Bobby Powers 📚

1M+ views | Bylines in Fast Company, The Startup, etc. | Read 70+ books/year & write about Leadership, Books, & Productivity | Visit me @

[Kei Watanabe @KeiWatanabe17]

We published a guest post by Bobby Powers in the Glasp newsletter!

"11 Life-Changing Perspectives I've Picked Up from Brilliant People"

He distills 11 life-changing perspectives—from “don’t wait to be picked” to living in permanent beta, running tiny experiments, choosing hard problems, and finishing what matters.

Read + highlight your favorite ideas on Glasp:

Thank you for the great post, @BobbyPowers_ !

[Kei Watanabe @KeiWatanabe17]

We're excited to publish a guest post by Bobby Powers (@BobbyPowers_) in the Glasp Newsletter!

His post introduces "Master Three 3 Steps to Succeed as a Creator in Today's Fast-Paced Economy."

Thank you for a great post, Bobby!

[Bobby Powers 📚 @BobbyPowers_]

"Meeting frequency is also a great predictor of relationship strength. When managers check in with direct reports less than once a week, their level of connection drops significantly."

2025 State of People Strategy Report | @LatticeHQ
via @_Glasp
https://t.co/uWZLRVfTxF

[Bobby Powers 📚 @BobbyPowers_]

"We’re just beginning to learn how to run creative firms, which is quite different. Industrial firms thrive on reducing variation (manufacturing errors); creative firms thrive on increasing variation (innovation)."

How Netflix Reinvented HR via @_Glasp
https://t.co/zf0v8tiNjN

[Bobby Powers 📚 @BobbyPowers_]

Read the writers who make you envious. They’re the ones who can teach you the most.

A few writers I envy:
@RyanHoliday
@AnnieDuke
@tferriss
@morganhousel
@BreneBrown
@Michael_Easter
@nickbilton
@StephenKing

[Bobby Powers 📚 @BobbyPowers_]

4 things I’ve learned:

1) Events are neutral.
2) The only thing we can control is how we respond.
3) We choose whether to interpret them as + or -
4) Our reaction to those events determines whether their eventual outcome will be “good” or “bad.”
https://t.co/u6pEBxP2c7

[Youth Lagoon @trevorpowersss]

‘The Year of Hibernation’ turns 13 yrs old today. I took out a student loan to pay for recording. Ppl made fun of my voice. I didn’t listen. They said I was delusional. I was. I did everything everyone told me not to. Trust the inner world at all costs. That is life itself.

[Bobby Powers 📚 @BobbyPowers_]

Excited to publish my first story with @FastCompany!

[Fast Company @FastCompany]

There's a somewhat perverse incentive for new executives to make the current state of affairs look bad. https://t.co/SmA1nxp3fH

[Bobby Powers 📚 @BobbyPowers_]

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.” -Seneca

from How Much Money Should You Save? by @DariusForoux via @_Glasp
https://t.co/PExAnFfi5B

[Bobby Powers 📚 @BobbyPowers_]

I've been fascinated by the art of asking questions for years.

@davesuperman's "How to Ask Your Team the Right Questions" is the best article I've ever found on the topic. Extremely insightful.

via @_Glasp
https://t.co/IBqKoZdoqW

[Bobby Powers 📚 @BobbyPowers_]

"When you shrug at the suffering of someone else, you invite it, inevitably, on yourself and people you love down the line." - @RyanHoliday

via @_Glasp
https://t.co/A3WNszQOtK

[Bobby Powers 📚 @BobbyPowers_]

"To experience time travel, read.

To achieve immortality, write."

-@JamesClear

[Bobby Powers 📚 @BobbyPowers_]

Compared to employees w/less frequent conversations w/their managers, those w/ at least weekly 1:1s feel:

• More trust in senior leaders
• More comfortable bringing up tough issues
• More frequently motivated
• More purpose at work

@_Glasp @15Five
https://t.co/m1D2yP1xZi

[Bobby Powers 📚 @BobbyPowers_]

“It is better either to be silent or to say things of more value than silence. Sooner throw a pearl at Hazard than an idle or useless word; and do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few.”

