The Hidden Structure Behind Great Essays

Long-form essays are gathering a lot of steam in the online writing space. Dan Koe is a big fan of it, and Craig Perry recently put together a great step-by-step guide for it here.

However, my guide today is all about the larger perspective shifts you need to make the nitty-gritties work. In a sense, this guide is for people who already have the know-how but are struggling to put them into practice.

So, below is the hidden structure behind every essay you've read from A Mug of Insights alongside rules for how to use it in your own writing.

0: You don’t need new ideas  

None of the ideas on A Mug of Insights are new. In fact, you can trace every idea, every newsletter, every framework and every workshop to something I’ve read, experienced or watched.

And the reason why I’ve been able to build a community of 20,000 people is not that my ideas are ground-breaking or novel. It’s just that I’m really good at translating them into perspective shifts.

Genuine perspective shifts are rare, but they change everything after we’ve experienced them. Byung-Chul Han wrote about it beautifully here:

‘An insight preceded by experience is capable of shaking up the status quo in its entirety and allowing something wholly Other to begin.’

In other words, the entire game of writing long-form essays is about creating these perspective shifts in your readers. You want them to walk away from every essay as different people, seeing different worlds.   

And as Han wrote, life experience needs to come before these perspective shifts. Great ideas aren't enough, and they need specific experiences to activate them. So, as a writer, you need to follow a similar structure to create these shifts in your readers:

Start with an experience in your life → introduce a perspective shift → describe the results of this shift in your life.

In a sense, writing long-form essays is all about mastering this powerful structure, and when it's executed well, you'll end up with an essay that has a clear payoff for the reader as well as an organic narrative tension. So, strap in, and let’s start with the first rule: