The Psychology of Writing

Morgan Housel is my favorite writer. He is a master at crafting collections of words that are both fun to read yet timelessly insightful. I have long admired Housel and as an aspiring writer myself look to him for advice on how he approaches his work.

Here are a set of core principles I took away from a couple of his podcast appearances with Matt Reustle & Dominic Cooke on Making Media, and David Perrell on How I Write. I am merely curating these quotes. Morgan, Matt, Dominic, and David deserve the credit for sharing their fascinating conversations with the world. Please check out their episodes here and here. If you haven’t heard of Morgan, please check out his blog here, his book, The Psychology of Money here, and his newly released book, Same As Ever, here. Here are some quotes from Morgan Housel on writing.

The Psychology of Writing

1. Write for an audience of one, yourself.

   • “I consider myself a selfish writer in the fact that I write for an audience of one, which is myself. I only write an article that I myself as a reader would be interested in.” - Making Media

2. Don’t be paralyzed by perfection.

   • “I think that the phrase, ‘good enough,’ is also important because at some point, you just have to let it go and just say, ‘This is good enough. I could keep editing this for weeks or months, but you just got to let it go.’" - Making Media

3. Follow your interests and curiosity.

   •  “I've never started reading a book with the idea of, ‘Oh, I bet I can find some great finance stories in here.’ I'm always just like, ‘Oh, this book seems interesting to me. I might enjoy this.’ I'm never even actively looking for these stories. It's just, ‘Oh, let's do some pleasure reading. I might be interested in reading this book." And then you kind of let them come to you naturally.’ - Making Media

4. Hook the reader with your first sentence - make your intros brief but intriguing.

   • “People who use a similar format of, ‘Oh, let me explain investing, but I'm going to talk about this other story.’ Nine times out of 10, I see authors, writers doing that. I'm like, ‘Oh, your intro is too long. Way too long. You've lost me. You've lost everybody else.’" - Making Media

5. Get in, make your point, and get out.

   • “None of the chapters are long and you’re welcome for that.” - Same As Ever

   • “I feel like there's always this impatient bug in my head that's like, ‘What's the point you're trying to make? Okay, make that point and move on to something else.’“ - Making Media

6. The act of writing is the act of learning.

   • “The process of writing is how I learn. I think that's true for almost every writer.” - Making Media

7. Your ideas don’t have to be original, but your story does.

   • “If I can stick out as a writer, I have to do it through the writing and through the examples and through the stories. And there are other people who are not good storytellers, but they can come up with great investing ideas. That's their skill. It's never been my skill.” - Making Media

8. Reuse your best ideas.

   • “I have no shame in repeating myself and using old material. I think it's probably true that I use that statistic as a passing quote in a different article. But I was like, ‘Oh, that's a cool statistic. I should elaborate on that.’ And that's where it came in, this article.” - Making Media

   • “I'm a big believer that a great bit is a great bit - if I go and see someone I love, like Robert Klein, I want to hear some classics and some new stuff. But a great stand-up bit takes a long time to really polish and perfect, and they're beautiful things when they're done.” - Jerry Seinfeld

   • “People point it out, they're like, ‘Hey, you've used this example before.’ I'm always like, ‘Yes, and I'll use it again because I think it's good.’ I have no problem repeating myself. So that happens a lot. A lot of times the basis of a blog post came from a passing comment in a different blog post.” - Making Media

9. Writing in public gives you a short feedback loop, for better and for worse.

   • “Well, what's true when you're writing publicly is that if an article is good, people will let you know. And if an article is bad, people will let you know. And this used to really bother me early on. I had very little confidence in myself as a writer.” - Making Media

10. There is a lot of luck to success.

    • “90% of virality is luck. It's just like the right person retweeted this at the right time, and it just took off. So it's really dangerous, I think, to read into it and say, ‘Oh, this article got two times as many page views as average. Let's try to replicate that in the future.’ It's like 90% of that was probably luck. It's easy to mislead yourself if you dig too deep into the data.” - Making Media

11. Consistency is important. Your progress looks small in the day to day, and month to month but can grow huge over years.

    • “Over 15 years, there's been a lot of growth. In any given year, it feels like no growth at all. And this is true too, when I go -- if I stumble across a blog post I wrote 10 years ago. Invariably, I read it and I'm like, ‘God, I would never write this today. I can't believe I used that sentence. I can't believe I thought that was a good way to describe it. I can't believe how much I'm rambling here.’ There's been a lot of progress, but you never notice it in any short period of time.” - Making Media

12. Brevity does not equal short.

    • “When people say brevity, brevity doesn't mean short. Brevity does mean that every word that's in there needs to be there.” - Making Media

13. Art isn’t formulaic, that’s what makes it hard and great.

    • “Art is in your soul. It's so corny to say, but I think it's so true. I would love to sit down and talk to those three about writing, but I don't know if I could pick up much from them or anyone else because art is hard to teach. It's not impossible to teach, but it's not like you can just say, ‘Oh, here's the formula. Go and copy it.’ It just doesn't work like that.” - Making Media

14. Outsource your credibility.

    • “Rather than you, the author, try to be the credible resource, quote other people, quote people who are more qualified than you.” - How I Write

15. The process of doing great writing should have some flow to it.

    • “Every time I've started to write a piece and from the get go it's tough, I’m done.” - How I Write

    • “You can tell after you've written a couple sentences ‘oh yeah this is really starting to click’ or you can just start and you’re like ‘this is not it.’” - How I Write

16.  Writing Approaches Are Not One Size Fits All.

    • “There’s a million ways to write, it’s an art, not a science and every form of art there are infinite ways to do it as long as you’re good at it.” - How I Write