The Mix Tape, Vol. 74
Welcome to this week’s Mix:
✏️Quick thoughts on writing well
👨🔬A timeless formula for marketing messages
💣When hype backfires
🚶♂️Getting started with fitness: walk, don’t run
Quick thoughts on writing well
Author and investor Morgan Housel shares some great ideas on writing. Here are three of my favorites:
Good ideas are easy to write, bad ideas are hard. Difficulty is a quality signal, and writer’s block usually indicates more about your ideas than your writing.
This is true, but don’t give up too early. Sometimes “bad” ideas morph into good articles if we keep pushing. Let your writing evolve as you go.
Delete without mercy. Jason Zweig says, “you can never create something worth reading unless you are committed to the total destruction of everything that isn’t.”
Almost every time I wrestle with a sentence, the best solution is to delete it.
If you have an idea but think “someone has already written that”just remember there are 1,010 published biographies of Winston Churchill.
This is one of the greatest writing-killers. We tell ourselves it’s already been done.
Many more great nuggets in Housel’s piece.
A timeless formula for marketing messaging
Dead simple. It’s worked for a hundred (maybe hundreds of?) years.
And don’t sleep on the pain in the headline—it’s really important to grabbing attention.
When hype backfires
In modern marketing, we celebrate the ability to garner attention and capture imagination, because it’s gotten so damn hard.
Reminder: If you generate hype, you better fulfill it.
The NYT profiles the disastrous launch of the game Cyberpunk 2077. Launched after 7+ years of development, the game is plagued with bugs to point of being nearly unplayable:
The immediate future looks dark for Cyberpunk’s makers — perhaps even darker than the future they built in Night City. Refund requests are pouring in by the thousands. Lawyers and investors in Warsaw are circling the situation, contemplating a class-action lawsuit against the company for what one attorney described as potential criminal “misrepresentation in order to receive financial benefits.” Many gamers are swearing off playing Cyberpunk entirely until the company fixes all of the problems.
Cyberpunk 2077 was supposed to be a headline title for the new generation of consoles. Instead, it’s a cautionary tale on failing to meet expectations.
Getting started with fitness: walk, don’t run
With the new year here, many are thinking about fitness again. But maybe you don’t know where to start.
Here’s some simple advice from author and endurance athlete Mark Sisson:
Just start. You can build and refine as you go. But only if you start.
Fall in Florida?
Apparently, fall comes to Tampa Bay in January.
Our front yard:
Not exactly the stuff of hot cider and pumpkins. But we’ll take it.
Thank you for reading and sharing.
Please hit reply if you have questions, comments, or open rebuttals. (Or just want to say hi.)