Yesterday, I shared the best strategy I’ve learned to build an audience (see here). It’s timeless and builds credibility. It’s the strategy Warren Buffett and Paul Graham use. The strategy is this: share what you learn with others. Said differently, if you learn or figure something out, don’t hoard that wisdom. Share it with the world.

The strategy is simple enough, but it’s not easy. Lots of people share what they learn, but most of them haven’t accrued the credibility that Buffett and Graham have. What gives?

Executing this audience-building strategy and achieving the outsize results that Buffett and Graham are underlain by some critical fundamentals. Many people skimp on them, and their efforts don’t pay off as well as they could. Here are some that I’ve noticed Buffett, Graham, and others have embraced that made all the difference:

• Prioritize learning – This is the key element that most miss. Heck, I missed it when I first started this blog. Everyone has a reservoir of wisdom they’ve accumulated from living and working that they can share. You can start by sharing your reservoir, but it will drain if you’re not refilling it by learning faster than you’re sharing. When it’s empty, you no longer have anything of value to share with your audience, you lose their attention, and your audience shrinks. To keep adding value to your audience by sharing what you learn, you must learn at an accelerated pace. This means you can’t be haphazard about learning; you have to make it a priority. You must seek out resources around topics you’re interested in and consume them regularly. It’s no coincidence that people who’ve built audiences by sharing what they learn are also avid daily readers. Buffet reads 500 pages a day (see here).
• Writing – You don’t have to think clearly to speak “well,” but you do have to think clearly to write “well.” Writing down what you’ve learned forces you to think clearly and understand a topic deeply. It also forces you to figure out the best way to communicate it to others. Once you’ve written it down in a way that others can understand, you’ve cemented your understanding of the topic in your brain and made it easier for you to speak “well” about the topic with extreme confidence. Someone who speaks well will be liked, but someone who writes well (and by extension speaks well) is always held in much higher regard.
• Consistency – The point of building an audience is to get people’s attention. Once you get their attention, your job isn’t done. You must keep their attention going forward. The best way to keep their attention is to have them coming back for more. If they know you’ll share thoughts on a regular schedule, you’re more likely to keep their attention. The best audience builders who share their learnings pick a schedule and stick to it. Warrant Buffett only releases an annual letter, but people know when to expect it, and they eagerly anticipate it. He keeps their attention and maintains their interest by consistently dropping that letter once a year in the same month. Pick a frequency, communicate it, and stick to it to keep your audience’s attention.
• Perseverance – Building an audience around sharing in writing what you learn isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon. It takes time for people to find what you’ve shared. So, don’t expect results or praise to come quickly. Howard Marks is a billionaire distressed-debt investor who is the founder of Oaktree Capital. He writes two or so long-form “memos” every year that explain investing concepts and current market conditions. He started writing these memos and sending them to his clients in 1990. He wrote them into a void for a decade. A decade! It wasn’t until 2000 that anyone acknowledged receiving or reading his memos. His 2000 memo went the equivalent of viral in the investing world. See more here and here. Now, his memos are eagerly anticipated, widely read, and praised by the smartest minds in the world. I read or listen to each memo the week it drops.

To sum up, building an audience by sharing what you’re learning is simple but not easy. To execute the strategy effectively and achieve outsize results, you must accelerate your learning (about things you’re interested in), write down what you’ve learned, be consistent with your sharing, and commit to sharing for a long period, regardless of feedback.

If you embrace these fundamentals, sharing what you learn can help build an audience in a timeless manner that enhances your credibility in the minds of your audience and engenders immense loyalty.

If you don’t believe me, look at the sharing journeys of Warren Buffett, Howard Marks, Paul Graham, and others.

I’ve noticed more people building audiences (think followers on X, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc.) and then creating solutions to problems they learn about from audience feedback. When the solution is built, they then have ready-made distribution. They point their audience to the solution they built. It’s a reverse-marketing approach (build an audience, then a product) that I’ve seen be highly effective for some people, so I studied it.

I’ve learned about lots of ways to go about building these audiences. Some are timeless; others, a flash in the pan. Some are questionable and erode trust; others build credibility and trust. The ones that interest me are timeless and build credibility. They’ve worked historically and will continue to work in the future. You build long-term trust with the audience by adding value to them.

So, what’s the best strategy I’ve found that meets these criteria? It’s simple, actually: Share what you learn. I’ve noticed that people who take the time to share their wisdom build loyal audiences who respect them highly. No selling or upsells. Just free game anyone can consume. This strategy is tried and true. So, who are some people who’ve used this strategy to build audiences?

