying to say? And what does this mean, right? And if it means something to me that I can make it mean something to you. So that sort of thing. So Larry David’s great at this too. Like whenever I watch that show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, like they’re making a story out of something so silly and small. Uh you know, like And it’s it’s 10 times more likable when it’s something relatable or small, but it still carries the emotional impact. And if you could do that, you have an infinite supply of stories. He notices that people don’t talk people don’t talk to someone if they’re wearing a maga hat, and so he starts wearing a maga hat all the time. He’s like, “I don’t want anyone to talk to me. I’m just going to wear this hat.” Yeah. Uh that that’s a a really good example of a high stakes uh high stakes and a low stakes environment. where like it doesn’t really matter, but it’s very funny. Um and then let’s talk about uh really tactical stuff. So short sentences. Um I’m a firm believer in short sentences. And so the I’ll give you I’ll explain why, but Warren Buffett owns, you know, runs Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire owns dozens and dozens of companies. Arguably the most complicated one is Geico. Insurance companies are very, very, very hard to understand. However, I don’t remember if the Hustle did analysis on this or someone else did, but he writes these famous annual shareholder letters every single year. He’s a very good writer. And listen to this. From uh 1974 to 2013, someone analyzed this, and the letters per sorry, the words per sentence dropped from 17 to 13. If you look at like we actually did an analysis on this. Every year, it gets shorter and shorter and shorter. And the reading level dropped from a 10th grade to a fourth grade reading level. So the richer he got and the more complicated his businesses got, the simpler the writing got because he just got better at explaining it in a really easy to understand way. And he’s probably once kind of somewhat the average show to be able to understand this. And so short, simple sentences are key even in complicated environments. And here’s a really good example. So if you go to hey.com, so hey.com is an alternative to Gmail. It’s a it’s a service that makes you pay though, so it’s even they they’ve raised the stakes there, so you have to pay for their email. There’s a letter from the CEO, and that’s one of my favorite uh like tactics by the way on a sales page, is letter from a CEO. And he says, “Hey everyone, I’m Jason, CEO of 37 Signals. Email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn’t. Email’s a treasure.” And he goes on to explain why uh email is awesome and why it should be more special than it is, and it’s the most simple language to explain email, and I love it. And there’s lots of examples of simple language and and simple ways to explain complicated things. And if you’re able to do that, oftentimes, it will have shorter sentences, less words, and it it’s significantly more uh effective than longer stuff.
Sam Parr: Related to that, it doesn’t have to be only one length. So there’s this great graphic that’s gone viral many times. You’ve probably seen it. Great writing has rhythm. So there’s a an example. So I’ll just read this out loud. He goes, “This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. This writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences, and I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I’m certain that the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the symbols, and sounds that say, “Listen to this, this is important.” So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create sound that pleases the reader’s ears. Don’t just write words, write music. I love that thing. It is amazing. And so you want to have short by default, but then, like he says, when the reader is rested and ready, use a long sentence to great effect. And so that’s like a advanced move when it comes to writing. Most people’s problem is everything every sentence is too long. And so you start with short sentences, but then you figure out how to vary it so that your writing sings.
Shaan Parr: Whenever I uh sometimes when I write something that I get really into, I am almost I almost feel like uh I’m like I channel like my inner Eminem or like some rapper or something where I’m like, “What type of rhythm can get people flowing?” Like I need to have a rhythm that gets people to fall down this. And like there’s small tactics, like anytime you want to use a comma, use a period and then start the next sentence with and or but. Um, or there’s other things like put your internal dialogue like um or like or or the reader’s internal dialogue like, “So why would I do this? You’re asking yourself right now.” Right. Or, “Who the hell is this person talking to me through my computer screen, telling me what to do, and why on earth should I trust them?” Like you can do these little things to change the rhythm and grab people’s attention.
Sam Parr: Yeah, 100% agree. Uh that’s a that’s a great way of putting it. I also think that uh you know, this also works for choosing what to write about. So for example, sometimes people will write about shit that they would never talk to you about. We had this problem early on at the Milk Road. So when we did the Milk Road, I was the initial writer, so I created the initial voice. And Milk Road was a a newsletter that we built in the crypto space, and we went from zero subscribers and never have written a daily newsletter before to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and sold it for millions of dollars. That in one year. So that was the the success outcome. So how did we actually do it? And more importantly, how did I train other people to write it instead of me? Because I didn’t want to wake up every morning and stress about sending this email out at 5:00 a.m. to, you know, a couple hundred thousand people. That that was not the idea of a good life for me. So I was like, “Let me see if I can train people to do this.” One of the hacks to training people to do this was I I was like, “God, I feel like they’re writing this both with too much extra fluff and jargon, and secondly, they’re writing about stuff that’s kind of boring. So like the topic is boring.” I’m like, “What’s happening?” I was like, and I told them, I was like, “I feel like you would never just tell me about this. Like if I was just talking to you, if I was your your friend and you were like, “Oh, did you hear what happened today?” Which is what a news what a new what the news is trying to tell you, right? Hey, did you hear what happened today? This crazy thing happened, this interesting thing happened, this big event happened. I was like, “You’re writing about stuff that wouldn’t even make that filter. You wouldn’t even tell me about it.” So why are you doing this? So when I had them do, I was like, “Forget writing a draft and having me be the editor. Instead, I want you to send me a voice memo, no more than 60 seconds in the morning, which is basically, “Oh, did you hear what happened today? Uh, this guy said this thing and people are freaking out because of blah blah blah.” And this announcement was made and people think it’s going to be a big deal and the price is going to go up because that would mean this. And as soon as they started doing that, I was like, “Yep, that sounds perfect. Just write that down.” And it just was such a good filter. And so one way to think about what to write about and how to write it is do this little kind of voice memo test. So can you just if you were just to tell your friend about this, you know, “Hey, I have this idea, blah blah blah” or, “You know, I noticed this thing, I found it really interesting because blah blah blah.” And if you can’t, if it’s not interesting to your friend, guess what? It’s not going to be interesting to a stranger, right? Like you have to be able to to explain it in a way that’s simple and use that as a filter. If you would never talk about it, don’t write about it.
Shaan Parr: Well, and the the tip that I used to give, so at when I sold the Hustle, we had close to 2 million subscribers, I believe. And for new writers, they would they like would kick ass in their audition. And then they would get nervous, like when they’re I’m like, “Yeah, 2 million, a lot of people, I get it.” But here’s the tip. Write to me, write to Sam. Just literally, you are only writing to one human being. It’s just coincidence that many others might read it, but just only write to one one person. Direct it to that one person, and that’s the way to go. Uh and so it makes it a lot easier. Uh let’s go to let’s go to uh write simply. What I found is around you can go as low as fourth grade, but around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade reading level is the way that you want to write. Now, to give you guys perspective, I think usanews.com, USA News, the newspaper, I believe that’s at a fourth-grade reading level. New York Times, which is highly regarded by a lot of people, that’s at a seventh-grade reading level. And I actually went and put Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett writes about insurance companies, a very complicated topic. I went and put his stuff through Hemingway app as well. Same thing, sixth, seventh, eighth-grade reading level, and it teaches you how to write at that level. And there’s tactics on how to do that, like don’t use adverbs, keep sentences short, but Hemingway app is an awesome way to um Check. Yeah, to check, to do it for you.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I think that’s a great one. Um, another one that you wrote in here is about storytelling. And so I think storytelling is now like kind of in the more advanced uh a little more advanced category of how to be a great writer is being able to use use the art of storytelling. Uh do you want to give an example of that uh or how do you want to talk about storytelling here?
Shaan Parr: So, here’s an example of storytelling. So, about 10 years ago, there was this company called Hint, Hint Water. It’s you see it’s like a beverage that you guys see in the stores. It’s called um and the the lady named Cara, she had this great story. She went and gave this talk uh at one of my events, and there was at the very end, there was one question that someone asked her, and I heard that story and of the 60-minute talk, I was like, “Oh, that’s a a hit,” because that just made me feel something. So the headline was, “Getting called sweetie helped this entrepreneur create a multi-million dollar business.” “Sweetie,” the executive said, and I just dropped the phone for a minute. Last week at Pizza and 40s, Cara Golden, the founder of Hint, told me a story that fired me up. The setup goes like this. And it explains the story about how she was drinking 10 Cokes a day. She was on the phone with an executive of Coca-Cola, and she said, “I’m going to create a new version of water that just has a a a little bit of fruit in it and no sugar.” An executive at Coco says, “Listen, sweetie, America’s love sweet. This is never going to work.” By the way, that’s a great example of working backwards from an emotion. Even if you didn’t consciously do it in this case, you you knew that story would hit because it has outrage. It has a WTF or OMG type of reaction of like, “That asshole.” But let me fill you in on the results. So I wrote the blog post not in order to promote Hint. I wrote the blog post because I thought this was just a cool story of a this entrepreneur getting like it was a sexist moment and she was getting hated on, whatever. Hint saw the article. They ended up spending millions of dollars to promote this article, and at the very bottom of the article, and it’s it says something like, “This conversation inspired Golden, now 17 later 17 years later to found Hint, and they do 100 million in sales. Uh, here’s the flavors they have.” This article made them tens of millions of dollars in sales. We used to get so much traffic to this article because they ended up promoting it. I wasn’t selling Hint water. I was just telling a cool story about the founder, and in exchange, it made all these people want to buy this stuff. And if in fact, if you Google Hint Water Sweetie article, you’ll see articles written about this article about how it was a huge success. And this was sort of an accident. I just wrote something cool and they actually were like, “Oh, let’s promote this.” But it worked wonderfully because it was a story that grabbed your attention.
Sam Parr: You want to say a few words on on on how to how to write a great story? I have a couple of tips. You you do it. So a couple of tips on on writing a great story or telling a great story. So go look at the greatest storytellers ever. Uh one of them is uh Aaron Sorkin. He’s known for writing great dialogue. He wrote, you know, the the Social Network movie, he wrote uh what is it, West Wing, he wrote the Newsroom, great writer, famous writer, famous Hollywood writer. He says, “I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.” So what he says is, a story is just two things. Somebody has an intention. Somebody wants something, and there’s an obstacle in their way. By the way, that line, “I worship at blank altar.” At the altar of blank. Yeah, so good. Yeah. That that is going into my bank. To your bank. Uh that’s funny. Uh all right, so uh so intention and obstacle. Intention is some character wants something and then there’s an obstacle in their way. The more they want it, like their daughter was just taken hostage, huge huge intention, obstacle, they don’t know by who or where they are and all they have to go on is this one five-second call that they were on or whatever, right? Like obstacle, they they have no way to find them and they’re just a dad. How are they going to ever, you know, get their daughter back? And so intention and obstacle is the core element of any good story. So somebody wants something. In the in the case that you just said, not only does Cara want to make her business successful, she wants to be taken seriously as a female entrepreneur. Obstacle, Coke executive, men men are pigs, nobody believes in her, right? That’s a core that’s a core of a story. And so any story, if you can’t, they always say like in a movie, you should be able to pause at any moment of any story and say, “What does that character want and what’s in their way?” And if you can’t pause and name that right now, you have failed as a storyteller because the audience you you think they’re you’re going to tell them later what they they want. No, no, you’ve lost their attention. The the initial stakes, and if you watch any movie, they establish this, right? And even like silly rom-coms, it’ll be uh she wakes up, she’s got her assistant and chauffeur driving her to work. She’s clearly high-powered, but her but she’s alone and she’s doesn’t have a relationship, right? Like that’ll be it’ll be obvious to her. She’ll see somebody out the window while she’s driving to work in her chauffeur limousine and it’s this girl in love with her boyfriend and she looks at it kind of longingly and then she just goes back to her her, you know, palm pilot or whatever before back to work. And so you know what the character wants and you know what’s in her way. She’s she doesn’t have somebody because she has to find the right guy and she’s so busy with work. And so everything is always this intention and obstacle. The second thing is you have to establish like how do you make a story better or worse? Stakes is the next thing. So what is that stake? Uh what do you have to lose if this doesn’t go well? And stakes doesn’t have like stakes initially, the beginner version of stakes is life or death. But the true art, and some if you like some of the stories that I’ve told on this podcast, the true art is when you can establish high stakes emotions in a low stakes environment. So if I can tell you how I was feeling and if I can get you to believe that I thought everything was on the line just with some little interaction I was having with the like this person in the grocery store line and how I didn’t want them to win because fuck them and they can’t cut they cut in front of me, but I’m not going to I’m not going to cut in front of them, but I need them to know that it wasn’t okay, but I don’t know how to do it without being an asshole myself. And if I can establish the stakes that this matters to me, I can get you to care about the outcome of it, but it can be in a low stakes situation. Now you’re really cooking with gas if you can do something like that. Because otherwise you’re limited to just life or death stories.
Shaan Parr: The best example you have done of that, you’re very good at this, is um I I distinctly remember the story of you doing a shirtless workout on your driveway and your HOA being like, “No, we we can’t have this.” And you’re like, “We’re going to petty court. We’re going to HOA.” Like I just that was a beautiful story. I should let this go. Oh, I can fight to the death as a matter of principle here because, you know, what are you trying to say? And what does this mean, right? And if it means something to me that I can make it mean something to you. So that sort of thing. So Larry David’s great at this too. Like whenever I watch that show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, like they’re making a story out of something so silly and small. Uh you know, like And it’s it’s 10 times more likable when it’s something relatable or small, but it still carries the emotional impact. And if you could do that, you have an infinite supply of stories. He notices that people don’t talk people don’t talk to someone if they’re wearing a maga hat, and so he starts wearing a maga hat all the time. He’s like, “I don’t want anyone to talk to me. I’m just going to wear this hat.” Yeah. Uh that that’s a a really good example of a high stakes uh high stakes and a low stakes environment. where like it doesn’t really matter, but it’s very funny. Um and then let’s talk about uh really tactical stuff. So short sentences. Um I’m a firm believer in short sentences. And so the I’ll give you I’ll explain why, but Warren Buffett owns, you know, runs Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire owns dozens and dozens of companies. Arguably the most complicated one is Geico. Insurance companies are very, very, very hard to understand. However, I don’t remember if the Hustle did analysis on this or someone else did, but he writes these famous annual shareholder letters every single year. He’s a very good writer. And listen to this. From uh 1974 to 2013, someone analyzed this, and the letters per sorry, the words per sentence dropped from 17 to 13. If you look at like we actually did an analysis on this. Every year, it gets shorter and shorter and shorter. And the reading level dropped from a 10th grade to a fourth grade reading level. So the richer he got and the more complicated his businesses got, the simpler the writing got because he just got better at explaining it in a really easy to understand way. And he’s probably once kind of somewhat the average show to be able to understand this. And so short, simple sentences are key even in complicated environments. And here’s a really good example. So if you go to hey.com, so hey.com is an alternative to Gmail. It’s a it’s a service that makes you pay though, so it’s even they they’ve raised the stakes there, so you have to pay for their email. There’s a letter from the CEO, and that’s one of my favorite uh like tactics by the way on a sales page, is letter from a CEO. And he says, “Hey everyone, I’m Jason, CEO of 37 Signals. Email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn’t. Email’s a treasure.” And he goes on to explain why uh email is awesome and why it should be more special than it is, and it’s the most simple language to explain email, and I love it. And there’s lots of examples of simple language and and simple ways to explain complicated things. And if you’re able to do that, oftentimes, it will have shorter sentences, less words, and it it’s significantly more uh effective than longer stuff.
Sam Parr: Related to that, it doesn’t have to be only one length. So there’s this great graphic that’s gone viral many times. You’ve probably seen it. Great writing has rhythm. So there’s a an example. So I’ll just read this out loud. He goes, “This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. This writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences, and I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I’m certain that the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the symbols, and sounds that say, “Listen to this, this is important.” So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create sound that pleases the reader’s ears. Don’t just write words, write music. I love that thing. It is amazing. And so you want to have short by default, but then, like he says, when the reader is rested and ready, use a long sentence to great effect. And so that’s like a advanced move when it comes to writing. Most people’s problem is everything every sentence is too long. And so you start with short sentences, but then you figure out how to vary it so that your writing sings.
Shaan Parr: Whenever I uh sometimes when I write something that I get really into, I am almost I almost feel like uh I’m like I channel like my inner Eminem or like some rapper or something where I’m like, “What type of rhythm can get people flowing?” Like I need to have a rhythm that gets people to fall down this. And like there’s small tactics, like anytime you want to use a comma, use a period and then start the next sentence with and or but. Um, or there’s other things like put your internal dialogue like um or like or or the reader’s internal dialogue like, “So why would I do this? You’re asking yourself right now.” Right. Or, “Who the hell is this person talking to me through my computer screen, telling me what to do, and why on earth should I trust them?” Like you can do these little things to change the rhythm and grab people’s attention.
Sam Parr: Yeah, 100% agree. Uh that’s a that’s a great way of putting it. I also think that uh you know, this also works for choosing what to write about. So for example, sometimes people will write about shit that they would never talk to you about. We had this problem early on at the Milk Road. So when we did the Milk Road, I was the initial writer, so I created the initial voice. And Milk Road was a a newsletter that we built in the crypto space, and we went from zero subscribers and never have written a daily newsletter before to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and sold it for millions of dollars. That in one year. So that was the the success outcome. So how did we actually do it? And more importantly, how did I train other people to write it instead of me? Because I didn’t want to wake up every morning and stress about sending this email out at 5:00 a.m. to, you know, a couple hundred thousand people. That that was not the idea of a good life for me. So I was like, “Let me see if I can train people to do this.” One of the hacks to training people to do this was I I was like, “God, I feel like they’re writing this both with too much extra fluff and jargon, and secondly, they’re writing about stuff that’s kind of boring. So like the topic is boring.” I’m like, “What’s happening?” I was like, and I told them, I was like, “I feel like you would never just tell me about this. Like if I was just talking to you, if I was your your friend and you were like, “Oh, did you hear what happened today?” Which is what a news what a new what the news is trying to tell you, right? Hey, did you hear what happened today? This crazy thing happened, this interesting thing happened, this big event happened. I was like, “You’re writing about stuff that wouldn’t even make that filter. You wouldn’t even tell me about it.” So why are you doing this? So when I had them do, I was like, “Forget writing a draft and having me be the editor. Instead, I want you to send me a voice memo, no more than 60 seconds in the morning, which is basically, “Oh, did you hear what happened today? Uh, this guy said this thing and people are freaking out because of blah blah blah.” And this announcement was made and people think it’s going to be a big deal and the price is going to go up because that would mean this. And as soon as they started doing that, I was like, “Yep, that sounds perfect. Just write that down.” And it just was such a good filter. And so one way to think about what to write about and how to write it is do this little kind of voice memo test. So can you just if you were just to tell your friend about this, you know, “Hey, I have this idea, blah blah blah” or, “You know, I noticed this thing, I found it really interesting because blah blah blah.” And if you can’t, if it’s not interesting to your friend, guess what? It’s not going to be interesting to a stranger, right? Like you have to be able to to explain it in a way that’s simple and use that as a filter. If you would never talk about it, don’t write about it.
