Tim Ferriss argues passion produces the best writing, citing Mark Cuban and his spontaneous "Prescription for Self Doubt" video. Ramit Sethi pushes back: empathy for readers matters more. Writers need both passion and audience relevance if they want people to actually read it.
So one of the questions is, it sounds like the content that's most successful for you is the content that you have the most personal interest in. Is that true? So this is a great question. And I read a quote from Mark Cuban at Blog Maverick, also a fairly wealthy individual, and he said, forget about writing what you think your readers are interested in. Write what you're passionate about. And I have really experimented with this and I've polled my readers and then tried to customize posts based on their feedback. And it never does as well as when I just have something I'm really excited about or really pissed off about or really frustrated with that I then figure out. And that means that some of my posts, like I put up a video and some notes around it called the Prescription for Self Doubt. And I put this video up at 2am one night when I was just having a really difficult day. And it had an impact on me. And it came out in like 15 minutes. It was very fast. And it's so much better than some of these other posts that I spent hours and hours crafting based on reader feedback. And that's not to say you don't listen to your readers, but write what you have in emotional connection to. At least for me, that is always my best content. Always. And I think it comes across.
I don't know, though. I think that's true for you. I think you've got for me, the number one skill of a writer is empathy. You understand your readers, and I think you have built in empathy. So even when you're writing something about how frustrated you are, if we go back and read that and look at the video, it's still relatable to someone else. You're not just complaining. And what I see with like, for example, in the personal finance world where I write sometimes people be like, oh my God, like, ing Direct is giving an extra 1%. Like, this is so cool. Or like, oh, wow, we should talk about asset allocation, because I just read it, but nobody really cares. And so I guess I would say there's a balance to strike between writing what you're passionate about. I agree with that. But at the same time, you have to understand that people have. If your goal is growing traffic, then people have to care about it. So there's definitely a balance to be had there.
