Mic Check Vol. 13: The daily habit that out-performs every other daily habit

And it's easier than brushing your teeth, promise.

Do you have a daily writing practice?

I think one of the simplest paths to becoming an excellent communicator is to write daily. Not writing like emails or content, but free-form, stream-of-consciousness writing that opens windows into your own brain. 

Understanding how you process things—and react to them—is a foundational skill of a great communicator. If you only think about the message you want to share, and not how that message will be received, it's sure to be lost on your audience. 

The best way to build this muscle? Studying it in yourself. 

For a lot of people, a daily writing practice looks like ten minutes of undistracted typing time, either at the beginning or end of the day, where you just focus on getting thoughts on paper. As you build the habit, you'll see patterns come to light: essentially, how you react to certain events, stories, and learnings. Under the hood, you're building your capacity for empathizing with an audience. 

If you write every day, have you found this to be true?

- Raman

📚 Open tabs

What team Rhetoric is reading during those awkwardly-timed few minutes between Zooms. 

Filed under "extremely cool": Hebbia just took on a bit of rocket fuel ($30M worth) to accelerate the development of their neural search engine. So, imagine being able to ask Hebbia a question like "which are the largest acquisitions in the supply chain industry within the past five years?" and have it return a concise answer, synthesized from a collection of trusted primary sources. What a superpower for storytellers. 

While many of us are thinking about building high-performance teams, this article struck a chord with me: why do we look for great leaders instead of great teammates?

The storytellers I admire most are the ones who can capture my undivided attention on topics I have no interest in mastering. See: why there are so few economies of scale in construction. 

✨ New ways to present better

Here's what's going on at Rhetoric this week:

Thanks to your feedback, we added 1.2x and 1.7x for those who like to listen to presentation fast, but not too fast. 🌟

Have a feature idea you want to see in Rhetoric? Add it to our public roadmap!