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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Nicolas Cole
Read between
April 24 - May 6, 2022
It didn’t take me long to realize that readers didn’t just want to learn how to be better gamers themselves. They also wanted to be entertained. Watching Ming execute this strategy perfectly, I began to mirror my writing style off his. Every one of his posts was a blend between informative content and controversy-inducing tangents.
For the rest of the afternoon, and the rest of the week, and ultimately the rest of the month, all I did was read answers on Quora. My feed was filled with a never-ending stream of questions—and attached to them, answers written like short stories. That’s what hooked me. Someone would ask the question, “What’s it like to be a serial entrepreneur?” and the most popular answer wasn’t a formal definition of entrepreneurship. It was an answer that started with, “When I was 20 years old, I sold my first company for a million dollars.” And before I could even decide whether or not I wanted to keep
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Notoriously, human beings spend an awful lot of time imagining the big achievement we want for ourselves at the end of the journey, but struggle tremendously getting through the beginning—where we suck. Gamers, on the other hand, know that you have to play Level 1 over and over again in order to reach Level 2. And then you have to play Level 2 over and over again before you can reach Level 3. And if you can just keep on keeping on your journey, learning and mastering each level, you will eventually climb all the way to the top of the ladder. That’s how you “beat the game.”
Day in, and day out, I showed up to work, spent all day playing Executive Assistant soaking up knowledge from my newfound mentor, and then would walk to the Starbucks down the street after work to write on Quora. I’d combine whatever I’d learned that day with the larger life lessons I’d learned as a pro gamer, or bodybuilder, and write my answer. The more answers I wrote, the more I learned what topics were resonating with the most people, and the more I started to realize what people really enjoyed about my writing. This was exactly the same lesson I’d learned as a teenage gaming blogger:
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Do you want to build a company and brand, making money selling ads, products, and/or services? Then a website and “blog” makes sense. But if you enjoy writing and want to build a personal brand, position yourself as an authentic voice in your industry, and share your thoughts, stories, opinions, and insights at scale, then do not start a blog. The Online Writing approach was made for you.
This is why I tell everyone—whether you’re an aspiring author or the CEO of a public company—that before you do anything, before you write your book, before you launch your product, before you think about “positioning yourself,” you need to write online.
Level 1: Conscious vs Unconscious
Successful writers play the game of Online Writing consciously. Unsuccessful writers play the game unconsciously—and then wonder why they aren’t succeeding.
Level 2: Choose A Category
Categories are how we organize information in our minds. Know your category and you’ll know where readers “fit” you into their own minds.
Level 3: Define Your “Style” (Where Do You Sit On The Writing Spectrum?)
The secret to creating a unique writing style is by doing what would be considered “unexpected” in your chosen category.
Level 4: Optimize Your Writing Style For Speed
Every single sentence advances the “story” to the next main point. And on the internet, this level of velocity is crucial to hooking and keeping a reader’s attention.
Level 5: Specificity Is The Secret
Once you decide to play the online writing game consciously… Once you know what category you’re competing in… Once you see where your style sits on the Writing Spectrum… Once you become aware of your Rate of Revelation… The only thing left to do is be the most specific writer in your chosen category.
Ineffective writing is nothing more than writing that does not resonate. And the reason it doesn’t resonate is almost always a reflection of specificity—or lack thereof. Either the writer isn’t being specific enough about their category, or the content of their writing isn’t speaking specifically to their target reader.
Level 6: Engineering Credibility
What makes a badge of credibility valuable isn’t really the badge itself. It’s how the writer chooses to wear it.
In 2015, most people didn’t even know what being a Top Writer on Quora actually meant. But because I was wearing my badge proudly, everyone else took it upon themselves to be proud of my badge too. This is one of the unspoken rules of building credibility on the internet. Credibility is in the eye of the beholder—and it’s a ladder anyone can climb.
Level 7: Create Your Own Category
Mega-successful writers (in both big ways, like selling millions of copies of books, and small ways, in going viral on the internet), don’t compete within existing categories. What they do, intuitively, accidentally, or intentionally, is create a new category for themselves.
Categories are created at unlikely intersections, spotted by writers with an intimate understanding of one or multiple sub-categories.
Mastering the art of online writing is also incredibly rewarding. By learning how to use your voice, how to create your own category, and how to market yourself, your words, your books, and yourself as a brand, you will have far more leverage than 99% of writers out there. And leverage means freedom. If your goal is to be a successful writer, then social platforms are for publishing first, and consuming second. I have a rule I live by, and it goes like this: “The number of hours I spend consuming should never equal or exceed the number of hours I spend creating.”
There are five types of writing on the internet. Form #1: Actionable Guide Form #2: Opinion Form #3: Curated List Form #4: Story Form #5: Credible Talking Head
The way you “win” the game of online writing is by creating the single best possible version of whatever form of writing you’re using in your chosen category.
Actionable Guide Again, the goal of writing an Actionable Guide of any kind is to get someone to bookmark it.
Opinion Opinion pieces are, without question, the most popular type of written content on the internet.
Curated List Ever since the dawn of BuzzFeed, lists on the internet have gotten a bad reputation.
In order for your list to not be clickbait, but actually be meaningful and valuable to a reader, you need two things: Specificity and Speed.
Story Stories aren’t just for fiction writers. Stories are one of the most powerful ways to “hook” a reader into your piece of writing. The goal of any story should be to move a reader’s eyes along the page so quickly that before they can even think to themselves, “Do I want to read this?” they’re already off and running.
The answers with the most engagement almost always begin at the absolute height of the story: “The first time I became a millionaire, I was living in my parents’ basement.” Boom. You’re in the story before you’ve even decided whether or not you wanted to be there in the first place.
Credible Talking Head And finally, there are things on the internet that get read simply because they’re “the most credible.”
What makes a great headline is getting someone to understand three things at the exact same time: What this piece of writing is about Who this piece of writing is for The PROMISE: the problem that will be solved, and/or the solution being offered This is what’s known as The Curiosity Gap. The Curiosity Gap is what tells the reader what this piece of writing is about, who it’s for, and what it’s promising—all without revealing the answer.
If you can say it in three sentences instead of five, try to say it in two. And if you can say it in two sentences, do your very best to say it in one. Viral articles, Twitter threads, and any other effective piece of written content online follows this basic structure: Section 1: Introduction Section 2: X Main Points Section 3: Conclusion As soon as a reader clicks on your headline and says to themselves, “Sure, I’ll bite,” your writing is now racing against their dwindling attention span.
The Golden Intersection of great writing is: Answering The Reader’s Question x Telling Them An Entertaining Story
The Golden Intersection puts the reader’s wants, needs, questions, and desires as the #1 priority.
Then, to give context to the information, and to make the examples feel more relatable, I (as the writer) should let you know where this information is coming from.
The single most effective way to “promote” yourself without promoting yourself is to use you, your company, or your product as context to the thing you’re explaining to the reader.
