Hey everybody 👋,

Greetings from Chicago!

I mentioned last week that the lack of physical activity due to quarantine was starting to negatively affect my mood. I’m happy to say that my gym made virtual workouts available and I’ve been exercising every day. Plus, our apartment windows are open and spring is in the air. What a difference!

This week, I published a new essay called The Power of Twitter. I want to say how much I appreciate my fellow Write of Passage alumni for their feedback during our weekend ‘CrossFit for Writing’ sessions. The power in online education is the community and friendships you develop. Having people help you learn, motivate you, and pull you back when you fall off track is priceless. Lifelong learning does not happen without community, this is why I’m so bullish on the future of online education.

P.S. If you missed last week’s newsletter, you can check it out here. I talked about A Tale of Two Data Points, How The Economic Machine Works, Building a Second Brain, and Tock’s Pivot.

The Power of Twitter

If it’s easier, you can also read this essay on my website

Being on Twitter in 2020 is like being in a famous Parisian café in 1800.

Café Procope in Paris was the center of the literary and philosophic life of the 18th and 19th centuries. It was frequented by La Fontaine, Voltaire and the Encyclopedists: Benjamin Franklin, Danton, Marat, Robespierre, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Today, Twitter is the global town square, neighborhood hub, networking space, the social pulse of the internet. It is frequented by the smartest people on the planet. People come to share their best ideas. Intellectuals gather to share their most cutting edge-thoughts. It’s a free conference hall where you can choose the speakers and the attendees.

If used to its full potential, a Twitter account could be worth more than a college degree. For my friend David Perell, this is 100% true.

ᴅᴀᴠɪᴅ ᴘᴇʀᴇʟʟ ✌ @david_perell

I think my Twitter account is worth more than my college degree. 😯

I met David on Twitter in mid-2014. At the time, he was a college student at Elon University with ~300 followers. He thought I was an influencer with ~800 followers. Funny how our perceptions change. We connected over a mutual love of golf, a curiosity about technology and venture capital, and a common belief in the power of the internet. Fast-forward six years, David has amassed a Twitter following well over 50K people. More impressively, he was able to build a business that has taught thousands of students to write online, including myself.

Why is Twitter so powerful? It doesn’t matter where you’re located. Solely based on the quality of your thinking and content, you can build an audience and gain success. Twitter reduces the distinction between insiders and outsiders. Simply by attaching yourself to a community, you can understand how insiders think and speak. A great example of this is within Financial Twitter (FinTwit), where people like Nick Maggiulli and Morgan Housel have become insiders through their fantastic writing and prolific tweeting. Twitter provides amazing and instant feedback, allowing writers to test their ideas to create and further distribute their work. Morgan Housel said, "Twitter is great for writers, investors, and entrepreneurs because when you post your thoughts you get instant feedback that's more unfiltered than anything you'll get face to face."

If Facebook is for people in your past, then Twitter is for people in your future.

Before you’ve built an audience, Twitter can feel like you’re shouting into the void. There is massive reach inequality on the internet. In order to attract an audience, it helps to be known for something. Being different is essentially free marketing. Having a unique set of skills and style helps to stand out. Over time, you become the only person who does what you do. Then, simply stay inside your circle of competence and carpet bomb your niche. You can tell the world about your talents by sharing the best of what you learn. When someone is mindlessly scrolling their feed, your profile will stand out in the crowd.

The best way to build an audience is to provide value. Chances are you won’t be able to send one tweet that will turn you into a billionaire like Uber’s first employee, Ryan Graves. A more sensible approach is what Gary Vaynerchuk calls the One Dollar Strategy, leaving your worthwhile two cents on $50 tweets. Attaching a quality reply to a viral tweet is a great way to stand out and reach a large audience while providing great insight. The way to be discovered is to either put out consistently great content or become part of a community and provide value. Educate others, avoid using “spammy” hashtags, or you’ll just end up hurting yourself in the end.

One way I was able to provide value to Twitter users, even without a large following, was to create a robust list featuring Twitter employees. Twitter used to own and maintain a list of their tweeting employees, but shortly before the company went public, the list was deleted. I was able to create this list myself with more than 1,100 employees at the time, which came in handy when there was news about the company. The list I put together is followed by over 100 people and was featured in this article by CNBC. (Scroll to #103)

An observation about life is the more effort that’s put in, the more fulfilling the outcome. This is true for everything from relationships, education, work, cooking, vacation destinations, or social media. It takes work to get to a place that feels fulfilling. Fred Wilson has written about this idea in No Pain No Gain. On Twitter, that means you should follow individuals instead of publications and ruthlessly unfollow anyone who doesn’t provide you valuable information. As long as you’re following someone, you agree to be brainwashed by their ideas for as long as you follow them. Therefore, it is best to find and follow obscure, interesting people. Then follow the people and ideas they follow. You can surface interesting ideas by seeing the topics the people you follow on Twitter like.

