On Writing
In boxing, you learn to throw the one, the two and the three: left jab, right cross, left hook.
These are the fundamentals, the basics. The left jab is the one — and so is writing.
The jab is the all-purpose punch, the rangefinder, your feeler, used for offense and defense and for speed. It’s the key punch that sets up all the others. When you boil your career down to the raw materials, writing is at the core of all of it, and it is the skill that can either make or break you.
For the record, I do not consider myself a very good writer, nor do I consider myself a writer any more than the next man. I am certainly not talented enough to be dispensing advice, and if advice is what you’re after, read Stephen King’s On Writing and Larry Phillips’ Hemingway on Writing. What I am here to advocate today is writing as a healthy habit, a hobby at the minimum, and something I strongly encourage people to take up for their own benefit — because if you don’t write clearly, you don’t think clearly.
“Most importantly, I believe you need to be a good writer. Look at Buffett; he’s one of the best writers ever in the business world. It’s not a coincidence that he’s also one of the best investors of all time. If you can’t write clearly, it is my opinion that you don’t think very clearly. And if you don’t think clearly, you’re in trouble. There are a lot of people who have genius IQs who can’t think clearly, though they can figure out bond or option pricing in their heads.”
The one thing I would add is that when you think about why Buffett is famous, it’s not necessarily for his investing acumen. There are hundreds of guys out there with better returns on capital. His writing ability is what makes him legendary. His mind operates at such a high level that he has been able to take complex investment concepts and boil them down into a sentence or two, epigrams and precepts that a fifth grader could understand. Be greedy when others are fearful, fearful when others are greedy. Price is what you pay, value is what you get. Rule #1 is don’t lose money, rule #2 is follow rule #1. If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die. He has a hundred of these straight-up bangers that have achieved immortality and will remain permanently enshrined in financial canon from now until the spontaneous heat death of the universe. These bangers are why he’s a household name, and the true hallmark of his brilliance, genius and wit is his ability to write with both clarity and brevity.
The fuel for this brilliance is the amount he reads, his infamous “500 pages per day.” Which brings us to our next point.
If writing is the one, reading is the two. The jab and the cross.
You, by virtue of being here at this very moment in time and reading this esoteric post written by a stranger on the internet, are a reader.
To be a reader without also being a writer is to short-change yourself. Because while reading is how you upload content, writing is how you test whether you retained and synthesized the content uploaded. To have one without the other is a waste of a beautiful symbiotic relationship: reading is input, writing is output. Inhale concepts, exhale content. Becoming a better writer makes you a better reader, and becoming a better reader makes you a better writer, because at the end of the day, you can’t write good copy if you don’t know what good copy looks like.
If you’re not reading, write. If you’re not writing, read. When you’re overthinking, write. When you’re underthinking, read. This constant toggle of reading and writing is how you get your mind operating like a machine as you practice the most basic fundamentals known to man, alternately throwing the one and the two.
“‘Did you write today?’
‘A little.’
‘Was it good?’
‘You never know until 18 days later.’”
No one is born a good writer. Like any other talent that can be honed, it takes a shitload of work. I can’t tell you how to write at a 10-out-of-10 level, because I’m nowhere near that rung of the ladder, but I can help someone walk the road to get from a 1 to a 5 and I can assist in removing some of the common mental stumbling blocks you’ll encounter.
I started writing around 2012 for career purposes. I was trying to land a job offer during graduate school, and in long/short equity your calling card is how well you can pitch a stock. This matters far more than your resume. It’s one of the beautiful parts of the industry, that there exists a genuine level of meritocracy within it. The guy who went to a state school and can pitch the fuck out of a stock in 90 seconds or less will get the job over all the private equity nepo babies. But before you get a chance to pitch in person, you have to pitch on paper, and that’s where your writing ability comes in.