Shaan Parr: Well, and the the tip that I used to give, so at when I sold the Hustle, we had close to 2 million subscribers, I believe. And for new writers, they would they like would kick ass in their audition. And then they would get nervous, like when they’re I’m like, “Yeah, 2 million, a lot of people, I get it.” But here’s the tip. Write to me, write to Sam. Just literally, you are only writing to one human being. It’s just coincidence that many others might read it, but just only write to one one person. Direct it to that one person, and that’s the way to go. Uh and so it makes it a lot easier. Uh let’s go to let’s go to uh write simply. What I found is around you can go as low as fourth grade, but around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade reading level is the way that you want to write. Now, to give you guys perspective, I think usanews.com, USA News, the newspaper, I believe that’s at a fourth-grade reading level. New York Times, which is highly regarded by a lot of people, that’s at a seventh-grade reading level. And I actually went and put Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett writes about insurance companies, a very complicated topic. I went and put his stuff through Hemingway app as well. Same thing, sixth, seventh, eighth-grade reading level, and it teaches you how to write at that level. And there’s tactics on how to do that, like don’t use adverbs, keep sentences short, but Hemingway app is an awesome way to um Check. Yeah, to check, to do it for you.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I think that’s a great one. Um, another one that you wrote in here is about storytelling. And so I think storytelling is now like kind of in the more advanced uh a little more advanced category of how to be a great writer is being able to use use the art of storytelling. Uh do you want to give an example of that uh or how do you want to talk about storytelling here?
Shaan Parr: So, here’s an example of storytelling. So, about 10 years ago, there was this company called Hint, Hint Water. It’s you see it’s like a beverage that you guys see in the stores. It’s called um and the the lady named Cara, she had this great story. She went and gave this talk uh at one of my events, and there was at the very end, there was one question that someone asked her, and I heard that story and of the 60-minute talk, I was like, “Oh, that’s a a hit,” because that just made me feel something. So the headline was, “Getting called sweetie helped this entrepreneur create a multi-million dollar business.” “Sweetie,” the executive said, and I just dropped the phone for a minute. Last week at Pizza and 40s, Cara Golden, the founder of Hint, told me a story that fired me up. The setup goes like this. And it explains the story about how she was drinking 10 Cokes a day. She was on the phone with an executive of Coca-Cola, and she said, “I’m going to create a new version of water that just has a a a little bit of fruit in it and no sugar.” An executive at Coco says, “Listen, sweetie, America’s love sweet. This is never going to work.” By the way, that’s a great example of working backwards from an emotion. Even if you didn’t consciously do it in this case, you you knew that story would hit because it has outrage. It has a WTF or OMG type of reaction of like, “That asshole.” But let me fill you in on the results. So I wrote the blog post not in order to promote Hint. I wrote the blog post because I thought this was just a cool story of a this entrepreneur getting like it was a sexist moment and she was getting hated on, whatever. Hint saw the article. They ended up spending millions of dollars to promote this article, and at the very bottom of the article, and it’s it says something like, “This conversation inspired Golden, now 17 later 17 years later to found Hint, and they do 100 million in sales. Uh, here’s the flavors they have.” This article made them tens of millions of dollars in sales. We used to get so much traffic to this article because they ended up promoting it. I wasn’t selling Hint water. I was just telling a cool story about the founder, and in exchange, it made all these people want to buy this stuff. And if in fact, if you Google Hint Water Sweetie article, you’ll see articles written about this article about how it was a huge success. And this was sort of an accident. I just wrote something cool and they actually were like, “Oh, let’s promote this.” But it worked wonderfully because it was a story that grabbed your attention.
Sam Parr: You want to say a few words on on on how to how to write a great story? I have a couple of tips. You you do it. So a couple of tips on on writing a great story or telling a great story. So go look at the greatest storytellers ever. Uh one of them is uh Aaron Sorkin. He’s known for writing great dialogue. He wrote, you know, the the Social Network movie, he wrote uh what is it, West Wing, he wrote the Newsroom, great writer, famous writer, famous Hollywood writer. He says, “I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.” So what he says is, a story is just two things. Somebody has an intention. Somebody wants something, and there’s an obstacle in their way. By the way, that line, “I worship at blank altar.” At the altar of blank. Yeah, so good. Yeah. That that is going into my bank. To your bank. Uh that’s funny. Uh all right, so uh so intention and obstacle. Intention is some character wants something and then there’s an obstacle in their way. The more they want it, like their daughter was just taken hostage, huge huge intention, obstacle, they don’t know by who or where they are and all they have to go on is this one five-second call that they were on or whatever, right? Like obstacle, they they have no way to find them and they’re just a dad. How are they going to ever, you know, get their daughter back? And so intention and obstacle is the core element of any good story. So somebody wants something. In the in the case that you just said, not only does Cara want to make her business successful, she wants to be taken seriously as a female entrepreneur. Obstacle, Coke executive, men men are pigs, nobody believes in her, right? That’s a core that’s a core of a story. And so any story, if you can’t, they always say like in a movie, you should be able to pause at any moment of any story and say, “What does that character want and what’s in their way?” And if you can’t pause and name that right now, you have failed as a storyteller because the audience you you think they’re you’re going to tell them later what they they want. No, no, you’ve lost their attention. The the initial stakes, and if you watch any movie, they establish this, right? And even like silly rom-coms, it’ll be uh she wakes up, she’s got her assistant and chauffeur driving her to work. She’s clearly high-powered, but her but she’s alone and she’s doesn’t have a relationship, right? Like that’ll be it’ll be obvious to her. She’ll see somebody out the window while she’s driving to work in her chauffeur limousine and it’s this girl in love with her boyfriend and she looks at it kind of longingly and then she just goes back to her her, you know, palm pilot or whatever before back to work. And so you know what the character wants and you know what’s in her way. She’s she doesn’t have somebody because she has to find the right guy and she’s so busy with work. And so everything is always this intention and obstacle. The second thing is you have to establish like how do you make a story better or worse? Stakes is the next thing. So what is that stake? Uh what do you have to lose if this doesn’t go well? And stakes doesn’t have like stakes initially, the beginner version of stakes is life or death. But the true art, and some if you like some of the stories that I’ve told on this podcast, the true art is when you can establish high stakes emotions in a low stakes environment. So if I can tell you how I was feeling and if I can get you to believe that I thought everything was on the line just with some little interaction I was having with the like this person in the grocery store line and how I didn’t want them to win because fuck them and they can’t cut they cut in front of me, but I’m not going to I’m not going to cut in front of them, but I need them to know that it wasn’t okay, but I don’t know how to do it without being an asshole myself. And if I can establish the stakes that this matters to me, I can get you to care about the outcome of it, but it can be in a low stakes situation. Now you’re really cooking with gas if you can do something like that. Because otherwise you’re limited to just life or death stories.
Shaan Parr: The best example you have done of that, you’re very good at this, is um I I distinctly remember the story of you doing a shirtless workout on your driveway and your HOA being like, “No, we we can’t have this.” And you’re like, “We’re going to petty court. We’re going to HOA.” Like I just that was a beautiful story. I should let this go. Oh, I can fight to the death as a matter of principle here because, you know, what are you trying to say? And what does this mean, right? And if it means something to me that I can make it mean something to you. So that sort of thing. So Larry David’s great at this too. Like whenever I watch that show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, like they’re making a story out of something so silly and small. Uh you know, like And it’s it’s 10 times more likable when it’s something relatable or small, but it still carries the emotional impact. And if you could do that, you have an infinite supply of stories. He notices that people don’t talk people don’t talk to someone if they’re wearing a maga hat, and so he starts wearing a maga hat all the time. He’s like, “I don’t want anyone to talk to me. I’m just going to wear this hat.” Yeah. Uh that that’s a a really good example of a high stakes uh high stakes and a low stakes environment. where like it doesn’t really matter, but it’s very funny. Um and then let’s talk about uh really tactical stuff. So short sentences. Um I’m a firm believer in short sentences. And so the I’ll give you I’ll explain why, but Warren Buffett owns, you know, runs Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire owns dozens and dozens of companies. Arguably the most complicated one is Geico. Insurance companies are very, very, very hard to understand. However, I don’t remember if the Hustle did analysis on this or someone else did, but he writes these famous annual shareholder letters every single year. He’s a very good writer. And listen to this. From uh 1974 to 2013, someone analyzed this, and the letters per sorry, the words per sentence dropped from 17 to 13. If you look at like we actually did an analysis on this. Every year, it gets shorter and shorter and shorter. And the reading level dropped from a 10th grade to a fourth grade reading level. So the richer he got and the more complicated his businesses got, the simpler the writing got because he just got better at explaining it in a really easy to understand way. And he’s probably once kind of somewhat the average show to be able to understand this. And so short, simple sentences are key even in complicated environments. And here’s a really good example. So if you go to hey.com, so hey.com is an alternative to Gmail. It’s a it’s a service that makes you pay though, so it’s even they they’ve raised the stakes there, so you have to pay for their email. There’s a letter from the CEO, and that’s one of my favorite uh like tactics by the way on a sales page, is letter from a CEO. And he says, “Hey everyone, I’m Jason, CEO of 37 Signals. Email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn’t. Email’s a treasure.” And he goes on to explain why uh email is awesome and why it should be more special than it is, and it’s the most simple language to explain email, and I love it. And there’s lots of examples of simple language and and simple ways to explain complicated things. And if you’re able to do that, oftentimes, it will have shorter sentences, less words, and it it’s significantly more uh effective than longer stuff.
Sam Parr: Related to that, it doesn’t have to be only one length. So there’s this great graphic that’s gone viral many times. You’ve probably seen it. Great writing has rhythm. So there’s a an example. So I’ll just read this out loud. He goes, “This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. This writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences, and I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I’m certain that the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the symbols, and sounds that say, “Listen to this, this is important.” So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create sound that pleases the reader’s ears. Don’t just write words, write music. I love that thing. It is amazing. And so you want to have short by default, but then, like he says, when the reader is rested and ready, use a long sentence to great effect. And so that’s like a advanced move when it comes to writing. Most people’s problem is everything every sentence is too long. And so you start with short sentences, but then you figure out how to vary it so that your writing sings.
Shaan Parr: Whenever I uh sometimes when I write something that I get really into, I am almost I almost feel like uh I’m like I channel like my inner Eminem or like some rapper or something where I’m like, “What type of rhythm can get people flowing?” Like I need to have a rhythm that gets people to fall down this. And like there’s small tactics, like anytime you want to use a comma, use a period and then start the next sentence with and or but. Um, or there’s other things like put your internal dialogue like um or like or or the reader’s internal dialogue like, “So why would I do this? You’re asking yourself right now.” Right. Or, “Who the hell is this person talking to me through my computer screen, telling me what to do, and why on earth should I trust them?” Like you can do these little things to change the rhythm and grab people’s attention.
Sam Parr: Yeah, 100% agree. Uh that’s a that’s a great way of putting it. I also think that uh you know, this also works for choosing what to write about. So for example, sometimes people will write about shit that they would never talk to you about. We had this problem early on at the Milk Road. So when we did the Milk Road, I was the initial writer, so I created the initial voice. And Milk Road was a a newsletter that we built in the crypto space, and we went from zero subscribers and never have written a daily newsletter before to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and sold it for millions of dollars. That in one year. So that was the the success outcome. So how did we actually do it? And more importantly, how did I train other people to write it instead of me? Because I didn’t want to wake up every morning and stress about sending this email out at 5:00 a.m. to, you know, a couple hundred thousand people. That that was not the idea of a good life for me. So I was like, “Let me see if I can train people to do this.” One of the hacks to training people to do this was I I was like, “God, I feel like they’re writing this both with too much extra fluff and jargon, and secondly, they’re writing about stuff that’s kind of boring. So like the topic is boring.” I’m like, “What’s happening?” I was like, and I told them, I was like, “I feel like you would never just tell me about this. Like if I was just talking to you, if I was your your friend and you were like, “Oh, did you hear what happened today?” Which is what a news what a new what the news is trying to tell you, right? Hey, did you hear what happened today? This crazy thing happened, this interesting thing happened, this big event happened. I was like, “You’re writing about stuff that wouldn’t even make that filter. You wouldn’t even tell me about it.” So why are you doing this? So when I had them do, I was like, “Forget writing a draft and having me be the editor. Instead, I want you to send me a voice memo, no more than 60 seconds in the morning, which is basically, “Oh, did you hear what happened today? Uh, this guy said this thing and people are freaking out because of blah blah blah.” And this announcement was made and people think it’s going to be a big deal and the price is going to go up because that would mean this. And as soon as they started doing that, I was like, “Yep, that sounds perfect. Just write that down.” And it just was such a good filter. And so one way to think about what to write about and how to write it is do this little kind of voice memo test. So can you just if you were just to tell your friend about this, you know, “Hey, I have this idea, blah blah blah” or, “You know, I noticed this thing, I found it really interesting because blah blah blah.” And if you can’t, if it’s not interesting to your friend, guess what? It’s not going to be interesting to a stranger, right? Like you have to be able to to explain it in a way that’s simple and use that as a filter. If you would never talk about it, don’t write about it.
Shaan Parr: Well, and the the tip that I used to give, so at when I sold the Hustle, we had close to 2 million subscribers, I believe. And for new writers, they would they like would kick ass in their audition. And then they would get nervous, like when they’re I’m like, “Yeah, 2 million, a lot of people, I get it.” But here’s the tip. Write to me, write to Sam. Just literally, you are only writing to one human being. It’s just coincidence that many others might read it, but just only write to one one person. Direct it to that one person, and that’s the way to go. Uh and so it makes it a lot easier. Uh let’s go to let’s go to uh write simply. What I found is around you can go as low as fourth grade, but around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade reading level is the way that you want to write. Now, to give you guys perspective, I think usanews.com, USA News, the newspaper, I believe that’s at a fourth-grade reading level. New York Times, which is highly regarded by a lot of people, that’s at a seventh-grade reading level. And I actually went and put Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett writes about insurance companies, a very complicated topic. I went and put his stuff through Hemingway app as well. Same thing, sixth, seventh, eighth-grade reading level, and it teaches you how to write at that level. And there’s tactics on how to do that, like don’t use adverbs, keep sentences short, but Hemingway app is an awesome way to um Check. Yeah, to check, to do it for you.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I think that’s a great one. Um, another one that you wrote in here is about storytelling. And so I think storytelling is now like kind of in the more advanced uh a little more advanced category of how to be a great writer is being able to use use the art of storytelling. Uh do you want to give an example of that uh or how do you want to talk about storytelling here?
Shaan Parr: So, here’s an example of storytelling. So, about 10 years ago, there was this company called Hint, Hint Water. It’s you see it’s like a beverage that you guys see in the stores. It’s called um and the the lady named Cara, she had this great story. She went and gave this talk uh at one of my events, and there was at the very end, there was one question that someone asked her, and I heard that story and of the 60-minute talk, I was like, “Oh, that’s a a hit,” because that just made me feel something. So the headline was, “Getting called sweetie helped this entrepreneur create a multi-million dollar business.” “Sweetie,” the executive said, and I just dropped the phone for a minute. Last week at Pizza and 40s, Cara Golden, the founder of Hint, told me a story that fired me up. The setup goes like this. And it explains the story about how she was drinking 10 Cokes a day. She was on the phone with an executive of Coca-Cola, and she said, “I’m going to create a new version of water that just has a a a little bit of fruit in it and no sugar.” An executive at Coco says, “Listen, sweetie, America’s love sweet. This is never going to work.” By the way, that’s a great example of working backwards from an emotion. Even if you didn’t consciously do it in this case, you you knew that story would hit because it has outrage. It has a WTF or OMG type of reaction of like, “That asshole.” But let me fill you in on the results. So I wrote the blog post not in order to promote Hint. I wrote the blog post because I thought this was just a cool story of a this entrepreneur getting like it was a sexist moment and she was getting hated on, whatever. Hint saw the article. They ended up spending millions of dollars to promote this article, and at the very bottom of the article, and it’s it says something like, “This conversation inspired Golden, now 17 later 17 years later to found Hint, and they do 100 million in sales. Uh, here’s the flavors they have.” This article made them tens of millions of dollars in sales. We used to get so much traffic to this article because they ended up promoting it. I wasn’t selling Hint water. I was just telling a cool story about the founder, and in exchange, it made all these people want to buy this stuff. And if in fact, if you Google Hint Water Sweetie article, you’ll see articles written about this article about how it was a huge success. And this was sort of an accident. I just wrote something cool and they actually were like, “Oh, let’s promote this.” But it worked wonderfully because it was a story that grabbed your attention.
Sam Parr: You want to say a few words on on on how to how to write a great story? I have a couple of tips. You you do it. So a couple of tips on on writing a great story or telling a great story. So go look at the greatest storytellers ever. Uh one of them is uh Aaron Sorkin. He’s known for writing great dialogue. He wrote, you know, the the Social Network movie, he wrote uh what is it, West Wing, he wrote the Newsroom, great writer, famous writer, famous Hollywood writer. He says, “I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.” So what he says is, a story is just two things. Somebody has an intention. Somebody wants something, and there’s an obstacle in their way. By the way, that line, “I worship at blank altar.” At the altar of blank. Yeah, so good. Yeah. That that is going into my bank. To your bank. Uh that’s funny. Uh all right, so uh so intention and obstacle. Intention is some character wants something and then there’s an obstacle in their way. The more they want it, like their daughter was just taken hostage, huge huge intention, obstacle, they don’t know by who or where they are and all they have to go on is this one five-second call that they were on or whatever, right? Like obstacle, they they have no way to find them and they’re just a dad. How are they going to ever, you know, get their daughter back? And so intention and obstacle is the core element of any good story. So somebody wants something. In the in the case that you just said, not only does Cara want to make her business successful, she wants to be taken seriously as a female entrepreneur. Obstacle, Coke executive, men men are pigs, nobody believes in her, right? That’s a core that’s a core of a story. And so any story, if you can’t, they always say like in a movie, you should be able to pause at any moment of any story and say, “What does that character want and what’s in their way?” And if you can’t pause and name that right now, you have failed as a storyteller because the audience you you think they’re you’re going to tell them later what they they want. No, no, you’ve lost their attention. The the initial stakes, and if you watch any movie, they establish this, right? And even like silly rom-coms, it’ll be uh she wakes up, she’s got her assistant and chauffeur driving her to work. She’s clearly high-powered, but her but she’s alone and she’s doesn’t have a relationship, right? Like that’ll be it’ll be obvious to her. She’ll see somebody out the window while she’s driving to work in her chauffeur limousine and it’s this girl in love with her boyfriend and she looks at it kind of longingly and then she just goes back to her her, you know, palm pilot or whatever before back to work. And so you know what the character wants and you know what’s in her way. She’s she doesn’t have somebody because she has to find the right guy and she’s so busy with work. And so everything is always this intention and obstacle. The second thing is you have to establish like how do you make a story better or worse? Stakes is the next thing. So what is that stake? Uh what do you have to lose if this doesn’t go well? And stakes doesn’t have like stakes initially, the beginner version of stakes is life or death. But the true art, and some if you like some of the stories that I’ve told on this podcast, the true art is when you can establish high stakes emotions in a low stakes environment. So if I can tell you how I was feeling and if I can get you to believe that I thought everything was on the line just with some little interaction I was having with the like this person in the grocery store line and how I didn’t want them to win because fuck them and they can’t cut they cut in front of me, but I’m not going to I’m not going to cut in front of them, but I need them to know that it wasn’t okay, but I don’t know how to do it without being an asshole myself. And if I can establish the stakes that this matters to me, I can get you to care about the outcome of it, but it can be in a low stakes situation. Now you’re really cooking with gas if you can do something like that. Because otherwise you’re limited to just life or death stories.
