The Two Kinds of Writers, The One I Am Right Now, And The One I’m Aspiring To Be

Recently I read a decent article by Darius Foroux called Arthur Schopenhauer: There Are Only Two Kinds Of Writers. Which talked about the Arthur Schopenhauer idea of two writers.

There are above all two kinds of writers: those who write for the sake of what they have to say and those who write for the sake of writing. The former have had ideas or experiences which seem to them worth communicating; the latter need money and that is why they write — for money.

If you hang out on Twitter or medium often, you probably notice more of the second writer. Publish a lot but seems to be a rehash of what somebody else says earlier. In some areas of twitter, it has only devolved into many buzzwords strung together as a tweet. Not meaning anything if you take 5 seconds to think about it.

This is not to say I'm not guilty. I tend to publish on a regular basis so many of the articles I have published frankly may not be my best work. But I do try to write about an interesting idea I found out or something that I learnt.

Build a business, not an audience. Touches on the same idea. That people should do interesting stuff with their lives then write about. Rather than “remixing” what other people have done. Doing interesting stuff leads to interesting content. It’s a pretty simple equation.

But to continue on the content treadmill. You have cut corners. But this leads to less than stellar content. As mentioned earlier bit twitter can descend into buzzwords.

We forget but one of the main goals of creating content is delivering value. Just tweeting for the sake of tweeting brings value to no one.

An insightful tweet from a unique observation of the world is very helpful for everybody. As Schopenhauer says former have had ideas or experiences which seem to them worth communicating.

Writing for money and writing to say something interesting are not separate activities. Lots of people can be both pretty well. But it can be easy to fall into the writing for money. In this case, writing for more followers or prestige.

If your content does help your reader, why are your writing in the first place?

Maybe you tweet or blog to use it as a journal. That’s great. As explaining how you area dealing with the problem at hand. Shows your thought process. And maybe useful for people in a similar situation.

This is different from manufacturing platitudes.

What is an audience anyway?

I think Alex Hillman (via farez) has the best definition:

https://farez.me/audience-building-for-saas/

"An audience is a group of people with common goals and interests, that you can study and most importantly SERVE". People in your audience look forward to learning from you, and to engage with you, and for you to engage with them too. Building an audience can benefit you as an individual and benefit your SaaS business.

What we confuse an audience with is followership:

Followership: This is when you're purely focused on the number of people who are following you. If your goal is to have more Twitter followers today than you had yesterday, then you're building followership, not an audience. If you intend to build a business with and learn from those who follow you, then building followership is the least effective way.

Who are we serving?

This question can help us see the forest for the trees.

Like the journaling section above you don’t need to consciously think about serving your audience. If you are writing about how you made your latest project and what you learnt. The reader will find something very useful from the blog post. As you likely take about your unique angle for tacking the project and produced some new ideas after finishing the project.

Why I’m writing this?

Likely as a reminder for myself. To make sure every blog post I create has some type of value for the reader. To make sure I don’t write about useless feel-goods on Twitter or elsewhere for that matter.

Capitalism and Personality worship

Capitalism and personality worship

I watched a YouTube video about Elon fanboys The video was from my favourite angry youtuber Buckley. He said the worst fanbases on the internet are BTS Stans and Elon fanboys. Which is something I can whole heartily get behind.

As I listen to K-pop but I hate listening to the drama of K-pop stans. Love the innovation that Elon musk’s companies are doing. As a person with great interest in entrepreneurship and science. But the Elon fanboys are annoying. Some make YouTube videos about his companies. Which some are very good. But after a while, it gets boring fast. As every video is the host explaining how much of a genius Elon musk is. When I subscribed to any of these channels. Any decision made by tesla. There was a video about the announcement was a 200 IQ play. And we mere souls could not comprehend them. The only one I'm subscribed to is hyper change. As he is a fantastic financial analyst. While I don’t watch all his videos for the reasons I mentioned above. He does good interviews talking about industries of the future like battery mining or electric cars.

I always wondered why Elon has fanboys. I understand why people view him as aspirational. That’s due to his world-beating achievements. But that does not explain the rabid fanbase online. Were any sight criticism of Elon. Is a personal attack. And go out of there way. To show you how you’re not smart or rich as Elon.

I think this has to do with our values in society. In our capitalistic world. People who have wealth are viewed favourably. But has money is the standard yardstick to measure people’s wealth. We look up to people that have the highest yardstick. As people want success in improving their yardstick. people will try to emulate some of the details. Which makes people feel like they are doing something about their yardstick. But it tends to be superficial actions. Not doing the work of starting a business. And researching how to make a product that will sell.

This reminds me of the quote humans make gods in their image. As capitalism is one of the forces of our society today. The gods we will look up to. Will be the ones to fill these values. People have argued rightly that celebrities are modern-day gods. Due to the excessive love and adulation of celebrities. Like massive crowds and trying to get autographs. We do not treat them as people but objects to faun over.

What I think separates Elon musk from, other rich famous people. That he has tangible proof that he is changing the future. Which people look up to. Which had been lacking for a long time. Probably since the financial crisis. So people feel he is the only one helping us make a better future. So anybody that goes against that is a bad person. And making a better future via capitalism is important to many people’s eyes. Hence the worship of his work ethic and his wealth.

His marketing does a good job. In getting people interested in what he's doing. And it may be sightly polarising as people have a propensity for Elon antics will love him. People that don’t turn away. But like religion, you need to wrap it under the banner of the common good. And have a good way to clearly define in-groups and out-groups.

Celebrity worship started to rise after popular TV. See Neil postman. This is just the latest iteration. Social media makes people into polarising characters. Which develops a cult following that lies in the character. Elon business tends to highly visual. Electric cars and rockets. So in an image-based society. That gains traction as they are highly visible items. A faster car is visual than a faster computer. Even for Elon companies. With PayPal, he wasn't as famous as he is now. As PayPal was just a payment processer. Which is fantastic but not as visual compared to his current companies. And did not have a cult following.