Hi friends,

The enrollment window for the upcoming Write of Passage cohort is open until Monday, September 26th. It begins on October 5th, and is the last one we'll run this year.

This time, we've made three commitments to students. In Write of Passage, you'll (1) publish quality ideas, (2) find your people, and (3) 2x your potential. If that's in your wheelhouse, click here to receive emails about the course or here to enroll.

Here's what I want to share this week:

1. My Vision for Write of Passage: Earlier this week, I published a detailed vision for the company's future. People seriously underestimate how radically the Internet can transform education, and I hope we can lead the way.
   ​
2. The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online: The most detailed thing I've ever written about the craft. It's based on the three pillars of online writing. (1) Writing from Abundance is a method for organizing your best ideas so you can avoid writer's block, (2) Writing from Conversation is a tool for systematically refining new ideas, and (3) Writing in Public is how writing can create opportunities for you. Read the 17,000-word guide here.
   ​

Friday Finds

​The Bull Case for Apple (2012): An early Michael Saylor prediction about why Apple was destined to hit $2,000 per share. He believed that Apple’s stock would soar because they’d sell 1 billion devices per year and become a luxury company, which would prevent downward price pressure (which is what happened to the PC industry). Apple isn’t a utility. It’s like jewelry, a piece of clothing, or a handbag — a fashion statement and an extension of your personality. This line stands out: “If you’re going to know a subject, know the subject. Because knowing only part of the subject is just enough to hurt yourself.” The video is only 2 minutes.

​Mechanical Paradise: How did the machine transform human consciousness? At first, the Eiffel Tower promised unlimited control over the world. Standing at the top made humans feel like birds and, by extension, guardians of the future. The view from the top was as breathtaking as the sight of the Earth from the moon almost 80 years later. Around the turn of the century, Ford rolled out the car, Edison invented sound recording, and Einstein invented the Theory of Relativity — the basis of the largest change in humanity’s view of the universe since Newton. As this documentary shows, the perspective shift is most evident in the art of the age. Specifically, in two shifts: one from nature to machine, and another from impressionism to cubism.

​The Origins of Entrepreneurship: This paper explores the core personality traits of entrepreneurs. The authors identify a few patterns, the most interesting of which is that entrepreneurs are more likely to have done “illicit activities.” But the key line is that “the number one predictor of entrepreneurship is asymmetric information about skill levels.” By that, the authors are talking about people who are more talented than they are credentialed. For example, they’re the kinds of people who know how to build a business, even though they never went to college.

Mushrooms and the Birth of Christianity: Okay, this one is a mind-bender. It falls under the probably-not-true-but-super-interesting category. John M. Allegro was an archaeologist and who studied the Dead Sea Scrolls. His book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross was particularly controversial because it argues that Christianity began as a shamanistic cult. Then, when the Gospels were written down, the Evangelists confused the meaning of the scrolls, which means the entire Christian tradition is based on a misunderstanding of them. One scholar called it “possibly the single most ludicrous book on Jesus scholarship by a qualified academic,” and Allegro was banished from the academy after it was published. Honestly, I have no idea if his claims have any legitimacy. I don’t know how to evaluate them, but this article does a thorough job arguing that we should look into Allegro’s theories again.

​Gatto’s Seven Lessons: John Gatto spent 30 years as a New York City school teacher. In this critique, he argues that the modern education system is designed to produce confused, passive, dependent, and materialistic children. The most surprising idea is about literacy rates. Gatto points to a paper released by Senator Ted Kennedy’s office that the literacy rate was 98% before the advent of compulsory education. By 1990, that figure had dropped to 91%. Though the argument doesn’t quite pass the sniff test, I’ve long doubted the validity of literacy rate measurements. No matter what, Gatto’s speech is worth reading in full.