Shaan Parr: The best example you have done of that, you’re very good at this, is um I I distinctly remember the story of you doing a shirtless workout on your driveway and your HOA being like, “No, we we can’t have this.” And you’re like, “We’re going to petty court. We’re going to HOA.” Like I just that was a beautiful story. I should let this go. Oh, I can fight to the death as a matter of principle here because, you know, what are you trying to say? And what does this mean, right? And if it means something to me that I can make it mean something to you. So that sort of thing. So Larry David’s great at this too. Like whenever I watch that show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, like they’re making a story out of something so silly and small. Uh you know, like And it’s it’s 10 times more likable when it’s something relatable or small, but it still carries the emotional impact. And if you could do that, you have an infinite supply of stories. He notices that people don’t talk people don’t talk to someone if they’re wearing a maga hat, and so he starts wearing a maga hat all the time. He’s like, “I don’t want anyone to talk to me. I’m just going to wear this hat.” Yeah. Uh that that’s a a really good example of a high stakes uh high stakes and a low stakes environment. where like it doesn’t really matter, but it’s very funny. Um and then let’s talk about uh really tactical stuff. So short sentences. Um I’m a firm believer in short sentences. And so the I’ll give you I’ll explain why, but Warren Buffett owns, you know, runs Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire owns dozens and dozens of companies. Arguably the most complicated one is Geico. Insurance companies are very, very, very hard to understand. However, I don’t remember if the Hustle did analysis on this or someone else did, but he writes these famous annual shareholder letters every single year. He’s a very good writer. And listen to this. From uh 1974 to 2013, someone analyzed this, and the letters per sorry, the words per sentence dropped from 17 to 13. If you look at like we actually did an analysis on this. Every year, it gets shorter and shorter and shorter. And the reading level dropped from a 10th grade to a fourth grade reading level. So the richer he got and the more complicated his businesses got, the simpler the writing got because he just got better at explaining it in a really easy to understand way. And he’s probably once kind of somewhat the average show to be able to understand this. And so short, simple sentences are key even in complicated environments. And here’s a really good example. So if you go to hey.com, so hey.com is an alternative to Gmail. It’s a it’s a service that makes you pay though, so it’s even they they’ve raised the stakes there, so you have to pay for their email. There’s a letter from the CEO, and that’s one of my favorite uh like tactics by the way on a sales page, is letter from a CEO. And he says, “Hey everyone, I’m Jason, CEO of 37 Signals. Email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn’t. Email’s a treasure.” And he goes on to explain why uh email is awesome and why it should be more special than it is, and it’s the most simple language to explain email, and I love it. And there’s lots of examples of simple language and and simple ways to explain complicated things. And if you’re able to do that, oftentimes, it will have shorter sentences, less words, and it it’s significantly more uh effective than longer stuff.
Sam Parr: Related to that, it doesn’t have to be only one length. So there’s this great graphic that’s gone viral many times. You’ve probably seen it. Great writing has rhythm. So there’s a an example. So I’ll just read this out loud. He goes, “This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. This writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences, and I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I’m certain that the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the symbols, and sounds that say, “Listen to this, this is important.” So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create sound that pleases the reader’s ears. Don’t just write words, write music. I love that thing. It is amazing. And so you want to have short by default, but then, like he says, when the reader is rested and ready, use a long sentence to great effect. And so that’s like a advanced move when it comes to writing. Most people’s problem is everything every sentence is too long. And so you start with short sentences, but then you figure out how to vary it so that your writing sings.
Shaan Parr: Whenever I uh sometimes when I write something that I get really into, I am almost I almost feel like uh I’m like I channel like my inner Eminem or like some rapper or something where I’m like, “What type of rhythm can get people flowing?” Like I need to have a rhythm that gets people to fall down this. And like there’s small tactics, like anytime you want to use a comma, use a period and then start the next sentence with and or but. Um, or there’s other things like put your internal dialogue like um or like or or the reader’s internal dialogue like, “So why would I do this? You’re asking yourself right now.” Right. Or, “Who the hell is this person talking to me through my computer screen, telling me what to do, and why on earth should I trust them?” Like you can do these little things to change the rhythm and grab people’s attention.
Sam Parr: Yeah, 100% agree. Uh that’s a that’s a great way of putting it. I also think that uh you know, this also works for choosing what to write about. So for example, sometimes people will write about shit that they would never talk to you about. We had this problem early on at the Milk Road. So when we did the Milk Road, I was the initial writer, so I created the initial voice. And Milk Road was a a newsletter that we built in the crypto space, and we went from zero subscribers and never have written a daily newsletter before to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and sold it for millions of dollars. That in one year. So that was the the success outcome. So how did we actually do it? And more importantly, how did I train other people to write it instead of me? Because I didn’t want to wake up every morning and stress about sending this email out at 5:00 a.m. to, you know, a couple hundred thousand people. That that was not the idea of a good life for me. So I was like, “Let me see if I can train people to do this.” One of the hacks to training people to do this was I I was like, “God, I feel like they’re writing this both with too much extra fluff and jargon, and secondly, they’re writing about stuff that’s kind of boring. So like the topic is boring.” I’m like, “What’s happening?” I was like, and I told them, I was like, “I feel like you would never just tell me about this. Like if I was just talking to you, if I was your your friend and you were like, “Oh, did you hear what happened today?” Which is what a news what a new what the news is trying to tell you, right? Hey, did you hear what happened today? This crazy thing happened, this interesting thing happened, this big event happened. I was like, “You’re writing about stuff that wouldn’t even make that filter. You wouldn’t even tell me about it.” So why are you doing this? So when I had them do, I was like, “Forget writing a draft and having me be the editor. Instead, I want you to send me a voice memo, no more than 60 seconds in the morning, which is basically, “Oh, did you hear what happened today? Uh, this guy said this thing and people are freaking out because of blah blah blah.” And this announcement was made and people think it’s going to be a big deal and the price is going to go up because that would mean this. And as soon as they started doing that, I was like, “Yep, that sounds perfect. Just write that down.” And it just was such a good filter. And so one way to think about what to write about and how to write it is do this little kind of voice memo test. So can you just if you were just to tell your friend about this, you know, “Hey, I have this idea, blah blah blah” or, “You know, I noticed this thing, I found it really interesting because blah blah blah.” And if you can’t, if it’s not interesting to your friend, guess what? It’s not going to be interesting to a stranger, right? Like you have to be able to to explain it in a way that’s simple and use that as a filter. If you would never talk about it, don’t write about it.
Shaan Parr: Well, and the the tip that I used to give, so at when I sold the Hustle, we had close to 2 million subscribers, I believe. And for new writers, they would they like would kick ass in their audition. And then they would get nervous, like when they’re I’m like, “Yeah, 2 million, a lot of people, I get it.” But here’s the tip. Write to me, write to Sam. Just literally, you are only writing to one human being. It’s just coincidence that many others might read it, but just only write to one one person. Direct it to that one person, and that’s the way to go. Uh and so it makes it a lot easier. Uh let’s go to let’s go to uh write simply. What I found is around you can go as low as fourth grade, but around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade reading level is the way that you want to write. Now, to give you guys perspective, I think usanews.com, USA News, the newspaper, I believe that’s at a fourth-grade reading level. New York Times, which is highly regarded by a lot of people, that’s at a seventh-grade reading level. And I actually went and put Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett writes about insurance companies, a very complicated topic. I went and put his stuff through Hemingway app as well. Same thing, sixth, seventh, eighth-grade reading level, and it teaches you how to write at that level. And there’s tactics on how to do that, like don’t use adverbs, keep sentences short, but Hemingway app is an awesome way to um Check. Yeah, to check, to do it for you.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I think that’s a great one. Um, another one that you wrote in here is about storytelling. And so I think storytelling is now like kind of in the more advanced uh a little more advanced category of how to be a great writer is being able to use use the art of storytelling. Uh do you want to give an example of that uh or how do you want to talk about storytelling here?
Shaan Parr: So, here’s an example of storytelling. So, about 10 years ago, there was this company called Hint, Hint Water. It’s you see it’s like a beverage that you guys see in the stores. It’s called um and the the lady named Cara, she had this great story. She went and gave this talk uh at one of my events, and there was at the very end, there was one question that someone asked her, and I heard that story and of the 60-minute talk, I was like, “Oh, that’s a a hit,” because that just made me feel something. So the headline was, “Getting called sweetie helped this entrepreneur create a multi-million dollar business.” “Sweetie,” the executive said, and I just dropped the phone for a minute. Last week at Pizza and 40s, Cara Golden, the founder of Hint, told me a story that fired me up. The setup goes like this. And it explains the story about how she was drinking 10 Cokes a day. She was on the phone with an executive of Coca-Cola, and she said, “I’m going to create a new version of water that just has a a a little bit of fruit in it and no sugar.” An executive at Coco says, “Listen, sweetie, America’s love sweet. This is never going to work.” By the way, that’s a great example of working backwards from an emotion. Even if you didn’t consciously do it in this case, you you knew that story would hit because it has outrage. It has a WTF or OMG type of reaction of like, “That asshole.” But let me fill you in on the results. So I wrote the blog post not in order to promote Hint. I wrote the blog post because I thought this was just a cool story of a this entrepreneur getting like it was a sexist moment and she was getting hated on, whatever. Hint saw the article. They ended up spending millions of dollars to promote this article, and at the very bottom of the article, and it’s it says something like, “This conversation inspired Golden, now 17 later 17 years later to found Hint, and they do 100 million in sales. Uh, here’s the flavors they have.” This article made them tens of millions of dollars in sales. We used to get so much traffic to this article because they ended up promoting it. I wasn’t selling Hint water. I was just telling a cool story about the founder, and in exchange, it made all these people want to buy this stuff. And if in fact, if you Google Hint Water Sweetie article, you’ll see articles written about this article about how it was a huge success. And this was sort of an accident. I just wrote something cool and they actually were like, “Oh, let’s promote this.” But it worked wonderfully because it was a story that grabbed your attention.
Sam Parr: You want to say a few words on on on how to how to write a great story? I have a couple of tips. You you do it. So a couple of tips on on writing a great story or telling a great story. So go look at the greatest storytellers ever. Uh one of them is uh Aaron Sorkin. He’s known for writing great dialogue. He wrote, you know, the the Social Network movie, he wrote uh what is it, West Wing, he wrote the Newsroom, great writer, famous writer, famous Hollywood writer. He says, “I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.” So what he says is, a story is just two things. Somebody has an intention. Somebody wants something, and there’s an obstacle in their way. By the way, that line, “I worship at blank altar.” At the altar of blank. Yeah, so good. Yeah. That that is going into my bank. To your bank. Uh that’s funny. Uh all right, so uh so intention and obstacle. Intention is some character wants something and then there’s an obstacle in their way. The more they want it, like their daughter was just taken hostage, huge huge intention, obstacle, they don’t know by who or where they are and all they have to go on is this one five-second call that they were on or whatever, right? Like obstacle, they they have no way to find them and they’re just a dad. How are they going to ever, you know, get their daughter back? And so intention and obstacle is the core element of any good story. So somebody wants something. In the in the case that you just said, not only does Cara want to make her business successful, she wants to be taken seriously as a female entrepreneur. Obstacle, Coke executive, men men are pigs, nobody believes in her, right? That’s a core that’s a core of a story. And so any story, if you can’t, they always say like in a movie, you should be able to pause at any moment of any story and say, “What does that character want and what’s in their way?” And if you can’t pause and name that right now, you have failed as a storyteller because the audience you you think they’re you’re going to tell them later what they they want. No, no, you’ve lost their attention. The the initial stakes, and if you watch any movie, they establish this, right? And even like silly rom-coms, it’ll be uh she wakes up, she’s got her assistant and chauffeur driving her to work. She’s clearly high-powered, but her but she’s alone and she’s doesn’t have a relationship, right? Like that’ll be it’ll be obvious to her. She’ll see somebody out the window while she’s driving to work in her chauffeur limousine and it’s this girl in love with her boyfriend and she looks at it kind of longingly and then she just goes back to her her, you know, palm pilot or whatever before back to work. And so you know what the character wants and you know what’s in her way. She’s she doesn’t have somebody because she has to find the right guy and she’s so busy with work. And so everything is always this intention and obstacle. The second thing is you have to establish like how do you make a story better or worse? Stakes is the next thing. So what is that stake? Uh what do you have to lose if this doesn’t go well? And stakes doesn’t have like stakes initially, the beginner version of stakes is life or death. But the true art, and some if you like some of the stories that I’ve told on this podcast, the true art is when you can establish high stakes emotions in a low stakes environment. So if I can tell you how I was feeling and if I can get you to believe that I thought everything was on the line just with some little interaction I was having with the like this person in the grocery store line and how I didn’t want them to win because fuck them and they can’t cut they cut in front of me, but I’m not going to I’m not going to cut in front of them, but I need them to know that it wasn’t okay, but I don’t know how to do it without being an asshole myself. And if I can establish the stakes that this matters to me, I can get you to care about the outcome of it, but it can be in a low stakes situation. Now you’re really cooking with gas if you can do something like that. Because otherwise you’re limited to just life or death stories.
Shaan Parr: The best example you have done of that, you’re very good at this, is um I I distinctly remember the story of you doing a shirtless workout on your driveway and your HOA being like, “No, we we can’t have this.” And you’re like, “We’re going to petty court. We’re going to HOA.” Like I just that was a beautiful story. I should let this go. Oh, I can fight to the death as a matter of principle here because, you know, what are you trying to say? And what does this mean, right? And if it means something to me that I can make it mean something to you. So that sort of thing. So Larry David’s great at this too. Like whenever I watch that show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, like they’re making a story out of something so silly and small. Uh you know, like And it’s it’s 10 times more likable when it’s something relatable or small, but it still carries the emotional impact. And if you could do that, you have an infinite supply of stories. He notices that people don’t talk people don’t talk to someone if they’re wearing a maga hat, and so he starts wearing a maga hat all the time. He’s like, “I don’t want anyone to talk to me. I’m just going to wear this hat.” Yeah. Uh that that’s a a really good example of a high stakes uh high stakes and a low stakes environment. where like it doesn’t really matter, but it’s very funny. Um and then let’s talk about uh really tactical stuff. So short sentences. Um I’m a firm believer in short sentences. And so the I’ll give you I’ll explain why, but Warren Buffett owns, you know, runs Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire owns dozens and dozens of companies. Arguably the most complicated one is Geico. Insurance companies are very, very, very hard to understand. However, I don’t remember if the Hustle did analysis on this or someone else did, but he writes these famous annual shareholder letters every single year. He’s a very good writer. And listen to this. From uh 1974 to 2013, someone analyzed this, and the letters per sorry, the words per sentence dropped from 17 to 13. If you look at like we actually did an analysis on this. Every year, it gets shorter and shorter and shorter. And the reading level dropped from a 10th grade to a fourth grade reading level. So the richer he got and the more complicated his businesses got, the simpler the writing got because he just got better at explaining it in a really easy to understand way. And he’s probably once kind of somewhat the average show to be able to understand this. And so short, simple sentences are key even in complicated environments. And here’s a really good example. So if you go to hey.com, so hey.com is an alternative to Gmail. It’s a it’s a service that makes you pay though, so it’s even they they’ve raised the stakes there, so you have to pay for their email. There’s a letter from the CEO, and that’s one of my favorite uh like tactics by the way on a sales page, is letter from a CEO. And he says, “Hey everyone, I’m Jason, CEO of 37 Signals. Email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn’t. Email’s a treasure.” And he goes on to explain why uh email is awesome and why it should be more special than it is, and it’s the most simple language to explain email, and I love it. And there’s lots of examples of simple language and and simple ways to explain complicated things. And if you’re able to do that, oftentimes, it will have shorter sentences, less words, and it it’s significantly more uh effective than longer stuff.
Sam Parr: Related to that, it doesn’t have to be only one length. So there’s this great graphic that’s gone viral many times. You’ve probably seen it. Great writing has rhythm. So there’s a an example. So I’ll just read this out loud. He goes, “This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. This writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences, and I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I’m certain that the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the symbols, and sounds that say, “Listen to this, this is important.” So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create sound that pleases the reader’s ears. Don’t just write words, write music. I love that thing. It is amazing. And so you want to have short by default, but then, like he says, when the reader is rested and ready, use a long sentence to great effect. And so that’s like a advanced move when it comes to writing. Most people’s problem is everything every sentence is too long. And so you start with short sentences, but then you figure out how to vary it so that your writing sings.
Shaan Parr: Whenever I uh sometimes when I write something that I get really into, I am almost I almost feel like uh I’m like I channel like my inner Eminem or like some rapper or something where I’m like, “What type of rhythm can get people flowing?” Like I need to have a rhythm that gets people to fall down this. And like there’s small tactics, like anytime you want to use a comma, use a period and then start the next sentence with and or but. Um, or there’s other things like put your internal dialogue like um or like or or the reader’s internal dialogue like, “So why would I do this? You’re asking yourself right now.” Right. Or, “Who the hell is this person talking to me through my computer screen, telling me what to do, and why on earth should I trust them?” Like you can do these little things to change the rhythm and grab people’s attention.
