WordCamp SF: Tim Ferris Speaks About Blogging

(Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes)

Just got back from WordCamp San Francisco 2009. It was great! The first speaker I listened to was Tim Ferriss of 4 Hour Work Week fame. Tim also runs a very successful WordPress-driven blog, and had a number of very interesting observations to share. You can probably find his talk on the web, but I’m going to expand on a few key pieces of his talk, and explain how his suggestions benefit you directly.

Develop your voice as a writer

Tim asserts that being a good writer and having a voice are not the same thing, and that having a voice is by far the more important of the two.

Here’s my take: Writing skills can be learned, or editing farmed out. Developing your voice requires more nuanced experience. If you have a voice and nobody’s listening, do you really have a voice? Developing your voice is in part what I believe happens when you make a commitment to write every day. You need not publish every day… but I can’t think of any writer at all who doesn’t insist that writing something every day is important.

Finding topics

After doing many surveys and asking his readers what they want to read, then writing on that topic, Tim has found that what actually gets read has almost no correlation to what people say they want to read.

To me, this is similar to how focus groups are often lousy predictors of product performance in the market place. The only real way to know what products sell, is to measure the sales of products. Tim is implying the same sort of thing: if you want to know what people want to read, look at what they actually read, and don’t listen to what they say they want to read.

Engage your emotions

Tim notes that anger is often a powerful motivation for writing. His policy is to never attack anyone personally.

I concur, but I’ll go even further: any time you feel strong emotion, your writing will reflect that emotion and move people! Engaging your emotions will engage your audience’s emotions.

Separate research from synthesis

Tim notes that his best creative time is between 1 and 5 am. He separates his writing into “research” and “synthesis.” Research for writing can happen any time of day, but synthesis, the actual crafting of an article, works best at certain times of day.

My experience is similar: fact-gathering can be relatively mindless. All you need is a decent system for collecting notes (I often use draft posts or a private wiki), and it easy to zap a bunch of links for future examination. I have a large number of other productivity techniques I use, but Tim described my strategy pretty well.

There’s more…

Tim put put out a few more little nuggets, one of which I regard as a personal gold mine for generating material. I may write a newsletter article on exactly how this killer technique works for me… you’re welcome, of course, to watch the video and find it for yourself. (Or subscribe to the Website In A Weekend newsletter.)

I’ll leave with Tim’s definition of “work” and why he can legitimately claim to work a 4 hour week: “Work is something you want to do less of.”

And that works for me.

Tagged as: Inspiration, Productivity, WordCamp, Writing