Hi friends,

Big stuff coming for you: I just saw the first cut of a 12-minute film I'm working on; the next Write of Passage cohort starts in 7 weeks; I finished a draft of a ChatGPT guide for writers; and my How I Write podcast will launch on August 23rd.

But for now, a few things from me this week:

1. Building a Course Business: Erik Torenberg interviewed me about my love for Walt Disney, how I choose what to focus on, and what I've learned building Write of Passage. (Watch on YouTube | Listen on Apple or Spotify)
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2. Join Our Affiliate Program: At Write of Passage, we help students transform their lives by writing online. If you want to contribute, you can join our new affiliate program. As one of our affiliates, you would help spread the word about our course and get commission on your sales (earning more than $1,000 for every person who enrolls because of you). Anyone can apply, but we're being selective about who we work with. If you’re interested in becoming an affiliate, apply here.

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Today's Finds

​Elon's Five-Step Process for Improvement: The worst thing a systems builder can do is spend time optimizing something that shouldn't exist in the first place. Elon Musk insists that you always question the requirements you're given. But school doesn't teach us to do that. In school, where we're taught convergent thinking instead of divergent thinking. We're taught to solve the problems we're given, not to question whether the problem is worth solving. If you're building a system, look out for things you can remove — problems that don't need to be solved. Elon says: "If you're not occasionally adding things back in, you're not deleting enough. The bias tends to be very strongly towards adding things." This 90-second video explains the rest.

​Obvious Adams: An obvious guide to business. It tells the story of an advertising man who becomes successful by doing the obvious thing at every step of his career. People love to over-complicate things. They do what's clever or entertaining instead of what's obvious, and then wonder why they haven't been successful. Business should be simple. Do the boring (and obvious) stuff repeatedly. And if it works, don't stop doing it. At the end of the book, the author includes five tests of obviousness. My favorite is "Put it on Paper." Give your project a simple name. Then describe it in no more than three sentences. Wait for the simple answer to come. You'll know it's right when it's obvious.

​Julius Evola's Introduction to Decline of the West: Written in 1957 as a preface to Evola's translation of Oswald Spengler's magnum opus, Spengler believed in a cyclical version of history, and he argued that the West has been in decline since 1000 AD. Civilizations, he said, enter a terminal and twilight phase once they adopt machinery, accept the omnipotence of money and finance, and embrace the rule of the masses. Evola's introduction is critical, though. He didn't believe in such a deterministic view of history. He thought Spengler's critique of Western history was too influenced by Western ideas themselves, such as the drive toward empiricism and quantifiability. Where Spengler saw the decline of the West as a material phenomenon, Evola saw it as a spiritual one.

​How to Do Great Work: One of the core lessons I took from this Paul Graham essay is that great work requires a sacrifice in almost all areas of your life, except love. Don't miss out on love. Graham says people under-estimate the cumulative value of getting a little bit of work done every day. For writers, this might mean finishing one page per day. That may not sound like much, but a page per day leads to a book per year. Consistency is the key: "People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing." Graham also emphasizes originality in thinking. Finding interesting answers begins with finding interesting questions. Too many people who hate what's fashionable devote their careers to working on fashionable problems.

​The Marginal Revolution Search Box: Tyler and Alex have been writing this eclectic blog for 20 years now. The search box in the top-right corner is the first place I look whenever I travel somewhere. Say, I'm visiting a city like Paris. I'll search "Paris" into the box and see where it takes me. It ranks very high on the effort-to-interestingness ratio, especially when it comes to cultural or historical recommendations. The utility of the Marginal Revolution search box also comes from the lack of correlation between the recommendations and what you'll find on a standard travel site.

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(One more thing: Here's a little window into the podcast I'm launching on the 23rd. Please don't share it publicly though).