Dickie Bush started a daily writing habit with a tight feedback loop to improve his thinking, get 10x more twitter followers, create an online movement and become a thought leader. He did all this in ONE year.
Dickie started out by using writing as a forcing function to understand information. He would use it to summarise, think through and interact with what he had learned. He started out by writing a weekly newsletter which describing everything he had learned that week. He also wrote an internal newsletter at work informing everyone of developments and news.
Around the same time he was writing his newsletter he also wrote a weekly blog post. He found however that he wasn’t getting enough visitors to his blog to get meaningful feedback. So he decided to post his blog posts as a series of tweets. Twitter is often seen as a double edge sword however it can undoubtedly get many eyes on your work fast.
Every Sunday he would spend two hours writing out 30 tweets and scheduling them out throughout he coming week. He did this for one month then looked at the analysis.
He compared the subject matter he enjoyed writing about the most and which tweets performed best to inform what he would write about going forward.
He repeated this process every month, ensuring he has a tight feedback loop on his writing.
Gaining momentum, Dickie then created the Atomic Essay. Atomic essays are mini blog posts, posted on twitter as a photo then when clicked on take up the whole phone screen. He found Atomic essays had the perfect feedback loop. They had to be enticing enough to be clicked on, and written well enough to read.
After seeing the success of his Atomic essays, he decided to share the template and create a 30 day challenge to help other people kick start their own writing habit.
And thus Ship 30 for 30 was born.
Since starting his experiments in writing and feedback loops in August 2020, Dickie has gained over 20K followers and regularly has over 300 participants in each Ship 30 for 30 cohort.
When reflecting on his writing and its results over the last year in a podcast Dickie used a James Clear quote to summarise his thoughts.
Writing is leadership at scale.
James Clear
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