Hi friends,

One of the best lessons you pick up from a Liberal Arts degree is how much you can learn from one book. Books are among the best knowledge-transmission tools ever invented, and you'd be smart to read the best ones carefully. Write a summary. Read commentaries. Spend a day on a single page. Join a discussion group.

I have a friend who calls himself a "Three Book Guy." He's an expert on the Bible, Plato's Republic, and Girard's Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Despite all the recommendations I make in this newsletter, I increasingly admire his focused strategy. Reading for volume is a fool’s choice. You’ll get more from reading three great books and writing a careful synopsis of each one than you would from racing through 50 books on the best-seller list.

A few things from me this week:

1. Job Alert: At Write of Passage, we believe that great products are built via subtle and compounding improvements. We're obsessed. So are our students. When I looked through our testimonials from the most recent cohort, I saw the words "life-changing" 38 times. Now, we're hiring a Director of Student Experience. If you're a gifted public speaker with facilitation experience and a passion for education, we want to talk to you. Apply here.
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2. I spoke with Hannah Frankman, the founder of rebelEducator. In this podcast, she interviewed me about why online education is a show, the problem with end-of-semester surveys at universities, and learning design Write of Passage. (Listen here: Apple | Spotify)
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   Or, watch on YouTube.

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Today's Finds

​Dialectic of the Enlightenment: A summary of the famous book by Adorno and Horkheimer. The central claim is that the history of humanity is regressive, not progressive because of our increasing ability to control and manipulate the world. Getting better at manipulating the external world has come at the cost of dominating ourselves. What we gain in knowledge we lose in agency. If mythical thinking turns things into souls, Enlightenment thinking turns souls into things. The Enlightenment taught us to believe that legitimate knowledge can only come from empirical evidence and scientific verification. We have become suspicious of knowledge that can't be calculated or measured. Thus, religion and mythology have fallen out of favor as a ways of understanding the world. Math, as with science, can tell you what is, but not what ought to be. You can use it to measure GDP growth, but not to criticize the efficacy of GDP as a metric in the first place.

​Getting Good at Google Search: Though Googling things well has been a comparative advantage for the past 15 years, I don't know many people who treat it as the serious skill it is. Remember, you aren't talking to a human. You're talking to a computer. People and machines interpret information in distinct ways. Though the computer understands English, your ability to Google well will increase in proportion to your fluency in search syntax.

​Getting Good at GPT Prompting: Think of GPT as an unbelievably smart research assistant. The assistant is highly intelligent, but you have to manage them well by giving clear instructions. The more specific and precise your prompts for GPT, the better its output will be. I know a CEO who has put a hiring freeze on at a company and is insisting on a 10% increase in profit margins due to the productivity gains he expects from GPT. At Write of Passage, we're experimenting with a 100-word "brand voice guide" that we'll use to prompt GPT, and if it works, everybody at the company will be able to write in our brand voice at ~7/10 quality. Like Google search, clear and specific directives yield the best results, especially if you ask it to adopt a persona.

​Great Man Theory: How much of human history is caused by the masses vs. the actions of a few individuals? Carlyle famously stated: "The history of the world is but the Biography of great men." Whether by talent, drive, or divine inspiration, he believed that basically all of history is inconsequential except for the actions of a few great men. People who have critiqued Carlyle's theory, like Herbert Spencer, believe that social change comes not from individuals remaking society, but from society remaking the masses.

​Sumner Redstone: Wealth and success are cool, but not if you turn out like him. Redstone built a chain of successful movie theaters early in his career. At 56, he was almost burned alive in a fire, and only survived because he hung out of the window until his wrist had almost burned through. After his miraculous survival, he ramped up his ambitions, and became the Chairman of Viacom in a hostile takeover. Where he rose in his professional life, he fell in his personal one. His lust for power fractured family relationships, and he battled in court against his brother, son, nephew, wife, and granddaughter.

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P.S. #1: The Jeremy Giffon podcast I shared last week is truly exceptional. One of the best things I'll share in Finds this year (Listen here: Apple | Spotify)

P.S. #2: Hello from London, where I just recorded a beautiful interview with The Cultural Tutor (our Writer-in-Residence at Write of Passage) about how he went from working at McDonalds to growing a Twitter audience in 15 months.