How to articulate yourself intelligently

Dan Koe spent a decade going from someone who couldn't string together coherent thoughts to someone millions of people subscribe to. Not because he's entertaining or funny. He's actually quite boring, by his own admission. The secret is building an inner album of greatest hits: 8-10 of your biggest ideas that can be connected to almost any topic. When it's time to write or speak, you have a starting point you've already thought through hundreds of times. You're not scrambling to sound smart. You're remixing proven material.

The beginner method is PAS: Problem, Amplify, Solution. Craft micro-stories using this framework. The intermediate method is the Pyramid Principle. Start with the main idea (your conclusion or recommendation), support it with 3-5 key arguments, then provide detailed evidence. Unlike most content that waits to give you the answer at the end, this takes an answer-first approach. If someone asks Alex Hormozi "What's the greatest skill to learn?" and he answers "The single greatest skill you can develop is the ability to stay in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about," that's the top of the pyramid. Then you support it with why and how.

The advanced method is cross-domain synthesis. The best podcast speakers don't answer the question the host asks directly. They don't say "Umm well, good question, I've talked about that topic before and here's the answer." They connect the question to one of their big ideas and riff from there. This only works if you've repeated yourself thousands of times. By nature, you must repeat yourself, because the most important ideas deserve to be repeated, and how else are you going to refine them?

The pattern Koe discovered: you can't articulate yourself intelligently by memorizing entire books worth of information so you can recite it on the spot. That's being good at taking tests, which is a different skill than stringing together coherent thoughts and communicating them to someone else. You need to write or speak thousands of times until your best ideas are obvious. Think of these big ideas as tweets. For each content pillar, you have a few short-form ideas you've written that hit hard. When you need them, they're ready. You're not improvising. You're performing your greatest hits.