Hi friends,

I spent the weekend at The Masters golf tournament, which is certifiably the best sporting event I've ever been to. And it's not just because of the golf. The conditions are immaculate, the food is delicious, and the operations are top-notch.

To my surprise, the tournament gives television rights to CBS and ESPN for free, in exchange for total control over the broadcast. This is why there are so few commercials on TV, why the announcers pump endless praise into their microphones, and why it's so easy to watch the tournament on your phone. I wrote about my experience at The Masters in this Twitter thread.

All weekend, I was thinking about how important it is to have supportive and ambitious peers. That's what today's piece is about, and it's also a core function of Write of Passage.

"Find Your People" is one of three commitments we make to students because it's so hard to consistently write well without the emotional and intellectual support of your peers. So many students come into the course with friends who mock their creative pursuits. But in the course, they meet ambitious peers who support them. Enrollment for Write of Passage Cohort 10 closes in 48 hours, and we'd love to have you.

​Ambitious People Need Each Other​

Ambition breeds a particular kind of frustration, and the more ambitious you are, the larger it looms. Without like-minded peers, ambitious people become suffocated by life — chained by tall poppy syndrome and the dogmas of complacency.

As social creatures, humans need to feel validated by their peers in order to go all in on who they are. We become like the people around us, so it’s hard to sustain ambition in a complacent environment. This is why actors move to Hollywood, musicians move to Nashville, and basically every podcaster/biohacker/Internet-writer type lives inside a twelve-mile radius in Austin, Texas.

Moving in search of ambitious peers isn’t a new idea. It’s why Ramanujan, one of history’s greatest mathematicians, went to Cambridge. At home in India, even though he showed a divine aptitude for math, he flunked out of school and hid under a cot because his parents disapproved of his obsession with math. Though he taught himself number theory by working through problems in a borrowed textbook on his own, he knew that his genius was ultimately constrained by a lack of ambitious peers. And so, he wrote to Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy to ask for help getting his work published. Once they met, everything changed for Ramanujan.

See, ambitious people don’t just need peers. They need mentors. They need people who will encourage them to pursue hard and meaningful projects.

In college, I felt insane for being driven and obsessive. The anti-dedication environment drove me nuts. My ambition was only validated when I arrived in New York City and met people who exuded the kind of heart and hustle for which I’d always been called crazy. The people I interviewed on my North Star Podcast became some of my peers.

Paul Graham, the founder of Y-Combinator and the low-key God of online writing says “Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone is mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people’s lives, then the ambitious ones won’t have many ambitious peers. When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants given water.”

Fight to find your kindred spirits, even if it means moving across the world like Ramanujan or staying in on Saturdays to write on the Internet. The more ambitious you are, the more consciously you’ll need to cultivate your social circle.

Ask yourself: Who do I need to surround myself with?