Sam Parr: Yeah, 100% agree. Uh that’s a that’s a great way of putting it. I also think that uh you know, this also works for choosing what to write about. So for example, sometimes people will write about shit that they would never talk to you about. We had this problem early on at the Milk Road. So when we did the Milk Road, I was the initial writer, so I created the initial voice. And Milk Road was a a newsletter that we built in the crypto space, and we went from zero subscribers and never have written a daily newsletter before to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and sold it for millions of dollars. That in one year. So that was the the success outcome. So how did we actually do it? And more importantly, how did I train other people to write it instead of me? Because I didn’t want to wake up every morning and stress about sending this email out at 5:00 a.m. to, you know, a couple hundred thousand people. That that was not the idea of a good life for me. So I was like, “Let me see if I can train people to do this.” One of the hacks to training people to do this was I I was like, “God, I feel like they’re writing this both with too much extra fluff and jargon, and secondly, they’re writing about stuff that’s kind of boring. So like the topic is boring.” I’m like, “What’s happening?” I was like, and I told them, I was like, “I feel like you would never just tell me about this. Like if I was just talking to you, if I was your your friend and you were like, “Oh, did you hear what happened today?” Which is what a news what a new what the news is trying to tell you, right? Hey, did you hear what happened today? This crazy thing happened, this interesting thing happened, this big event happened. I was like, “You’re writing about stuff that wouldn’t even make that filter. You wouldn’t even tell me about it.” So why are you doing this? So when I had them do, I was like, “Forget writing a draft and having me be the editor. Instead, I want you to send me a voice memo, no more than 60 seconds in the morning, which is basically, “Oh, did you hear what happened today? Uh, this guy said this thing and people are freaking out because of blah blah blah.” And this announcement was made and people think it’s going to be a big deal and the price is going to go up because that would mean this. And as soon as they started doing that, I was like, “Yep, that sounds perfect. Just write that down.” And it just was such a good filter. And so one way to think about what to write about and how to write it is do this little kind of voice memo test. So can you just if you were just to tell your friend about this, you know, “Hey, I have this idea, blah blah blah” or, “You know, I noticed this thing, I found it really interesting because blah blah blah.” And if you can’t, if it’s not interesting to your friend, guess what? It’s not going to be interesting to a stranger, right? Like you have to be able to to explain it in a way that’s simple and use that as a filter. If you would never talk about it, don’t write about it.
Shaan Parr: Well, and the the tip that I used to give, so at when I sold the Hustle, we had close to 2 million subscribers, I believe. And for new writers, they would they like would kick ass in their audition. And then they would get nervous, like when they’re I’m like, “Yeah, 2 million, a lot of people, I get it.” But here’s the tip. Write to me, write to Sam. Just literally, you are only writing to one human being. It’s just coincidence that many others might read it, but just only write to one one person. Direct it to that one person, and that’s the way to go. Uh and so it makes it a lot easier. Uh let’s go to let’s go to uh write simply. What I found is around you can go as low as fourth grade, but around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade reading level is the way that you want to write. Now, to give you guys perspective, I think usanews.com, USA News, the newspaper, I believe that’s at a fourth-grade reading level. New York Times, which is highly regarded by a lot of people, that’s at a seventh-grade reading level. And I actually went and put Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett writes about insurance companies, a very complicated topic. I went and put his stuff through Hemingway app as well. Same thing, sixth, seventh, eighth-grade reading level, and it teaches you how to write at that level. And there’s tactics on how to do that, like don’t use adverbs, keep sentences short, but Hemingway app is an awesome way to um Check. Yeah, to check, to do it for you.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I think that’s a great one. Um, another one that you wrote in here is about storytelling. And so I think storytelling is now like kind of in the more advanced uh a little more advanced category of how to be a great writer is being able to use use the art of storytelling. Uh do you want to give an example of that uh or how do you want to talk about storytelling here?
Shaan Parr: So, here’s an example of storytelling. So, about 10 years ago, there was this company called Hint, Hint Water. It’s you see it’s like a beverage that you guys see in the stores. It’s called um and the the lady named Cara, she had this great story. She went and gave this talk uh at one of my events, and there was at the very end, there was one question that someone asked her, and I heard that story and of the 60-minute talk, I was like, “Oh, that’s a a hit,” because that just made me feel something. So the headline was, “Getting called sweetie helped this entrepreneur create a multi-million dollar business.” “Sweetie,” the executive said, and I just dropped the phone for a minute. Last week at Pizza and 40s, Cara Golden, the founder of Hint, told me a story that fired me up. The setup goes like this. And it explains the story about how she was drinking 10 Cokes a day. She was on the phone with an executive of Coca-Cola, and she said, “I’m going to create a new version of water that just has a a a little bit of fruit in it and no sugar.” An executive at Coco says, “Listen, sweetie, America’s love sweet. This is never going to work.” By the way, that’s a great example of working backwards from an emotion. Even if you didn’t consciously do it in this case, you you knew that story would hit because it has outrage. It has a WTF or OMG type of reaction of like, “That asshole.” But let me fill you in on the results. So I wrote the blog post not in order to promote Hint. I wrote the blog post because I thought this was just a cool story of a this entrepreneur getting like it was a sexist moment and she was getting hated on, whatever. Hint saw the article. They ended up spending millions of dollars to promote this article, and at the very bottom of the article, and it’s it says something like, “This conversation inspired Golden, now 17 later 17 years later to found Hint, and they do 100 million in sales. Uh, here’s the flavors they have.” This article made them tens of millions of dollars in sales. We used to get so much traffic to this article because they ended up promoting it. I wasn’t selling Hint water. I was just telling a cool story about the founder, and in exchange, it made all these people want to buy this stuff. And if in fact, if you Google Hint Water Sweetie article, you’ll see articles written about this article about how it was a huge success. And this was sort of an accident. I just wrote something cool and they actually were like, “Oh, let’s promote this.” But it worked wonderfully because it was a story that grabbed your attention.
Sam Parr: You want to say a few words on on on how to how to write a great story? I have a couple of tips. You you do it. So a couple of tips on on writing a great story or telling a great story. So go look at the greatest storytellers ever. Uh one of them is uh Aaron Sorkin. He’s known for writing great dialogue. He wrote, you know, the the Social Network movie, he wrote uh what is it, West Wing, he wrote the Newsroom, great writer, famous writer, famous Hollywood writer. He says, “I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.” So what he says is, a story is just two things. Somebody has an intention. Somebody wants something, and there’s an obstacle in their way. By the way, that line, “I worship at blank altar.” At the altar of blank. Yeah, so good. Yeah. That that is going into my bank. To your bank. Uh that’s funny. Uh all right, so uh so intention and obstacle. Intention is some character wants something and then there’s an obstacle in their way. The more they want it, like their daughter was just taken hostage, huge huge intention, obstacle, they don’t know by who or where they are and all they have to go on is this one five-second call that they were on or whatever, right? Like obstacle, they they have no way to find them and they’re just a dad. How are they going to ever, you know, get their daughter back? And so intention and obstacle is the core element of any good story. So somebody wants something. In the in the case that you just said, not only does Cara want to make her business successful, she wants to be taken seriously as a female entrepreneur. Obstacle, Coke executive, men men are pigs, nobody believes in her, right? That’s a core that’s a core of a story. And so any story, if you can’t, they always say like in a movie, you should be able to pause at any moment of any story and say, “What does that character want and what’s in their way?” And if you can’t pause and name that right now, you have failed as a storyteller because the audience you you think they’re you’re going to tell them later what they they want. No, no, you’ve lost their attention. The the initial stakes, and if you watch any movie, they establish this, right? And even like silly rom-coms, it’ll be uh she wakes up, she’s got her assistant and chauffeur driving her to work. She’s clearly high-powered, but her but she’s alone and she’s doesn’t have a relationship, right? Like that’ll be it’ll be obvious to her. She’ll see somebody out the window while she’s driving to work in her chauffeur limousine and it’s this girl in love with her boyfriend and she looks at it kind of longingly and then she just goes back to her her, you know, palm pilot or whatever before back to work. And so you know what the character wants and you know what’s in her way. She’s she doesn’t have somebody because she has to find the right guy and she’s so busy with work. And so everything is always this intention and obstacle. The second thing is you have to establish like how do you make a story better or worse? Stakes is the next thing. So what is that stake? Uh what do you have to lose if this doesn’t go well? And stakes doesn’t have like stakes initially, the beginner version of stakes is life or death. But the true art, and some if you like some of the stories that I’ve told on this podcast, the true art is when you can establish high stakes emotions in a low stakes environment. So if I can tell you how I was feeling and if I can get you to believe that I thought everything was on the line just with some little interaction I was having with the like this person in the grocery store line and how I didn’t want them to win because fuck them and they can’t cut they cut in front of me, but I’m not going to I’m not going to cut in front of them, but I need them to know that it wasn’t okay, but I don’t know how to do it without being an asshole myself. And if I can establish the stakes that this matters to me, I can get you to care about the outcome of it, but it can be in a low stakes situation. Now you’re really cooking with gas if you can do something like that. Because otherwise you’re limited to just life or death stories.
Shaan Parr: The best example you have done of that, you’re very good at this, is um I I distinctly remember the story of you doing a shirtless workout on your driveway and your HOA being like, “No, we we can’t have this.” And you’re like, “We’re going to petty court. We’re going to HOA.” Like I just that was a beautiful story. I should let this go. Oh, I can fight to the death as a matter of principle here because, you know, what are you trying to say? And what does this mean, right? And if it means something to me that I can make it mean something to you. So that sort of thing. So Larry David’s great at this too. Like whenever I watch that show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, like they’re making a story out of something so silly and small. Uh you know, like And it’s it’s 10 times more likable when it’s something relatable or small, but it still carries the emotional impact. And if you could do that, you have an infinite supply of stories. He notices that people don’t talk people don’t talk to someone if they’re wearing a maga hat, and so he starts wearing a maga hat all the time. He’s like, “I don’t want anyone to talk to me. I’m just going to wear this hat.” Yeah. Uh that that’s a a really good example of a high stakes uh high stakes and a low stakes environment. where like it doesn’t really matter, but it’s very funny. Um and then let’s talk about uh really tactical stuff. So short sentences. Um I’m a firm believer in short sentences. And so the I’ll give you I’ll explain why, but Warren Buffett owns, you know, runs Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire owns dozens and dozens of companies. Arguably the most complicated one is Geico. Insurance companies are very, very, very hard to understand. However, I don’t remember if the Hustle did analysis on this or someone else did, but he writes these famous annual shareholder letters every single year. He’s a very good writer. And listen to this. From uh 1974 to 2013, someone analyzed this, and the letters per sorry, the words per sentence dropped from 17 to 13. If you look at like we actually did an analysis on this. Every year, it gets shorter and shorter and shorter. And the reading level dropped from a 10th grade to a fourth grade reading level. So the richer he got and the more complicated his businesses got, the simpler the writing got because he just got better at explaining it in a really easy to understand way. And he’s probably once kind of somewhat the average show to be able to understand this. And so short, simple sentences are key even in complicated environments. And here’s a really good example. So if you go to hey.com, so hey.com is an alternative to Gmail. It’s a it’s a service that makes you pay though, so it’s even they they’ve raised the stakes there, so you have to pay for their email. There’s a letter from the CEO, and that’s one of my favorite uh like tactics by the way on a sales page, is letter from a CEO. And he says, “Hey everyone, I’m Jason, CEO of 37 Signals. Email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn’t. Email’s a treasure.” And he goes on to explain why uh email is awesome and why it should be more special than it is, and it’s the most simple language to explain email, and I love it. And there’s lots of examples of simple language and and simple ways to explain complicated things. And if you’re able to do that, oftentimes, it will have shorter sentences, less words, and it it’s significantly more uh effective than longer stuff.
Sam Parr: Related to that, it doesn’t have to be only one length. So there’s this great graphic that’s gone viral many times. You’ve probably seen it. Great writing has rhythm. So there’s a an example. So I’ll just read this out loud. He goes, “This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. This writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences, and I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I’m certain that the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the symbols, and sounds that say, “Listen to this, this is important.” So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create sound that pleases the reader’s ears. Don’t just write words, write music. I love that thing. It is amazing. And so you want to have short by default, but then, like he says, when the reader is rested and ready, use a long sentence to great effect. And so that’s like a advanced move when it comes to writing. Most people’s problem is everything every sentence is too long. And so you start with short sentences, but then you figure out how to vary it so that your writing sings.
Shaan Parr: Whenever I uh sometimes when I write something that I get really into, I am almost I almost feel like uh I’m like I channel like my inner Eminem or like some rapper or something where I’m like, “What type of rhythm can get people flowing?” Like I need to have a rhythm that gets people to fall down this. And like there’s small tactics, like anytime you want to use a comma, use a period and then start the next sentence with and or but. Um, or there’s other things like put your internal dialogue like um or like or or the reader’s internal dialogue like, “So why would I do this? You’re asking yourself right now.” Right. Or, “Who the hell is this person talking to me through my computer screen, telling me what to do, and why on earth should I trust them?” Like you can do these little things to change the rhythm and grab people’s attention.
Sam Parr: Yeah, 100% agree. Uh that’s a that’s a great way of putting it. I also think that uh you know, this also works for choosing what to write about. So for example, sometimes people will write about shit that they would never talk to you about. We had this problem early on at the Milk Road. So when we did the Milk Road, I was the initial writer, so I created the initial voice. And Milk Road was a a newsletter that we built in the crypto space, and we went from zero subscribers and never have written a daily newsletter before to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and sold it for millions of dollars. That in one year. So that was the the success outcome. So how did we actually do it? And more importantly, how did I train other people to write it instead of me? Because I didn’t want to wake up every morning and stress about sending this email out at 5:00 a.m. to, you know, a couple hundred thousand people. That that was not the idea of a good life for me. So I was like, “Let me see if I can train people to do this.” One of the hacks to training people to do this was I I was like, “God, I feel like they’re writing this both with too much extra fluff and jargon, and secondly, they’re writing about stuff that’s kind of boring. So like the topic is boring.” I’m like, “What’s happening?” I was like, and I told them, I was like, “I feel like you would never just tell me about this. Like if I was just talking to you, if I was your your friend and you were like, “Oh, did you hear what happened today?” Which is what a news what a new what the news is trying to tell you, right? Hey, did you hear what happened today? This crazy thing happened, this interesting thing happened, this big event happened. I was like, “You’re writing about stuff that wouldn’t even make that filter. You wouldn’t even tell me about it.” So why are you doing this? So when I had them do, I was like, “Forget writing a draft and having me be the editor. Instead, I want you to send me a voice memo, no more than 60 seconds in the morning, which is basically, “Oh, did you hear what happened today? Uh, this guy said this thing and people are freaking out because of blah blah blah.” And this announcement was made and people think it’s going to be a big deal and the price is going to go up because that would mean this. And as soon as they started doing that, I was like, “Yep, that sounds perfect. Just write that down.” And it just was such a good filter. And so one way to think about what to write about and how to write it is do this little kind of voice memo test. So can you just if you were just to tell your friend about this, you know, “Hey, I have this idea, blah blah blah” or, “You know, I noticed this thing, I found it really interesting because blah blah blah.” And if you can’t, if it’s not interesting to your friend, guess what? It’s not going to be interesting to a stranger, right? Like you have to be able to to explain it in a way that’s simple and use that as a filter. If you would never talk about it, don’t write about it.
Shaan Parr: Well, and the the tip that I used to give, so at when I sold the Hustle, we had close to 2 million subscribers, I believe. And for new writers, they would they like would kick ass in their audition. And then they would get nervous, like when they’re I’m like, “Yeah, 2 million, a lot of people, I get it.” But here’s the tip. Write to me, write to Sam. Just literally, you are only writing to one human being. It’s just coincidence that many others might read it, but just only write to one one person. Direct it to that one person, and that’s the way to go. Uh and so it makes it a lot easier. Uh let’s go to let’s go to uh write simply. What I found is around you can go as low as fourth grade, but around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade reading level is the way that you want to write. Now, to give you guys perspective, I think usanews.com, USA News, the newspaper, I believe that’s at a fourth-grade reading level. New York Times, which is highly regarded by a lot of people, that’s at a seventh-grade reading level. And I actually went and put Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett writes about insurance companies, a very complicated topic. I went and put his stuff through Hemingway app as well. Same thing, sixth, seventh, eighth-grade reading level, and it teaches you how to write at that level. And there’s tactics on how to do that, like don’t use adverbs, keep sentences short, but Hemingway app is an awesome way to um Check. Yeah, to check, to do it for you.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I think that’s a great one. Um, another one that you wrote in here is about storytelling. And so I think storytelling is now like kind of in the more advanced uh a little more advanced category of how to be a great writer is being able to use use the art of storytelling. Uh do you want to give an example of that uh or how do you want to talk about storytelling here?
Shaan Parr: So, here’s an example of storytelling. So, about 10 years ago, there was this company called Hint, Hint Water. It’s you see it’s like a beverage that you guys see in the stores. It’s called um and the the lady named Cara, she had this great story. She went and gave this talk uh at one of my events, and there was at the very end, there was one question that someone asked her, and I heard that story and of the 60-minute talk, I was like, “Oh, that’s a a hit,” because that just made me feel something. So the headline was, “Getting called sweetie helped this entrepreneur create a multi-million dollar business.” “Sweetie,” the executive said, and I just dropped the phone for a minute. Last week at Pizza and 40s, Cara Golden, the founder of Hint, told me a story that fired me up. The setup goes like this. And it explains the story about how she was drinking 10 Cokes a day. She was on the phone with an executive of Coca-Cola, and she said, “I’m going to create a new version of water that just has a a a little bit of fruit in it and no sugar.” An executive at Coco says, “Listen, sweetie, America’s love sweet. This is never going to work.” By the way, that’s a great example of working backwards from an emotion. Even if you didn’t consciously do it in this case, you you knew that story would hit because it has outrage. It has a WTF or OMG type of reaction of like, “That asshole.” But let me fill you in on the results. So I wrote the blog post not in order to promote Hint. I wrote the blog post because I thought this was just a cool story of a this entrepreneur getting like it was a sexist moment and she was getting hated on, whatever. Hint saw the article. They ended up spending millions of dollars to promote this article, and at the very bottom of the article, and it’s it says something like, “This conversation inspired Golden, now 17 later 17 years later to found Hint, and they do 100 million in sales. Uh, here’s the flavors they have.” This article made them tens of millions of dollars in sales. We used to get so much traffic to this article because they ended up promoting it. I wasn’t selling Hint water. I was just telling a cool story about the founder, and in exchange, it made all these people want to buy this stuff. And if in fact, if you Google Hint Water Sweetie article, you’ll see articles written about this article about how it was a huge success. And this was sort of an accident. I just wrote something cool and they actually were like, “Oh, let’s promote this.” But it worked wonderfully because it was a story that grabbed your attention.
