Digital Writing Hack: Borrowing Credibility

What's up, digital writers? This week's thread breakdown is going to be on the theme of borrowing credibility. So an easy way of thinking about this is when you sit down to write, the first question you should ask yourself, and this is one of the core questions that we teach people in ship 30 for 30, is, am I writing from a place of personal experience? Or am I writing from a place of borrowing from someone else's experience? And for example, depending on what topic you want to write about, either you're speaking from a place of I have experienced this. You know, I used to work in this industry, so I know a lot about it. Or I currently work in this industry, so I know a lot about it. Or an extreme example would be, you know, why should you trust my opinion on TV shows? I've watched over 10,000 hours of TV shows on Netflix, right? You're speaking from personal credibility. The other side of the barbell is borrowing credibility. So this is usually when you're learning about something, you are pulling not from your own experience, but from someone else's experience. And you can see people like Ryan Holiday does this with stoicism, right? It's not really what he thinks about stoicism necessarily. He's starting from a place of, here's what Marcus Aurelius said about stoicism, and here's what I also think about it, right? Or Tim Ferriss doing this. It's not his insights necessarily. It's the insights of the people he interviews on his podcasts. So a lot of people have built really successful careers over not their own experiences and knowledge, but curating and borrowing other. Other people's experiences and knowledge. And that's called borrowing credibility. So a really easy example here is Dickie wrote this thread 2021, so two years ago at this point. And you can see, like, right out the gate, you know, this is not personal credibility. This is borrowed credibility. So one of the most legendary marketers of all time, David Ogilvy. So this is. This is not Dickey's perspectives on copywriting. This is David Ogilvy's perspectives on copywriting. And Dickey is curating them. He's borrowing Ogilvy's credibility, right? And then you go into it. In 1982, David wrote an internal memo to the employees of his advertising agency titled how to Write. Again, this is not Dickie saying how to write. This is Dicke curating how David Ogilvy said to write. And in just 10 bullets, put together a masterclass in effective writing. Here's a breakdown of each One, and at the time, Dicke was just getting started on Twitter. And it's a really great example of if you are learning about something, so he's learning about writing and copywriting, you might not be an expert in that yet, or you might not feel like you're an expert yet. So the easiest thing that you can do is go find someone who is an expert and borrow their credibility to crystallize the things that you're learning. I wanted to point out this example at the beginning of this breakdown, because this is the easiest way of executing borrowed credibility. However, there are some other ways that you can borrow credibility to hop on trending topics or to just write about things that might not necessarily be your perspective or only your perspective. You can do a lot of curation in there as well. So, for example, this was in. Yeah, the end of 2022. If you were on Twitter at the time or just sort of paying attention. This is right after Elon bought Twitter. And one of the first things he did is he fired a ton of the middle management. And it was a really controversial thing at the time. It was a trending topic. A lot of publications were writing about it, A lot of other tech companies were talking about it. And because it was a trending topic, what Dicke did is he wrote this sort of a mini commentary thread. It's not as linear as a normal thread would be, but what he did is he jumped on that trending topic and basically opened with this sort of like, metaphor just to help people understand what was happening. He said, if you played competitive sports at a high level, you see what Elon is doing. Again, this sentence really only makes sense in the context of you're paying attention to Twitter and you understand that this trending topic is going on. And then he expands on the metaphor. When a coach inherits a poor culture, the first thing they do is a series of grueling workouts. A good chunk of the team will quit, which is the goal. Then you rebuild with the best performers, which is essentially what Elon was doing within Twitter. But a lot of people either A, didn't understand that or B, had strong opinions on it that maybe hadn't drawn this sort of parallel before. And so Dickie, being a athlete and had played competitive football in college, was like, this is an opportunity for me to draw that parallel and explain it. And then he linked to a thread which apparently got deleted by the author and then kind of expanded on it. Here in the thread, you only understand this tweet if you've experienced it. As a player on a team where this happened. And I think part of what made this go really viral is that a lot of other, I imagine, athletes or competitive people resonated with this metaphor. And, and it also kind of got that tangential related juice of it being a trending topic and a viral topic. A lot of people were talking about it, a lot of people were sharing their opinions on it. And this is again, one of the really helpful things you can do when you're sitting down to write is A, asking yourself, what do I want to write? And is it from a place of personal experience or borrowed experience, credibility? And B, is there a way where I can tie it to something that's happening right now? Because if so, you're just kind of naturally going to ride that wave a little bit more. This is one example of a. This isn't the most obvious way of leveraging someone else's credibility or borrowing credibility, but it's, it's being done here and I wanted to point it out because it's a unique way of doing it. A different way of thinking about this is this was a thread that I wrote of and it's very subtle here, which is why I wanted to point it out. 30 things successful people Tell Themselves. And each tweet is just a quick sort of, you know, just this is the thing that successful person tells themselves. And a lot