Outlining 101: How To Organize Your Ideas To Write A Book 10x Faster

all right you want to dig into today's framework yeah this is so it's based on this thread that i did you know the the hook and this is true that's what i tell everyone i took me four years to write my first book took me four months to write my second book you know and now i essentially if you add up all the words i write in a week i basically write a book a week essentially and one of my biggest ahas over the past couple years is you ever look at a maze like if

uh if you were to explore through a maze and someone didn't show you the maze from a top-down perspective it's just you walked right into it right and the maze is dark and you gotta find your way through and they go here's a flashlight and you have to find your way to the end right that's what writing feels like to most people they walk into a maze it's pitch black they have no idea how big the maze is where the end is they have no idea where they're going it's just a bunch of walls going

in a bunch of different directions and you gotta find your way with a flashlight okay and that's what makes the process of creating anything but that's what makes writing so difficult and the reason that i know this is true right is if you have if you try and write something how do people write they write linearly okay what did we just do that's three steps forward in a maze every single word is a step forward inside the maze and you're trying to find your way to the end okay and so what happens is people take

three steps and then they go up no i wasn't supposed to go left i supposed to go right and then they go back and then they rewrite the first three steps and then they try two more and then they're like oh wait i wasn't supposed to take that right you're supposed to go left and then they go back to the beginning right and that's what makes the whole thing take so long it's very difficult okay and so the biggest change that i've had in my own writing process has been you don't want to start exploring

the maze until you understand where the end is right you don't want to go you put me into a maze give me my flashlight and move forward what you want is you want to raise your hand and go hey can i please ask for a bird's eye view before i begin my adventure they take you up in an elevator and you look down at the maze and you go oh here's the beginning and here's the end and i kind of get a sense of where i'm going right because the moment you know where the end

is all of a sudden now you have something very clear to work for okay and this is what's called creating an outline all right i just it's understand it's important to understand what an outline actually is and all an outline is is saying this is where you're starting and this is where you're ending now go on the journey it's ten times easier right so how do you create an outline how do you create an outline for a twitter thread an ebook uh your magnum opus book your course your free email course right whatever it is

that you're creating how do you assemble an outline well there's a handful of steps and we're going to walk through each one so that you can kind of internalize this framework so that every time you sit down to write this is not what you should do first if you start the writing process by writing you're already lost so just think about that if you start the writing process by writing you're already lost because you don't know where you're going okay so first we gotta figure out where we're going so we're gonna walk through the whole

thing okay so step one you do not do the title last the title is not a bow that you put at the top of your present the title is literally a sketch from this is where we're starting to this is where we're going and there's a very easy framework that i use all the time dicky uses this all the time every great copywriter uses all the time authors unconsciously understand this is what they're doing okay and the framework is called this how to outcome without the obstacle that's the title how to what do you want

without the what's the hard part okay so let's just let's just fill it in and if anyone if you want to throw in some options in the chat to play with let's do it okay how to make tons of money without working 60 hours per week all right now we know where we're going right how to build a house without having to build it yourself now we know where we're going right how to write something viral without having to use buzz feed titles it's very simple how to outcome without obstacle if you can't answer that

question you don't know what you're writing about okay so so all this whole idea of like i need to go right to figure it out maybe but you need this in order to begin what are you telling the person and why is it compelling right here's the outcome without the hard part all right so just for the sake of making this easy let's say dickie and i want to write about something that has to do with writing okay so how to become a digital writer without spending 120 k on an english degree okay so here's

where we're gonna here's what we're gonna explain to you right and because you're using this framework the reader immediately goes i understand what i'm gonna get right i'm gonna i'm gonna learn how to do this and i understand why this is so compelling i don't have to go spend this right okay so now we know where we're going all right so that's step one and i say this seriously the majority of your time should be spent figuring this out first like sit there and go through a couple iterations until you have that clear outcome without

obstacle you know and then once you land on one where you're like okay i think i think this is the one then you start building this out all right so already the interest and we're going to do this at every at every step when someone says i need to write a lot to know if it's a good book or to know if it's a good email course or to know if it's a good whatever no you don't real real quick drop in the chat is this is this a good book would you want to read

