Life Is a Team Sport
When I interviewed Annie Duke, we discussed the writing process for her first book, Thinking In Bets. Duke had made writing a team sport, firstly by recruiting a friend with a Juris Doctor degree, who was also a writer, to be her editor — outside of her editor at her publisher. This friend helped serve as a source of market feedback.
Duke advised me, “Take every opportunity that you can to try your material out… Every time that I would be at a party, people would be like, ‘Well, what do you do?’ And for a while, my answer was, ‘I do keynotes and consulting on decision making and critical thinking skills.’”
This idea planted a seed in my mind. Up to that point, I’d treated writing largely as a singleplayer game: I write stuff, you read it. While I wasn’t a keynote speaker yet, I started opening up my eyes for opportunities to test my ideas.
The seed of writing as a team sport was nurtured by David Perell’s idea that writing in public improves the quality of ideas (writing to think!), and Ryan Holiday’s advice that every book should start as a conversation.
While I still make a lot of time to write (e.g., to work on my notes, to read, to research), building relationships with other people (sometimes through platforms like Medium), having conversations with them, and asking for their feedback, has infused my writing with vitality…
