Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

Milestone celebration time: This is the 200th edition of Monday Musings. It started as an experiment in 2018, and I’ve never missed a week because writing is such an effective way to improve your thinking.

Writing this newsletter has helped me express myself in more interesting ways and attract an audience of 65,000 people by sharing the coolest things I learn every week.

I'd love to help you develop a writing habit and, in turn, create opportunities for yourself. If that’s something you’re interested in, click here to receive more information about the upcoming Write of Passage cohort over the next two weeks.

Here’s what I want to share this week:

1. The Paradox of Abundance: The average quality of information is getting worse and worse, while the best gets better and better. That's why markets of abundance are simultaneously bad for the median consumer but good for conscious consumers. Here’s my YouTube video and the associated essay.​
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2. Why Paul Graham is so Successful: The more I reflect on Graham’s influence, the more I think it revolves around the contradictions of his interests: hacking and painting, art and technology, writing and entrepreneurship. In this video, I explore how his Venn diagram of interests helped him build such a unique Personal Monopoly.

Coolest Things I Learned This Week

The Beatles Were a Cover Band

The Beatles are a classic example of my Imitate, then Innovate philosophy.

Originally, they didn’t write much of their own music. When they started out, they simply wanted to listen to great music. Even when they played their early shows, they were just a cover band recreating their favorite songs.

But when other bands started performing before them and playing the songs they intended to play, the Beatles decided to write their own music — even if they were originally a cover band. Paul McCartney posits they weren’t very good until getting a record deal forced them to level up their game. Using all that music as inspiration, they found ways to blend elements of classical music, rock and roll, and traditional pop into their craft.

Too often, writers are afraid to take inspiration from others because they think it’ll hurt their ability to be original. But the more I study all kinds of artists, the more I think that strategy is nonsense.

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The Dark Side of Entrepreneurs

A surprising number of the best entrepreneurs I know had illegal side hustles in high school. Thus, one benefit of capitalism is the way it redirects the energy of driven but rebellious people.

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How We’re Hiring:

We’re hiring a VP of Ops at Write of Passage, and here’s how I’m thinking about the interviews.

1. Good vs. Great: The difference between good and great is an element of surprise. Only people who “wow” us with their knowledge make it into the great category.
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2. Knife Theory of Hiring: When you first start a company, you need Swiss Army Knife people who can do a little bit of everything. Once your company gets big, you need a bunch of kitchen knife people who do one thing very, very well.
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3. The Two Kinds of Roles: Whenever we open up a new role, we start by asking if it’s a high-variance or low-variance role. With high-variance roles, you’re looking for people who see big upside and who are generally okay with taking risks. Executives and creative types come to mind here. Low-variance roles are the opposite. They are extremely reliable and don’t make many mistakes. Surgeons, lawyers, and accountants come to mind here, all of which are the kinds of jobs that school trains us for because most professions reward a low-variance disposition.

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Crazy People Budget

If I ran a venture capital firm or a hedge fund, I’d have a “Crazy People” budget where I’d employ people simply because they have crazy ideas.

In power law industries like these ones, one successful moonshot can fund a team of productive weirdos for your entire career. Another challenge for investors is that successful people get insulated from fringe and unpopular opinions, both because people suck up to them and because they have to attend suit-and-tie meetings where nobody says anything controversial.

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Funding the Next Renaissance

A friend says the entire Renaissance — artists like Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Botticelli, Raphael, and all the other greats — was funded by a single family and the equivalent of roughly $500 million in today’s dollars.

The lesson: Creativity depends more on culture than cash.

Photo of the Week

I’m recording a lecture series about René Girard with Johnathan Bi this week. We have 65,000 words worth of notes that we’ll be drawing upon to create roughly 15 hours of video.

We’ll be covering Girard’s comprehensive theory of history, his take on the modern world, and his apocalyptic outlook on the future. We're doing the lecture series because Girard’s ideas are so hard to understand. Furthermore, neither of us have found a satisfactory lecture series about his work that goes beyond a cursory introduction.

If you’d like to receive these lectures by email, click here. I'll send you an email with the videos as they are published.