The Best Writing Advice I've Ever Gotten
Write as if the reader is selfish.
The reader cares about exactly three things: themselves, their family, and if they run a business, their business. Your company is outside that circle. So is your industry. So is the revolutionary world you are trying to build.
Every piece of writing that lands has already accepted this. Every piece that does not land is still negotiating with it.
Ryan Holiday Figured This Out
Ryan Holiday writes Stoic philosophy essays multiple times a week and has become one of the most-read thinkers alive. Stoicism is two thousand years old. Marcus Aurelius is public domain. The raw material is free.
What Ryan does is take the abstract principle and re-aim it at one specific person: you. The Stoic line "humans suffer more in imagination than in reality" becomes "you are spiraling about that email your boss sent before you have even read it." The philosophy is universal. His framing is always individual.
He worked under Robert Greene for years and absorbed the craft. The craft is: abstract ideas do not move people. Abstract ideas aimed at this person's life right now do.
Most Marketing Copy Fails This Test
Default marketing copy is written from the company's chair, about the company, to an imagined buyer. "We build world-class AI systems for forward-thinking enterprises." Nobody reading that is thinking about the company. They are thinking about their Q3 targets, their kid's tuition, their irritating co-founder.
The copy that works assumes the reader has exactly one lens: does this help me tomorrow morning. Industry-level claims slide off. The problem sitting in their inbox right now is the only one they can feel.
The World-Builder Version
This one is for me and anyone else trying to communicate a revolutionary new world. New industries, new economies, new technology, new kinds of institutions.
The default failure is to describe the world. "Here is what the imagination economy is. Here is why the elevator economy is unfolding. Here is the civilizational thesis." All true. None of it breaches the reader's ribcage.
The version that lands reaches through the world-description into the reader's specific life. How does this new world change what your kid should study? How does this economy change what happens to your marriage if you stay at your current job through the compression? How does this technology put money in your pocket by next quarter, or take it out?
That is the question every paragraph has to earn the right to answer. How does this improve my life?
Precision Over Demographics
Write for a specific human. Demographics are too abstract to aim at. "A forty-two-year-old chiropractor whose two-person front desk is going to be replaced by AI this year and who has no idea whether that is a threat or a gift" is a reader you can actually write to. "Small business owner" is not.
The more precise your picture, the sharper the writing. Every abstraction in your draft is a place you failed to picture a specific person.
Kill the Cathedral-Show-Off Reflex
Part of why writers miss is ego. You built a cathedral of thought and you want to show every buttress. The reader is not there for the cathedral. They are there to find one stone that fits a hole in their life. Give them that stone. If they want the rest, they will walk into the cathedral on their own.
This is the same move as connecting the dots for people. Synthesis only lands when the reader can forward it as the answer to a question someone in their life is already asking. The vehicle is always a specific person's specific stake.
The reader is selfish. That is the shape of the surface you are writing on. Aim every sentence at their life. The ideas do the traveling on the back of self-interest.