On content quality
Avoid "money content" like the plague. Devour content written for the subject's sake.
Bad writing—whether you consume or create—is a result of trying to cover the page despite having nothing to say; this often happens when a person writes solely for the money. Arthur Schopenhauer said it best in his essay, On Authorship:
The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say.
You’re all too familiar with this, am I right?
Huge websites posting “291 tools you NEED to use right now”—instead of tools for thinking—day after day. Really?
Not to mention obnoxious YouTube clickbait named “This will make you [good result] in [exagerrated amount of time]” with red arrows all over the thumbnail.
You’d think that mass producers of content don't care one bit about your attention, and you’d be right.
Sure, they want their articles to look professional and seem helpful, but they’re more inclined on making them clickable and shareable; anything but insightful.
Let me ask you: How often have huge “authority” websites changed your decisions for a day? for a week? for a year?
They might have the most information on a single topic, but often they don’t have the best.
“For crying out loud, Al, we’re talking about free information!”
Monetarily, yes. But you’re paying a far higher price: your attention.
If we’re talking about opportunity costs, the time you spend reading 30 articles on productivity tactics this week could’ve been used to find that single article that helps you think about productivity for yourself.
In productivity, for example, if you’ve just read a few high-quality ones that gives you tools for thinking and lets you design your own workflow, then the rest of your time are freed up for actually getting stuff done!
I admit, I was guilty of creating these types of content in the past. I even started a blog just to make money! All while posting garbage anyone can either:
Easily think of by themselves
Easily find by themselves in one Google search
In short, nothing was original—I had nothing to say yet I wrote to make money. That, in my opinion, was far worse than these big sites.
Just to be clear, I’m not at all saying everyone who writes in exchange for money is a bad writer—no. Mark Manson and Tiago Forte, for example, both have subscription sites that have the most excellent content I’ve seen on the web! David Perell, another prolific writer, tells us why: (emphasis mine)
If you have the means, pay for the content you consume. Even better if it’s a subscription, where the creator is optimizing for lifetime value. That way, you know their incentives are aligned with yours. The logic of the business model dictates the content. Most ad-based content is optimized for clicks, and most paid content advertises for engagement. Ad-supported content is fine, but don’t make it your default. Attention is too valuable to waste time on most free content.
Therefore, the only trouble is when a writer has nothing to say, but writes for money anyway.
In that case, what content are the most worthwhile? The first one, subscription-based content. The second, older books.
Why? Because older books were mostly written for the subject's sake, while newer books are the opposite.
There were no incentives to write ideas back then other than to advance knowledge, or to persuade people. And as far as I know, it’s even risky to do that back then. Either way, it is safer to read what has been written a long time ago; they survived the filter of time—the massacre of crappy ideas—after all.
To quote Arthur Schopenhauer again:
The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little.
Now then, where should you start?
The best choice, I believe, are books and essays made by the masters—inventors, discoverers, thinkers, and field founders. They are most likely to change how you think.
Reading great thinkers allow you to borrow their thought patterns for a bit.
By the time you’re done reading a piece, you’ll be seeing problems—the world, even—in a different way. You’ll also maximizing the rate of great ideas entering your brain, and therefore improving your own ideas at the same time. In other words, you’ll gain new tools for thinking.
That, for me, is the best thing a piece of writing can ever give a reader. It goes both ways, too. When content lasts in the readers’ mind, so does the writer.
The best part of this is you can guarantee these thinkers wrote content for the subject’s sake, no matter what era they lived. That’s because they genuinely had something to say.
In case you’re interested, here’s what I’m reading now and have enjoyed lately:
You and Your Research by Richard Hamming. Hamming is a mathematician who’ve also worked with the father of information theory, Claude Shannon. The way he thinks is just brilliant—I’m not finished with this, though.
On Reading and Books by Arthur Schopenhauer. This one is my favorite so far. Schopenhauer’s thinking becomes increasingly relevant today. For context, his essays were written in the 1800’s. (Also that link is a goldmine for old essays and classics)
Mental Efficiency (Chapter 1) by Arnold Bennett. When we feel weakness and bodily insecurity, we cure it with some resistance training, but why is it that when we feel the same thing with our brains, we don’t even do mental calisthenics? This book has persuaded me to do that. (more appropriately, this chapter.)
Of Studies by Francis Bacon. This guy invented the scientific method—no joke. Reading him is a no-brainer. The other translations were still archaic, though.
Alright, it’s 3:30PM already and the sun’s burning me through this window near my computer—I’ll leave that to you, and soon enough I’m gonna post about this topic at length on my site.
Let me know if you want more of this! Have a great day!