of these things, there are things that I knew, like, I guess you could say that this is a person I'm writing from personal experience. But the reality is a lot of these things were also things that I had learned from mentors or I had seen other successful people on Twitter writing about. And because none of these are super specific, like if you're taking someone else's framework or someone else's languaging or someone else's packaging of an idea, it's respectful and, you know, best practice that you should credit that person or say like, where you got it from, you know. But things that are sort of more vague and open ended, like this, you could think of this as a curation thread and a really easy, you know, if you wanted to go write a 30 things successful people Tell Themselves thread, a really easy thing to do would be to just think, you know, what would I write here? And then what are all the things that other people write here? And this is again, because it's so short form, there's not like much to credit, you know, like, who would you credit with? Mastery over my craft is the highest accolade. It's like that's sort of a combination of what tons of people say about the topic and what I say about the topic. There's. There's not. Again, where you should think about crediting people is when you're referencing specific frameworks, specific languaging, specific packaging of an idea. And so this is another very subtle way of, like, borrowing, but you're not borrowing credibility from anyone in particular. You're sort of. Sort of think of it as borrowing from the hive mind of all of the things that are floating around on that subject is a different way of thinking about it. And then third, this is the more linear one, and you see this on Twitter all the time, is you're literally borrowing someone's specific idea. And again, it's like, okay, that's someone's framework. I'm crediting who the framework is coming from. You know, someone's languaging. I'm crediting who. Who I'm taking the languaging from. So this is a really easy hook to understand a mental model, everyone should know. Insert some sort of named framework. That's really key. You know, whenever you see something like this is the priority principle, you know, or the Pareto principle, or the regret minimization framework. Whenever you give something or an idea a name, it seems so much more like a thing, because things that are packaged have names. Whereas if you don't give it a name, it just feels like a floating, unfinished idea. And so whenever possible, you always either want to give something a name of your own, or you want to curate someone else's idea or framework and then use their name and use that, the. The languaging for that idea. And then the credit is given here by saying, this is how Jeff Bezos used this model to decide to start Amazon. And then you kind of go into the whole thread here. So if you want to look at something like this as a hook, like, how would you steal this? You could literally keep the same first sentence. A mental model, everyone should know. Go find a different framework, put the name here, and then this is how. Who's the person that you got it from? Use this model to decide to start X or decide to do Y, or use this model to accomplish X, Y, Z. These are just really. Again, every time that you see a. A thread or any sort of hook that goes viral, it's worth pausing and asking yourself, how could I deconstruct this and then turn this into a hook for myself? So this, I think, is a cool theme to think about in general is this idea of, are you writing from A place of personal experience and credibility, or are you borrowing it from someone else? And it's also worth reinforcing that in the beginning. It's actually easier to borrow from other people than to create your own, because creating your own framework, frameworks and languaging and ideas requires a lot of pattern recognition. It requires a lot of years of experience. It requires a lot of testing and learning and trying things and learning hard lessons. Right. There's a reason why people that create new, new ways of thinking have usually been in their fields for a long period of time. Because you just, you have to play with all of that information in order to create something that's net new. So it's actually being. Being the creator is the harder path. A much easier path is actually being the curator. And again, people like Ryan Holiday and Tim Ferriss have built amazing careers for themselves creating, curating other people's insights. And you see a lot of people on Twitter that have adopted this, this strategy, and they've built huge audiences by just curating other people's ideas. You know, another really good example is Sahil. I mean, he's basically built an entire audience just curating other people's ideas. It's not even. It's not even his own ideas. Right, so here we go. Harsh truth. Most people don't really care about you. The spotlight effect. The spotlight effect is a psychological phenomenon where. Right. And where did he get it? It was coined by a group of psychologists in the year 2000. Right. So these aren't his ideas. He just went out and thought, I want to write about this topic broadly. Let me go find someone else's named framework or languaging, and let me just distill it and curate it for other people. So in the beginning, this is actually a much easier place to start because. And it allows you to gain traction and sort of learn. Where's your sweet spot? What do you enjoy learning about? What else can you dig into? And then chances are, over time, the goal is to kind of move down on the curation ladder and move up on the creation ladder. So over time, people who are curating a ton should then begin internalizing all of this knowledge and information and hopefully end up creating some net new thinking inside the sphere that they're writing within. So I always like pointing that out, because especially if you're stuck in the beginning, I always nudge people to say, don't worry about creating net new things as much as learning and distilling what you're learning by borrowing other people's credibility and curating them, which is only going to accelerate your learning, which is only going to crystallize the things you're learning, which is only going to make it easier for you to eventually create net new ideas.