The one thing you can do to make any kind of writing memorable is to make it more visual. Steven Pinker explains why: "Language is a means to an end of getting people to appreciate what the ideas you're trying to convey are, which are not just a string of verbiage. And those ideas very often are visual." "Allowing your reader to be able to form a mental image based on what you're writing is the next key to good writing." "Don't talk about a level or a perspective or a framework or a paradigm or a concept, all of which mean a lot to you in your day-to-day work, but no one can form an image of a paradigm in their mind's eye."

"I think of writing as a tool to think more clearly or to get to the essence of something." "There are these ideas that I think I'm super clear on, and then I try to make myself write it down in a one page summary. And I was like, oh, I didn't really understand that in the first place." -Sam Altman

Most of us assume there's a place you arrive once you've truly made it. Andrew Sean Greer has won the Pulitzer Prize, and he can tell you firsthand what's actually there: "There is no champagne room that you're finally invited into, where all the VIPs are sitting around and say, well done, my good and faithful servant. And there's no heaven. There's just writers." "There's no separate existence. It's still the hard work. And no private club."

AI is going to make us weirder. "My one and only optimistic take about AI, is it's going to make humans be more human. We're gonna realize we can't do what AI is doing and we don't work like AI." "We're going to become more human and I feel like the taste is going be for weirder stuff." "True creativity is gonna become more valuable. Things that AI can't do because it doesn't exist and it's only knowing what's existed, and we're trying to create things that haven't existed. We're going to have to find new messy human things." "I think there's a sort of optimism there that actually being human is something quite different that AI won't be able to replicate because we create more beautiful mistakes." @matthaig1

You can figure people out if you understand what Will Storr calls the "theory of control." It helps explain the behavior of people like Donald Trump or fictional figures like Ebenezer Scrooge: "You can think about the brain as this machine for controlling the world. That's what we're all trying to do, that's what every living thing is trying to do, trying to control the world in order to get what they want." "Every human has this kind of set of ideas that dictates their behavior such that they get what they want. If you put Donald Trump and Gandalf in a room, they both want different things from the world." "A character is this kind of theory of control about how do they control the world. And the way to start off is with a really simple idea, ideally a one-sentence idea. This is my theory of how the world works." "Think about Scrooge in A Christmas Carol: I'm only safe if I keep all the money and love to myself. That's his theory of control. The only way he can protect himself and keep himself safe is by making sure he's got all the money." "Then, the three ghosts come along. They show him: these are the ramifications of your theory of control, this is the damage it's causing your life. And he learns and changes. Then by the end of the story, he's the opposite. He's very generous. And so he gets the rewards of the hero: he gets love, he gets status." @wstorr

Dan Wang writes one piece a year that is read by hundreds of thousands of people. That's it. Those annual letters turned him into one of the world's China experts, and led him to write a New York Times bestseller. He explains why he thinks more people should write less: "The tragedy of a lot of modern technologies is that it is really trying to make posts and thoughts as short as possible and as frequent as possible." "The apotheosis of this is Twitter, but I think the Substack model is really trying to encourage people to write a piece a week, a piece a month. And I was trying to bring down the average. I was trying to write one piece a year." "What I really want to do is to read a writer's most considered thoughts, the reflections, the well-crafted sentences, looking past the immediate headlines in order to deliver a product at the end of every year."

"The best ideas are extremely fragile." Good ideas can distract Founders, but early on, you want to avoid killing your best ideas too quickly. "There is an unbelievable amount of value in figuring out a setup, a method, whatever you wanna call it, for not killing very fragile but potentially very great ideas." "It comes down to who you surround yourself with." "A particular kind of toxicity to avoid are the people who are so smart they understand why every great idea is bad." @sama

"Boredom is the enemy of the attention economy. We have been taught to fear it." Robert Macfarlane makes the case for boredom: "I always wonder about the phrase 'paying attention.' It seems to bring attention into the capitalist economy: we pay attention, and in return, something is paid back to us." "Maybe we give attention. That feels truer to the idea of unselfish and unselfing attention." "We're in an attention fracking economy, which is always shattering and mining our attention for each monetizable unit." "Boredom is an opening of possibility. It's when the mind starts to wander and starts to notice things that were latent in the painting or the landscape or the person."

"Linear time is an illusion." Elif Shafak on why our sense of time and reality is wrong: "There is magic in life, in daily life, in even the most ordinary, seemingly ordinary moments. That's one of the reasons why I don't like this term magical realism, because it assumes that there is the world of magic and then there is the world of reality. Whereas I think in life everything is constantly mixed." "We want to think of time as a much more linear, steady march. But when you pay attention to a river, a tree, a rock, just the soil itself, there is no linear time there."

"The mind works best at three miles an hour. Mine happens to work best at about six or seven." Robert Macfarlane & Elif Shafak on where ideas show up: Robert: "I run every day, quite long distances. I will very often be sending myself voice notes while I'm running, and then later trying to decipher these panting messages from my tired self to my recovered self." "Sometimes when you are giving absolute attention to the task in hand, that's when it becomes hardest. So maybe you shake thought free by doing other things." Elif: "I don't run, but I walk a lot. And you get the best ideas, as you said, in that movement, and then you have to send little notes to yourself."

"Beware the fetish of the desk." Robert Macfarlane on why the perfect setup is a trap: "The desk has to be feng shui'd into a perfect set of orientations, and the pencil has to be sharp, and the notebook has to be right, and the silence has to reign." "That can bring you to this devotional state, and then actually you're confronted by the problem of writing rather than the problem of preparing to write." "Writing, it's not an unfurling of sentence after sentence in a perfect woven fabric. It's much more mosaic and kaleidoscopic, moving pieces around in order to recognize their relations."

