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Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

I'm hiring a Chief of Staff.

This person will report directly to me, and it's one of the most important roles at Write of Passage. If you want to see how a business works up close or are planning to start your own company someday, this is some of the best training you can receive. Read about the role here.

Here's what I want to share this week:

1. ​The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online: Yes, yes, yes… My new essay is live! It’s a step-by-step guide to the best stuff I’ve learned about writing since publishing my first article seven years ago. Read it here.
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2. ​Never-Ending Now: The gravity of the Internet pulls us towards things created in the past 24 hours. Prioritizing speed over depth, and urgency over importance has taken us away from history's most thoughtful ideas. As a consequence, we're stuck in a Never-Ending Now. Here's my mini-essay and YouTube video.​
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3. ​My Podcast with Balaji Srinivasan: Yesterday, I spent 2.5 hours with Balaji for an interview about his writing process. It was a trip. The guy is 10-20 years ahead of the rest of us. For now, I'll share my first interview with him. Listen here: Apple | Spotify​
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4. The Write of Passage Video Team: Now that our production studio in Austin, TX is done, we're scaling up the video team. We're hiring a Script Writer, Video Editor, and a Head of Studio to create curriculum videos and grow our YouTube channel.

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Today's Finds

The Theory of Constraints: When I started working with Tiago Forte, I learned how the Theory of Constraints shows up all over the place. For instance, my first introduction came through this excellent multi-part series about bottlenecks and supply chains. It’s essentially a summary of The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt (I recommend the audiobook). The theory provides an entry point to productivity, from personal tasks to global supply chains. To see how The Theory of Constraints is practically relevant, I recommend this Twitter thread about the Long Beach port and all the container ships camping out nearby. I like the idea that “you should always choose the most capital intensive part of the line to be your bottleneck.”

​Patrick Collison, Startup Grind Talk: One of my favorite pockets of YouTube is talks with entrepreneurs before they became successful. I've watched this one with Patrick Collison a few times, mostly because the stuff on hiring is so good. Stripe took two years to hire their first five employees. Each of Stripe's first ten hires had started a company before. Seeing the dysfunction at Twitter, (a very siloed company), Stripe made it easy to switch teams and share information across the company (at Twitter, people were more likely to leave the company than switch teams). You don't just want to hire talented people. You also want to hire people who are known to be talented so they can attract other talented people. And finally, I like these hiring heuristics: "Is this person going to get you to where you need to be way faster than you think any reasonable person could? When this person disagrees with you, is it as likely they’re right as it is that you’re right?" Here's the full talk and a shorter clip about the early days of Stripe.

​The Genesis of the iPhone: Paul Graham describes this story better than I ever could: "Steve Jobs started a tablet project because he was annoyed by a guy at Microsoft. Then after they made a tablet demo, he asked if they could shrink it to pocket size. And when he saw that demo he said: pause the tablet, let's make a phone."

​Rethinking Economics: I’m torn about the value of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a metric. On one hand, it’s highly correlated with happiness indices, and people like Tyler Cowen have gracefully argued we should pursue a strategy of maximizing sustainable GDP, with a low discount rate on the future. With that said, the headstrong pursuit of GDP has perverse side effects for physical and emotional health. In the past 100 years, in America, we’ve seen the decline of community, the death of the nuclear family, and a country that is increasingly obese and diabetic.

​A World Split Apart: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist and critic of both communism and the Soviet Union. In his 1978 commencement speech, he warned against the West’s wholehearted embrace of individual rights and the decreasing responsibilities towards God and society. Voluntarily self-restraint is almost unheard of now. Sexual and economic norms have been forgotten. Ideas like sacrifice and selfless risk aren’t celebrated like they once were. Instead, in the name of liberation, the West has caved into the allures of consumption, hedonism, and short-term thinking.