Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

My Monday Musings post, 28 Pieces of Life Advice, received more responses than all editions I've published in the past four months combined. You can read it on my site or on Twitter.

Also, the Cultural Tutor (our Writer-in-Residence at Write of Passage) has published a Twitter thread every day for the past few months. He joined Twitter in May of 2022 and recently hit 425,000 followers. I've long written about my desire to improve how the Liberal Arts are taught, and the Cultural Tutor and I have big plans for what we're going to create together. If you like Friday Finds, you'll like his writing. Start with his list of curated threads, and if you like what you see, I recommend his newsletter.​

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Today's Finds

​Schools vs. Sports Cars: Why is there so much more information about sports cars than our schools? If you're looking to purchase a Porsche Cayenne, there's seemingly endless detail you can learn about the product quality. Everything from the 0-to-60 speed, to the quality of the interior stitching, to the crash test safety rating. There's no equivalent in the education industry. In this piece, Michael Strong asks: "Why do we have better product information on sports cars than we do on schools?"

Jony Ive, on Steve Jobs, on Building Products: There's a fragility to new ideas. Creative people know the feeling of a young idea that has potential, even if they know the idea is raw and aren't yet able to articulate its promise. Steve Jobs was a master of this. At his funeral, Apple's Design Chief Jony Ive revealed Jobs' approach to early-stage products: “I think he, better than anyone, understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily just squished.” Here's the 45-second video.

​The Courage to Be Disliked: This snippet is everything I want Friday Finds to be: a place to explore big and crazy questions, even when I haven’t reached my own conclusions and especially when those questions contradict mainstream consensus. Here, I want to pose three questions about trauma: (1) What if trauma didn't exist? (2) What if focusing on trauma actually worsens the trauma itself? (3) What if all our focus on trauma traps us in the past instead of helping us move forward into the future? That’s the thesis of this book by Ichiro Kishimi. It’s based on the ideas of Alfred Adler, an oft-forgotten psychologist who was a contemporary of Jung and Freud. I’m still in the exploratory phase here, but given the rise of depression and suicide rates in the West, something seems off about our psychological consensus. In Kishimi‘s words: “[Adler] is not saying that the experience of a horrible calamity or abuse during childhood or other such incidents have no influence on forming a personality; their influences are strong. But the important thing is that nothing is actually determined by those influences. We determine our own lives according to the meaning we give to those past experiences. Your life is not something that someone gives you, but something you choose yourself, and you are the one who decides how you live.” For a contrasting perspective about the harmful effects of trauma, I recommend this summary of The Body Keeps the Score.

​The History of Silicon Valley: Marc Andreessen was one of the first people to ignite my intellectual curiosity. I still remember the way his tweets brought ideas to life for me, and I’m bummed that he has since stopped producing at such a prolific pace. I enjoyed this two-part series where he narrates the history of Silicon Valley with a clarity that only somebody who was in the trenches during its inception can deliver. If you're interested in this topic, you might also like this Tom Wolfe piece on Robert Noyce, the invention of the semiconductor, and the early origins of Silicon Valley.

​Building in Singapore: A gorgeous 5-minute video that shows how fast impressive buildings are rising into the sky in Singapore. Today the architectural heartbeat of the future seems to beat stronger there than in any other city in the world. While I’m certainly not a fan of everything Singapore does, Westerners might benefit from studying aspects of its culture and enjoy a healthy dose of envy for its impressive infrastructure development.