"I know how to write sociopaths because I grew up with them." Dean Koontz on how his childhood influenced his life: "What seemed to me as a child the worst thing in my life turned out to give me an insight into a certain kind of psychology that's been very valuable for the books I write." "I didn't talk about my childhood until I'd been writing for decades. I was stunned that I suddenly was getting thousands of letters from people who had similar childhoods, some not as bad as mine, some worse. And the question kept being, 'how did you get past it?'" "This is not noble, but you have to get past it, or the bastard won. You don't want the person trying to destroy your life to win."

Alex Hormozi holds the world record for the fastest-selling nonfiction book ever. Here's how he designed the cover: "The word "leads," I tested the hell out of. I had $100,000,000 Promotion, $100,000,000 Advertising, $100,000,000 Leads, $100,000,000 Marketing, and Leads was the one that won." "Leads is the output of advertising. No one wants to advertise. People want leads." "If you're gonna go through all the work of writing the book, which is significantly harder than testing the cover and the title, do that." "Tim Ferriss tested The 4-Hour Workweek. He hated the title, but it crushed all the other titles. So that's what the book became, and obviously became a bestseller."

AI is making all writing sound the same. But nature writing still resists this trend. Ocean Vuong reads from J.A. Baker's The Peregrine: "Mud was deep in the lanes, and along the sea wall. Thick, ochre mud, like paint. Oozing, gluttonous mud that seemed to sprout on the marsh like fungus. Octopus mud that clutched, and clung, and squelched, and sucked. Slippery mud, smooth, treacherous as oil. Mud stagnant. Mud evil. Mud in the clothes, in the hair, in the eyes. Mud to the bone." "I will never look at mud the same."

Tom Junod says there's one thing humanity has ever done right, and AI can't do it. He explains why: "The only thing maybe that humanity has ever really done right is bear witness to its own thing." "Anybody who is writing seriously from the heart is bearing witness to this onward stamping of this blind genius being that is humanity." "Bear witness to the truth, to ourselves, to God, all of it. That's the soul. You see the soul do its work over the course of human history." "Why the fuck would we ever want to give that up? It's the one thing that we can do."

"Wonder is an essential survival skill." We walk past nature without giving it a second thought. Robert Macfarlane reminds us of the wonder behind a rainbow: "When you see a rainbow, you still stop. That's wonder. Rainbows are the charismatic megafauna of wonder. They do it often and well." "The other thing about a rainbow is it's utterly bespoke. It was no one else's rainbow, because it's a prismatic function: the water is lensing light and separating light into its constituent wavelengths. If you'd stepped a yard to the right and become a different person, you'd have seen a different rainbow. That's wondrous." "And science finesses the real into wonder. Science doesn't mean unweaving the rainbow. It can help us continue to be astonished by the world, just understand a little bit better how it works." "I don't see science and wonder as opposed."

"Seinfeld said comedy is when you decide it's a funny story." "Life is not funny. You just decide. What happened today to you is awful and miserable, but you decide it's a funny story when you tell it to your friends at the bar, and they laugh, and you feel, okay, I'm over it." -Andrew Sean Greer (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

"We've become so arrogant as human beings, and we have turned ourselves into consumers of nature." Elif Shafak on how we've stopped appreciating nature: "We take it for granted, but a grain of sand, a drop of water, the seemingly small, the seemingly insignificant actually says so much about the universe, because everything is interconnected." "I did a lot of research about the Yazidi minorities. In the month of April, if children are running around, jumping up and down as children do, the Yazidi grandmothers gently warn them. Why? Because according to them, in the month of April, the earth is pregnant. And so when you walk, you need to walk softly, you need to tread gently." "Now, to our rational modern minds, this is just an irrational thing. Of course the earth is pregnant. You're going to see all these flowers blooming, the fruits. This idea that you need to tread gently because it's alive, you can't stomp on it." "Only a culture that has not disconnected itself from nature can come up with this kind of storytelling."

Not all feedback is useful, and too much of it can drown your work. Andrew Sean Greer on how to make the most out of the feedback you get: "We think that the book is the patient, the editor is the doctor. They know they're going to say, nurse, here's what I need you to do, and that you do it. But that is not true. The editor is the patient. They're the reader. They know they're feeling things." "It's like a patient who comes in and says, doctor, my arm hurts. I'm sure it's arm cancer. You, the writer, say: there's no such thing as arm cancer, but the arm hurts. That's important. I will figure it out." "The editor will not know the answer, because it's in your head, the thing you want to make. They have no access to it. A good editor will not tell you specifically what to do. They will just tell you where it hurts." "You could have a lot of people read your book, and if they consistently say where it hurts, ignore, please ignore the advice they give you. It'll really throw you off, especially in a workshop. But they're right about what's not working."

"Say yes to everything before you're 40, and say no to everything after you're 40." "Before you're 40, you don't know what you're good at. You don't know what you're energized by. And the world is changing." "Trying lots of things that you're curious about allows you to figure out, if you pay attention: here's what the parts of it I'm energized by, here are the parts of it that exhaust me. Then just maximize for your energy." "By the time you're 40, you should know those things. What are those things for you? And after that, you say no to everything else, because now the bet you can make is: I can work at these things for a long time and know that I care about them." - Atul Gawande