How To Think, Learn, Read, Research, and Write

If you're into technology and investing, Marc Andreessen needs no introduction. From creating the web browser, to inventing the tweetstorm, to coining "software is eating the world", he's a legend of Silicon Valley.

David Perell recently sat down with him to discuss all things writing. It was one of my favorite things to listen to in a long time.

Being in technology, I found myself nodding to so much of his insight. Much of what he conveys, I never realized have been keys to my own journey, especially around being the person to write things down.

The summary and takeaways of the conversation and video are below:

1. Read, read, read... then read some more.

2. Many of your best ideas will emerge in fits of rage or frustration. Channel the fury. Smash the keyboard. Lean into the passion. Torch the page with your energy.

3. Marc doesn't have much of a formal writing process. He thinks and thinks, and when epiphany strikes, he hammers out an outline as fast as possible to get his ideas on paper. Then, he turns it into a full article.

4. Marc's motto for writing and thinking: "Strong views, weakly held." Put yourself out there, but stay on the hunt for dissenting opinions from smart and respectful people.

5. Online writing tolerates and even encourages stylistic idiosyncrasies that traditional publishing would not accommodate. Lean into them.

6. The world is awash in bad content. You need to punch through. Snappy one-liners and genuine conviction are two ways to do that.

7. Marc's been reading online for as long as anybody on the planet, and the biggest thing that's surprised him is how political the Internet's become. Something changed between ~2013-2015. The Internet was once an escape from political debates. Now it's a hotbed of them.

8. Writing software is halfway between writing a novel and building a bridge.

9. Play around with communication tools. Push the limits. Doesn't matter what the rules are. When Marc felt constrained by Twitter's 140-character limit, he started replying to his own tweets and invented the Twitter thread.

10. On the quest for good ideas, surround yourself with "lateral thinkers" who can't help but come up with variant perspectives on everything they see. They won't always be right, but they're always challenge your thinking.

11. Media formats are cyclical. Nietzsche wrote in aphorisms and Twitter is aphorisms-as-a-service. Hip-hop brought back poetry. Montaigne pioneered the essay format and blogs brought them back into vogue.

12. People should write more manifestos.

13. Marc's nomination for the best living American novelist: James Ellroy.

14. GPT has revealed how much writing is pure pablum. Bland, lifeless, uninsightful, unoffensive, and not worth the price of the ink it was printed with.

15. "With GPT, every writer now has a writing partner who can do an infinite amount of grunt work without complaining."

16. "ChatGPT plagiarism is a complete non-issue. If you can't out-write a machine, what are you doing writing?"

17. Marc writes from the heart. He doesn't do much editing and likes to provide reading recommendations instead of directly citing his sources.

18. The person who writes down the plan in an organization has tremendous power. If you want to find the up-and-comers at a tech company, look into who's writing the plan. Though they may not be coming up with all the ideas, you'll know they have the energy, motivation, and skills to organize and communicate ideas in a written form.

19. Marc uses a barbell approach to consume information. He focuses on what's happening right now while also reading a lot of things that were written 10+ years ago. The content is either timely or timeless, with almost nothing in between.