Sam Parr: You want to say a few words on on on how to how to write a great story? I have a couple of tips. You you do it. So a couple of tips on on writing a great story or telling a great story. So go look at the greatest storytellers ever. Uh one of them is uh Aaron Sorkin. He’s known for writing great dialogue. He wrote, you know, the the Social Network movie, he wrote uh what is it, West Wing, he wrote the Newsroom, great writer, famous writer, famous Hollywood writer. He says, “I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.” So what he says is, a story is just two things. Somebody has an intention. Somebody wants something, and there’s an obstacle in their way. By the way, that line, “I worship at blank altar.” At the altar of blank. Yeah, so good. Yeah. That that is going into my bank. To your bank. Uh that’s funny. Uh all right, so uh so intention and obstacle. Intention is some character wants something and then there’s an obstacle in their way. The more they want it, like their daughter was just taken hostage, huge huge intention, obstacle, they don’t know by who or where they are and all they have to go on is this one five-second call that they were on or whatever, right? Like obstacle, they they have no way to find them and they’re just a dad. How are they going to ever, you know, get their daughter back? And so intention and obstacle is the core element of any good story. So somebody wants something. In the in the case that you just said, not only does Cara want to make her business successful, she wants to be taken seriously as a female entrepreneur. Obstacle, Coke executive, men men are pigs, nobody believes in her, right? That’s a core that’s a core of a story. And so any story, if you can’t, they always say like in a movie, you should be able to pause at any moment of any story and say, “What does that character want and what’s in their way?” And if you can’t pause and name that right now, you have failed as a storyteller because the audience you you think they’re you’re going to tell them later what they they want. No, no, you’ve lost their attention. The the initial stakes, and if you watch any movie, they establish this, right? And even like silly rom-coms, it’ll be uh she wakes up, she’s got her assistant and chauffeur driving her to work. She’s clearly high-powered, but her but she’s alone and she’s doesn’t have a relationship, right? Like that’ll be it’ll be obvious to her. She’ll see somebody out the window while she’s driving to work in her chauffeur limousine and it’s this girl in love with her boyfriend and she looks at it kind of longingly and then she just goes back to her her, you know, palm pilot or whatever before back to work. And so you know what the character wants and you know what’s in her way. She’s she doesn’t have somebody because she has to find the right guy and she’s so busy with work. And so everything is always this intention and obstacle. The second thing is you have to establish like how do you make a story better or worse? Stakes is the next thing. So what is that stake? Uh what do you have to lose if this doesn’t go well? And stakes doesn’t have like stakes initially, the beginner version of stakes is life or death. But the true art, and some if you like some of the stories that I’ve told on this podcast, the true art is when you can establish high stakes emotions in a low stakes environment. So if I can tell you how I was feeling and if I can get you to believe that I thought everything was on the line just with some little interaction I was having with the like this person in the grocery store line and how I didn’t want them to win because fuck them and they can’t cut they cut in front of me, but I’m not going to I’m not going to cut in front of them, but I need them to know that it wasn’t okay, but I don’t know how to do it without being an asshole myself. And if I can establish the stakes that this matters to me, I can get you to care about the outcome of it, but it can be in a low stakes situation. Now you’re really cooking with gas if you can do something like that. Because otherwise you’re limited to just life or death stories.
Shaan Parr: The best example you have done of that, you’re very good at this, is um I I distinctly remember the story of you doing a shirtless workout on your driveway and your HOA being like, “No, we we can’t have this.” And you’re like, “We’re going to petty court. We’re going to HOA.” Like I just that was a beautiful story. I should let this go. Oh, I can fight to the death as a matter of principle here because, you know, what are you trying to say? And what does this mean, right? And if it means something to me that I can make it mean something to you. So that sort of thing. So Larry David’s great at this too. Like whenever I watch that show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, like they’re making a story out of something so silly and small. Uh you know, like And it’s it’s 10 times more likable when it’s something relatable or small, but it still carries the emotional impact. And if you could do that, you have an infinite supply of stories. He notices that people don’t talk people don’t talk to someone if they’re wearing a maga hat, and so he starts wearing a maga hat all the time. He’s like, “I don’t want anyone to talk to me. I’m just going to wear this hat.” Yeah. Uh that that’s a a really good example of a high stakes uh high stakes and a low stakes environment. where like it doesn’t really matter, but it’s very funny. Um and then let’s talk about uh really tactical stuff. So short sentences. Um I’m a firm believer in short sentences. And so the I’ll give you I’ll explain why, but Warren Buffett owns, you know, runs Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire owns dozens and dozens of companies. Arguably the most complicated one is Geico. Insurance companies are very, very, very hard to understand. However, I don’t remember if the Hustle did analysis on this or someone else did, but he writes these famous annual shareholder letters every single year. He’s a very good writer. And listen to this. From uh 1974 to 2013, someone analyzed this, and the letters per sorry, the words per sentence dropped from 17 to 13. If you look at like we actually did an analysis on this. Every year, it gets shorter and shorter and shorter. And the reading level dropped from a 10th grade to a fourth grade reading level. So the richer he got and the more complicated his businesses got, the simpler the writing got because he just got better at explaining it in a really easy to understand way. And he’s probably once kind of somewhat the average show to be able to understand this. And so short, simple sentences are key even in complicated environments. And here’s a really good example. So if you go to hey.com, so hey.com is an alternative to Gmail. It’s a it’s a service that makes you pay though, so it’s even they they’ve raised the stakes there, so you have to pay for their email. There’s a letter from the CEO, and that’s one of my favorite uh like tactics by the way on a sales page, is letter from a CEO. And he says, “Hey everyone, I’m Jason, CEO of 37 Signals. Email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn’t. Email’s a treasure.” And he goes on to explain why uh email is awesome and why it should be more special than it is, and it’s the most simple language to explain email, and I love it. And there’s lots of examples of simple language and and simple ways to explain complicated things. And if you’re able to do that, oftentimes, it will have shorter sentences, less words, and it it’s significantly more uh effective than longer stuff.
Sam Parr: Related to that, it doesn’t have to be only one length. So there’s this great graphic that’s gone viral many times. You’ve probably seen it. Great writing has rhythm. So there’s a an example. So I’ll just read this out loud. He goes, “This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. This writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences, and I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I’m certain that the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the symbols, and sounds that say, “Listen to this, this is important.” So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create sound that pleases the reader’s ears. Don’t just write words, write music. I love that thing. It is amazing. And so you want to have short by default, but then, like he says, when the reader is rested and ready, use a long sentence to great effect. And so that’s like a advanced move when it comes to writing. Most people’s problem is everything every sentence is too long. And so you start with short sentences, but then you figure out how to vary it so that your writing sings.
Shaan Parr: Whenever I uh sometimes when I write something that I get really into, I am almost I almost feel like uh I’m like I channel like my inner Eminem or like some rapper or something where I’m like, “What type of rhythm can get people flowing?” Like I need to have a rhythm that gets people to fall down this. And like there’s small tactics, like anytime you want to use a comma, use a period and then start the next sentence with and or but. Um, or there’s other things like put your internal dialogue like um or like or or the reader’s internal dialogue like, “So why would I do this? You’re asking yourself right now.” Right. Or, “Who the hell is this person talking to me through my computer screen, telling me what to do, and why on earth should I trust them?” Like you can do these little things to change the rhythm and grab people’s attention.
Sam Parr: Yeah, 100% agree. Uh that’s a that’s a great way of putting it. I also think that uh you know, this also works for choosing what to write about. So for example, sometimes people will write about shit that they would never talk to you about. We had this problem early on at the Milk Road. So when we did the Milk Road, I was the initial writer, so I created the initial voice. And Milk Road was a a newsletter that we built in the crypto space, and we went from zero subscribers and never have written a daily newsletter before to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and sold it for millions of dollars. That in one year. So that was the the success outcome. So how did we actually do it? And more importantly, how did I train other people to write it instead of me? Because I didn’t want to wake up every morning and stress about sending this email out at 5:00 a.m. to, you know, a couple hundred thousand people. That that was not the idea of a good life for me. So I was like, “Let me see if I can train people to do this.” One of the hacks to training people to do this was I I was like, “God, I feel like they’re writing this both with too much extra fluff and jargon, and secondly, they’re writing about stuff that’s kind of boring. So like the topic is boring.” I’m like, “What’s happening?” I was like, and I told them, I was like, “I feel like you would never just tell me about this. Like if I was just talking to you, if I was your your friend and you were like, “Oh, did you hear what happened today?” Which is what a news what a new what the news is trying to tell you, right? Hey, did you hear what happened today? This crazy thing happened, this interesting thing happened, this big event happened. I was like, “You’re writing about stuff that wouldn’t even make that filter. You wouldn’t even tell me about it.” So why are you doing this? So when I had them do, I was like, “Forget writing a draft and having me be the editor. Instead, I want you to send me a voice memo, no more than 60 seconds in the morning, which is basically, “Oh, did you hear what happened today? Uh, this guy said this thing and people are freaking out because of blah blah blah.” And this announcement was made and people think it’s going to be a big deal and the price is going to go up because that would mean this. And as soon as they started doing that, I was like, “Yep, that sounds perfect. Just write that down.” And it just was such a good filter. And so one way to think about what to write about and how to write it is do this little kind of voice memo test. So can you just if you were just to tell your friend about this, you know, “Hey, I have this idea, blah blah blah” or, “You know, I noticed this thing, I found it really interesting because blah blah blah.” And if you can’t, if it’s not interesting to your friend, guess what? It’s not going to be interesting to a stranger, right? Like you have to be able to to explain it in a way that’s simple and use that as a filter. If you would never talk about it, don’t write about it.
Shaan Parr: Well, and the the tip that I used to give, so at when I sold the Hustle, we had close to 2 million subscribers, I believe. And for new writers, they would they like would kick ass in their audition. And then they would get nervous, like when they’re I’m like, “Yeah, 2 million, a lot of people, I get it.” But here’s the tip. Write to me, write to Sam. Just literally, you are only writing to one human being. It’s just coincidence that many others might read it, but just only write to one one person. Direct it to that one person, and that’s the way to go. Uh and so it makes it a lot easier. Uh let’s go to let’s go to uh write simply. What I found is around you can go as low as fourth grade, but around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade reading level is the way that you want to write. Now, to give you guys perspective, I think usanews.com, USA News, the newspaper, I believe that’s at a fourth-grade reading level. New York Times, which is highly regarded by a lot of people, that’s at a seventh-grade reading level. And I actually went and put Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett writes about insurance companies, a very complicated topic. I went and put his stuff through Hemingway app as well. Same thing, sixth, seventh, eighth-grade reading level, and it teaches you how to write at that level. And there’s tactics on how to do that, like don’t use adverbs, keep sentences short, but Hemingway app is an awesome way to um Check. Yeah, to check, to do it for you.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I think that’s a great one. Um, another one that you wrote in here is about storytelling. And so I think storytelling is now like kind of in the more advanced uh a little more advanced category of how to be a great writer is being able to use use the art of storytelling. Uh do you want to give an example of that uh or how do you want to talk about storytelling here?
Shaan Parr: So, here’s an example of storytelling. So, about 10 years ago, there was this company called Hint, Hint Water. It’s you see it’s like a beverage that you guys see in the stores. It’s called um and the the lady named Cara, she had this great story. She went and gave this talk uh at one of my events, and there was at the very end, there was one question that someone asked her, and I heard that story and of the 60-minute talk, I was like, “Oh, that’s a a hit,” because that just made me feel something. So the headline was, “Getting called sweetie helped this entrepreneur create a multi-million dollar business.” “Sweetie,” the executive said, and I just dropped the phone for a minute. Last week at Pizza and 40s, Cara Golden, the founder of Hint, told me a story that fired me up. The setup goes like this. And it explains the story about how she was drinking 10 Cokes a day. She was on the phone with an executive of Coca-Cola, and she said, “I’m going to create a new version of water that just has a a a little bit of fruit in it and no sugar.” An executive at Coco says, “Listen, sweetie, America’s love sweet. This is never going to work.” By the way, that’s a great example of working backwards from an emotion. Even if you didn’t consciously do it in this case, you you knew that story would hit because it has outrage. It has a WTF or OMG type of reaction of like, “That asshole.” But let me fill you in on the results. So I wrote the blog post not in order to promote Hint. I wrote the blog post because I thought this was just a cool story of a this entrepreneur getting like it was a sexist moment and she was getting hated on, whatever. Hint saw the article. They ended up spending millions of dollars to promote this article, and at the very bottom of the article, and it’s it says something like, “This conversation inspired Golden, now 17 later 17 years later to found Hint, and they do 100 million in sales. Uh, here’s the flavors they have.” This article made them tens of millions of dollars in sales. We used to get so much traffic to this article because they ended up promoting it. I wasn’t selling Hint water. I was just telling a cool story about the founder, and in exchange, it made all these people want to buy this stuff. And if in fact, if you Google Hint Water Sweetie article, you’ll see articles written about this article about how it was a huge success. And this was sort of an accident. I just wrote something cool and they actually were like, “Oh, let’s promote this.” But it worked wonderfully because it was a story that grabbed your attention.
Sam Parr: You want to say a few words on on on how to how to write a great story? I have a couple of tips. You you do it. So a couple of tips on on writing a great story or telling a great story. So go look at the greatest storytellers ever. Uh one of them is uh Aaron Sorkin. He’s known for writing great dialogue. He wrote, you know, the the Social Network movie, he wrote uh what is it, West Wing, he wrote the Newsroom, great writer, famous writer, famous Hollywood writer. He says, “I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.” So what he says is, a story is just two things. Somebody has an intention. Somebody wants something, and there’s an obstacle in their way. By the way, that line, “I worship at blank altar.” At the altar of blank. Yeah, so good. Yeah. That that is going into my bank. To your bank. Uh that’s funny. Uh all right, so uh so intention and obstacle. Intention is some character wants something and then there’s an obstacle in their way. The more they want it, like their daughter was just taken hostage, huge huge intention, obstacle, they don’t know by who or where they are and all they have to go on is this one five-second call that they were on or whatever, right? Like obstacle, they they have no way to find them and they’re just a dad. How are they going to ever, you know, get their daughter back? And so intention and obstacle is the core element of any good story. So somebody wants something. In the in the case that you just said, not only does Cara want to make her business successful, she wants to be taken seriously as a female entrepreneur. Obstacle, Coke executive, men men are pigs, nobody believes in her, right? That’s a core that’s a core of a story. And so any story, if you can’t, they always say like in a movie, you should be able to pause at any moment of any story and say, “What does that character want and what’s in their way?” And if you can’t pause and name that right now, you have failed as a storyteller because the audience you you think they’re you’re going to tell them later what they they want. No, no, you’ve lost their attention. The the initial stakes, and if you watch any movie, they establish this, right? And even like silly rom-coms, it’ll be uh she wakes up, she’s got her assistant and chauffeur driving her to work. She’s clearly high-powered, but her but she’s alone and she’s doesn’t have a relationship, right? Like that’ll be it’ll be obvious to her. She’ll see somebody out the window while she’s driving to work in her chauffeur limousine and it’s this girl in love with her boyfriend and she looks at it kind of longingly and then she just goes back to her her, you know, palm pilot or whatever before back to work. And so you know what the character wants and you know what’s in her way. She’s she doesn’t have somebody because she has to find the right guy and she’s so busy with work. And so everything is always this intention and obstacle. The second thing is you have to establish like how do you make a story better or worse? Stakes is the next thing. So what is that stake? Uh what do you have to lose if this doesn’t go well? And stakes doesn’t have like stakes initially, the beginner version of stakes is life or death. But the true art, and some if you like some of the stories that I’ve told on this podcast, the true art is when you can establish high stakes emotions in a low stakes environment. So if I can tell you how I was feeling and if I can get you to believe that I thought everything was on the line just with some little interaction I was having with the like this person in the grocery store line and how I didn’t want them to win because fuck them and they can’t cut they cut in front of me, but I’m not going to I’m not going to cut in front of them, but I need them to know that it wasn’t okay, but I don’t know how to do it without being an asshole myself. And if I can establish the stakes that this matters to me, I can get you to care about the outcome of it, but it can be in a low stakes situation. Now you’re really cooking with gas if you can do something like that. Because otherwise you’re limited to just life or death stories.
Shaan Parr: The best example you have done of that, you’re very good at this, is um I I distinctly remember the story of you doing a shirtless workout on your driveway and your HOA being like, “No, we we can’t have this.” And you’re like, “We’re going to petty court. We’re going to HOA.” Like I just that was a beautiful story. I should let this go. Oh, I can fight to the death as a matter of principle here because, you know, what are you trying to say? And what does this mean, right? And if it means something to me that I can make it mean something to you. So that sort of thing. So Larry David’s great at this too. Like whenever I watch that show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, like they’re making a story out of something so silly and small. Uh you know, like And it’s it’s 10 times more likable when it’s something relatable or small, but it still carries the emotional impact. And if you could do that, you have an infinite supply of stories. He notices that people don’t talk people don’t talk to someone if they’re wearing a maga hat, and so he starts wearing a maga hat all the time. He’s like, “I don’t want anyone to talk to me. I’m just going to wear this hat.” Yeah. Uh that that’s a a really good example of a high stakes uh high stakes and a low stakes environment. where like it doesn’t really matter, but it’s very funny. Um and then let’s talk about uh really tactical stuff. So short sentences. Um I’m a firm believer in short sentences. And so the I’ll give you I’ll explain why, but Warren Buffett owns, you know, runs Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire owns dozens and dozens of companies. Arguably the most complicated one is Geico. Insurance companies are very, very, very hard to understand. However, I don’t remember if the Hustle did analysis on this or someone else did, but he writes these famous annual shareholder letters every single year. He’s a very good writer. And listen to this. From uh 1974 to 2013, someone analyzed this, and the letters per sorry, the words per sentence dropped from 17 to 13. If you look at like we actually did an analysis on this. Every year, it gets shorter and shorter and shorter. And the reading level dropped from a 10th grade to a fourth grade reading level. So the richer he got and the more complicated his businesses got, the simpler the writing got because he just got better at explaining it in a really easy to understand way. And he’s probably once kind of somewhat the average show to be able to understand this. And so short, simple sentences are key even in complicated environments. And here’s a really good example. So if you go to hey.com, so hey.com is an alternative to Gmail. It’s a it’s a service that makes you pay though, so it’s even they they’ve raised the stakes there, so you have to pay for their email. There’s a letter from the CEO, and that’s one of my favorite uh like tactics by the way on a sales page, is letter from a CEO. And he says, “Hey everyone, I’m Jason, CEO of 37 Signals. Email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn’t. Email’s a treasure.” And he goes on to explain why uh email is awesome and why it should be more special than it is, and it’s the most simple language to explain email, and I love it. And there’s lots of examples of simple language and and simple ways to explain complicated things. And if you’re able to do that, oftentimes, it will have shorter sentences, less words, and it it’s significantly more uh effective than longer stuff.
Sam Parr: Related to that, it doesn’t have to be only one length. So there’s this great graphic that’s gone viral many times. You’ve probably seen it. Great writing has rhythm. So there’s a an example. So I’ll just read this out loud. He goes, “This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. This writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences, and I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I’m certain that the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the symbols, and sounds that say, “Listen to this, this is important.” So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create sound that pleases the reader’s ears. Don’t just write words, write music. I love that thing. It is amazing. And so you want to have short by default, but then, like he says, when the reader is rested and ready, use a long sentence to great effect. And so that’s like a advanced move when it comes to writing. Most people’s problem is everything every sentence is too long. And so you start with short sentences, but then you figure out how to vary it so that your writing sings.
