Hi friends,

Greetings from Augusta, Georgia!

I will never turn down a trip to The Masters. The tournament is exactly what you'd end up with if you had ridiculously high standards, decades of experience, and a nearly unlimited budget to bring your vision to life.

Above the ground, the course feels like it's run by Luddites. No cell phones. No digital screens. But the world below is a technological marvel. Cameras on the course connect to the press building through a series of underground cables. Every green has a grid of pressurized valves and electric motors that pump oxygen to the roots of the grass. When it started raining today, I heard the motors switch into "vacuum mode" and suck moisture out of the greens.

After the golf, I'm heading back to Austin before the next Write of Passage cohort begins on April 17th. Enrollment closes in less than a week, on Wednesday, April 12th.

A major theme of the course is how you can level-up your social life by writing online. Before I started writing, I struggled to meet people who loved ideas and intellectual conversations as much as I did. Sharing your ideas in public is the fastest way to meet people who'll enrich your intellectual life and share your obsessions. Case in point... I'm only at the Masters this week because a Friday Finds reader invited me.

If you’re considering Cohort 10, you can also apply for a scholarship or our Education Fellowship.

Today's Finds

​Tiger Woods’ Biography: Speaking of golf, this is one of my favorite biographies because it forces you to ask: “When does pain facilitate greatness?” Parts of Tiger’s life are enviable. Between 1997 and 2009, he was the greatest athlete in the world and it wasn’t even close. But he’s also had more than six surgeries and suffered through the most public divorce the world’s ever seen. You can’t understand Tiger’s psychology without learning about his father, Earl Woods, an abusive alcoholic who subjected him to “psychological warfare” tactics he learned in the military. That way, Tiger would be mentally tougher than any of his competitors. It worked. But in Tiger’s story, you can’t take the greatness without the pain, which makes his biography so exhilarating.

​Buxton Index: Measures the length of an entity's time horizons. For example, the average American politician, who's thinking about their re-election thinks in four-year time horizons while the average public company CEO might think in quarters. For the true Christian, it's infinity. Though the Buxton Index is morally neutral, I increasingly believe that long time horizons are a mark of maturity too. Most kids can only think as long as their next sleep or meal. Meanwhile, the elders I speak with think in terms of decades and centuries. In Rockefeller's biography, Ron Chernow makes a point of emphasizing that the oil tycoon succeeded because he believed in the long-term prospects of his business and didn't treat it as a slow-fading mirage. Peter Thiel, too, says this: "The cliche goes like this: live each day as if it were your last. The best way to take this advice is to do exactly the opposite: live each day as if you would live forever.”

One of Jeff Bezos' Favorite Books: Legend has it that Amazon Web Services was inspired by Creation by Steve Grand. It's technically a book about programming artificial life, but the idea that all complex things come out of simple primitives/building blocks inspired him. In the early days of AWS, Bezos instructed his team to build only the necessary building blocks and let developers do the rest. Bezos' biographer Brad Stone wrote: "If Amazon wanted to stimulate creativity among its developers, it shouldn’t try to guess what kind of services they might want; such guesses would be based on patterns of the past. Instead, it should be creating primitives—the building blocks of computing—and then getting out of the way."

​The Holy Church of Christ Without Christ: I’m recommending this one as much for the writing style as the content itself. Yesterday, I was reflecting on my education when I realized that I went through K-12 and then all of college without ever reading the Gospels. Even if I’m not religious, that’s insane. Word-for-word, it’s hard to find a document that’s shaped Western thinking more. Among other things, such as the myopia of utilitarianism (ruling by Excel spreadsheet) and the relationship between science and belief, this essay explains why.

​The Geography of Nowhere: Why are American cities so ugly and indistinguishable from each other? Why is the vast majority of what’s been built in America over the past 80 years so depressing, and soul-sucking? This book answers these questions, walking through the history of American architecture. It begins with the first pilgrim settlements and eventually explores the car’s impact on cities and suburbia. My biggest issue with car-centrism is the inequality and atomization it produces. Cars destroy community. Long distances between work and home lead to long commute times for the poor. When people are always in their cars, they stop valuing the kinds of public spaces that make Western European cities so delightful. The book can be summarized in one lyric from the Counting Crows: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” If you’re looking for a YouTube video on the same subject, I recommend this one from Wendover Productions.