The hook

A hook is what you put in front of the fishing line, not the middle.

The hook is the first action you take, it’s the first thing you say — it’s the first and most important point that needs to be made in order for a change to happen.

Making a good hook is not as simple as bending any piece of metal into the shape of a J, you have think about the gape, the point, the throat, the barb, the bend, and the shank.

A good hook is about tweaking all the parameters of an act to make it good enough to be a signal that perks up ears in a competitive and noisy landscape.

A good hook hook immediately answers why and bypasses the momentum-crushing hesitation that gets in the way of making a change.

Yes, the other means matter: the rod, the reels, and the lines. But in this case the first thing is first for a reason: nothing changes in practice without a good hook.
Abraham Kim
And also an honest hook somehow encapsulates the truth -- hehe -- of the rest of the piece it introduces within it's own microcosm. This is why often the novel's first few pages -- the hook -- are written after the book is completed.

Do you ever spend time deliberately working on the hook? If so in what contexts? 

I feel like a good place to practice hooking is in sales copy. 
2021-01-14 16:51:27
William Liao
Haha, nicely incorporated. We still need to talk about what truth might mean - even if it means agreeing on its peripheral outcomes (e.g. people feeling a sense of belonging and resonance).

Good point on novel writing, Graham Greene has some famous first lines: "Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him."

I work on hooks deliberately for every thing I publish with an eye towards capturing the spirit of what I'm trying to say so that people can assess whether the writing (and its meaning) is for them.

Hooking is 100% important in sales copy, but I also think hooks transcend just words which is why I made the ambiguous statement: "Making a good hook is not as simple as bending any piece of metal into the shape of a J, you have think about the gape, the point, the throat, the barb, the bend, and the shank."

If we take a good hook to be thing that communicates your creation's most important features, then it can embody many different forms depending on what you're building. 

For a computer, it might be the aesthetics of the case. For a book it might be the cover design (not the words on it). For a camera, it might be the unique-colored button that you install onto your shutter button. For a product, it might be the logo. Etc. 
2021-01-14 18:12:57
Abraham Kim
Oh yes. I was keeping my comment scoped to just words, but you are totally right. The hook is basically the entirety of how a person might happenstance on it. This is what Apple gets right. They have the ads and the store and even the look of the chassis at the cafe when somebody else is on it.

So I knew you would be hooking with the writing you publish, but I was figuring that you used the same deliberate strategy when it comes to your work managing teams.

What I would like to do is actually have a deliberate practice of hooking. I'm creating a Hooking Tribe and inviting you to it. Basically what this Tribe feature allows us to do is write within our own containerized space and not have it flood out to the global feed. We don't need to begin right away but i know that I could use some practice with hooks. And I know that someone like 
brianball
would like to be in on this.
2021-01-14 18:28:34
Abraham Kim
Okay so i gotta give some instrutions because this tribe user interaction is still foobar. To be able to write in the tribe you need a project. To create a project go to 

https://adagia.org/project/create 

sorry links don't work in comments!! copy and paste please

and then once you've created it. Access our tribe through the Tribes link on the header. 

And then add the project you've created onto the tribe.
2021-01-14 18:31:10