Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

It's game time. After having tons of fun for the past few months, my #1 goal for December is to double down on work and write a ton. Right now, I'm putting the finishing touches on that documentary about Porter Robinson and an essay about the virtues of commitment. Once those are done, I'll start working on my Annual Review, which is the most personal thing I write every year.

Here’s what I want to share this week:

1. ​Beware of Chasing Prestige: As I write in this mini-essay, if you want to do impactful work, beware of chasing prestige.
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2. ​Why You Should Write Less: Usually when we think of creating, we think of adding things. But great creatives are masters of subtraction, and often, distorting reality to make things useful.

Coolest Things I Learned This Week

Building an Audience

One of the best ways to gain momentum as an online writer is to find a relatively undiscovered person who doesn't write much and put their best ideas on paper.

In my own life, Peter Thiel’s Religion is one of my most popular essays, and Farnam Street was originally the ultimate hub for ideas about Charlie Munger. If you’re looking for somebody to write about, look for people who give a lot of speeches but don’t write very much. Then, give them credit for the original ideas.

By doing so, you’re tapping into an inefficient market for ideas. The existing supply will live outside the written word, usually in podcasts or YouTube videos. Since they’re already popular, you know there’s demand. Also, you’ll often develop an unseen angle on somebody else’s work whenever you translate them into a new medium.

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You’re Probably Not Late

1. Whenever you find yourself thinking you’re late to a new technological trend, remember that Walt Disney thought he was late to animation in 1923.
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2. On the same theme, Marc Andreessen thought he’d missed the Silicon Valley boom when he arrived in 1994. He said: “My big feeling was I just missed it, I missed the whole thing. It had happened in the ‘80s, and I got here too late.”
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3. According to one of my Twitter followers, some of the earliest written fragments from Sumer in 3,000 BCE show people complaining that all the good subjects had already been covered by earlier poets.

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​Teaching is a Performance​

Mediocre teachers focus on delivering information in an efficient manner. Great ones focus on delivering information in an entertaining one.

The best teachers inspire their students with joy and enthusiasm. When I talk about enthusiasm, I’m inspired by its original Greek term: enthousiasmos. It referred to the divine inspiration granted by people who act like they're inhabited by a feeling of God-like ecstasy.

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Mistakes Page

A few years ago, I had a page in my notes where I wrote down all my mistakes. Every time I made one, I’d answer three questions:

1. What was the mistake?
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2. What was I thinking at the time?
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3. How can I prevent the same mistake from happening again?

To my surprise, more than 50% of my mistakes came from the same thing: making a commitment, not writing it down, and forgetting about it.

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My Freshman Year College Report Card

Photo of the Week​
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While in San Francisco for Thanksgiving, I visited the Walt Disney Family Museum in the Presidio.

One of the best ideas I picked up was the importance of knowing your bottlenecks. After World War II, Walt funded a series of nature documentaries called The True-Life Adventures. To film them, he recruited a team of nature photographers to venture into the wild and film animal life.

Walt said: "The biggest problem was getting [the photographers] to keep shooting. They would be too conservative with film because when they were working on their own they had to buy that film. They would cut the camera just as an animal would do something. I had to pound: Shoot, shoot! I had to sell them on the idea that the film was the cheapest thing [in our operation], and if they missed something-it got to the point that they never dared come in to tell me something they saw that they didn't photograph because I would raise heck with them. Also, they would quit too early in the day. I said, Keep shooting!”

Owners usually think about cash differently than employees. Since owners tend to think about cash in positive-sum investments, things that seem expensive to an employee can actually be a reasonable expense so long as the work generates a positive return. If so, it’s an owner’s job to push the employee to spend more than they would on their own when it’ll generate a positive return on investment.