Friday Finds (JFK, Fitness, China, Music, Envy)

Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

First up: My Annual Review is now live.

I spent the better part of December cranking away on it. I'll be honest. It was a tough few weeks because I had to confront so many of the ways I fell short of my expectations last year. What results is a 9,000-word reflection on my professional life (and, to an extent, my personal life), and the clearest roadmap I've ever had for the future of Write of Passage.

Here's what I want to share this week:

1. Laws of the Internet: A list of frameworks that'll help you take advantage of the Internet. You can read it on Twitter or this site.
   ​
2. Expression is Compression: What makes communication successful? Compression. And it applies to all kinds of art forms — drawing, writing, music, dance, and storytelling. You can read my essay or watch the video below.

​

Today's Finds

Dan Wang's Annual Letters: If you want to learn about China, this is your guy. Every year, Dan writes an Annual Letter where he reflects on his on-the-ground observations from China. He's unique because he's lived in each of China's main mega-regions. Most of his observations center around the intersection of culture and technology, but they stretch from classical music to industrial policy to how political decisions shape public opinion. Here are his letters from 2021, 2020, and 2019.

​Own the Demand: This piece has been tattooed in my brain ever since I discovered it. With the rise of the Internet, power in the economy shifted from people who controlled supply to people who owned demand. That's why Bill Gurley, perhaps the most successful marketplace investor of all-time, once wrote: "A lesson I have learned many times in my 20 years as a marketplace investor is that aggregating demand is the one & only key." The lesson is simple: Have a direct relationship with your customers. If somebody gets between you and your customer, your margins will fall as customer acquisition costs rise. One statistic stands out: Google pays ~$9 billion per year to Apple to be iOS’ default search engine.

​Music in Human Evolution: If you aren’t familiar with Kevin Simler’s writing, it’s time to change that. He writes at the intersection of anthropology, psychology, and evolution. His entire archive is worth reading, but I recommend this essay on music in particular. For a preview into his insights, consider that humans are the only ground-dwelling species that sings (the others like birds, gibbons, dolphins, whales, and seals sing from water or the air). And, of all the animals that sing, humans are the only ones that use rhythm. This essay explores why.

​Envy: A summary of Helmut Schoeck’s Envy, which was first published in 1966. The emotion comes from our animalistic, status-seeking nature, but it’s under-studied because it’s such a taboo emotion.

JFK's Fitness Plan for America: In the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy laid out a vision to get America in shape. He worried that young Americans had become fat, weak, and un-athletic after World War II, and he even published an article in Sports Illustrated called "The Soft American." His words echoes the ancient Greek idea that sound minds are born from sound bodies. I recommend this 3-minute statement he gave in 1962 and the trailer of a documentary called The Motivation Factor, which builds upon Kennedy's original vision.