Shane Parrish - Mental Models, Good Decisions & Better Content | Modern Wisdom Podcast 334

Let's say I write an article for the website. It- it's really popular. So now I know if I write another article like that, it's going to be really popular. Well, if I do this over and over again, and- and- and on a weekly basis, it won't make a difference, on a monthly basis, it won't make a difference, but if I do this for years, eventually, I become irrelevant. And I become irrelevant not only in my knowledge and my learning and my development, but I become irrelevant to my audience because this is the same thing rehashed over and over again. And all's I'm going for is that immediate dopamine hit.

(wind blowing) So I fell in love with a tweet of yours from the other month which said, "If you're not obsessed with it, you'll never master it. Being obsessed want- with something won't ensure mastery, but not being obsessed will ensure you won't master it." What have you been obsessed with this year?

I've been obsessed with taking care of my family. I mean, it's COVID, right? So it's obsessed about taking care of all the people in my life. Um, work-wise, I'm just obsessed with little details, right? Like the font on the website and the Instagram backgrounds and, you know, people- people think that that's a little bit obsessive, but it's part of the craft. It's part of what we do. Uh, writing, I'm trying to get better at. I'm obsessed with getting better at writing and being clear and being succinct and being relatable to people. And it helps my- clarify my thinking, right? Because writing is thinking on the page. And often, I discover that through writing, that I really don't know what I'm talking about, and that's- that's a great feeling in a way. It- it's bad in a way, but it's sort of like the dawning of wisdom, right? Because, you know, you- you can't learn anything if you- you think you already know it, and when you write it down, you- you force yourself to confront the fact that maybe you don't know it as well as you did, especially when you're trying to write it down for an audience that might not have the context or might not be a domain expert in what you're writing about, so you have to simplify. And simplify doesn't mean that it's simplistic. It just means that you're using different words that everybody can relate to, so you're- now you're translating it, it's out of the domain in which you might have learned something, you're translating it to a more relatable domain for everybody else. And I think that that's so powerful for us to just calibrate our own knowledge and hone our understanding of what we know.

How do you avoid getting bogged down in little details? Tiago Forte had a tweet a couple of months ago talking about how the highest leverage people that he knows, most of their work has a rough-edged, half-assed quality to it because perfectionism is a low leverage activity. How do you avoid restricting the pace at which you ship work by focusing on the minutiae?