Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

This week was a milestone. When I wrote my Annual Review at the beginning of 2022, I set "building an executive team" for Write of Passage as one of my top goals. I dedicated the first half of my year to hiring a VP of Operations. Since July, I've been looking for a VP of Marketing. As of this week, she's officially a full-time member of our team.

For the first time since starting Write of Passage, I have an executive to handle each of our core pillars: product, marketing, and operations.

Now, my attention is shifting to the tempo of the company.
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We increasingly follow Matt Mochary's suggestions in The Great CEO Within. Here's why: (1) The entire book (and more!) can be found in this Google Doc, so we can easily refer to digital documents, (2) the videos on Matt’s YouTube channel provide supplemental advice, along with tactical ways to implement it, and (3) the method is particularly well-suited for technologically driven remote companies like ours.

Here are today's Finds.

Friday Finds

​Destruction and Creation: John Boyd was a US military strategist during the middle part of the 20th century. He’s known for the concept of the OODA loop, but I like this paper even more. Though he was writing about military battles, his ideas about creating an accurate model of the world apply to just about anything. He says that creativity is less about simple creation but rather a constant oscillation between destructive deduction and creative synthesis. My friend Taylor Pearson wrote the best summary I’ve seen of the paper, and here’s how he summarized it: “Destruction is related to deduction, taking the big parts and breaking them down into constituent pieces. Creation is related to induction, synthesis, and integration. It’s taking the little bits and re-building them into a coherent whole.”

​In Praise of Idleness: A 1932 essay from Bertrand Russell where he talks about the cult of workaholism, and what we should do to avoid it. He talks about the problems with seeing hard work as inherently virtuous, and how our obsession with hard work leads to a concept for stillness. Here’s a summary from Maria Popova.

Common Knowledge: A foundational idea for me. Often, it’s not enough for one person to know something. The dynamics of a situation change when everybody knows that everybody knows something. That’s why sermons are repetitive and often have a call-and-response style. Read Ads Don’t Work that Way if you want something quick or Rational Ritual if you want a book-length treatment of the idea.

​On Re-doing Things: Kevin Kelly once said: “To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.” The essay explores this idea in a kind of soul-driven fashion that you rarely see on the Internet. It made me realize that heart-wrenching creative work is driven by two forces: the desire to produce and the pain of actually doing it, and only once the thirst of desire is stronger than the anguish of hard work can you do great work.

​Where are the Thought Police: Why are people in Democratic countries expected to have an educated opinion on so many policy matters, from abortion to foreign policy? Here, Johnathan Bi (who I made the Girard Lectures with) argues that it’s downstream of our political structure. Since people in a Democracy are theoretically in charge, they should have strong opinions about how a society should be structured. But there are tradeoffs, such as the politicization of social life and, counterintuitively, the suppression of free speech in the private sphere. Alexis de Tocqueville argued that bottom-up thought control is more pervasive than the top-down alternative because even the mightiest of monarchs don’t have the power to police the average person’s speech. No society can ever escape the political and achieve unlimited freedom of thought. But the organization of a society will determine what kinds of thought control exist.