Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

With Write of Passage beginning next week, I'm back in town for a little while to focus on teaching and writing. Also, I've been on a roll at the keyboard and have published a few pieces recently.

1. Ambitious People Need Each Other: The more ambitious you are, the harder you'll have to work to develop your peer group. I wrote about this on Twitter and on my website.
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2. ​Surrendering to Your Nature: A lesson I've learned the hard way. Life gets easier when you accept who you truly are, even if doing so may disappoint your friends, your family, and the person you see in the mirror every day.

Sara Dietschy has long been one of my closest creator friends, and I made a cameo in her latest video when she stopped by my production studio to get a behind-the-scenes tour and use our blazing-fast WiFi. Here's a snippet of her visit.

Today's Finds

​Augusta National and the Masters Tournament: I spent last week at the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia. It's by far the best-run sporting event I've ever attended. The bunker sand is shipped in from mines in North Carolina, and rumor has it that the bird songs you hear on the course are piped in through hidden speakers. And they're pretty strict. In 1994, CBS commentator Gary McCord was banned from the tournament when he said: "They don't cut the greens here at Augusta. They use bikini wax." He was forever banned from the tournament. They also give television rights away for free to ESPN and CBS in exchange for full creative control of the broadcast. That "generosity" is powered by huge profit margins in the gift shop, where they earn about $1 million per hour and about $70 million per week in revenue. This book traces the origins of the course and the tournament.

​Make Something Wonderful: A collection of stories, photos, and interviews from the Steve Jobs Archive, with a particular focus on his time at NeXT and the early days of his return to Apple. It's basically a digital museum. One of Jobs' major insights was that most people didn't want to program computers. They wanted to use them. This countered the prevailing narrative in the computer industry, which was that everyone would want to build their own computers. At the time, Jobs's radical vision was to create a computer so simple that people could learn to use it in twenty minutes. Since his early days, Jobs was hell-bent on doing something special with his life. A poem he sent to a friend in 1974 said: "Don't waste your life." I also adore this observation about what it takes to do creative work: "So to be a creative person, you need to 'feed' or 'invest' in yourself by exploring uncharted paths that are outside the realm of your past experience. Seek out new dimensions of yourself — especially those that carry a romantic scent."

​The Story of Uniqlo: The CEO of Uniqlo shares his principles for the soul of his company. Maybe I like the article because Uniqlo is one of my favorite brands, but it doubles as a window into the kind of Japanese craftsmanship I learned about on my podcast episode with Patrick McKenzie. For years, Uniqlo was seen as an undesirable brand. But that changed with the 1998 launch of a flagship store in Tokyo’s Harajuku neighborhood. Today, Uniqlo is a global brand with around $16 billion in yearly sales.

​The Use of Knowledge in Society: The most important economics paper I’ve ever read. It shows how price signals can help societies make the best use of resources, especially in an ever-changing world that’s impossible to plan for. The price system allows people to coordinate at scale. If there’s a shortage of a given material, like copper, the price will rise and thereby incentivize people to produce more of it. When the price falls, the opposite will happen. By following the price system, individuals can contribute to a spontaneous global order by following their incentives. Here’s a good summary, and here’s Hayek’s original paper.

​My Life Pouring Concrete: One man’s haunting perspective on the construction industry, which he says is plagued by alcoholism and opioid addiction. This quote stuck out: “Most of the men I worked with had little formal education. Many had a criminal record. Men working in construction and extraction have the highest suicide rate of any industry, as well as the highest rate of opioid addiction and (predictably) overdoses. Alcoholism rates are second only to the mining industry.” A solid read, even if it’s a difficult one.​