Shaan Parr: Whenever I uh sometimes when I write something that I get really into, I am almost I almost feel like uh I’m like I channel like my inner Eminem or like some rapper or something where I’m like, “What type of rhythm can get people flowing?” Like I need to have a rhythm that gets people to fall down this. And like there’s small tactics, like anytime you want to use a comma, use a period and then start the next sentence with and or but. Um, or there’s other things like put your internal dialogue like um or like or or the reader’s internal dialogue like, “So why would I do this? You’re asking yourself right now.” Right. Or, “Who the hell is this person talking to me through my computer screen, telling me what to do, and why on earth should I trust them?” Like you can do these little things to change the rhythm and grab people’s attention.
Sam Parr: Yeah, 100% agree. Uh that’s a that’s a great way of putting it. I also think that uh you know, this also works for choosing what to write about. So for example, sometimes people will write about shit that they would never talk to you about. We had this problem early on at the Milk Road. So when we did the Milk Road, I was the initial writer, so I created the initial voice. And Milk Road was a a newsletter that we built in the crypto space, and we went from zero subscribers and never have written a daily newsletter before to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and sold it for millions of dollars. That in one year. So that was the the success outcome. So how did we actually do it? And more importantly, how did I train other people to write it instead of me? Because I didn’t want to wake up every morning and stress about sending this email out at 5:00 a.m. to, you know, a couple hundred thousand people. That that was not the idea of a good life for me. So I was like, “Let me see if I can train people to do this.” One of the hacks to training people to do this was I I was like, “God, I feel like they’re writing this both with too much extra fluff and jargon, and secondly, they’re writing about stuff that’s kind of boring. So like the topic is boring.” I’m like, “What’s happening?” I was like, and I told them, I was like, “I feel like you would never just tell me about this. Like if I was just talking to you, if I was your your friend and you were like, “Oh, did you hear what happened today?” Which is what a news what a new what the news is trying to tell you, right? Hey, did you hear what happened today? This crazy thing happened, this interesting thing happened, this big event happened. I was like, “You’re writing about stuff that wouldn’t even make that filter. You wouldn’t even tell me about it.” So why are you doing this? So when I had them do, I was like, “Forget writing a draft and having me be the editor. Instead, I want you to send me a voice memo, no more than 60 seconds in the morning, which is basically, “Oh, did you hear what happened today? Uh, this guy said this thing and people are freaking out because of blah blah blah.” And this announcement was made and people think it’s going to be a big deal and the price is going to go up because that would mean this. And as soon as they started doing that, I was like, “Yep, that sounds perfect. Just write that down.” And it just was such a good filter. And so one way to think about what to write about and how to write it is do this little kind of voice memo test. So can you just if you were just to tell your friend about this, you know, “Hey, I have this idea, blah blah blah” or, “You know, I noticed this thing, I found it really interesting because blah blah blah.” And if you can’t, if it’s not interesting to your friend, guess what? It’s not going to be interesting to a stranger, right? Like you have to be able to to explain it in a way that’s simple and use that as a filter. If you would never talk about it, don’t write about it.
Shaan Parr: Well, and the the tip that I used to give, so at when I sold the Hustle, we had close to 2 million subscribers, I believe. And for new writers, they would they like would kick ass in their audition. And then they would get nervous, like when they’re I’m like, “Yeah, 2 million, a lot of people, I get it.” But here’s the tip. Write to me, write to Sam. Just literally, you are only writing to one human being. It’s just coincidence that many others might read it, but just only write to one one person. Direct it to that one person, and that’s the way to go. Uh and so it makes it a lot easier. Uh let’s go to let’s go to uh write simply. What I found is around you can go as low as fourth grade, but around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade reading level is the way that you want to write. Now, to give you guys perspective, I think usanews.com, USA News, the newspaper, I believe that’s at a fourth-grade reading level. New York Times, which is highly regarded by a lot of people, that’s at a seventh-grade reading level. And I actually went and put Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett writes about insurance companies, a very complicated topic. I went and put his stuff through Hemingway app as well. Same thing, sixth, seventh, eighth-grade reading level, and it teaches you how to write at that level. And there’s tactics on how to do that, like don’t use adverbs, keep sentences short, but Hemingway app is an awesome way to um Check. Yeah, to check, to do it for you.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I think that’s a great one. Um, another one that you wrote in here is about storytelling. And so I think storytelling is now like kind of in the more advanced uh a little more advanced category of how to be a great writer is being able to use use the art of storytelling. Uh do you want to give an example of that uh or how do you want to talk about storytelling here?
Shaan Parr: So, here’s an example of storytelling. So, about 10 years ago, there was this company called Hint, Hint Water. It’s you see it’s like a beverage that you guys see in the stores. It’s called um and the the lady named Cara, she had this great story. She went and gave this talk uh at one of my events, and there was at the very end, there was one question that someone asked her, and I heard that story and of the 60-minute talk, I was like, “Oh, that’s a a hit,” because that just made me feel something. So the headline was, “Getting called sweetie helped this entrepreneur create a multi-million dollar business.” “Sweetie,” the executive said, and I just dropped the phone for a minute. Last week at Pizza and 40s, Cara Golden, the founder of Hint, told me a story that fired me up. The setup goes like this. And it explains the story about how she was drinking 10 Cokes a day. She was on the phone with an executive of Coca-Cola, and she said, “I’m going to create a new version of water that just has a a a little bit of fruit in it and no sugar.” An executive at Coco says, “Listen, sweetie, America’s love sweet. This is never going to work.” By the way, that’s a great example of working backwards from an emotion. Even if you didn’t consciously do it in this case, you you knew that story would hit because it has outrage. It has a WTF or OMG type of reaction of like, “That asshole.” But let me fill you in on the results. So I wrote the blog post not in order to promote Hint. I wrote the blog post because I thought this was just a cool story of a this entrepreneur getting like it was a sexist moment and she was getting hated on, whatever. Hint saw the article. They ended up spending millions of dollars to promote this article, and at the very bottom of the article, and it’s it says something like, “This conversation inspired Golden, now 17 later 17 years later to found Hint, and they do 100 million in sales. Uh, here’s the flavors they have.” This article made them tens of millions of dollars in sales. We used to get so much traffic to this article because they ended up promoting it. I wasn’t selling Hint water. I was just telling a cool story about the founder, and in exchange, it made all these people want to buy this stuff. And if in fact, if you Google Hint Water Sweetie article, you’ll see articles written about this article about how it was a huge success. And this was sort of an accident. I just wrote something cool and they actually were like, “Oh, let’s promote this.” But it worked wonderfully because it was a story that grabbed your attention.
Sam Parr: You want to say a few words on on on how to how to write a great story? I have a couple of tips. You you do it. So a couple of tips on on writing a great story or telling a great story. So go look at the greatest storytellers ever. Uh one of them is uh Aaron Sorkin. He’s known for writing great dialogue. He wrote, you know, the the Social Network movie, he wrote uh what is it, West Wing, he wrote the Newsroom, great writer, famous writer, famous Hollywood writer. He says, “I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.” So what he says is, a story is just two things. Somebody has an intention. Somebody wants something, and there’s an obstacle in their way. By the way, that line, “I worship at blank altar.” At the altar of blank. Yeah, so good. Yeah. That that is going into my bank. To your bank. Uh that’s funny. Uh all right, so uh so intention and obstacle. Intention is some character wants something and then there’s an obstacle in their way. The more they want it, like their daughter was just taken hostage, huge huge intention, obstacle, they don’t know by who or where they are and all they have to go on is this one five-second call that they were on or whatever, right? Like obstacle, they they have no way to find them and they’re just a dad. How are they going to ever, you know, get their daughter back? And so intention and obstacle is the core element of any good story. So somebody wants something. In the in the case that you just said, not only does Cara want to make her business successful, she wants to be taken seriously as a female entrepreneur. Obstacle, Coke executive, men men are pigs, nobody believes in her, right? That’s a core that’s a core of a story. And so any story, if you can’t, they always say like in a movie, you should be able to pause at any moment of any story and say, “What does that character want and what’s in their way?” And if you can’t pause and name that right now, you have failed as a storyteller because the audience you you think they’re you’re going to tell them later what they they want. No, no, you’ve lost their attention. The the initial stakes, and if you watch any movie, they establish this, right? And even like silly rom-coms, it’ll be uh she wakes up, she’s got her assistant and chauffeur driving her to work. She’s clearly high-powered, but her but she’s alone and she’s doesn’t have a relationship, right? Like that’ll be it’ll be obvious to her. She’ll see somebody out the window while she’s driving to work in her chauffeur limousine and it’s this girl in love with her boyfriend and she looks at it kind of longingly and then she just goes back to her her, you know, palm pilot or whatever before back to work. And so you know what the character wants and you know what’s in her way. She’s she doesn’t have somebody because she has to find the right guy and she’s so busy with work. And so everything is always this intention and obstacle. The second thing is you have to establish like how do you make a story better or worse? Stakes is the next thing. So what is that stake? Uh what do you have to lose if this doesn’t go well? And stakes doesn’t have like stakes initially, the beginner version of stakes is life or death. But the true art, and some if you like some of the stories that I’ve told on this podcast, the true art is when you can establish high stakes emotions in a low stakes environment. So if I can tell you how I was feeling and if I can get you to believe that I thought everything was on the line just with some little interaction I was having with the like this person in the grocery store line and how I didn’t want them to win because fuck them and they can’t cut they cut in front of me, but I’m not going to I’m not going to cut in front of them, but I need them to know that it wasn’t okay, but I don’t know how to do it without being an asshole myself. And if I can establish the stakes that this matters to me, I can get you to care about the outcome of it, but it can be in a low stakes situation. Now you’re really cooking with gas if you can do something like that. Because otherwise you’re limited to just life or death stories.
Shaan Parr: The best example you have done of that, you’re very good at this, is um I I distinctly remember the story of you doing a shirtless workout on your driveway and your HOA being like, “No, we we can’t have this.” And you’re like, “We’re going to petty court. We’re going to HOA.” Like I just that was a beautiful story. I should let this go. Oh, I can fight to the death as a matter of principle here because, you know, what are you trying to say? And what does this mean, right? And if it means something to me that I can make it mean something to you. So that sort of thing. So Larry David’s great at this too. Like whenever I watch that show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, like they’re making a story out of something so silly and small. Uh you know, like And it’s it’s 10 times more likable when it’s something relatable or small, but it still carries the emotional impact. And if you could do that, you have an infinite supply of stories. He notices that people don’t talk people don’t talk to someone if they’re wearing a maga hat, and so he starts wearing a maga hat all the time. He’s like, “I don’t want anyone to talk to me. I’m just going to wear this hat.” Yeah. Uh that that’s a a really good example of a high stakes uh high stakes and a low stakes environment. where like it doesn’t really matter, but it’s very funny. Um and then let’s talk about uh really tactical stuff. So short sentences. Um I’m a firm believer in short sentences. And so the I’ll give you I’ll explain why, but Warren Buffett owns, you know, runs Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire owns dozens and dozens of companies. Arguably the most complicated one is Geico. Insurance companies are very, very, very hard to understand. However, I don’t remember if the Hustle did analysis on this or someone else did, but he writes these famous annual shareholder letters every single year. He’s a very good writer. And listen to this. From uh 1974 to 2013, someone analyzed this, and the letters per sorry, the words per sentence dropped from 17 to 13. If you look at like we actually did an analysis on this. Every year, it gets shorter and shorter and shorter. And the reading level dropped from a 10th grade to a fourth grade reading level. So the richer he got and the more complicated his businesses got, the simpler the writing got because he just got better at explaining it in a really easy to understand way. And he’s probably once kind of somewhat the average show to be able to understand this. And so short, simple sentences are key even in complicated environments. And here’s a really good example. So if you go to hey.com, so hey.com is an alternative to Gmail. It’s a it’s a service that makes you pay though, so it’s even they they’ve raised the stakes there, so you have to pay for their email. There’s a letter from the CEO, and that’s one of my favorite uh like tactics by the way on a sales page, is letter from a CEO. And he says, “Hey everyone, I’m Jason, CEO of 37 Signals. Email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn’t. Email’s a treasure.” And he goes on to explain why uh email is awesome and why it should be more special than it is, and it’s the most simple language to explain email, and I love it. And there’s lots of examples of simple language and and simple ways to explain complicated things. And if you’re able to do that, oftentimes, it will have shorter sentences, less words, and it it’s significantly more uh effective than longer stuff.
Sam Parr: Related to that, it doesn’t have to be only one length. So there’s this great graphic that’s gone viral many times. You’ve probably seen it. Great writing has rhythm. So there’s a an example. So I’ll just read this out loud. He goes, “This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. This writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences, and I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I’m certain that the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the symbols, and sounds that say, “Listen to this, this is important.” So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create sound that pleases the reader’s ears. Don’t just write words, write music. I love that thing. It is amazing. And so you want to have short by default, but then, like he says, when the reader is rested and ready, use a long sentence to great effect. And so that’s like a advanced move when it comes to writing. Most people’s problem is everything every sentence is too long. And so you start with short sentences, but then you figure out how to vary it so that your writing sings.
Shaan Parr: Whenever I uh sometimes when I write something that I get really into, I am almost I almost feel like uh I’m like I channel like my inner Eminem or like some rapper or something where I’m like, “What type of rhythm can get people flowing?” Like I need to have a rhythm that gets people to fall down this. And like there’s small tactics, like anytime you want to use a comma, use a period and then start the next sentence with and or but. Um, or there’s other things like put your internal dialogue like um or like or or the reader’s internal dialogue like, “So why would I do this? You’re asking yourself right now.” Right. Or, “Who the hell is this person talking to me through my computer screen, telling me what to do, and why on earth should I trust them?” Like you can do these little things to change the rhythm and grab people’s attention.
Sam Parr: Yeah, 100% agree. Uh that’s a that’s a great way of putting it. I also think that uh you know, this also works for choosing what to write about. So for example, sometimes people will write about shit that they would never talk to you about. We had this problem early on at the Milk Road. So when we did the Milk Road, I was the initial writer, so I created the initial voice. And Milk Road was a a newsletter that we built in the crypto space, and we went from zero subscribers and never have written a daily newsletter before to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and sold it for millions of dollars. That in one year. So that was the the success outcome. So how did we actually do it? And more importantly, how did I train other people to write it instead of me? Because I didn’t want to wake up every morning and stress about sending this email out at 5:00 a.m. to, you know, a couple hundred thousand people. That that was not the idea of a good life for me. So I was like, “Let me see if I can train people to do this.” One of the hacks to training people to do this was I I was like, “God, I feel like they’re writing this both with too much extra fluff and jargon, and secondly, they’re writing about stuff that’s kind of boring. So like the topic is boring.” I’m like, “What’s happening?” I was like, and I told them, I was like, “I feel like you would never just tell me about this. Like if I was just talking to you, if I was your your friend and you were like, “Oh, did you hear what happened today?” Which is what a news what a new what the news is trying to tell you, right? Hey, did you hear what happened today? This crazy thing happened, this interesting thing happened, this big event happened. I was like, “You’re writing about stuff that wouldn’t even make that filter. You wouldn’t even tell me about it.” So why are you doing this? So when I had them do, I was like, “Forget writing a draft and having me be the editor. Instead, I want you to send me a voice memo, no more than 60 seconds in the morning, which is basically, “Oh, did you hear what happened today? Uh, this guy said this thing and people are freaking out because of blah blah blah.” And this announcement was made and people think it’s going to be a big deal and the price is going to go up because that would mean this. And as soon as they started doing that, I was like, “Yep, that sounds perfect. Just write that down.” And it just was such a good filter. And so one way to think about what to write about and how to write it is do this little kind of voice memo test. So can you just if you were just to tell your friend about this, you know, “Hey, I have this idea, blah blah blah” or, “You know, I noticed this thing, I found it really interesting because blah blah blah.” And if you can’t, if it’s not interesting to your friend, guess what? It’s not going to be interesting to a stranger, right? Like you have to be able to to explain it in a way that’s simple and use that as a filter. If you would never talk about it, don’t write about it.
Shaan Parr: Well, and the the tip that I used to give, so at when I sold the Hustle, we had close to 2 million subscribers, I believe. And for new writers, they would they like would kick ass in their audition. And then they would get nervous, like when they’re I’m like, “Yeah, 2 million, a lot of people, I get it.” But here’s the tip. Write to me, write to Sam. Just literally, you are only writing to one human being. It’s just coincidence that many others might read it, but just only write to one one person. Direct it to that one person, and that’s the way to go. Uh and so it makes it a lot easier. Uh let’s go to let’s go to uh write simply. What I found is around you can go as low as fourth grade, but around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade reading level is the way that you want to write. Now, to give you guys perspective, I think usanews.com, USA News, the newspaper, I believe that’s at a fourth-grade reading level. New York Times, which is highly regarded by a lot of people, that’s at a seventh-grade reading level. And I actually went and put Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett writes about insurance companies, a very complicated topic. I went and put his stuff through Hemingway app as well. Same thing, sixth, seventh, eighth-grade reading level, and it teaches you how to write at that level. And there’s tactics on how to do that, like don’t use adverbs, keep sentences short, but Hemingway app is an awesome way to um Check. Yeah, to check, to do it for you.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I think that’s a great one. Um, another one that you wrote in here is about storytelling. And so I think storytelling is now like kind of in the more advanced uh a little more advanced category of how to be a great writer is being able to use use the art of storytelling. Uh do you want to give an example of that uh or how do you want to talk about storytelling here?
Shaan Parr: So, here’s an example of storytelling. So, about 10 years ago, there was this company called Hint, Hint Water. It’s you see it’s like a beverage that you guys see in the stores. It’s called um and the the lady named Cara, she had this great story. She went and gave this talk uh at one of my events, and there was at the very end, there was one question that someone asked her, and I heard that story and of the 60-minute talk, I was like, “Oh, that’s a a hit,” because that just made me feel something. So the headline was, “Getting called sweetie helped this entrepreneur create a multi-million dollar business.” “Sweetie,” the executive said, and I just dropped the phone for a minute. Last week at Pizza and 40s, Cara Golden, the founder of Hint, told me a story that fired me up. The setup goes like this. And it explains the story about how she was drinking 10 Cokes a day. She was on the phone with an executive of Coca-Cola, and she said, “I’m going to create a new version of water that just has a a a little bit of fruit in it and no sugar.” An executive at Coco says, “Listen, sweetie, America’s love sweet. This is never going to work.” By the way, that’s a great example of working backwards from an emotion. Even if you didn’t consciously do it in this case, you you knew that story would hit because it has outrage. It has a WTF or OMG type of reaction of like, “That asshole.” But let me fill you in on the results. So I wrote the blog post not in order to promote Hint. I wrote the blog post because I thought this was just a cool story of a this entrepreneur getting like it was a sexist moment and she was getting hated on, whatever. Hint saw the article. They ended up spending millions of dollars to promote this article, and at the very bottom of the article, and it’s it says something like, “This conversation inspired Golden, now 17 later 17 years later to found Hint, and they do 100 million in sales. Uh, here’s the flavors they have.” This article made them tens of millions of dollars in sales. We used to get so much traffic to this article because they ended up promoting it. I wasn’t selling Hint water. I was just telling a cool story about the founder, and in exchange, it made all these people want to buy this stuff. And if in fact, if you Google Hint Water Sweetie article, you’ll see articles written about this article about how it was a huge success. And this was sort of an accident. I just wrote something cool and they actually were like, “Oh, let’s promote this.” But it worked wonderfully because it was a story that grabbed your attention.
