Hi friends,

I'm with family today, so I've recycled some of my favorite links from past editions this week. Also, I'm planning to publish my own writing much more consistently again, and if you want to receive those pieces in your inbox, click here.

This week, I shared a piece with 18 beliefs about the education system.

Today's Finds

​The Idea Maze: This article from Balaji Srinivasan is a roadmap for entrepreneurs who want to turn an idea into a profitable business. It orbits around a concept called “The Idea Maze.” Great entrepreneurs don’t just have an idea. They have a bird’s eye view of the landscape. They’ve thought through various paths they can take their company and have an answer not just for why they’re choosing a specific path but also why they’ve rejected the alternatives. If you want to build a company, this article is for you.

​Remystifying Supply Chains: Everybody’s life is shaped by supply chains, but few people understand them. Supply chains aren’t some distant phenomenon either. We live inside of them. They shape every aspect of our lives, from the computer you’re reading this on to the clothes you’re wearing. Here, Venkatesh Rao shows us how we should upgrade the analogies we use to think about supply chains. For a more practical look at supply chains, I also recommend a book summary called The Epic Story of Container Shipping.

​The Mystery of the Miracle Year: Here’s a mystery for you. Why have so many of the great scientists done a disproportionate amount of their best work in a single year? Einstein published four game-changing papers in 1905, Newton discovered the theory of gravity and the language he used to express it (calculus) between 1665-1666, and Linus Torvalds developed the raw material for Linux in a single summer at the age of 21.

​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.

​The 11 Laws of Showrunning: An obscure PDF about managing creatives, from the 1970s. It’s written for people in Hollywood but applies to anybody who does unbounded work. My favorite point is how sentences like “I’ll know it when I see it” are a cardinal sin. As a manager, you need to set a clear vision. Preach it day in and day out until it becomes gospel. But you want to do it in a way that ignites the creative spirit in people who work for you. For example, the design brief for the original Coca-Cola bottle in 1915 said: “A bottle so distinct that it could be recognized by touch in the dark or when lying broken on the ground.”

How I Write

​

Two of Steven Pressfield's books have influenced me: The War of Art and Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t. He's a fountain of wisdom about the creative process, and struggled for 27 years before publishing his first novel (which became a Hollywood movie).

Here's what stuck out from our conversation:

1. The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.
2. Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies. They help you go through patches where a “sane” person would quit.
3. Discipline beats talent when talent isn’t disciplined. Pressfield: “If you have discipline and no talent, you're way better off than if you have a lot of talent and no discipline.”

For a quick taste of what we spoke about, I recommend these three clips:

• ​How to find your distinct writing voice​
• ​How to write a first draft​
• ​Why is writing so hard?​

Listen to the full episode here: Apple | Spotify | YouTube​