In this lesson's episode, learn how best-selling authors refine massive bodies of work into timeless, useful books by focusing only on what truly resonates.

Learn how audience feedback from tweets to beta readers helps shape what stays and what gets cut and learn why the best books solve real problems quickly, making them worthy of your time and attention.

What do you think, you know, when you look at all the different ideas that you brought into this book, what, how did you select the universally, universally applicable

ones and maybe just some wisdom for other authors that are trying to figure out what to put

in their body of work versus what to leave out so that it has the highest chance of like commercial success.

Yeah. So I think my process is weird because I'm starting with a huge body of work. But I started

my napkin math is like there were well over a million words of like source material that I worked

from. everything that

all had ever shared publicly like went into the pot and I just tried to cook it all down and

cook it all down and the final book is like 40 maybe 50,000 words and it just is like doing a

giant jigsaw puzzle and so it's trying to like pick up every idea understand it figure out

which ideas it connects to how to create a thread through them. And, you know, my first draft, it's like funny in retrospect. My first draft was like 150,000 words. It was like a massive thing. And I sent it to my friends. And I was like, tell me what you think of the book. And they're like, all of them were were like I really liked what I read but I did not

shit. I was like okay thank you which parts did you jump to what did you skip like where you know

where were you excited to flip to and it was just a process of like cutting out anything that

didn't really vibe with people and And that was heartbreaking because there's a

bunch of stuff in there that I thought was really interesting that I loved that I wanted people to

know. And Tucker has got great lines that I've now adopted on this, which is like, nobody gives

a shit what you want them to know. Like they want what serves them. Like, who are you to? You're not prescribing. You're not lecturing. Like, they want what serves them. Like, who are you to?

You're not prescribing.

You're not lecturing.

Like, nobody wants to be on the receiving end of a lecture.

Deliver things that the reader wants.

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