The two parts of any pitch are numbers and narrative. The numbers are a much smaller part of a pitch than you would think. The first half of the first page is a summary table of numbers, the next ten to twenty pages are where you lay out the narrative that not just supports the numbers but brings the story to life. What is it about humans that makes us gravitate towards stories, I have no idea, but they fuel the stock market and they’re the reason why the best-selling self-help book of all-time is the Bible, with somewhere between five and seven billion copies sold. It’s all stories. Are any of them true, we don’t know and we don’t care — the power of the moral lessons buried in each story are what make it a timeless book and the foundational text of Western civilization. Anyway, my early stock pitches were sort of like the Bible, except the complete opposite. My writing was sub-par and my knowledge of the numbers was even worse than my writing.
This was when I started really putting in the work, sitting in the library at Columbia and skipping class to bang out stock pitch after stock pitch. I still have all of them and they are so bad that I don’t think there’s anything to be gained from posting them — I seriously believe that reading them could accidentally infect your subconscious, poison your brain and turn you into a worse writer, which is not why we’re here today.
By 2014, my writing had improved enough where I started landing interviews at megafunds. There was one major pivot point that stands out. I had made it to the final round for a fantastic seat at BlueCrest, a long/short analyst role covering Consumer & Retail for a portfolio manager that was both sharp as fuck and a really nice guy (a rara avis in the industry). I was given one week to write up stock pitches for two businesses, Tiffany and SABMiller, including fully-built out Excel models for each company. I wrote ten pages on each, Tiffany short, SABMiller long, then got to work on the models. This is an ass-backwards way to draw up a pitch, but like I said, I had holes in my game and my modeling skills were nowhere near what they needed to be.
Tiffany is a fairly straightforward business and my model had some semblance of structure and integrity, but SABMiller, thenceforth my Anglo-South African bête noire, operates in a billion different countries and has a billion different joint ventures and equity investments within a Byzantine org structure and I just couldn’t make any of it tie together. I knew the stock was priced attractively, I knew that there were qualitative trends working in favor of the business, but I just could not figure out how to build the goddamn model. I sent in everything at 11:30 PM on the night of the deadline.
When I went in for the final round interview later that week, he had me pitch him both businesses in-person as he just sat and listened. At the very end, he couldn’t have been more blunt. “Greg, you can write a damn good pitch and I fully agree with your logic on both the long and the short. Unfortunately, your models are so bad that I can’t hire you. I’m sorry.”
That was that. I was fucking crushed. I still have both models and he’s absolutely right, like, they are beyond embarrassing and totally useless. But as with anything that breaks your heart, good things came of it.
One, I pretty much went into solitude for three months and refused to come back outside until I had taught myself how to build a weapons-grade model. I was living in a disgusting studio apartment above a bakery on 14th and 7th that had both cockroaches and mice living in pestilential harmony. The apartment itself was so dilapidated that it was an insta-dealbreaker for girls who would walk in with some original intention of spending the night before looking around, doing a 180 and getting the fuck out of there. The place couldn’t even fit a desk. I would stay up late in the night sitting on the edge of the bed, balancing a laptop on my knees and practicing all the shortcuts for this Excel add-in called Macabacus until I had confidence that my models were bombproof. It worked, and it worked because rejection remains undefeated as the most powerful source of motivation this world has to offer.
Two, his compliment on my writing ability, the Parthian shot in tandem with the denial, gave me the confidence to start publishing long-form for public consumption. That was eleven years ago, and here we are.
The biggest mental stumbling block that people have a hard time getting over is exposing themselves to criticism. I covered this at decent length in On Criticism, but what I’ve found is that people are never really honest about this part. They never say “I’m afraid of criticism” . . . when that’s 100% what they are. They are controlled by fear. Every single reason a man gives you as to why he doesn’t want to write and publish for the American public is bullshit. You can replace what they say with two words: I’m scared. The same goes for every single person who posts from an anonymous account instead of posting from their real name. They will give you ten intelligent-sounding yet dishonest reasons why they do it, and they won’t give you the one honest answer: I am scared. Scared of speaking the truth, scared of personal accountability, scared of their hypocrisy being revealed, scared of retaliation, scared of their own flaws and shortcomings and dirty laundry being held to the light, scared of what people will say. . . I’m telling you, I have been hanging around this part of town for quite some time now, and every single one of these excuses is complete and utter bullshit. This is one of the few hills I’m willing to die on: in America today, there exists not one legitimate reason why a man shouldn’t speak out using his real name unless he’s a coward or he’s hiding something. That’s all there is to it and everything else is lies and excuses.
