How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably | Steph Smith | How I Write Podcast — How I Write

Steph Smith is a writer, podcaster, and creator who has built a distinctive online presence through her writing, her podcast at a16z, her time at The Hustle, and her book Doing Content Right. In this episode of How I Write, she and host David Perell explore what it takes to stand out as a writer online, arguing that the real secret isn’t consistency or picking the right topic but developing a genuine voice rooted in your intrinsic interests and showing up in a way that’s different from everyone else.
- Distribution and distinctiveness are the two pillars of successful online writing. Distribution means having a tactical plan for getting your work into the world, through platforms like Hacker News, Twitter, Reddit, communities, newsletters, and direct outreach. Distinctiveness means cultivating a voice and style that makes people say there’s no one else like you, not just choosing a niche topic.
  - Writers often spend all their time creating and almost none distributing. Steph recommends a roughly 50/50 split between writing and actively seeding your work across platforms.
  - Distribution tactics that Steph used early on include posting articles on Hacker News, Lobsters, Reddit, Medium, and Dev.to; sharing in communities like Women Make and Work in Progress; building in public on Twitter; and doing direct outreach to people whose work she referenced in articles.
  - A concrete example: Steph wrote an article connecting Adam Grant’s Give and Take and Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies to dynamics in remote work. She reached out to both authors not asking them to share it but asking if they’d thought about that angle. Both engaged, and Rubin retweeted the piece. Her hit rate on this kind of outreach was very high because people genuinely enjoy hearing that someone is thoughtfully engaging with their work.
- Voice matters more than topic. People recommend newsletters and podcasts because of how they’re done, not what they’re about. There are countless business newsletters and true crime podcasts; what makes someone subscribe is elegance, depth, humor, or approachability.
  - Steph’s own voice, as reflected back to her by readers, is “approachable.” She pursues serious topics like coding or remote work in a way that makes everyday people feel like they could do it too. This wasn’t a calculated choice; it emerged naturally because she started writing from genuine excitement rather than from a desire to go viral or make money.
  - Miles Davis said, “Sometimes it takes a long time to be able to play like yourself.” Voice develops through consistent writing and feedback, not through following a recipe.
- The best ideas live in the center of your forehead, too close for you to see. Steph uses the metaphor of pressing your finger to your forehead: you can’t see the tip of your own finger, just as you can’t always see what makes your own perspective interesting. You need other people to reflect it back to you.
  - David’s example: he’s deeply fascinated by the New Orleans Square section of Disneyland, the way it blends French and American aesthetics, the jewelry shops, the narrow walkways, the Cajun and Creole food, and how it connects to the Mark Twain boat and the Haunted Mansion. Most people walk right past it. When he described this passion to Steph, she immediately said he should write about it. That’s the kind of intrinsic fascination that makes for distinctive writing.
  - Steph’s own version: she loves spreadsheets. Her eyes light up navigating shortcuts and building automated spreadsheets. One of her most popular articles is a love letter to Excel and its history. This fascination existed long before she wrote about it; the writing was the residue of years of genuine interest.
  - The practical takeaway: when you notice yourself getting animated about something in conversation, or when someone responds to you with genuine curiosity (“You do what?”), that’s a signal. Write it down immediately because these epiphanies are fleeting.
- Writing from intrinsic interest produces better work than writing from assigned topics. In school, you’re given a topic and a deadline and must build knowledge before writing. But the best online writing works the opposite way: you’ve already built up knowledge and curiosity over the course of your life, and writing is how you express what’s already there.
  - Steph’s writing process involves a long rumination period. She throws ideas into a Google Doc as they encounter her, sometimes over weeks, months, or even years. She doesn’t start with a title. She waits until there’s enough activation energy and she understands how she wants to say something, then she sits down and refines it.
  - Her article “How to Be Great” (which became one of her most well-known pieces) went through this process. She had the core idea about the long game and how people try to be wonderful in life, but she was missing the hook. She did keyword research and discovered that a surprising number of people literally Google “how do I become great.” That data point became the title and framing of the article.
  - Not every article should have the same word count or timeline. Some should be 400 words, some 4,000. Some should take a week, some a year. Giving each piece its own natural cycle lets the ideas that have staying power rise to the top.
- SEO and keyword research are underrated tools for writers, not for gaming algorithms but for understanding what people actually think. Google is one of the largest datasets in the world about what problems people struggle with and how they articulate them. Keyword research reveals not just what people search for but what secondary questions they have and whether interest in a topic is growing or shrinking.
  - The healthy middle ground: ignore black-hat SEO tactics and content farms, but don’t ignore the data entirely. Pair your intuition about what interests you with information about what billions of people are curious about.
- Visuals and graphics are a massively underused distribution tool. Writers focus on thumbnails but neglect infographics, data visualizations, and moving graphics. A single striking statistic presented visually can be worth more than a 3,000-word essay because it compresses a multi-decade history into something tight and shareable.
  - Derek Thompson at The Atlantic promoted a loneliness article not with a thumbnail but with a single statistic: “Americans have never spent more time alone than they do now,” with a screenshot from the essay. This taught readers something before they even clicked, pulling them into the piece.
  - Tools like Flourish now make it possible to create moving infographics in minutes, and Google has a dedicated search engine for datasets. Getting good at Canva, Figma, or data visualization can be a powerful differentiator for a beginning writer.
