In this episode, Roy talks with author Eric Ries: software engineer, accidental blogger, initially-reluctant public speaker, and author. His first book was The Lean Startup, which gave the startup world its vocabulary. And his newest is Incorruptible, about how to help companies stay true to what they originally set out to do.

We learned that the writing comes last. Eric spent years trying out metaphors that fell flat, meetings that went nowhere, and typing out blog posts on a Palm Treo keyboard at a Starbucks on Sand Hill Road. This all happened before a single word of the manuscript existed.

A book isn't a longer blog post. And understanding the difference between those two mediums is most of the work.

The most important thing an author does is collect. From academic papers to weird governance ideas, and stories that don't make it in the published edition. You're like a baker gathering ingredients before you know what you're baking.

Eric dives into the inner life of the job and walks us through his journey: what it means to have your ideas escape and stop belonging to you, the strange “optimal level of fame” where people know your work better than your face, why the feedback is almost always about the reader and not about you, and what it's actually like to write and rewrite, and rewrite again.

This Is Not Advice is Roy Bahat's attempt to understand every aspect of a job directly from the people who do it. Roy is a startup investor focused on the future of work at Bloomberg Beta and an MBA professor.

Chapters:

00:00:00 – Preview

00:3:20 Becoming an author in the first place

00:54:00 Getting ideas

01:18:00 Making the work (crafting the writing)

02:23:00 Selling the work

02:45:39 Communicating about yourself and the work

03:59:30 Progressing your career

03:02:42 Understanding and improving the system

03:08:018 Final words: What should someone considering entering the occupation do?

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