• Paul Graham – The founder of Y Combinator is also a prolific blogger. Graham has an essay section on his blog that people rave about. These essays are long-form distillations of Graham’s understanding of topics. They are often quoted widely by founders and investors. Some were written many years ago, but the wisdom in them is timeless and still shared and written about. Like this one from 2004 about making wealth or this one from 2006 about doing what you love. Timeless wisdom led to timeless content that attracted a huge international audience on the internet.  
• Warren Buffett – The Oracle of Omaha is often regarded as one of the best investors ever, but if you think about it, he’s really operating a mix of a hedge fund and a private equity (PE) firm in a single firm. Lots of people have generated amazing returns by founding hedge funds and PE firms. But most people don’t think as highly of them as they do of Buffet. Why is Buffett different? Buffett isn’t just an investor; he’s also a teacher. He puts a tremendous amount of time and energy into sharing what he’s learned with others. For decades, he’s written an annual letter (spending months to do it) that he distributes widely (see letters back to 1977 here). Also for decades, he’s held an annual meeting at which people can ask him anything. He’s written countless articles in various publications sharing his thoughts, investing principles, and (in his early days) stock picks. He’s given so many CNBC interviews that CNBC created an archive and dedicated a portion of its website to it (see here). By sharing what he knows, he’s built a loyal base of disciples (an audience) who hold him in high regard. Many people followed his value-investing principles (which he borrowed from people like Ben Graham and Philip Fisher) and became rich, thus cementing his credibility.

These are just two examples; many others have had outsize success with this approach.

This sounds like a simple strategy, and it is. But after digging more, I’ve learned that although it’s simple, it’s not easy. There’s a critical component of the strategy that’s necessary to make it work, and it, too, is simple but far from easy to execute.

This post is already pretty long, so I’ll share that critical part in tomorrow’s post.

The beginning of this year was full of frustration and pain related to sharing and tracking the books I’d read (see here). My Google Sheet wasn’t cutting it anymore, and I couldn’t share it publicly (it’s pretty crude). That led to my adding a Library section to this site in February, which I’m happy with. The look and feel will get tweaked more, but the functionality is just what I was aiming for.

I mainly read biographies about entrepreneurs, and I want a way to track and share my research about these people. The process has been slow, with starts and stops, but I now have a better idea of how I want it to work. So that’s the current side project I’m working on for this site. Hopefully, I’ll have something to share in a few weeks that you’ll find useful and that will help you learn more about entrepreneurs too.

One of my friends, whom I’ve known for decades, told me I do a great job of researching and of learning about topics at a deeper level than most. He said that’s the reason he comes to me when he has an idea or wants to talk through something—I can often share a piece of information I’ve learned along the way and point him toward an article or other resource he finds useful.

He suggested that I link to more things I find interesting on my blog instead of primarily sharing when people ask. He thinks people would find the curation helpful.

I like this idea, but I’m not sure what it would look like in practice. I do share some links or resources today, but I don’t share most of what I consume. I’ll think more about this, because I like the idea of being more intentional about regularly sharing the resources I’ve found valuable via this blog.

Let me know what you think.

Ever since I read James Webb Young’s  A Technique for Producing Ideas a few weeks ago, one of its ideas has been in the back of my mind: the importance of learning a principle before a tactic when trying to master something.

Here are a few passages from the book about this:

“In learning any art, the important things to learn are, first Principles; and second, Method.”

“Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up, of what Dr. Robert Hutchins has called rapidly aging facts. Principle and method are everything.”

“We may know all these [advertising tactics] and still not be an advertising man, because we have no understanding of the principles and fundamental methods by which advertising works.”

“On the other hand, we may know none of these [advertising tactics] but have insight into advertising principles and method, so that employing technicians to help us we may produce advertising results.”

“Thus we sometimes see a manufacturer or merchant who is a better advertising man than his advertising agent or manager.”

I’m not sure how other people approach this, but I haven’t been intentional about learning principles first when I’m trying to master something. I’m intentional about focusing my reading and knowledge consumption on information specifically related to the topic. But I haven’t thought to prioritize starting with a book or podcast that explains principles. It happens sometimes, but it’s random.

The more I’ve thought about Young’s approach, the more sense it’s made. Principles are the foundation that isn’t likely to change, while tactics and methods evolve with the times. Understanding the principle is key to understanding why a current tactic is valid and to being able to experiment to find its replacement if it becomes ineffective.

I suspect that Young’s approach applies to learning in general, too. To understand concepts (even if you don’t plan on mastering something), it’s best to seek out and understand the principles and then seek out tactics that others have used. Doing so will result in better comprehension and retention, or so I think. I’m going to test this theory as I learn about copywriting this summer (see here).

I’ve been learning more about copywriting, which most people think of as writing that makes people buy something. That’s true, but it’s more than that. It’s about persuading or influencing someone, but with the written word instead of oral communication.

I’m not great at persuasion, but I’ve always wanted to get better, which is why I’m curious about copywriting. When I read the biographies of advertising and public relations entrepreneurs Albert Lasker (see here and here) and Edward Bernays (see here), I realized that I don’t understand the fundamentals of persuasion. Before I dive into the tactics of writing persuasively, I want to learn the principles underlying them.