If you are someone who is struggling with fear, here is what I can say to help get you across the line. One, you are never going to improve as a writer until you are consistently putting yourself out there and letting the world shred you to pieces. It sucks at first, it’s painful to your delicate little ego, but the pain very quickly approaches zero in asymptotic fashion. Two, people are always going to talk about you. When you fail they’ll laugh at you, when you succeed they’ll try to bring you down, and at any given moment when you aren’t in the room with them, people are going to gossip about you behind your back. The only possible way to make people not talk about you is to hide under the covers for your whole life, dominated by fear, before unceremoniously dying a craven death.
There is always going to be some stupid motherfucker with something to say, and the only way to it is through it. If they don’t like what you wrote today, write something tomorrow and make sure it’s better than what you wrote today. If they don’t like that, give them something the day after. Warrior mindset, homie: I’m here, I’ll be here tomorrow as well, and guess what, I will also be here the day after that. Eventually they will either leave you alone or your writing will improve to the point where they can’t say shit. Most importantly, in this process of shaking the human equivalent of leeches off your cock, you will have built regularity, discipline and routine into your writing process. You just have to commit to putting yourself out there. Remember, you will never be shot at by another writer. Ever. It’s only the critics that shoot at you, the mediocrity chirping from the cheap seats in the bleachers. You can tell who the other writers are because they will be the ones showing courage and helping you up when you fall. This is one of the very few segments of life that is truly black and white: a man is either a spectator or a player, a critic or a participant. It’s 100% binary, and only you can determine which of those two groups you will choose to call your own.
The second mental block is along the lines of I don’t know what to write about.
For business writing slash self-help, which to be honest are both boring as hell and deserve every bit of contempt, scorn and denigration that they receive, the easy answer is to just write about whatever you’re allegedly an expert in. I’m not even sure expertise is a requirement anymore, you can be a total clown today and LARP as a successful entrepreneur or motivational guru until you get enough followers where people assume that you must have done something meaningful. It’s like the upper-middle class male equivalent of Kim K’s sex tape, where you have all these bizfluencers who are famous for being famous yet no one has the foggiest clue what, if anything, they’ve actually accomplished aside from being born on third base.
As for writing about life, the way around this mental block is to reflect on some of the greatest stories you have ever read. What you will find is that when you boil them down to a sentence or two, like, a lot of the shit that people write about is pretty ordinary! There’s the dolled-up version of the story that you see in the book description, and there’s the one-sentence version of the story stripped bare. A girl gets dumped, a guy goes to rehab, a stranger comes to town; the underlying plotlines don’t vary that much.
How many stories are written about love, compared to how many permutations exist for the actual endings of a real-life love story? He leaves or she leaves. That’s it. Maybe someone dies, maybe someone gets cheated on, but at the end of the day, there’s like ten variations versus the ten trillion love stories that have been written. What brings it to life is the author’s ability to speak truth to pain — Hemingway’s write hard and clear about what hurts — and if you can write about getting your heart ripped out in a way that makes the reader feel something, you will always find an audience.
It’s not the content that makes writing great, it’s the writer’s ability to shape the content. A bad writer can ruin an incredible story, a good writer can bring something totally bland to life. And so in terms of what to write about, like, write about whatever it is in your life where you think you can speak the truth in a way that will make the reader say: this perfectly describes the world as I see it. Thank you God, I’m not alone.
We have reached the end of the road from level 1 to level 5, and I, the Virgil to your Dante, must now leave you.
I hope this helps. If you need someone to read your writing who is guaranteed not to pass judgment, you can message me on X.
GB
