Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

Since publishing my Annual Review, I've felt like I'm at a threshold in my business. I've spent the past three years building Write of Passage, and I'm proud of what it's become.

But I honestly feel unprepared for the next leap. Nevertheless, I'm finding solace in the idea that every successful company has these moments. I think Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb once said that your entire company needs to change every time it doubles in size. As a leader, you need to confront your limitations as a human being and either hire somebody to complement them or say yes to levels of responsibility that nobody's trained you for. Such is the pain and beauty of entrepreneurship.

Here’s what I want to share this week:

1. ​Why Peter Thiel Searches for Secrets: I recently had dinner with Peter Thiel and was surprised to see how relentlessly he looks for secrets. In this essay, I provide a framework for discovering those secrets and explain why you should beware of consensus.
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2. ​What is Write of Passage Workshop: Somehow, even though I've been running the course for three years, I've never fully explained what we do and how we do it. It's time to change that. We'll have our alumni, mentors, community stewards, and team members there too. If you'd like to join the live presentation and see what the cutting-edge of education looks like, register here.​
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3. ​How to Write a Book: Ali Abdaal has 2.7 million YouTube subscribers and is now trying to write his first book. This conversation functioned like a therapy session where I helped him escape certain creative ruts and think differently about the writing process. If you’d like to write with us, he’ll be joining my upcoming Write of Passage cohort, which begins on March 2nd.

Coolest Things I Learned This Week

The Two Sides of Fear

What should you do when you want to write but feel scared to do so?

F. Scott Fitzgerald said: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” In that spirit, this question has two contradictory answers. You should simultaneously dance with your fears and transcend them:

1. Dancing with Your Fear: I think of a story from Seth Godin where he talks about a champion marathon runner. After winning the race, a little kid came up to him and said: “Wow, do you run so fast and not get tired?”
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   To which the runner replied: “Of course I get tired. I just know where to put the tired.”
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   Fear is the same way. Every artist has fears. The difference between them and ordinary people is they know where to "put the fear."
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2. Transcending Your Fear: When your mission is important enough, the fear of pursuing it goes dim. Just think of all the soldiers who’ve marched to battle for their beloved country. When your vision is lofty and clear enough, your fears become irrelevant. In that moment, we are humbled by our work, which helps us transcend our fears. As Steven Pressfield once said: "The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”
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   That doesn’t mean you should go all-in right away, though. In psychology, there’s an idea called “Exposure Therapy,” where people confront their fears by exposing themselves to progressively more intense doses of stimulus. So if somebody’s afraid of elevators, they’ll look at photos of them, then touch one, then step into one, then ride one for 10 seconds, and eventually work their way up to calmness in the presence of an elevator.
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   Writing is the same way. Start small. If it helps, write under a pseudonym. Continue saying yes to progressively ambitious projects. Increasingly, you’ll find yourself comfortable with activities that would’ve terrified you a few years ago.

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Testosterone

When people think of testosterone, they think of aggression. They think of the stereotypical angry man who is red with rage and yells at everybody who spites him.

But Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford psychologist and author of Behave, argues that our understanding of testosterone is misguided. He says that testosterone doesn’t prompt aggression. Instead, it prompts whatever behaviors are required to change status.

To investigate the effects of testosterone, researchers at the University of Zurich asked: “What happens if acquiring status requires you to be nice?”

To find an answer, they asked people to play an Ultimatum Game where you decide how to split money between you and another player. Since the outcome of the game influenced people’s status and reputation, people who were given testosterone before playing made more generous offers — which is the opposite of testosterone’s reputation as an aggression-inducing hormone. Through this, they discovered that testosterone levels foster aggression only when they influence a change in status.

Sapolsky summarizes the findings as such: "In a world where status is awarded for the best of our behaviors, testosterone would be the most prosocial hormone in existence."

Thanks to Dan Shipper for sharing this nugget with me.

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Days vs. Decades

The cadence of your work shapes your temperament. When you’re a day trader, every phone notification matters. But when you’re a committed buy-and-hold investor, you can mostly ignore them. The longer your time horizon, the calmer life becomes. Zoom out far enough, and once-gargantuan hurdles turn into tiny speed bumps on the road of life.

This is an excerpt from my essay, Hugging the X-Axis.

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​The Color of Prisons​

An experiment found that when its (all-male) subjects were exposed to a specific shade of pink, they became up to 23% weaker. The US government jumped on this, painting prisons Baker-Miller pink to quell inmate violence. "If these Baker-Miller pink tests were conducted before World War II when pink was seen as more masculine and energizing, they might’ve not turned out so peacefully."

Photo of the Week

I snapped this photo at Pennybacker Bridge in Austin yesterday afternoon. The city's been booming for the past few years. But why are so many people moving here right now?

Here are three reasons:

1. Escape the BS: People who move here are tired of people telling them how to think. It’s a way of opting out of the dogmas of political correctness and people here don’t police your speech like they do on the coasts. Moving to Austin is the geographical equivalent of saying: “I don’t read the news.” The result is that people in Austin value freedom more than money. It’s cool to be ambitious, but people look down upon the kinds of extreme ambition you find in San Francisco and New York. Many of my favorite coffee shops in Austin don’t even allow people to use computers on Sundays. It’s Austin’s way of whispering that weekends are for leisure. This is where Texas' spirit shines through. My friend Justin Murphy says that historically, people have moved to California for riches and Texas for freedom. It was true in 1849 when pioneers raced to the west to strike gold. Meanwhile, people moved to Texas for land and the freedom of a cowboy lifestyle. Fast forward 170 years and these dynamics are still at play.
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2. Taxes: So many of the people you meet in Austin are from New York and California. Many move here for lower taxes, and I have a few friends who are here because they intend to liquidate a meaningful amount of assets in the next few years.
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3. Small-Town Vibe: Austin is a city that feels like a town. I live close to the city center, which means that nothing is more than 15-minutes away, even during rush hour. Having all your friends close by makes it easy to build deep friendships. Since there’s not a ton going on here in the name of events, people entertain themselves by spending quality time together. These days, most of my hangouts involve some combination of fitness and time outside. The deepest conversations happen in 90-minute sauna-cold plunge sessions.

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