this you already know the answer whether it's yes or no you already have an opinion right because because it's clear right versus if this is just titled you know writing 101 we don't really have the pieces people are like i don't really know if that's for me right so you need to be able to answer this question okay so so we pick something now we go into step two step two is what are all the big ideas okay so again we're not writing right you are not going to write linearly that's not how this gets

assembled how you get assembled is you go what are all my main ideas all right and let's see we can we can make this a little group activity if i'm going to write about this let's throw some ideas in the chat what are all the different things the big ideas what are all the big things that i should probably cover in this right there's a dozen right building a daily writing habit yeah okay so here we go building a daily writing habit how to come up with ideas how to write irresistible headlines right the most

effective writing tools mindset development digital writer mindset what's the digital writer mindset now where to publish how do i get more exposure on my writing what are the best platforms to use right yeah how should we avoid distractions editing myself how do i avoid distractions right yeah where should i not publish okay so these are all just big ideas right now here's the thing this is the whole outline of your book this is the whole outline of your course this is the outline of your email course right because these are all the big ideas so

before you've even started writing you already know hey somewhere in here i need to talk about these 10 things right okay so how do you do this visually in a way that makes sense we go one by one all right idea one building a daily writing habit idea two how to come up with ideas idea three how to write headlines okay and you can do this visually if you want to but you go all right so these are all my big ideas all right now what are each one of these each one's a chapter each

one's an email in your sequence each one's a module in your course right because you know these are the 10 big ideas that i got i got to talk about right okay so now here's the question you go through and you do this do you need to write the entire thing in order to know whether your book is valuable or not whether to know if your course is valuable or not no of course not you just go to someone and give them this list and you go hey if i explain these 12 things to you

is this helpful and they go yes then you go great i now know that the thing that i'm writing is valuable or if they look at that list and they go actually i only really care about two of those things the other eight i don't really need help with what do you do you go back and you build another list right so your job this is this is what took me like 10 years to understand as a writer your job is not to sit down and write your job is to come up with what are

the most valuable ideas what are the most valuable things that i need to talk about for the reader what are the problems that the reader needs solved right and you can accomplish all of that without even writing a single page all you have to do is just make the list what are the 10 big ideas that you want to cover what are the 12 big ideas what are the eight big ideas right this works for a twitter thread when i sit down to write a twitter thread this is what i do what are the 10

ideas i want to share in this twitter thread right when i sit down to write a book what do i do what are the 10 big ideas that i want to share in this book okay so you just you go down the list okay then that's so that's step two all right step three then is we go okay well now that i've got a bunch of these what are all the sub ideas that go inside each one right and what are we actually doing when we do this we are outlining each chapter we're outlining each

tweet we're outlining each email we're outlining each module okay so building a daily writing habit just on that throw throw in the chat what are all the things that someone needs to understand in terms of building a daily writing habit what do we need to tell them well we need to tell them how to find and preserve your sacred hours right yeah the importance of writing anything okay find the most productive place in your apartment or house how about the importance of espresso right don't go a single day without writing a word right these are

all the things that we need to tell the reader just about this one point okay so again we haven't even started writing yet all we're doing is just saying what are the ideas what are all the things that we need to say all right then let's go to the next one how do you come up with ideas what are all the things that we need to say ideas are everywhere around you how about like a note-taking idea capture system how about taking inspiration from conversations how about curation versus creation right these are all things that

we need to cover in order for someone to understand well how do i come up with ideas right and so you just go down the list and you do this for each one of these sections and by the time you're done you're gonna have an entire page where the whole thing is already all it's done and you haven't written a single page linearly right because you have all the answers right so now let's make this even more just so you can really see it this is the this is the chapter or this is the module

or this is the email and then underneath it it's like section one how to find your sacred hours section two the importance of publishing right and each one of these is its own section okay so just look at this visually section three how to find the most productive place in your apartment right and you just keep going down the list right okay so now you open this and people go well how do i organize all my ideas well you already did and now to write and assemble this thing all you have to do is go

