Hi friends,

My British friends use the word 'cheeky' and I honestly didn't know what it meant until two months ago when I looked it up on Urban Dictionary. Well anyways, I hosted a cheeky Twitter Spaces event on Tuesday night where I spoke about why the best CEOs are sloganeers, Seinfeld's bit on torture, and my new favorite Greek word: archēgos.

On the less cheeky and more prepared front, I'm hosting a workshop this Tuesday called How to Start Writing Online. I'll present the most distilled lessons I've learned by writing for the past decade and teaching more than 1,500 Write of Passage students. I won't just talk tactics. I'll show you how writing can boost your career, ignite your intellectual life, and attract opportunities that have your Mom saying: "Wait... you did that by writing on the Internet?!?"

Yep.

​Join me. ​

How I Write Podcast

Five episodes in and this thing is really rolling now. Here are a few of the people I'll be interviewing in the next three weeks: Marc Andreessen, Riva Tez, Chamath Palihapitiya, Mark Manson, Steph Smith, Colin & Samir, and Steven Pressfield. All in person too.

This week, I published an episode with Lulu Cheng Mersevey. Most companies speak like dead robots. She makes them sound human.

"Cut the throat clearing" was the best piece of writing advice she gave. It's the writing equivalent of cutting those long introductions to lectures that nobody likes, but everybody sits through. Same thing happens in writing. Cut the intro. Get to the good stuff.

(Listen here: Apple | Spotify)

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Today's Finds

​Where Genius Comes From: Clusters of genius occurred in Athens between 440 and 380 B.C.E, Florence between 1440 and 1490, and London between 1570 and 1640. David Banks asks: Why these places? Why these times? What conditions lead to outsized success? The essay is filled with hypotheses, but the most surprising one to me was that all three societies had a substantial military victory before they exploded with innovation. The Athenians had just secured victory at Marathon. Florence conquered Pisa and Lucca. England conquered the Spanish Armada.

​Buffett’s Reading Obsession: Many people look at the way Warren Buffett reads 500 pages a day and try to do the same. The problem is that the things that made him successful on the way up aren’t the things that keep him successful now that he’s made it. This article goes into the things that made Buffett successful on the way up. He obsessed over the biographies of people he admired, interrogated executives to understand the mechanics of business, and hosted friends for a bi-annual conference in what eventually became known as “The Buffett Group.”

​Jordan Peterson, on Music: One of the more beautiful descriptions of music I’ve heard. Peterson argues that music is multiple patterns layered on top of each other, just like the structure of reality — which is made of patterns as much as objects. Thus, music is an analog of the structure of existence itself. Music also represents life by putting you on the border of chaos and order, because good music is predictable enough to be coherent but unpredictable enough to surprise you.

How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart: Sometimes, great performers have such a natural talent that they’re unable to describe what makes them so great. This essay by David Foster Wallace explores that phenomenon through the lens of tennis. Though it focuses on sports, it’s not an essay about sports at all. I recommend listening to the essay because Wallace is somehow so good at reading his own writing. Or, here’s the PDF if you prefer to read it.

​Birds and Frogs in Physics: I’ve always liked the Fox vs. Hedgehog distinction between people who know a little bit about many things and people who know a lot about one thing. This essay makes a similar argument that people are either birds or frogs. Birds see things from, well… a bird’s-eye view where they have a vast landscape in front of them without a lot of detail. On the other hand, frogs like to get dirty and dive into the nitty-gritty details. But this essay goes beyond that and tells a brief history of physics. Einstein and Feynman were birds, while Fermi and Hubble were frogs.

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P.S. We open Write of Passage for enrollment twice a year, and the next sign up window starts on Tuesday. For years, the benefits of writing online felt like a vague pipe dream. Now I know it works. Hannah Frankman met the investor of her company in the course. Ivy Xu sold her startup to somebody she met in a breakout room. Ana Lorena Fabrega published her first article in Write of Passage and published her first book this week.

If you're feeling trapped in your career and know you're made for more, consider enrolling in the course.