  - Branding through visuals matters. Jack Butcher’s Visualize Value uses a consistent black-and-white refined style; Tim Urban’s Wait But Why uses goofy stick figures. You’d never see stick figures on Jack’s site or polished graphics on Tim’s. Both are instantly recognizable because they made simple, consistent decisions about their visual identity.
    - Tim Urban didn’t use stick figure drawings until around post 250 of his blog. The thing he became known for took him a long time to discover, which underscores the value of just getting started and meandering until your voice emerges.
- Consistency is helpful but not sufficient. Showing up regularly can help you develop your voice, but it’s not a strategy for differentiation. In industries like golf, music, and writing, increased access to information and best practices has led to homogenization. The kooky, distinctive voices get smoothed out.
  - The difference between trying to be great and trying to be the absolute best in the world: if you want to be the best, you might need to converge on a proven formula. But if you want to have a fulfilling, distinctive creative life, leaning into your weird swing is wonderful.
  - One practical approach: take something serious and do what the serious players won’t do. Barstool Sports arbitraged ESPN’s buttoned-up approach by talking about sports the way fans actually talk about them. The Skimm did the same with news. You can also go super deep on something that seems surface-level uninteresting, or spend far more time on a beautiful infographic than anyone else is willing to.
- Personality and full-stack creation amplify distinctiveness. Steph learned to code not to become a developer but to have full control over how her projects look and feel. Her blog, her courses, and her tools are all built or customized by her, which means they carry her voice in a way that’s impossible when you hand everything off to contractors.
  - Kevin Kelly is an example of someone who has fully leaned into his own uniqueness. His home office is a museum of his obsessions, a 60-foot bookshelf filled with anatomy specimens and artifacts from his travels. There’s no gap between who he is on the page and who he is in real life. That alignment is what makes an N=1 life.
- The game you’re playing matters, and most creators don’t think about it clearly. Are you playing the Frank Ocean game, disappearing for long periods and returning with something deeply considered? Or the Casey Neistat game, vlogging daily and building an audience fast? Neither is better, but problems arise when what you’re doing and what you want are incongruent.
  - Steph structures her life to protect her creative integrity: she keeps a full-time job so that everything she creates on the side is purely driven by what she wants to create, not what pays the bills. This is a trade-off, but it gives her the space to let ideas germinate over years.
  - David uses the metaphor of the redwood trees at Muir Woods: they grow one ring per year over centuries, and their majesty comes from the fact that their growth can’t be rushed. When creative work becomes your job with employees depending on you, it’s hard to maintain that patience.
- Audience is best defined as “relationship at scale,” not raw numbers. Page views, likes, and subscribers are easy to measure but don’t capture what matters. The qualitative signal that Steph pays most attention to is the quality of emails she receives. When people write multi-thousand-word emails confiding in her about their lives or telling her that her writing about faith gave them courage to explore their own, that’s the real KPI.
  - David’s inbox has a similar pattern: he gets tactical writing questions, but increasingly he gets emails from people talking about faith, saying his writing gave them courage. That depth of response is a better indicator of resonance than any analytics dashboard.
  - Hacker News can bring 30,000 page views if you hit the top spot, but it’s a one-time spike. The same people don’t see your work repeatedly. A song sticks with you because you hear it over and over; an audience sticks with you because they keep coming back. Viral platforms are great for distribution but not great for building lasting relationships.
- Honesty and vulnerability are what people resonate with most. Steph’s most impactful writing isn’t where she tries to be smart or impressive; it’s where she shares her struggles, mistakes, and growth. This is also why early work often goes viral: when no one’s listening, there’s no performance, just raw expression.
  - MrBeast’s earliest videos were silly extremes like counting to a million. Porter Robinson’s breakthrough album Worlds was followed by a depressive period where he questioned whether to double down on what made him famous or evolve as a person. His next album, Nurture, was different and less commercially successful, but it was honest, and it set the stage for future growth. The challenge is maintaining that rawness once people are watching.
  - Steph herself hasn’t written on her blog in years partly because she feels the weight of expectation from her early success. She wants to write differently now but finds it hard to divorce herself from what people liked before. Recognizing that this expectation is mostly self-imposed is important.
- Music and poetry offer lessons for writers about encoding ideas. Music bypasses the rational mind and hits the heart. Repetition makes songs inseparable from who you are. The best writing has rhythm and musicality too: think of “Ask not what your country can do for you” or Eminem’s “His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy.” These stick because of how they’re structured, not just what they say.
  - Steph thinks about how to create taglines and ideas that stick the way songs do, with rhythm and internalization that lasts beyond the few minutes someone spends reading.
- If you’re teaching a writing class, start with helping students spot what’s interesting. Most writing education either assigns topics or gives no guidance at all. What’s missing is training your attunement to what’s interesting, which starts with understanding your own fascinations and developing intuition for what others will find interesting.
  - Steph’s exercise from her Trends days: ask new hires to send three trends, without writing articles or creating infographics. Just three things they find interesting. The differentiation in responses was immediately obvious and revealed who had a natural sense for what’s worth surfacing.
- The core thesis: there are 8 billion people, and you cannot differentiate by talking about the same things in the same ways. What’s unique to you is what you’re drawn to, what you spend an abnormal amount of time on, even if it sounds silly. Fifty years ago, those strange interests might not have found an audience. Today, the internet lets you find enough people who align with your particular weirdness. The secret sauce is leaning into that intrinsic interestingness rather than suppressing it to do what you think you should be doing.

Summary