Hi friends,

Greetings from San Francisco!

I flew to California for the launch of Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain book. While out here, I also got to spend a day at Disneyland, work in-person with Craig Frazier (who is re-designing our Write of Passage brand), watch the Warriors win the NBA Finals, and see family for a few days too.

Here's what I want to share this week:

1. ​Writing Under a Pseudonym: We recently launched a writing accelerator at Write of Passage, and this is the first essay to come out of it. It tells the story of Charlie Bleeker's experience writing under a pseudonym. Writing under her real name, she was shy and timid. A pseudonym allowed her to express her sassy, loud-mouth self, and her writing became a form of therapy.
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2. We're Hiring at Write of Passage: We're hiring for a bunch of full-time roles, so if the combination of writing and online education fires you up, we want to hear from you ASAP. Here are our job openings.
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3. ​Practice Analytically, Perform Intuitively: This is my motto for improving at just about every skill. While away from your practice, study it obsessively. Break it down. Explore the nuances of the craft. Then, once it's time to perform, put all the thinking away and let the wisdom of intuition guide you. ​
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4. Practice Analytically, Perform Intuitively: You can also find these ideas explored in my YouTube video below.

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Friday Finds

​Speaking to the Masses: I don't know much about British politics, but I do like hearing Boris Johnson speak about linguistics and speechwriting. In this video, he shares oration lessons from Winston Churchill (who he wrote a book about!). His lessons begin with the structure of English itself. Johnson says that politicians should speak with more Anglo-Saxon words, which are short and simple, and reduce use of Latin-inspired ones, which are longer and more complicated. The same idea applies to writing.

​Steve Jobs, on Hiring: A collection of short interviews with Steve Jobs about his recruiting philosophy at Apple. Two principles stand out: (1) The greatest people are self-managed, but need a common vision, which comes from leadership, and (2) Apple wouldn't hire somebody unless they absolutely lit up when they saw the Macintosh computer. Apple also hired a number of professional managers who didn't pan out. From this mistake, he learned the best managers are stellar individual contributors who don't want to be managers, but take the role on to maintain their quality standards.

​​Peer-Reviewed Knowledge: A short video about the limits of peer-reviewed knowledge. Yes, we should be skeptical of anecdotal ideas and celebrate the scientific method. But that doesn’t mean we should discount the wisdom of intuition and observation. There are many claims that are obviously true even if we don’t have an academic paper to support them. As Paul Chek said so forcefully: “I don’t need a randomized controlled trial to know that a kick in the testicles is going to hurt.”

​The Building a Second Brain Book: I first learned about Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain method in 2017. Until then, I felt overwhelmed by information overload. There were too many books, emails, podcasts, articles, texts, and newsletters to sort through. I felt like I was swimming in a tsunami of information. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep up. I didn’t have a system to manage inputs, and felt stressed, anxious, and frustrated. Tiago's Second Brain system was like a life jacket for me. The violent waters of information overload stopped being an issue. Instead, the opposite happened. Like a surfer, I came to welcome the rush of the waves. Five years have passed since I first discovered the Second Brain system, and this book still teaches me something new every time I pick it up. My book at home is covered in stickies and Post-It notes. Tiago's CODE methodology has become an operating system for everything I do. Perhaps, the coolest thing about it is the way it applies across project types. Writers collect notes, organize their ideas, distill their best thinking, and express themselves by publishing their work. Photographers collect inspirational photos, organize them into Pinterest boards, distill them on platforms like Lightroom, and express themselves by posting their photos. Across creative mediums, the methods may change, but the core principles stay the same. Tiago has created the human operating system for life in the Internet Age. It's like a sequel to David Allen's "Getting Things Done" method, written for the era of high-powered note-taking apps. If you're feeling information overload, or want to inject more creativity into your life, this book is for you.

​Preference Falsification: One of my favorite ideas from Timur Kuran. It comes from a book called Public Truths, Private Lies (here’s a written summary and a podcast about it), where Kuran shows how people lie about their beliefs to look good in social situations. As Martin Luther King once said: “Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody. Not a few men who cherish lofty and noble ideas hide them under a bushel for fear of being called different.” Once you learn about preference falsification, you’ll start seeing it everywhere. For more ideas like this, here’s a list of 50 that shaped my worldview.