Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

With the next Write of Passage cohort beginning in a month, I wrote a Twitter thread about why you should write in public.

Two things stick out: First, writing helps you understand yourself. All of us have unprocessed feelings and emotions. Writing is the best way to identify what's making you uncomfortable. By writing, you gain clarity in your life, which tends to reduce stress and anxiety. Second, writing accelerates your learning. If you want to understand a topic better, start teaching it. As I wrote in Against 3x Speed, the act of putting ideas into your own words tattoos them into your mind.

If you’re interested in receiving emails about the upcoming cohort, click here.​

Here’s what I want to share this week:

1. ​Practice Analytically, Perform Intuitively: This is my motto for improving at just about anything. In this essay, I show you how the synthesis of art and science can make you better at whatever you’re trying to achieve. Read the essay here.​
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2. Why You Should Write Online: This is the Twitter thread I mentioned above, and it's exactly what it sounds like. You can read it on Twitter or in your browser.
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3. ​How Writing Can Help You Start a Business: I spoke to the CEO of Gumroad about his process for writing The Minimalist Entrepreneur and for this video, I turned that discussion into a systematic way of thinking about how writing online can make you a better entrepreneur.

Coolest Things I Learned This Week

Trends

An investor in Silicon Valley once told me: "The worst investment mistakes I've made came from thinking I was too late to a trend that was actually just getting started.”

Applies to a lot of things.

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Richard Feynman: A Prolific Writer

Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, famously had an office covered with notebooks.

One day, a visitor walked into his office, saw them all, and said: “I’m delighted to see such wonderful records of Feynman’s thinking.”

To which, Feynman replied: "No, no! They aren’t a record of my thinking process. They are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.”

Whether you’re writing essays or solving physics proofs, the process of thinking is the same. Putting ideas onto paper deepens your thought process and forces you to concretely express what you’re thinking. The more you get ideas onto paper, the less effort your brain has to devote to memory. Knowing that the pieces you’ve already solved are waiting on the page for you allows you to move into new intellectual territory and explore the depths of an idea.

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Quality and Popularity

My writing coach, Ellen Fishbein, made an interesting observation this week. People have lost faith in the idea that something can simultaneously be excellent and popular. They assume that popular things are only popular because the artist sold out, and excellent things can’t be popular because the masses are dumb and have the attention span of a puppy.

Just look at academia, where researchers are rewarded for using obscure language that common people don’t understand. Many years ago, I saw a study showing a correlation between the obscurity of words in a research paper and the likelihood of it getting published. Given the usefulness of knowledge, this is tragic.

I’m not saying that everything should appeal to a common audience. Of course not. So often, we are too quick to dumb things down. But we should be careful of immediately dismissing things that are popular because sometimes, they are indeed excellent: The Beatles and The Lord of the Rings come to mind.
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Meta-Maintenance

I like the idea of “meta-maintenance” from Patrick Collison.

He observes that we don’t have good ways to avoid sclerosis in the stuff we build. As a result, our institutions slow down over time until they become cobwebs of bureaucracy that are inefficient, impossible to navigate, and can’t achieve anything. It’s not just organizations. It’s cities, highways, and all kinds of infrastructure too.

Given the influence of these projects and institutions, developing a series of principles for maintenance would be a valuable Personal Monopoly.

Note: The closest person I’ve found is Samo Burja.

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​Choose Your Industry Carefully​

Small changes in positioning and industry choice can have a large influence on the profitability of your company.

Say you want to play a racket sport like tennis, badminton, or pickle ball. If you’re gunning for cash potential, choose tennis. A Top 10 tennis player earns 10-20 times more than a Top 10 player in the next most prosperous racket sport.

One study found that “50% of a firm’s performance compared to the broader corporate universe is driven by what’s happening in its industry…” If true, the industry you choose will determine your potential for outperformance more than any other factor.

Photo of the Week

The Girard lectures are complete! From Monday to Wednesday, Johnathan Bi and I spent ~25 hours recording a seven-part series about René Girard’s conception of psychology and history.

Our plan is to release one lecture per month, beginning in March. If you’d like to receive them by email when they go live, click here. ​

As I wrote in Saving the Liberal Arts and my Annual Review, my plan is to study the western intellectual canon by creating the go-to lecture series on the figures that interest me most. Instead of hosting the lectures myself, I’ll find scholars like Johnathan who can bring their existing expertise.

On that note, this past weekend, I started working on a Shakespeare project that I plan to record in the fall.