​

Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

​Write of Passage opens for enrollment twice per year and today is one of those days. Writing consistently is one of the best ways to make friends, improve your thinking, and accelerate your career. If you’ve been waiting for a sign that the world needs your best thinking, your best ideas, your writing — this is it.

I love how a member of our team described our mission this morning. He says we're trying to revive the original vision of the Internet from the early 90s: "It’s like an oasis; a secret salon in a sprawling city, carrying a forgotten torch around self-expression and finding the others."

Our next cohort begins on March 2nd, and you can enroll here.​

Here’s what I want to share this week:

1. One Big Idea: Many of the most successful people I’ve met have found their edge by putting their faith in one big idea. They’ve committed to the idea and studied it so much that its implications have become second nature. Read my essay here.​
   ​
2. ​How to Write Online Workshop: Tomorrow, I'll be hosting a workshop called How to Write Online. This is the free public workshop we hold before each Write of Passage cohort. It’s the most distilled version of everything I teach in the course and you’ll walk away with clear principles for succeeding as an online writer. Sign up for the workshop here.​
   ​
3. ​Writing Online with Ali Abdaal: This is by far the biggest YouTube collaboration I’ve ever done. Ali Abdaal has 2.68 million subscribers and I flew to London to create this video about how to improve as an online writer, identify your Personal Monopoly, and earn a living as a creator.

Coolest Things I Learned This Week

Calling

While watching Dune over the weekend, I was struck by this line: “A great man doesn't seek to lead. He's called to it. And he answers.”

I love that word: calling. If you’ve ever been called to something, you’ll know that it’s a feeling of surrender, where you start serving a mission instead of yourself. As you do, you open up the potential for beauty.

We shouldn't be surprised that the Greek word for beauty ("kalon") is related to the word for calling ("kalein"). Reflecting on their similarities, the poet John O’Donahue says that’s because the presence of beauty is not a neutral thing — it calls you.

When you hear the echoes of that calling, you rise into leadership.

— —

My Favorite Business Frameworks

Last week, I wrote a Twitter thread with my favorite business frameworks. These were the ones that stood out to me in particular:

1. Strong Culture, Fewer Rules: When a culture is tight-knit, people don't need to be told what to do explicitly. They just copy what everybody else does, which allows them to be entrepreneurial. But weak cultures need many precise rules to keep people in check. (Source: Airbnb)
   ​
2. Table Selection: This idea comes from poker. Choose your opponents carefully and don’t compete against the best people. You don’t need to get good at doing difficult things if you get good at avoiding difficult things in the first place. So if you want to win, pick an easy table.
   ​
3. The Boring-Sexy Matrix: If you want to start a highly profitable company, build highly differentiated products in markets without a lot of competition. These products will tend to be boring, complex, and outside the media spotlight. (Source: Charlie Songhurst)

​

— —

When Laziness Looks like Morality

This week, we had a few inches of snow in Austin, which caused the entire city to shut down for a few days. Restaurants were closed, appointments were canceled, people avoided the gym, and all kinds of people stayed home instead of going to work. Their stated reasons were all the same. They didn’t want to “put other people at risk.”

Though the day-long closure wasn’t a big deal, it sparked an epiphany. Observing the madness, my friend Johnathan made an excellent point: “Sometimes, what looks like morality is actually just laziness.”

Out of curiosity, I went for a drive myself, and there were absolutely no issues with any of the roads I drove on. But looking outside, you would have thought they were filming I Am Legend on the streets of Austin.

People are masters at justifying why they don’t want to do things, but the most dangerous justifications come when a vice is made to look like a virtue. We all do it. In your own life, ask yourself: “How am I rationalizing my resistance to doing things I need to do?"

— —

Have a Consistent Thing

Every few months, I’ll meet a friend who I love spending time with and want to build a deeper relationship with. The problem is that we usually get stuck in the same cycle of dinners and coffee dates. Whenever this happens, I try to “start a thing” with them. Doing so promises a series of shared experiences and a consistent time on the calendar.

Here are some examples in my life:

• My friend group from New York stays in touch by meeting for a book club every few months. Tonight, we are discussing Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation.
  ​
• Justin Mares and I are hosting our first intellectual dinner salon this week and plan to do them once per month.
  ​
• Some friends in Austin have a standing time where they meet at one of the local swimming pools every week. People can come and go as they please, but the consistent schedule formalizes the friend group.

​
Of course, you don’t want to have too many “things” on your calendar and you don’t need to always commit in perpetuity. But this little change of putting a formal commitment in the calendar has made my friendships much stronger.

Photo of the Week

While recording our recent ​YouTube video, Ali Abdaal asked me: “How can people grow an online audience?”

In the heat of the moment, I came up with a three-part framework that I want to dive into here: people, ideas, and trends.

1. People: I’ve always followed the method of People-Driven Learning. If you can find somebody who is worth learning from that few people have written about, write about them (please focus on learning over gossip). In my own life, the success of Peter Thiel’s Religion inspired me to write more about his worldview, which was part of the impetus for my recent essay: Why Peter Thiel Searches for Reality-Bending Secrets.
   ​
2. Ideas: When an idea is juicy enough, it’s worth following for years. All of my work is focused on the craft of online writing. My friend, Tiago Forte, writes about building a second brain. In our past work together, we’ve encouraged each other to double down on our One Big Idea because they’re timely, useful, and have an infinite well to explore.
   ​
3. Trends: Following a trend is the fastest way to build an audience, but also the strategy with the least staying power. People are always desperate to learn about the hot new buzzword. Those who write about them won’t have much competition because they are new, by definition. As a writer, you should aim to become the go-to person on this new trend. The issue is that people who rise quickly on the back of a trend tend to fall quickly once the trend simmers.

​