Influence is a famous book by Robert Cialdini. I’ve heard nothing but good things about it, and it’s been mentioned in several biographies as having an outsize impact on entrepreneurs. I’ve owned this book for several years but never read it. But that’s about to change—I’m going to read it soon. I hope it helps me understand the principles of persuasion so the tactics I learn regarding persuasive written and oral communication will be more effective.

I listen to YouTube every day. It’s one of my preferred daily learning methods (see here). I even pay for the premium version, and it’s money well spent. As I’ve ramped up my use of YouTube, I keep running into the same pain point. Today I hit it again.

A few weeks ago, I listened to an interview on YouTube in which an entrepreneur shared one of his tricks for improving his decision-making when something isn't working. It was a good trick that stuck with me (high level, at least). Today, I wanted to use it but couldn’t remember the specifics. I tried to find the interview without success. I know who said it, but I don’t know which YouTube video he said it in.

It’s a pain not being able to quickly find a specific segment of a YouTube video I’ve watched. My current workaround is to search through my viewing history and try to figure out which video is the right one. Then, I search through the transcript to find the segment I’m looking for. Sometimes I find it, and sometimes I don’t. But in all instances, it’s a painful experience.

I’d love to use a tool that looks at my YouTube history, indexes the transcripts of the videos I’ve watched, and helps me identify the segment I need via a simple chat interface. I’d happily pay for this because it would enhance my learning and give me a repository of all the information I’ve consumed on YouTube.

If you know of a tool that can solve this problem, please let me know.

A few days ago, a friend told me about Reducto. The company just raised over $24 million from venture capital firms to solve the problem of unstructured data in PDFs by making it usable. It structures the text in PDF documents so you can feed it into other systems, such as LLMs or your own applications.

Some companies are building solutions that require information from PDFs to be fed into their software to achieve a desired output. They spend a significant amount of time figuring out how to extract unstructured information from PDFs, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. The issue is that this isn’t what these companies specialize in, so it takes them a long time to figure out. In many cases, they build something that’s decent but not great. Reducto’s PDF-processing service lets them skip mastering PDF extraction. They use the output from Reducto and focus on the more important aspects of the solution they’re building.

I spent some time playing with the tool’s free version. A few notes:

• Reducto can scan any document and turn the entire document into structured JSON. The free version has a 30-page document limit.
• The tool is incredibly good at extracting information from charts, which isn’t easy.
• There are many useful settings, including extraction method, chunking method, and more.
• The tool has an API, which is great for automation.
• If you need the extracted data formatted in a particular way, you can create a schema in Reducto, and the output will be formatted using your schema. I love this feature.

This is an impressive tool that solves a boring but big problem for companies. I can see companies quickly agreeing to pay for this service, which likely led to rapid growth in revenue and caught the attention of venture capital investors.

I get the impression this service is built for enterprise clients. I wonder if Reducto plans to offer something that’s more suited to small or midsize companies.

I’m committed to reading a book a week to learn and improve. Usually it’s a biography or autobiography because I get the most from reading about entrepreneurs’ journeys. I’m also committed to sharing what I’m reading in the library section of this site. Each week, after I read a book, I share it in my Learning Library, as it’s called now. My goal is to post a new book every Sunday.

This week, I shared a biography I read about Charlie Munger. Several books have been written about the life of his business partner, Warren Buffet, but I wanted to learn about Charlie’s journey, too—specifically, how he came by his multidisciplinary way of thinking and solving problems.

Damn Right! was just what I was looking for. Not only did it offer great insights into Charlie’s early career and tragedy, it also included great context about his businesses before Berkshire (including his hedge fund), his personal life, his quirky personality, and his commitment to multidisciplinary learning.

If you’re interested in learning more about Charlie Munger, consider reading Damn Right! by Janet Lowe.

This week, I connected on X (formerly Twitter) with an investor who’s an avid reader. He does a great job of sharing what he’s reading and what he’s learning from the books he reads. From what I can tell, he’s a fan of biographies and investing books, as I am.

When I interact with avid readers who also share their learnings publicly, I get excited and curious to learn about their process. I’ve struggled with managing and later finding highlights in books I’ve read (see here). I’m trying to solve this problem for myself or at least reduce the pain. I asked this investor and learned that he’s doing a lot of what I’m doing: manual highlighting and making notes in physical books.

One thing he does stuck with me: He extracts quotes from books and stores them in a file, sorted by quote type. Retrieving a quote when he needs it is significantly faster than if he had to find it in one of many physical books.

Even though I send friends quotes from books all the time (by sending pics of the page with the quote highlighted), I don’t keep all the useful quotes I’ve read in a single place.

I’m glad this investor took the time to share his process with me. His approach to storing quotes is something I’ll replicate going forward.