When it comes to sharing information, respect your audience’s time and attention. I’ve been using Twitter for over 12 years. When I started, there was no etiquette to what someone should share. As Twitter became a place where the best and the brightest shared their thoughts, I feared that people would not care what I had to say. I would always think, is what I’m saying valuable to others or self-serving? Will it make someone laugh? Will it be thought-provoking? As the years went on, my engagement with the platform plummeted. It wasn’t until taking Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain and David’s Write of Passage online courses did my mindset shift. I used what I learned to capture, organize, and share what I learned. Write of Passage alumni Joe Wells said, “The amateur hoards his knowledge…He believes that if he shares what he possesses with others, he will lose it.” How silly of me. Feedback is critical for good work and I gave up valuable time by not sharing what I had to say.

Finally, Direct Messages are the single most powerful part of Twitter that no one talks about. Twitter is what LinkedIn has always tried to be. A place to learn, make friends and create opportunities for yourself. It could be the best networking tool in the world. When finding like-minded, interesting people, keep conversations active in DMs to set up meetings in-person or by phone. Try to see if there is a way to work together. As David Perell said, try to structure your life on Twitter for serendipity. The internet rewards people who publish their ideas frequently. Each article, email newsletter or tweet can be the vehicle for personal or career opportunities. The more you can share, the more opportunities you invite into your life.

This quote from Bill Gurley summarizes the power of Twitter so well:

“Twitter is the most amazing networking and learning network ever built. For someone who’s pursuing their dream job, or chasing a group of mentors or peers, it’s remarkable. In any given field, 50-80% of the top experts in that field are on Twitter and they’re sharing ideas, and you can connect to them or follow them in your personal feed. If you get lucky enough and say something they find interesting, they might follow you, and the reason this becomes super interesting is that it unlocks direct message, and now all of a sudden you can communicate directly or electronically with that individual. Very, very powerful.
If you’re not using Twitter, you’re missing out.”

Coolest Things I Learned This Week

Tim Ferriss on Writing to Improve your Thinking

As I build my writing habits through the blog and newsletter and see how much it has helped me think, I agree with everything Tim says.

Here’s a summary of the key points or a copy of my Evernote notes.

If you don’t write, it’s hard to freeze your thinking so that you can sharpen it.
Morning pages are an easy way to practice writing so that you can see your thinking. This takes the anxieties out of your head and shows you where your thinking is sharp and where it’s dull.
If you’re looking for a proofreader, talk to friends with legal training. They look at language extremely carefully.
When editing: the first edit is you. The second edit is for those who will love to read your writing. The third edit is for those who will try to tear your work apart.
Ask people to read and highlight anything that’s confusing, anything they dislike, anything they love, or anything they hate. In Write of Passage, we used the acronym CRIBS—confusing, repetitive, insightful, boring, surprising.
The 10% rule: what is the 10% that should be kept no matter what? what is the 10% that can be cut?
Writing improves cognition, analysis, and awareness.

Chicago Architecture

I replied to my friend David on with a photo of some Chicago architecture which he graciously shared in his Monday Musings newsletter. (Hi new subscribers! 👋)

I wanted to attribute that photo properly and share more of their phenomenal work. The photos belong to Cape Horn Illustration. I really love the first image with the different building styles. My favorites are the Art Deco (Chicago Board of Trade Building), Structural Expressionism (John Hancock Tower), and Contemporary (Radisson Blu Aqua Hotel).

With all of these styles together, I’ll take Chicago’s skyline over any other in the United States.

Consumer Spending Patterns

As we continue to shelter-in-place, it’s interesting to see how COVID affects shopping behavior across industries and categories on a year-over-year basis.

Bank of America shared this data with their institutional clients.

Categories above 100% (Airlines, Lodging, Cruises) include refunds.
Online shopping increased significantly since we’re all working from home.
Groceries spiked in mid-March when cities instituted stay-at-home policies.

Photo of the Week

It’s hard to believe it’s already been four years since I was in Vancouver.

One of my best friends from college lives in Seattle so we took a trip to Vancouver for the weekend to celebrate his birthday, catch a Blackhawks game, and even tried some curling!

I can’t wait to travel again when the quarantine is over.

That’s all for this week’s Wednesday Wisdom. Feel free to forward this to anyone you like. If you have any feedback, advice, or thoughts on what I shared, email me at lev.naginsky@gmail.com or tweet me at @levnaginsky

Until next week,

Lev

Wednesday Wisdom

Wednesday Wisdom (#5)