all right so i got a color in got a color inside the lines here and then i got a color inside the lines here and then i color inside the lines here and you do that for all your sub points all the way down and then the chapter is done the module's done the email's done whatever right so when it comes time to actually write the writing should you shouldn't be thinking about what to write about you already know right you go i'm writing about this thing broadly and in this section all i have to

do is tell the reader how to find their sacred hours that's it and then in this section all i have to do is tell the reader about the importance of publishing and then in this section all i have to do is tell the reader here's how to find the most productive place in your apartment and all of a sudden as dickie likes to say right it's all execution risk you know what to do you don't have to sit down and think all you have to do is sit there and go in this section for 500

words all i have to do is explain this one thing and if you do that over and over and over and over and over again you've assembled something giant that's it you haven't done any writing up to this point i think the big takeaway here is how little friction there is in writing something this long when you look at the very first step that cole took which was make a bullet point list of the main ideas you can do that anywhere the second an idea strikes say idea all the big main ideas that have to

do with it and you can do that on a walk i recommend doing that on a walk that's where i do almost all of my writing and it's funny how paul and i's methods kind of come together because this is exactly what i do i don't always map it out by sitting down most of the time i have an idea when i'm on a walk and i go idea every bullet that i know i'm gonna eventually fill in and boom i have an outline and i just tuck that away because then when i sit down

on my computer i'm not staring at a blank page i'm starting always with this outline and i'm immediately diving into it i can add to that draft over time if i know that hey this is going to be a little bit longer of a thread or a piece whatever i need i can kind of fill in just like cole did but not always sitting at your computer right recognizing that this is a multi-step process and you can write anywhere and it's not oh time to write right you're writing all the time you're always collecting ideas

you're always filling in the blanks yep that's exactly right and so the i just saw the golden question in the chat which is great i'm glad i'm glad that you you asked it uh jay is doesn't this require non-trivial fluency with your subject so yes why can i do this so quickly because i've already thought about all this stuff right so it's very easy to do this when you're dealing with something that you already know about right and so that's why a lot of what we talk about is hey like imposter syndrome only exists when

you're trying to do something that you don't actually know anything about right so like just share what you know two year test right but here's the thing is that this also works when you're trying to write something that you're learning or something that you want to learn okay this was me in ghost writing for years how do i write about things that i don't know anything about right and so how do you do it well we go back to this step okay first of all we have to know what is the outcome and what is

the obstacle so even if you're learning about something you should know i'm trying to learn how to get outcome without having to endure obstacle right you should at least know that and then the second step is well what are all the main ideas so as you learn and as you go on the journey yourself you go hey this is a big idea like i want to make sure that we cover this right or if you're like as a ghostwriter right i would have to go out and the first question i would ask is what are

all the big ideas what are all the things that everyone's talking about with this in 2016 i was ghostwriting for uh a guy who was deep in crypto i didn't know anything about crypto at the time super early too right and how did i ghostwrite for something that i didn't know anything about well the first thing i did is i went out and i was like what are all the big ideas here right what is bitcoin what is blockchain technology what does ethereum actually do what are all these you know zero knowledge proof algorithms like

what what are all the big ideas that people are talking about let me go educate myself on them and then now you have something to work with okay so a lot of times people ask like how does the role of research play in your writing yeah each one of these i might i might get to this step and go the most effective writing tools i i don't know i need to go spend five hours researching that but i already know the puzzle piece that it's fitting into right and that's the whole idea is that you

can understand the puzzle before you go and even figure out the content or go and do the research the puzzle is the same okay so this i i can't stress this enough i'm not lying in this first lead-in tweet like this was the biggest problem this is why my first book took so long this is why it took me so long to create products is because i was trying to do it in a linear fashion and so every time you sit down to write your goal is to start with this if you don't have a

working title outcome obstacle and you don't have your list of what are your main ideas here you don't have a project you don't have a shell you don't have a puzzle you gotta create the outline of the puzzle first and then you just fill it in and your life will be ten times easier and dicky can attest to it this is how i produce stuff in like 38 minutes because you just create the frame and then you just color inside the lines amazing and i it's simple and obvious almost that you should of course start

