Differentiation by Input
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Asked why he grew so fast, Quirke gives two structural answers rather than tactics. First, inputs: he has a rule against reading anything published in the last fifty years, because if you read the same books as everyone else you will not only write the same way, you will think the same way. Reading something written seven hundred years ago guarantees the output is different. Second, register: most of the feed is either politics, which causes division and anger, or engineered doom-scrolling, which leaves people empty. Writing about Monet's water lilies, Gothic architecture or the great step wells of India is apolitical, uplifting and meaningful, which is not what people expect to find online. He noticed readers quote-tweeting him with the phrase timeline refresh and read it as evidence of the gap.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Audit what everyone in your space is reading
Start from the observation that the way you write is downstream of what you read. If your inputs are the same bestseller list as your competitors, your framing and even your thinking will converge on theirs.
- 2
Adopt a hard input rule that forces divergence
His rule is to read nothing published in the last fifty years. Whatever he then writes is inevitably different, because the raw material is drawn from a corpus almost nobody else in his feed is reading.
Pro tip The rule does the work automatically — no creativity or contrarian posturing required.
Watch out This is a heuristic for differentiation, not a claim that older writing is better.
- 3
Diagnose what the feed is starving readers of
He characterises the internet as split between politics, which makes people angry and divided, and mindless doom-scrolling content engineered to hold attention for ad revenue. Both leave readers feeling empty rather than fed.
- 4
Occupy the missing register
He writes about art, architecture and history — apolitical, not clickbait, not merely entertaining. Readers encountering Monet's water lilies or Gothic architecture between political fights find something interesting, uplifting, beautiful and meaningful.
Pro tip Uplift is a positioning choice as much as a taste, because so little of the feed offers it.
- 5
Listen for reader language that names the gap
People kept quote-tweeting him with 'timeline refresh'. He initially thought little of it, then read it as a signal: their timelines were so full of nonsense and unpleasantness that something pleasant and meaningful registered as an event.
Pro tip Recurring phrases in quote tweets are free positioning research — collect them.
- 6
Refuse to write for predicted engagement
He admits occasionally writing pieces because he thought people wanted them. More often than not those did worst — the worst engagement or the worst feedback — and he did not feel good about them. He accepts strong titles and images as legitimate attention-getters, provided the substance backs them up.
Pro tip Clickbait is acceptable if you back it up with something genuinely valuable and useful.
Watch out Readers can usually tell how much you cared about a piece, even when they cannot articulate why.
In the wild
As the account grew, a pattern appeared in the responses: people would quote-tweet a post about art or architecture and simply call it a timeline refresh. Looking back, he read the phrase as diagnostic rather than complimentary — it meant their feeds were so saturated with anger and filler that encountering something pleasant and meaningful was unusual enough to remark on. He treats that as a large part of where the growth actually came from.
→ Confirmation that the differentiation was in register, not in topic novelty alone.
On a handful of occasions he was tempted to write about something because he believed it was what people wanted to hear, and gave in. Those pieces did not outperform. More often than not they took the worst engagement or the worst feedback, and he did not feel good about them afterwards. He concluded it is worth paying an expected engagement penalty to make something he actually wants to make.
→ A working rule: write what you are curious about and accept the occasional traffic cost.
Common mistakes
Reading the same books as everyone in your niche
Shared inputs produce shared outputs. If your reading list is the current bestseller list, your differentiation has to come from style alone, which is far harder than simply changing what goes in.
Writing what you predict the audience wants
His engagement-chasing pieces performed worst on both metrics and felt bad to write. He argues readers can sense how much you cared, so the calculated piece usually loses to the curious one.
From the transcript
“if you read the same books as everyone else not only will you write the same way but you'll think the same way”
“people would often quote tweet me and they'd say you know timeline refresh”
“more often than not those sorts of pieces have done the worst either just got the worst engagement or got the worst feedback and I…”
From the episode
How To Build A 1.5 Million Following As An Online Writer - The Cultural Tutor
The Cultural Tutor