– Pythagoras
via @_Glasp
https://t.co/qggnAn8GJI

[Bobby Powers 📚 @BobbyPowers_]

“It is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply."
-Ernest Hemingway
https://t.co/j8fRzJGXm7

[Bobby Powers 📚 @BobbyPowers_]

"Use reality to inform fantasy. Inject fact into your fiction. Build fake castles out of real wood and nails. Doing so is the only way to help readers get lost in the world you’ve created."

via @_Glasp
https://t.co/kg4mUa35CQ

[Bobby Powers 📚 @BobbyPowers_]

“Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don't want to run out of gas on your trip, but you're not doing a tour of gas stations.”
-Tim O’Reilly

via the 5-Bullet Friday newsletter (https://t.co/y5KRAFttFy) from @tferriss

[David Perell @david_perell]

Harry Dry is the best copywriter I know.

He's built a 130,000-person newsletter teaching people how to do it, and by the end of this interview, you'll be at least a Green Belt in copywriting.

Some of his rules for writing:

1) A great sentence is a good sentence made shorter.

2) Writing great copy begins with having something to say in the first place.

3) Copy is like food. How it looks matters.

4) Since the look of copy matters so much, don't write copy in Google Docs. Write it in Figma (so you can write and design at the same time).

5) Kaplan's Law of Words: Any word that isn't working for you is working against you.

6) You know a paragraph is ready to ship when there's nothing left to remove. It's like a Jenga tower. The entire thing should collapse if you remove something.

7) Make a promise in the title so the reader knows exactly what they're going to get if they click. Then, deliver on the promise.

8) The three laws of copywriting: (1) Make it concrete, (2) make it visual, and (3) make it falsifiable.

9) Make it concrete: Don't be abstract. For an example, say you're writing about habits. Don't talk about "productive routines." That's abstract. Write about "waking up at 6am to write" instead. It's concrete — and much more vibrant.

10) Make it visual: People see in pictures. This is why instead of memorizing card numbers directly, world memory champions memorize cards by turning them into pictures and then back to cards.

11) Make it falsifiable: When you write a sentence that's true or false, you put your head on the chopping block, which makes people sit up in their seat.

12) When has a falsifiable statement resonated? Galileo got sentenced to a decade of house arrest for saying that the earth spins around the sun. That's a falsifiable sentence. But nobody would've done anything if he'd said that the earth has a harmonious connection with a celestial object.

13) Write with the delete key. Using fewer words lets you be more impactful with the words you keep.

14) The job of a sales page is to make a bold claim at the top. Then spend the rest of the page backing up what you've said... with a ridiculous amount of proof.

15) If your competitor could've written the sentence, cut it.

16) Good copy is differentiated. Here's an example: Elon Musk shouldn't write "The Cybertruck is the world's best truck." Ford or Dodge can write that sentence. But only Elon can write: "The Cybertruck is tougher than an F-150 and faster than a Porsche."

17) Some days, the writing comes easily. Some days, it takes sweat. The reader doesn't care if you wrote for two minutes, two hours, or two days. The ink looks the same.

18) Great copy reads like your customer wrote it. Talk to them.

That's just an introduction to the copywriting philosophy of @harrydry.

I've shared the full interview below. I recommend you watch this one because we pull from so many visual references and do a lot of screen sharing. If you'd rather watch on YouTube, I've shared the link in the reply tweets.

[Bobby Powers 📚 @BobbyPowers_]

"Vulnerability isn’t just the center of hard emotions, it’s the core of all emotions. To feel is to be vulnerable. Believing that vulnerability is weakness is believing that feeling is weakness." - @BreneBrown

Book Review: "Dare to Lead" - via @_Glasp
https://t.co/HemCp2gjfU

[Bobby Powers 📚 @BobbyPowers_]

This is one of the biggest career lessons I've learned in the past 10 years.

As always, @lizandmollie have a simple, insightful way of communicating a complex concept.