Sam Parr: You want to say a few words on on on how to how to write a great story? I have a couple of tips. You you do it. So a couple of tips on on writing a great story or telling a great story. So go look at the greatest storytellers ever. Uh one of them is uh Aaron Sorkin. He’s known for writing great dialogue. He wrote, you know, the the Social Network movie, he wrote uh what is it, West Wing, he wrote the Newsroom, great writer, famous writer, famous Hollywood writer. He says, “I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.” So what he says is, a story is just two things. Somebody has an intention. Somebody wants something, and there’s an obstacle in their way. By the way, that line, “I worship at blank altar.” At the altar of blank. Yeah, so good. Yeah. That that is going into my bank. To your bank. Uh that’s funny. Uh all right, so uh so intention and obstacle. Intention is some character wants something and then there’s an obstacle in their way. The more they want it, like their daughter was just taken hostage, huge huge intention, obstacle, they don’t know by who or where they are and all they have to go on is this one five-second call that they were on or whatever, right? Like obstacle, they they have no way to find them and they’re just a dad. How are they going to ever, you know, get their daughter back? And so intention and obstacle is the core element of any good story. So somebody wants something. In the in the case that you just said, not only does Cara want to make her business successful, she wants to be taken seriously as a female entrepreneur. Obstacle, Coke executive, men men are pigs, nobody believes in her, right? That’s a core that’s a core of a story. And so any story, if you can’t, they always say like in a movie, you should be able to pause at any moment of any story and say, “What does that character want and what’s in their way?” And if you can’t pause and name that right now, you have failed as a storyteller because the audience you you think they’re you’re going to tell them later what they they want. No, no, you’ve lost their attention. The the initial stakes, and if you watch any movie, they establish this, right? And even like silly rom-coms, it’ll be uh she wakes up, she’s got her assistant and chauffeur driving her to work. She’s clearly high-powered, but her but she’s alone and she’s doesn’t have a relationship, right? Like that’ll be it’ll be obvious to her. She’ll see somebody out the window while she’s driving to work in her chauffeur limousine and it’s this girl in love with her boyfriend and she looks at it kind of longingly and then she just goes back to her her, you know, palm pilot or whatever before back to work. And so you know what the character wants and you know what’s in her way. She’s she doesn’t have somebody because she has to find the right guy and she’s so busy with work. And so everything is always this intention and obstacle. The second thing is you have to establish like how do you make a story better or worse? Stakes is the next thing. So what is that stake? Uh what do you have to lose if this doesn’t go well? And stakes doesn’t have like stakes initially, the beginner version of stakes is life or death. But the true art, and some if you like some of the stories that I’ve told on this podcast, the true art is when you can establish high stakes emotions in a low stakes environment. So if I can tell you how I was feeling and if I can get you to believe that I thought everything was on the line just with some little interaction I was having with the like this person in the grocery store line and how I didn’t want them to win because fuck them and they can’t cut they cut in front of me, but I’m not going to I’m not going to cut in front of them, but I need them to know that it wasn’t okay, but I don’t know how to do it without being an asshole myself. And if I can establish the stakes that this matters to me, I can get you to care about the outcome of it, but it can be in a low stakes situation. Now you’re really cooking with gas if you can do something like that. Because otherwise you’re limited to just life or death stories.
Shaan Parr: The best example you have done of that, you’re very good at this, is um I I distinctly remember the story of you doing a shirtless workout on your driveway and your HOA being like, “No, we we can’t have this.” And you’re like, “We’re going to petty court. We’re going to HOA.” Like I just that was a beautiful story. I should let this go. Oh, I can fight to the death as a matter of principle here because, you know, what are you trying to say? And what does this mean, right? And if it means something to me that I can make it mean something to you. So that sort of thing. So Larry David’s great at this too. Like whenever I watch that show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, like they’re making a story out of something so silly and small. Uh you know, like And it’s it’s 10 times more likable when it’s something relatable or small, but it still carries the emotional impact. And if you could do that, you have an infinite supply of stories. He notices that people don’t talk people don’t talk to someone if they’re wearing a maga hat, and so he starts wearing a maga hat all the time. He’s like, “I don’t want anyone to talk to me. I’m just going to wear this hat.” Yeah. Uh that that’s a a really good example of a high stakes uh high stakes and a low stakes environment. where like it doesn’t really matter, but it’s very funny. Um and then let’s talk about uh really tactical stuff. So short sentences. Um I’m a firm believer in short sentences. And so the I’ll give you I’ll explain why, but Warren Buffett owns, you know, runs Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire owns dozens and dozens of companies. Arguably the most complicated one is Geico. Insurance companies are very, very, very hard to understand. However, I don’t remember if the Hustle did analysis on this or someone else did, but he writes these famous annual shareholder letters every single year. He’s a very good writer. And listen to this. From uh 1974 to 2013, someone analyzed this, and the letters per sorry, the words per sentence dropped from 17 to 13. If you look at like we actually did an analysis on this. Every year, it gets shorter and shorter and shorter. And the reading level dropped from a 10th grade to a fourth grade reading level. So the richer he got and the more complicated his businesses got, the simpler the writing got because he just got better at explaining it in a really easy to understand way. And he’s probably once kind of somewhat the average show to be able to understand this. And so short, simple sentences are key even in complicated environments. And here’s a really good example. So if you go to hey.com, so hey.com is an alternative to Gmail. It’s a it’s a service that makes you pay though, so it’s even they they’ve raised the stakes there, so you have to pay for their email. There’s a letter from the CEO, and that’s one of my favorite uh like tactics by the way on a sales page, is letter from a CEO. And he says, “Hey everyone, I’m Jason, CEO of 37 Signals. Email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn’t. Email’s a treasure.” And he goes on to explain why uh email is awesome and why it should be more special than it is, and it’s the most simple language to explain email, and I love it. And there’s lots of examples of simple language and and simple ways to explain complicated things. And if you’re able to do that, oftentimes, it will have shorter sentences, less words, and it it’s significantly more uh effective than longer stuff.
Sam Parr: Related to that, it doesn’t have to be only one length. So there’s this great graphic that’s gone viral many times. You’ve probably seen it. Great writing has rhythm. So there’s a an example. So I’ll just read this out loud. He goes, “This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. This writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences, and I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I’m certain that the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the symbols, and sounds that say, “Listen to this, this is important.” So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create sound that pleases the reader’s ears. Don’t just write words, write music. I love that thing. It is amazing. And so you want to have short by default, but then, like he says, when the reader is rested and ready, use a long sentence to great effect. And so that’s like a advanced move when it comes to writing. Most people’s problem is everything every sentence is too long. And so you start with short sentences, but then you figure out how to vary it so that your writing sings.
Shaan Parr: Whenever I uh sometimes when I write something that I get really into, I am almost I almost feel like uh I’m like I channel like my inner Eminem or like some rapper or something where I’m like, “What type of rhythm can get people flowing?” Like I need to have a rhythm that gets people to fall down this. And like there’s small tactics, like anytime you want to use a comma, use a period and then start the next sentence with and or but. Um, or there’s other things like put your internal dialogue like um or like or or the reader’s internal dialogue like, “So why would I do this? You’re asking yourself right now.” Right. Or, “Who the hell is this person talking to me through my computer screen, telling me what to do, and why on earth should I trust them?” Like you can do these little things to change the rhythm and grab people’s attention.
Sam Parr: Yeah, 100% agree. Uh that’s a that’s a great way of putting it. I also think that uh you know, this also works for choosing what to write about. So for example, sometimes people will write about shit that they would never talk to you about. We had this problem early on at the Milk Road. So when we did the Milk Road, I was the initial writer, so I created the initial voice. And Milk Road was a a newsletter that we built in the crypto space, and we went from zero subscribers and never have written a daily newsletter before to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and sold it for millions of dollars. That in one year. So that was the the success outcome. So how did we actually do it? And more importantly, how did I train other people to write it instead of me? Because I didn’t want to wake up every morning and stress about sending this email out at 5:00 a.m. to, you know, a couple hundred thousand people. That that was not the idea of a good life for me. So I was like, “Let me see if I can train people to do this.” One of the hacks to training people to do this was I I was like, “God, I feel like they’re writing this both with too much extra fluff and jargon, and secondly, they’re writing about stuff that’s kind of boring. So like the topic is boring.” I’m like, “What’s happening?” I was like, and I told them, I was like, “I feel like you would never just tell me about this. Like if I was just talking to you, if I was your your friend and you were like, “Oh, did you hear what happened today?” Which is what a news what a new what the news is trying to tell you, right? Hey, did you hear what happened today? This crazy thing happened, this interesting thing happened, this big event happened. I was like, “You’re writing about stuff that wouldn’t even make that filter. You wouldn’t even tell me about it.” So why are you doing this? So when I had them do, I was like, “Forget writing a draft and having me be the editor. Instead, I want you to send me a voice memo, no more than 60 seconds in the morning, which is basically, “Oh, did you hear what happened today? Uh, this guy said this thing and people are freaking out because of blah blah blah.” And this announcement was made and people think it’s going to be a big deal and the price is going to go up because that would mean this. And as soon as they started doing that, I was like, “Yep, that sounds perfect. Just write that down.” And it just was such a good filter. And so one way to think about what to write about and how to write it is do this little kind of voice memo test. So can you just if you were just to tell your friend about this, you know, “Hey, I have this idea, blah blah blah” or, “You know, I noticed this thing, I found it really interesting because blah blah blah.” And if you can’t, if it’s not interesting to your friend, guess what? It’s not going to be interesting to a stranger, right? Like you have to be able to to explain it in a way that’s simple and use that as a filter. If you would never talk about it, don’t write about it.
Shaan Parr: Well, and the the tip that I used to give, so at when I sold the Hustle, we had close to 2 million subscribers, I believe. And for new writers, they would they like would kick ass in their audition. And then they would get nervous, like when they’re I’m like, “Yeah, 2 million, a lot of people, I get it.” But here’s the tip. Write to me, write to Sam. Just literally, you are only writing to one human being. It’s just coincidence that many others might read it, but just only write to one one person. Direct it to that one person, and that’s the way to go. Uh and so it makes it a lot easier. Uh let’s go to let’s go to uh write simply. What I found is around you can go as low as fourth grade, but around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade reading level is the way that you want to write. Now, to give you guys perspective, I think usanews.com, USA News, the newspaper, I believe that’s at a fourth-grade reading level. New York Times, which is highly regarded by a lot of people, that’s at a seventh-grade reading level. And I actually went and put Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett writes about insurance companies, a very complicated topic. I went and put his stuff through Hemingway app as well. Same thing, sixth, seventh, eighth-grade reading level, and it teaches you how to write at that level. And there’s tactics on how to do that, like don’t use adverbs, keep sentences short, but Hemingway app is an awesome way to um Check. Yeah, to check, to do it for you.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I think that’s a great one. Um, another one that you wrote in here is about storytelling. And so I think storytelling is now like kind of in the more advanced uh a little more advanced category of how to be a great writer is being able to use use the art of storytelling. Uh do you want to give an example of that uh or how do you want to talk about storytelling here?
Shaan Parr: So, here’s an example of storytelling. So, about 10 years ago, there was this company called Hint, Hint Water. It’s you see it’s like a beverage that you guys see in the stores. It’s called um and the the lady named Cara, she had this great story. She went and gave this talk uh at one of my events, and there was at the very end, there was one question that someone asked her, and I heard that story and of the 60-minute talk, I was like, “Oh, that’s a a hit,” because that just made me feel something. So the headline was, “Getting called sweetie helped this entrepreneur create a multi-million dollar business.” “Sweetie,” the executive said, and I just dropped the phone for a minute. Last week at Pizza and 40s, Cara Golden, the founder of Hint, told me a story that fired me up. The setup goes like this. And it explains the story about how she was drinking 10 Cokes a day. She was on the phone with an executive of Coca-Cola, and she said, “I’m going to create a new version of water that just has a a a little bit of fruit in it and no sugar.” An executive at Coco says, “Listen, sweetie, America’s love sweet. This is never going to work.” By the way, that’s a great example of working backwards from an emotion. Even if you didn’t consciously do it in this case, you you knew that story would hit because it has outrage. It has a WTF or OMG type of reaction of like, “That asshole.” But let me fill you in on the results. So I wrote the blog post not in order to promote Hint. I wrote the blog post because I thought this was just a cool story of a this entrepreneur getting like it was a sexist moment and she was getting hated on, whatever. Hint saw the article. They ended up spending millions of dollars to promote this article, and at the very bottom of the article, and it’s it says something like, “This conversation inspired Golden, now 17 later 17 years later to found Hint, and they do 100 million in sales. Uh, here’s the flavors they have.” This article made them tens of millions of dollars in sales. We used to get so much traffic to this article because they ended up promoting it. I wasn’t selling Hint water. I was just telling a cool story about the founder, and in exchange, it made all these people want to buy this stuff. And if in fact, if you Google Hint Water Sweetie article, you’ll see articles written about this article about how it was a huge success. And this was sort of an accident. I just wrote something cool and they actually were like, “Oh, let’s promote this.” But it worked wonderfully because it was a story that grabbed your attention.
Sam Parr: You want to say a few words on on on how to how to write a great story? I have a couple of tips. You you do it. So a couple of tips on on writing a great story or telling a great story. So go look at the greatest storytellers ever. Uh one of them is uh Aaron Sorkin. He’s known for writing great dialogue. He wrote, you know, the the Social Network movie, he wrote uh what is it, West Wing, he wrote the Newsroom, great writer, famous writer, famous Hollywood writer. He says, “I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.” So what he says is, a story is just two things. Somebody has an intention. Somebody wants something, and there’s an obstacle in their way. By the way, that line, “I worship at blank altar.” At the altar of blank. Yeah, so good. Yeah. That that is going into my bank. To your bank. Uh that’s funny. Uh all right, so uh so intention and obstacle. Intention is some character wants something and then there’s an obstacle in their way. The more they want it, like their daughter was just taken hostage, huge huge intention, obstacle, they don’t know by who or where they are and all they have to go on is this one five-second call that they were on or whatever, right? Like obstacle, they they have no way to find them and they’re just a dad. How are they going to ever, you know, get their daughter back? And so intention and obstacle is the core element of any good story. So somebody wants something. In the in the case that you just said, not only does Cara want to make her business successful, she wants to be taken seriously as a female entrepreneur. Obstacle, Coke executive, men men are pigs, nobody believes in her, right? That’s a core that’s a core of a story. And so any story, if you can’t, they always say like in a movie, you should be able to pause at any moment of any story and say, “What does that character want and what’s in their way?” And if you can’t pause and name that right now, you have failed as a storyteller because the audience you you think they’re you’re going to tell them later what they they want. No, no, you’ve lost their attention. The the initial stakes, and if you watch any movie, they establish this, right? And even like silly rom-coms, it’ll be uh she wakes up, she’s got her assistant and chauffeur driving her to work. She’s clearly high-powered, but her but she’s alone and she’s doesn’t have a relationship, right? Like that’ll be it’ll be obvious to her. She’ll see somebody out the window while she’s driving to work in her chauffeur limousine and it’s this girl in love with her boyfriend and she looks at it kind of longingly and then she just goes back to her her, you know, palm pilot or whatever before back to work. And so you know what the character wants and you know what’s in her way. She’s she doesn’t have somebody because she has to find the right guy and she’s so busy with work. And so everything is always this intention and obstacle. The second thing is you have to establish like how do you make a story better or worse? Stakes is the next thing. So what is that stake? Uh what do you have to lose if this doesn’t go well? And stakes doesn’t have like stakes initially, the beginner version of stakes is life or death. But the true art, and some if you like some of the stories that I’ve told on this podcast, the true art is when you can establish high stakes emotions in a low stakes environment. So if I can tell you how I was feeling and if I can get you to believe that I thought everything was on the line just with some little interaction I was having with the like this person in the grocery store line and how I didn’t want them to win because fuck them and they can’t cut they cut in front of me, but I’m not going to I’m not going to cut in front of them, but I need them to know that it wasn’t okay, but I don’t know how to do it without being an asshole myself. And if I can establish the stakes that this matters to me, I can get you to care about the outcome of it, but it can be in a low stakes situation. Now you’re really cooking with gas if you can do something like that. Because otherwise you’re limited to just life or death stories.
Shaan Parr: The best example you have done of that, you’re very good at this, is um I I distinctly remember the story of you doing a shirtless workout on your driveway and your HOA being like, “No, we we can’t have this.” And you’re like, “We’re going to petty court. We’re going to HOA.” Like I just that was a beautiful story. I should let this go. Oh, I can fight to the death as a matter of principle here because, you know, what are you trying to say? And what does this mean, right? And if it means something to me that I can make it mean something to you. So that sort of thing. So Larry David’s great at this too. Like whenever I watch that show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, like they’re making a story out of something so silly and small. Uh you know, like And it’s it’s 10 times more likable when it’s something relatable or small, but it still carries the emotional impact. And if you could do that, you have an infinite supply of stories. He notices that people don’t talk people don’t talk to someone if they’re wearing a maga hat, and so he starts wearing a maga hat all the time. He’s like, “I don’t want anyone to talk to me. I’m just going to wear this hat.” Yeah. Uh that that’s a a really good example of a high stakes uh high stakes and a low stakes environment. where like it doesn’t really matter, but it’s very funny. Um and then let’s talk about uh really tactical stuff. So short sentences. Um I’m a firm believer in short sentences. And so the I’ll give you I’ll explain why, but Warren Buffett owns, you know, runs Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire owns dozens and dozens of companies. Arguably the most complicated one is Geico. Insurance companies are very, very, very hard to understand. However, I don’t remember if the Hustle did analysis on this or someone else did, but he writes these famous annual shareholder letters every single year. He’s a very good writer. And listen to this. From uh 1974 to 2013, someone analyzed this, and the letters per sorry, the words per sentence dropped from 17 to 13. If you look at like we actually did an analysis on this. Every year, it gets shorter and shorter and shorter. And the reading level dropped from a 10th grade to a fourth grade reading level. So the richer he got and the more complicated his businesses got, the simpler the writing got because he just got better at explaining it in a really easy to understand way. And he’s probably once kind of somewhat the average show to be able to understand this. And so short, simple sentences are key even in complicated environments. And here’s a really good example. So if you go to hey.com, so hey.com is an alternative to Gmail. It’s a it’s a service that makes you pay though, so it’s even they they’ve raised the stakes there, so you have to pay for their email. There’s a letter from the CEO, and that’s one of my favorite uh like tactics by the way on a sales page, is letter from a CEO. And he says, “Hey everyone, I’m Jason, CEO of 37 Signals. Email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn’t. Email’s a treasure.” And he goes on to explain why uh email is awesome and why it should be more special than it is, and it’s the most simple language to explain email, and I love it. And there’s lots of examples of simple language and and simple ways to explain complicated things. And if you’re able to do that, oftentimes, it will have shorter sentences, less words, and it it’s significantly more uh effective than longer stuff.