this way but it blows my mind that most people think that you just start writing and then you write all the way down the page and it isn't anything like that and it what i love is it's practical meaning this is the same way you write a tweet as it is a 50 000 word ultimate guide blog post or book right you start and you expand and as you think about the atomic writing process you can be sharing your outline for things as a listicle or a checklist or a bunch of different things as you

go where you're validating these ideas in real time right so if you took the main ideas here and was like i want to think are these really the main ideas i would turn this into a tweet and say you know the seven pillars of digital writing blank blank blank blank point blank what else would you add and i'd ask my audience hey what am i missing here right so when you have this outline it's just the beginning of your writing process then you take it to the feedback algorithms or feedback loops of twitter linkedin whatever

and start to post small you know quick win kind of content once you're doing that consistently then you know hey i have this follow-up question or you turn each of these sections in the into their own thread right it's the building blocks into a longer form piece where this turns into the ultimate guide to becoming a digital writer without spending 120 yeah it might take you three months to really write but once you have it that asset works for you forever so replace digital writing with whatever you want to write the ultimate guide to and

you're going to assemble it this way it's exactly how we assembled our in on running online.com so again i think this is just worth soaking on how powerful this framework is if you take it seriously and there's i see two really good questions that i want to want to cover here in the chat so one is oscar you asked where do you place things like quotes stories like how do you think about organizing that so let's kind of retrace so we have our what are our big ideas so each one is a chapter each one's

a module each one's a thing right an email inside of that we have our what are all of our sub ideas inside each one right and so when you break it out and you go okay here's chapter one section one which is just a sub idea right how you color inside the lines this is from a different deep dive a couple weeks ago if you remember how you color inside the lines are what are all the things that we can give someone we can give them steps we can give them examples right we can give

them case studies yeah we could give them quotes if we wanted to right we give them personal stories right so all of these things are over and over again you can see how even if you just take these right and you just put those in each section all you're asking yourself is like okay how to find your sacred hours what do i need to put in here is this does the reader need some steps here yeah maybe you know would it help to put a personal story hey for years i struggled to find my sacred

hours yeah that might be valuable right should we throw a case study in here hey and actually teaching ship 30 we noticed so many people struggle finding their sacred hours here's what happened when they did right so a lot of it is once you understand the puzzle pieces assembling the puzzles is really easy it's just a matter of taking the time and and understanding like what are the big ideas that you want to talk about and then just grouping things together okay so that's one side of it and then there's another one that's like the

counterpoint so yeah molina is what if you have too much content and you need to simplify right so this is where i spend the majority of my time here what am i saying all right what are the big ideas and if this list if you're like i want to write a book but this list is you know will just for sake of visual representation your list looks like this you don't have a list okay because what's happening here is you you're not differentiating between big idea important idea and sub idea right what what are like

that and create constraints for yourself like go i can only have 10 big ideas right i can only have eight big ideas can only have 12 big ideas right and then any other things that you come up with they need to fit inside one of those buckets right but if you just list everything out like this this is not there's nothing coherent here because you don't know what's the big idea what's the sub idea right and if you have too many big ideas you're probably trying to do way too much you haven't niched down enough

right so these are all just mental frameworks of how do you take something that you want to write about get rid of the unnecessary stuff put it into a frame and then color inside the lines if you can build that skill you can write anything anything but most people either write linearly or when they build their outline they do this and they just put a zillion ideas on the page with no rhyme or reason no you have to start with big idea sub ideas big idea sub ideas big ideas sub ideas and if you do

that then each right a book isn't a book a book is 12 blog posts reframe right a book is not a book a book is 12 blog posts so just make each thing its own standalone piece and if you organize it it's very easy questions anything i this i use this framework every single day so i thought it would be very helpful to kind of walk through it and share what are the variants to the framework right so i think my head jumps right away it's not without you just start changing the obstacle so not

without obstacle war but or but in x amount of time or even if you think blank right it could be a mental obstacle to be a time based off it could be a mindset it could be um a resources a age right how to start a business even if you're only 20 or xyz right so we could actually brainstorm what all the different obstacles are right and how you can solve a problem other than just without uh you know the white cold frame but even still like there's there's variations on everything but this is this

