Dickie Bush is a full time Portfolio Manager based in New York City. He is a graduate of Princeton, where he received a degree in Financial Engineering and played on the football team.Dickie writes a weekly newsletter called Dickie’s Digest where he shares thoughts and links on growth of all kinds, including personal, intellectual, physical, network, economic, and other forms of growth.Dickie is probably best known as the founder of Ship 30 for 30, an online cohort based course where he teaches writers how to write better, grow their audience, and show up consistently.In this episode, you’ll learn:
How Dickie runs Ship 30 for 30
How to build an online writing habit
How to shorten your feedback loops to improve your writing
Tactical tips to build a following on Twitter
Links & Resources
James Clear
The Art and Business of Online Writing by Nicolas Cole
30 Days to Better Writing by Sean McCabe
ConvertKit
Jack Butcher
Tim Ferriss
The Nathan Barry Show 031: Mario Gabriele – From Lifelong Obsession to Thriving Business
David Perell
Andrew Wilkinson
Sahil Bloom
Julian Shapiro
Dickie Bush’s Links
Ship 30 for 30
Substack: dickiebush.substack.com

Twitter: @dickiebush

Episode TranscriptDickie: [00:00:00] One that accelerated my growth, every morning, Monday through Friday at 9:00 AM, you’ll get a question to reflect on where a lot of the replies become interesting pieces of advice. Right? I’m playing with one right now that I said, “Give the best advice you can in just two words.” It had 3,000 replies.The Twitter algorithm. When people respond to something, it shows up in more feeds.Nathan: [00:00:27] In this episode, I talked to Dickie Bush, who works in the finance industry, but has this wildly successful side hustle teaching writers how to write better, grow their audience and show up consistently, called Ship 30 for 30. This episode we get into a ton of great stuff, how to grow your Twitter list, how to stay accountable.We deep dive more than any other episode on the Twitter algorithm, what works, what doesn’t, some of it is pure speculation. Some of it are things that have been pretty verifiable. There’s a lot of good stuff. I think you’re going to enjoy it. I particularly love how Dickie has put together these flywheels that he’s refining each time he does a new cohort of the course. There’s a ton of momentum here. He’s just absolutely going to blow up. And it’s really, really impressive. So with that, let’s dive in. Dickie, welcome to the show.Dickie: [00:01:15] I appreciate you having me. Look forward to it. Nathan: [00:01:17] All of our listeners are very active on Twitter. And you can’t be active on Twitter in the circles that you and I run in and not see your Twitter growth. I see Ship 30 for 30 growing, like crazy everyone, you know, posting essays and all of that. Before we dive into all of that, there’s something that I actually didn’t realize until prepping for this episode yesterday.And that’s that everything we see online is just a side hustle for you. Can you talk about, at a high level, what you do day to day, and then, how you balance that with your wildly successful side hustle. Dickie: [00:01:58] Sure. So what I do, full-time, I’m a macro portfolio manager and the way I kind of describe it as my day job is to predict the global economy and how that unfolds. And there’s only so many charts and numbers you can look at on kind of a daily basis from seven or 8:00 AM to five or six. And so my writing online and kind of journey, and that has been just a, a way to kind of step back from kind of the madness of, of markets and economies and things like that.And explore just little interests to me. And that has evolved relatively quickly, over the last, you know, nine months.Nathan: [00:02:38] Oh, I’m glad you said the nine months time. I, cause that that’s roughly what I’ve noticed as well. What was that inflection point where you decided you’re going to really focus on building an online audience and, you know, start wri