Sam Parr: Related to that, it doesn’t have to be only one length. So there’s this great graphic that’s gone viral many times. You’ve probably seen it. Great writing has rhythm. So there’s a an example. So I’ll just read this out loud. He goes, “This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. This writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences, and I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I’m certain that the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the symbols, and sounds that say, “Listen to this, this is important.” So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create sound that pleases the reader’s ears. Don’t just write words, write music. I love that thing. It is amazing. And so you want to have short by default, but then, like he says, when the reader is rested and ready, use a long sentence to great effect. And so that’s like a advanced move when it comes to writing. Most people’s problem is everything every sentence is too long. And so you start with short sentences, but then you figure out how to vary it so that your writing sings.
Shaan Parr: Whenever I uh sometimes when I write something that I get really into, I am almost I almost feel like uh I’m like I channel like my inner Eminem or like some rapper or something where I’m like, “What type of rhythm can get people flowing?” Like I need to have a rhythm that gets people to fall down this. And like there’s small tactics, like anytime you want to use a comma, use a period and then start the next sentence with and or but. Um, or there’s other things like put your internal dialogue like um or like or or the reader’s internal dialogue like, “So why would I do this? You’re asking yourself right now.” Right. Or, “Who the hell is this person talking to me through my computer screen, telling me what to do, and why on earth should I trust them?” Like you can do these little things to change the rhythm and grab people’s attention.
Sam Parr: Yeah, 100% agree. Uh that’s a that’s a great way of putting it. I also think that uh you know, this also works for choosing what to write about. So for example, sometimes people will write about shit that they would never talk to you about. We had this problem early on at the Milk Road. So when we did the Milk Road, I was the initial writer, so I created the initial voice. And Milk Road was a a newsletter that we built in the crypto space, and we went from zero subscribers and never have written a daily newsletter before to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and sold it for millions of dollars. That in one year. So that was the the success outcome. So how did we actually do it? And more importantly, how did I train other people to write it instead of me? Because I didn’t want to wake up every morning and stress about sending this email out at 5:00 a.m. to, you know, a couple hundred thousand people. That that was not the idea of a good life for me. So I was like, “Let me see if I can train people to do this.” One of the hacks to training people to do this was I I was like, “God, I feel like they’re writing this both with too much extra fluff and jargon, and secondly, they’re writing about stuff that’s kind of boring. So like the topic is boring.” I’m like, “What’s happening?” I was like, and I told them, I was like, “I feel like you would never just tell me about this. Like if I was just talking to you, if I was your your friend and you were like, “Oh, did you hear what happened today?” Which is what a news what a new what the news is trying to tell you, right? Hey, did you hear what happened today? This crazy thing happened, this interesting thing happened, this big event happened. I was like, “You’re writing about stuff that wouldn’t even make that filter. You wouldn’t even tell me about it.” So why are you doing this? So when I had them do, I was like, “Forget writing a draft and having me be the editor. Instead, I want you to send me a voice memo, no more than 60 seconds in the morning, which is basically, “Oh, did you hear what happened today? Uh, this guy said this thing and people are freaking out because of blah blah blah.” And this announcement was made and people think it’s going to be a big deal and the price is going to go up because that would mean this. And as soon as they started doing that, I was like, “Yep, that sounds perfect. Just write that down.” And it just was such a good filter. And so one way to think about what to write about and how to write it is do this little kind of voice memo test. So can you just if you were just to tell your friend about this, you know, “Hey, I have this idea, blah blah blah” or, “You know, I noticed this thing, I found it really interesting because blah blah blah.” And if you can’t, if it’s not interesting to your friend, guess what? It’s not going to be interesting to a stranger, right? Like you have to be able to to explain it in a way that’s simple and use that as a filter. If you would never talk about it, don’t write about it.
Shaan Parr: Well, and the the tip that I used to give, so at when I sold the Hustle, we had close to 2 million subscribers, I believe. And for new writers, they would they like would kick ass in their audition. And then they would get nervous, like when they’re I’m like, “Yeah, 2 million, a lot of people, I get it.” But here’s the tip. Write to me, write to Sam. Just literally, you are only writing to one human being. It’s just coincidence that many others might read it, but just only write to one one person. Direct it to that one person, and that’s the way to go. Uh and so it makes it a lot easier. Uh let’s go to let’s go to uh write simply. What I found is around you can go as low as fourth grade, but around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade reading level is the way that you want to write. Now, to give you guys perspective, I think usanews.com, USA News, the newspaper, I believe that’s at a fourth-grade reading level. New York Times, which is highly regarded by a lot of people, that’s at a seventh-grade reading level. And I actually went and put Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett writes about insurance companies, a very complicated topic. I went and put his stuff through Hemingway app as well. Same thing, sixth, seventh, eighth-grade reading level, and it teaches you how to write at that level. And there’s tactics on how to do that, like don’t use adverbs, keep sentences short, but Hemingway app is an awesome way to um Check. Yeah, to check, to do it for you.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I think that’s a great one. Um, another one that you wrote in here is about storytelling. And so I think storytelling is now like kind of in the more advanced uh a little more advanced category of how to be a great writer is being able to use use the art of storytelling. Uh do you want to give an example of that uh or how do you want to talk about storytelling here?
Shaan Parr: So, here’s an example of storytelling. So, about 10 years ago, there was this company called Hint, Hint Water. It’s you see it’s like a beverage that you guys see in the stores. It’s called um and the the lady named Cara, she had this great story. She went and gave this talk uh at one of my events, and there was at the very end, there was one question that someone asked her, and I heard that story and of the 60-minute talk, I was like, “Oh, that’s a a hit,” because that just made me feel something. So the headline was, “Getting called sweetie helped this entrepreneur create a multi-million dollar business.” “Sweetie,” the executive said, and I just dropped the phone for a minute. Last week at Pizza and 40s, Cara Golden, the founder of Hint, told me a story that fired me up. The setup goes like this. And it explains the story about how she was drinking 10 Cokes a day. She was on the phone with an executive of Coca-Cola, and she said, “I’m going to create a new version of water that just has a a a little bit of fruit in it and no sugar.” An executive at Coco says, “Listen, sweetie, America’s love sweet. This is never going to work.” By the way, that’s a great example of working backwards from an emotion. Even if you didn’t consciously do it in this case, you you knew that story would hit because it has outrage. It has a WTF or OMG type of reaction of like, “That asshole.” But let me fill you in on the results. So I wrote the blog post not in order to promote Hint. I wrote the blog post because I thought this was just a cool story of a this entrepreneur getting like it was a sexist moment and she was getting hated on, whatever. Hint saw the article. They ended up spending millions of dollars to promote this article, and at the very bottom of the article, and it’s it says something like, “This conversation inspired Golden, now 17 later 17 years later to found Hint, and they do 100 million in sales. Uh, here’s the flavors they have.” This article made them tens of millions of dollars in sales. We used to get so much traffic to this article because they ended up promoting it. I wasn’t selling Hint water. I was just telling a cool story about the founder, and in exchange, it made all these people want to buy this stuff. And if in fact, if you Google Hint Water Sweetie article, you’ll see articles written about this article about how it was a huge success. And this was sort of an accident. I just wrote something cool and they actually were like, “Oh, let’s promote this.” But it worked wonderfully because it was a story that grabbed your attention.
Sam Parr: You want to say a few words on on on how to how to write a great story? I have a couple of tips. You you do it. So a couple of tips on on writing a great story or telling a great story. So go look at the greatest storytellers ever. Uh one of them is uh Aaron Sorkin. He’s known for writing great dialogue. He wrote, you know, the the Social Network movie, he wrote uh what is it, West Wing, he wrote the Newsroom, great writer, famous writer, famous Hollywood writer. He says, “I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.” So what he says is, a story is just two things. Somebody has an intention. Somebody wants something, and there’s an obstacle in their way. By the way, that line, “I worship at blank altar.” At the altar of blank. Yeah, so good. Yeah. That that is going into my bank. To your bank. Uh that’s funny. Uh all right, so uh so intention and obstacle. Intention is some character wants something and then there’s an obstacle in their way. The more they want it, like their daughter was just taken hostage, huge huge intention, obstacle, they don’t know by who or where they are and all they have to go on is this one five-second call that they were on or whatever, right? Like obstacle, they they have no way to find them and they’re just a dad. How are they going to ever, you know, get their daughter back? And so intention and obstacle is the core element of any good story. So somebody wants something. In the in the case that you just said, not only does Cara want to make her business successful, she wants to be taken seriously as a female entrepreneur. Obstacle, Coke executive, men men are pigs, nobody believes in her, right? That’s a core that’s a core of a story. And so any story, if you can’t, they always say like in a movie, you should be able to pause at any moment of any story and say, “What does that character want and what’s in their way?” And if you can’t pause and name that right now, you have failed as a storyteller because the audience you you think they’re you’re going to tell them later what they they want. No, no, you’ve lost their attention. The the initial stakes, and if you watch any movie, they establish this, right? And even like silly rom-coms, it’ll be uh she wakes up, she’s got her assistant and chauffeur driving her to work. She’s clearly high-powered, but her but she’s alone and she’s doesn’t have a relationship, right? Like that’ll be it’ll be obvious to her. She’ll see somebody out the window while she’s driving to work in her chauffeur limousine and it’s this girl in love with her boyfriend and she looks at it kind of longingly and then she just goes back to her her, you know, palm pilot or whatever before back to work. And so you know what the character wants and you know what’s in her way. She’s she doesn’t have somebody because she has to find the right guy and she’s so busy with work. And so everything is always this intention and obstacle. The second thing is you have to establish like how do you make a story better or worse? Stakes is the next thing. So what is that stake? Uh what do you have to lose if this doesn’t go well? And stakes doesn’t have like stakes initially, the beginner version of stakes is life or death. But the true art, and some if you like some of the stories that I’ve told on this podcast, the true art is when you can establish high stakes emotions in a low stakes environment. So if I can tell you how I was feeling and if I can get you to believe that I thought everything was on the line just with some little interaction I was having with the like this person in the grocery store line and how I didn’t want them to win because fuck them and they can’t cut they cut in front of me, but I’m not going to I’m not going to cut in front of them, but I need them to know that it wasn’t okay, but I don’t know how to do it without being an asshole myself. And if I can establish the stakes that this matters to me, I can get you to care about the outcome of it, but it can be in a low stakes situation. Now you’re really cooking with gas if you can do something like that. Because otherwise you’re limited to just life or death stories.
Shaan Parr: The best example you have done of that, you’re very good at this, is um I I distinctly remember the story of you doing a shirtless workout on your driveway and your HOA being like, “No, we we can’t have this.” And you’re like, “We’re going to petty court. We’re going to HOA.” Like I just that was a beautiful story. I should let this go. Oh, I can fight to the death as a matter of principle here because, you know, what are you trying to say? And what does this mean, right? And if it means something to me that I can make it mean something to you. So that sort of thing. So Larry David’s great at this too. Like whenever I watch that show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, like they’re making a story out of something so silly and small. Uh you know, like And it’s it’s 10 times more likable when it’s something relatable or small, but it still carries the emotional impact. And if you could do that, you have an infinite supply of stories. He notices that people don’t talk people don’t talk to someone if they’re wearing a maga hat, and so he starts wearing a maga hat all the time. He’s like, “I don’t want anyone to talk to me. I’m just going to wear this hat.” Yeah. Uh that that’s a a really good example of a high stakes uh high stakes and a low stakes environment. where like it doesn’t really matter, but it’s very funny. Um and then let’s talk about uh really tactical stuff. So short sentences. Um I’m a firm believer in short sentences. And so the I’ll give you I’ll explain why, but Warren Buffett owns, you know, runs Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire owns dozens and dozens of companies. Arguably the most complicated one is Geico. Insurance companies are very, very, very hard to understand. However, I don’t remember if the Hustle did analysis on this or someone else did, but he writes these famous annual shareholder letters every single year. He’s a very good writer. And listen to this. From uh 1974 to 2013, someone analyzed this, and the letters per sorry, the words per sentence dropped from 17 to 13. If you look at like we actually did an analysis on this. Every year, it gets shorter and shorter and shorter. And the reading level dropped from a 10th grade to a fourth grade reading level. So the richer he got and the more complicated his businesses got, the simpler the writing got because he just got better at explaining it in a really easy to understand way. And he’s probably once kind of somewhat the average show to be able to understand this. And so short, simple sentences are key even in complicated environments. And here’s a really good example. So if you go to hey.com, so hey.com is an alternative to Gmail. It’s a it’s a service that makes you pay though, so it’s even they they’ve raised the stakes there, so you have to pay for their email. There’s a letter from the CEO, and that’s one of my favorite uh like tactics by the way on a sales page, is letter from a CEO. And he says, “Hey everyone, I’m Jason, CEO of 37 Signals. Email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn’t. Email’s a treasure.” And he goes on to explain why uh email is awesome and why it should be more special than it is, and it’s the most simple language to explain email, and I love it. And there’s lots of examples of simple language and and simple ways to explain complicated things. And if you’re able to do that, oftentimes, it will have shorter sentences, less words, and it it’s significantly more uh effective than longer stuff.
Sam Parr: Related to that, it doesn’t have to be only one length. So there’s this great graphic that’s gone viral many times. You’ve probably seen it. Great writing has rhythm. So there’s a an example. So I’ll just read this out loud. He goes, “This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. This writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences, and I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I’m certain that the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the symbols, and sounds that say, “Listen to this, this is important.” So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create sound that pleases the reader’s ears. Don’t just write words, write music. I love that thing. It is amazing. And so you want to have short by default, but then, like he says, when the reader is rested and ready, use a long sentence to great effect. And so that’s like a advanced move when it comes to writing. Most people’s problem is everything every sentence is too long. And so you start with short sentences, but then you figure out how to vary it so that your writing sings.
Shaan Parr: Whenever I uh sometimes when I write something that I get really into, I am almost I almost feel like uh I’m like I channel like my inner Eminem or like some rapper or something where I’m like, “What type of rhythm can get people flowing?” Like I need to have a rhythm that gets people to fall down this. And like there’s small tactics, like anytime you want to use a comma, use a period and then start the next sentence with and or but. Um, or there’s other things like put your internal dialogue like um or like or or the reader’s internal dialogue like, “So why would I do this? You’re asking yourself right now.” Right. Or, “Who the hell is this person talking to me through my computer screen, telling me what to do, and why on earth should I trust them?” Like you can do these little things to change the rhythm and grab people’s attention.
Sam Parr: Yeah, 100% agree. Uh that’s a that’s a great way of putting it. I also think that uh you know, this also works for choosing what to write about. So for example, sometimes people will write about shit that they would never talk to you about. We had this problem early on at the Milk Road. So when we did the Milk Road, I was the initial writer, so I created the initial voice. And Milk Road was a a newsletter that we built in the crypto space, and we went from zero subscribers and never have written a daily newsletter before to the biggest crypto newsletter in the world and sold it for millions of dollars. That in one year. So that was the the success outcome. So how did we actually do it? And more importantly, how did I train other people to write it instead of me? Because I didn’t want to wake up every morning and stress about sending this email out at 5:00 a.m. to, you know, a couple hundred thousand people. That that was not the idea of a good life for me. So I was like, “Let me see if I can train people to do this.” One of the hacks to training people to do this was I I was like, “God, I feel like they’re writing this both with too much extra fluff and jargon, and secondly, they’re writing about stuff that’s kind of boring. So like the topic is boring.” I’m like, “What’s happening?” I was like, and I told them, I was like, “I feel like you would never just tell me about this. Like if I was just talking to you, if I was your your friend and you were like, “Oh, did you hear what happened today?” Which is what a news what a new what the news is trying to tell you, right? Hey, did you hear what happened today? This crazy thing happened, this interesting thing happened, this big event happened. I was like, “You’re writing about stuff that wouldn’t even make that filter. You wouldn’t even tell me about it.” So why are you doing this? So when I had them do, I was like, “Forget writing a draft and having me be the editor. Instead, I want you to send me a voice memo, no more than 60 seconds in the morning, which is basically, “Oh, did you hear what happened today? Uh, this guy said this thing and people are freaking out because of blah blah blah.” And this announcement was made and people think it’s going to be a big deal and the price is going to go up because that would mean this. And as soon as they started doing that, I was like, “Yep, that sounds perfect. Just write that down.” And it just was such a good filter. And so one way to think about what to write about and how to write it is do this little kind of voice memo test. So can you just if you were just to tell your friend about this, you know, “Hey, I have this idea, blah blah blah” or, “You know, I noticed this thing, I found it really interesting because blah blah blah.” And if you can’t, if it’s not interesting to your friend, guess what? It’s not going to be interesting to a stranger, right? Like you have to be able to to explain it in a way that’s simple and use that as a filter. If you would never talk about it, don’t write about it.
Shaan Parr: Well, and the the tip that I used to give, so at when I sold the Hustle, we had close to 2 million subscribers, I believe. And for new writers, they would they like would kick ass in their audition. And then they would get nervous, like when they’re I’m like, “Yeah, 2 million, a lot of people, I get it.” But here’s the tip. Write to me, write to Sam. Just literally, you are only writing to one human being. It’s just coincidence that many others might read it, but just only write to one one person. Direct it to that one person, and that’s the way to go. Uh and so it makes it a lot easier. Uh let’s go to let’s go to uh write simply. What I found is around you can go as low as fourth grade, but around sixth, seventh, and eighth grade reading level is the way that you want to write. Now, to give you guys perspective, I think usanews.com, USA News, the newspaper, I believe that’s at a fourth-grade reading level. New York Times, which is highly regarded by a lot of people, that’s at a seventh-grade reading level. And I actually went and put Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett writes about insurance companies, a very complicated topic. I went and put his stuff through Hemingway app as well. Same thing, sixth, seventh, eighth-grade reading level, and it teaches you how to write at that level. And there’s tactics on how to do that, like don’t use adverbs, keep sentences short, but Hemingway app is an awesome way to um Check. Yeah, to check, to do it for you.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I think that’s a great one. Um, another one that you wrote in here is about storytelling. And so I think storytelling is now like kind of in the more advanced uh a little more advanced category of how to be a great writer is being able to use use the art of storytelling. Uh do you want to give an example of that uh or how do you want to talk about storytelling here?
Shaan Parr: So, here’s an example of storytelling. So, about 10 years ago, there was this company called Hint, Hint Water. It’s you see it’s like a beverage that you guys see in the stores. It’s called um and the the lady named Cara, she had this great story. She went and gave this talk uh at one of my events, and there was at the very end, there was one