Have Wonder

I sometimes get asked what to write about,¹¹ In my case that usually means for startups. and one hack I’ve used to explain it is: have wonder.

One way to get to wonder into what you write is to explain the making of. After years in any industry, company, or function, you become inured to the magic of producing whatever you produce. You’ve been around it for too long, so it’s hard to see it as magical.

But to an outsider, it is.

Many aspects of making something can be interesting to an outsider. Making sets for a broadway play, what it takes to give mice cancer in animal studies, how makeup is formulated. Day-to-day, these things are someone’s job that they get bored with just like anyone gets bored. But to someone who doesn’t do that, it can be interesting.

Here are some non-branded examples that have stuck with me over the years:

• Making perfumes

• The linguistics of texting²² I believe that this type of “have wonder” content is what made TED so successful in its heyday. This was in the time when most of the talks were more about how things work and less about changing the world. Another favorite is Lessons from an Ad Man.

• What happens to a stolen bicycle

• Airlines are just banks now

• How sound effects are made

The “making of” trick works because it plays on two things simultaneously that seemingly conflict, and the tension is memorable.

When you see something done at an exceptionally high level, it inspires awe. Imagine watching a ballet dancer who has trained for twenty five years performing steps exquisitely with a body you could never have, or reading the cover paper in Nature about how a scientist brought a new framework to a field you didn’t know existed, or reading the prose of a writer who brings together words you didn’t know with such precision you have to reread and reread. To behold extraordinary expertise is inspiring. But unless you are still young (or feel young), it also can feel impossible to achieve:

“I could never do that!”

On the other hand, learning how awe-inspiring products (art, writing, technologies, startups) are made is eminently relatable. There’s always weird shortcuts, tricks, mistakes, and quirks. And those feel similar to the weird quirks in our own lives. So we end up relating:

“I could totally do that!”

Which is cool, because we are also in awe of it.

For me, I know I will never write prose like David Brooks or Anne Lamott, but I do feel like I could crawl around on the floor compiling scribbles, notes, and papers or teach basic writing in Sunday school to a local community. That’s the trick doing its work.

To write (or shoot, take, draw) this type of content, you have to be an anthropologist. You just landed on planet startup, and you are trying to figure out how it works. You are watching yourself do what you do.

Once you see something ordinary to you through an outsider’s eyes, the magic creates itself. That’s because in order to explain it, and explain why it’s interesting, you have to give a lot of context. And that context is storytelling. Ben and David, probably two of the best storytellers on the planet right now, do this implicitly. Less than 20% of Acquired episodes are analysis or facts.

More importantly, they play on the trick: they tell the history of the best companies in the world (I could never build Nike!) but they explain the shortcuts, messy mistakes, and quirks of the companies while doing so (but I have had random dreams with random words in them!).³³ According to Acquired, this is how Nike was named.

Another way to write have wonder content is to explain technical concepts, with awe, at an approachable level. I’m not an engineer but I want to understand how AI works, I’m not a climate scientist but I want to understand how field data is gathered, I’m not an academic but I want to understand language as if I’m still a college linguistics student.

This type of content is hard to produce at first. It takes technical expertise (mastery) and a sense of what is and isn’t interesting to an outsider.⁴⁴ It’s easy to identify content that isn’t written this way. Explaining things without awe (a manual), or wonder but for an insider (Feynman), or content that’s clearly meant to sell (much of the internet).

One helpful thing though: it’s what you know. If you work at a startup, write about what your company does, with the single twist of an altered perspective. Insider to outsider.

Some branded examples I like are Cloudflare post-mortems or the famous (and controversial) OKTrends blog from OKCupid circa ~2009.

The tone that pulls the outsider in is wonder. Just ask anyone who has young children. Wonder is contagious.

And the thing that makes it stick is the trick of layering the impossible with the relatable.