is the easiest one and this is the one that is it you don't have to be fancy about it you know it's just understanding that a story requires a conflict right a story requires a beginning and an end so here what is that it's outcome and obstacle you know so however you get to beginning and end right you start here you end up here however you get there is fine but the easiest way of thinking about it is outcome and obstacle he would you so what about the first line opener what gets fun is once

you're coloring in the lines you have your own frameworks for doing that coloring in the line right very first sentence i need some kind of credibility or some kind of moment in time right are we talking about our six one sentence openers you just kind of you have i've watched cole do this as he assembles his writing and it's okay i'm coloring in the lines here bang how am i gonna open this how am i gonna add texture how am i going to format like you have this writing toolkit from the very beginning that once

you start diving in you're just digging in and saying okay now i need a piece of credibility how do i have credibility on this right on the blank keep going this is why we say you should not sit down and create something massive a book an ebook an ultimate guide of course whatever if you have not first done a twitter thread that at least shares your big ideas or even an individual tweet that's like these are the five biggest ideas that this category of person would be thinking about these are the five biggest problems that

i want to solve right it's so easy to validate so why would you go spend in my case four years writing a book where you have no idea if any of the things you're talking about are the right problems right and so it's it's hard and molina i see your your comment in the chat is like what if you don't want to go get the feedback well then don't be surprised with the result right if you don't want to take the time to to go through the steps and really understand if you're solving the right

problems then don't be surprised if you put something out into the world and the world goes that wasn't the right problem i'm not giving you my attention right so if you break it down into something that's very actionable you should be able to test each one of these things as you go along you know there's no reason why you can't write a twitter thread in the next 30 minutes that validates are these the 10 biggest problems if they are expand that twitter thread and do an ultimate guide expand that ultimate guide into a book right

it's so easy now because we have technology and yes uh the same works for the title if no one knows this story um you can do this in a bunch of different ways but when tim ferriss was coming up with the head the title for the four hour work week it originally was not supposed to be titled that he had a different title idea but he wanted to validate it so he ran a bunch of google ad campaigns with like 20 different title ideas and he saw which ones got the most clicks the one that

got the most clicks was four hour work week that was his title right funny i have a funny addition to that because i i'm just a tim ferriss geek so four hour work week was the second most popular the first most popular was drug dealing for fun and profit and that one uh clearly didn't make the list but it was funny that that was number one and then four our work three was number two he's like i'm not going to go with drug dealing fun and puppet i i think i'm getting that story right but

i've heard him say before um but that made me laugh when i first heard it because it's like don't assume run a test and it worked yeah that's awesome i actually didn't know that that's cool um but yeah that's and and we talk about this with lean writing all the time why why did uh mark manson title his book the subtle art of not giving a because the name of his most popular blog post was the subtle art of not giving a why did malcolm gladwell title his book the tipping point because his most popular

article was called the tipping point right we talk about these things over and over again because they they work they matter they're real so take your ideas and if you're like i want to go and spend the next three years of my life building the most legendary course the world's ever seen well then you better have some data that says each one of these modules is solving the problem that people have and if you're and if you've got that ego investment being like well i think this is right but you haven't shared it you haven't

gotten any feedback you have no data you haven't talked to anybody then do not be surprised when you put your course or your book or whatever out into the world and nobody pays attention because you skipped the most important step right so that's why this this is one of those things where like it takes a little bit of reorienting but if you internalize this your speed and your quality of creation goes up 10x because you know exactly who you're creating for and you know how to assemble the frame in record time record time hmm i

need to soak in this i need to soak on this awesome drop in the chat this helpful what's your big takeaway here what do you put into practice right away crystallize it if you're watching this on youtube throw a comment what's the biggest thing you're taking away here what are you going to go outline uh what's the golden nugget because sometimes it's easy to watch these sit feel like you're learning what are you going to put into practice immediately if if bearcat that's a great question what does it mean if you can't elaborate on an

idea or a sub idea it means that it wasn't as valuable as you thought right if you put an idea down and then you're like oh wait there's really nothing here don't keep the idea right kick it to the curb it's that's your big idea is you should look at and be like wow i could write about this for years right so that's that's the whole point is you're differentiating between what's really there and what's not