Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

Chances are, your eyes have been glued to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Though I’ve been following it closely, I have nothing intelligent to add on the matter, so this is going to be a normal Monday Musings.

A little more than a year ago, when I was getting started with YouTube, I didn't know where to begin. I didn't know what equipment to buy, how to write a script, or how to grow an audience on YouTube. Desperate for answers, I enrolled in Ali Abdaal's Part-Time YouTuber Academy (affiliate link). Today, I have more than 20,000 YouTube subscribers and consistently publish a few videos every month.

Ali has also become a good friend, which is why I flew to London to record a YouTube video with him last month. If you're looking to grow a YouTube channel, his course is my top recommendation. As of today, the enrollment window is officially open.

Here’s what I want to share this week:

1. Hugging the X-Axis: We live in a world where people are scared of commitment. Among yuppies in particular, people are switching jobs more and are hesitant to get married. But honestly, why should they commit to things? The world is abundant, and we should try everything, right? The challenge is that a life without commitment is a life without meaning. Without commitment, you'll be stuck hugging the X-Axis. Read my essay here.​
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2. ​Business Writing Podcast: The founder of Levels interviewed me about written communications in the corporate world. He did such a good job. Minute-for-minute, he led me towards more new ideas than just about any podcast I've ever recorded. We discussed the tradeoffs of writing memos, when it's better to communicate through audio or video instead, and how writing inspired the Industrial Revolution. You can find the podcast on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify.​
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3. The Story of Peter Thiel: Peter Thiel preaches the importance of questioning the status quo. He follows in the footsteps of his mentor, René Girard, whose Mimetic Theory shaped Thiel's worldview and inspired him to look for hidden knowledge, which he calls secrets.

Coolest Things I Learned This Week​
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Taste

The worse your taste, the more likely you are to think that taste is subjective.

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Writing Like a Sushi Chef

Every time I eat sushi, I think to myself: “This delicious combination of raw fish and rice is so simple that I could do it.”

But if you’ve ever seen the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, you’ll know how much work goes into making it. Just so you can eat sushi, a fisherman has to go into the ocean to capture your food and bring it to the market before a restaurant employee picks it up, drives it to the kitchen, and hands it to the chef who can prepare it for you. On top of that, the rice needs to be solid enough to keep the sushi together when you pick it up with chopsticks, but soft enough to dissolve when it enters your mouth — which only happens if the rice’s outer layer is more densely packed than the inside. To ensure a subtle aroma, a chef should sprinkle vinegar on the fish in a process known as Su-Jime. If doing so makes the fish too moist, a chef can drop snowflakes of salt on top. Too much of either, and the fish will lose its essence.

Even with all that, I’m sure I’ve described ~1% of the sushi-making process.

Sushi illuminates the paradox of good writing: Your work is done when it looks so simple that the reader thinks they could’ve done it, which means they won’t appreciate how hard you worked.

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​Volitional Philanthropy​

Encouraging people to reach higher and illuminating their strengths is some of the most effective philanthropy you can do.

The researcher Michael Nielsen wrote about T.E. Lawrence in a short essay on the subject. Lawrence’s biography credited him with a unique “capacity for enablement.” In the span of a single conversation, he could help them find something within them they’d always possessed but had never been able to realize. After just a few minutes of conversation, people would set their sights higher and move through the world with more confidence.

Volitional philanthropy is not a motivational speech. It gains its power from personalized observations, not high energy. Where motivational speeches rile people up for hours or days at a time, the candle of Volitional philanthropy shines with a softer light that can burn for an entire lifetime.

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We’re Not Very Good at Compliments

Volitional Philanthropy would be more effective if we were better at giving compliments. Most of the time, people give compliments that are too broad. To a writer, they’ll say things like “I like your writing” or “you write so clearly.”

Though these compliments are fine and sometimes necessary, they don’t have meaningful staying power. They won’t pierce into the heart and alter the trajectory of somebody’s life. To do that, you need to be much more specific.

So if you’re complimenting a writer, say something like: “You are exceptionally observant and have a way of describing things with language so fresh that you make people laugh.” Now, that’s a helpful compliment because it’s so specific. In addition to warming a writer’s heart, the compliment is useful because it tells the writer what kinds of skills they should cultivate.

The more specific the skill you identify, the more they can develop it. The world rewards people who have outlier strengths and when somebody identifies one of them, it’s in your best interest to cultivate it.

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​The Two Kinds of People​

The writer David Goodhart observes that there are two kinds of people: Somewhere People and Anywhere People.

Anywhere People tend to be educated and mobile. They are career-driven and base their identities on academic and professional success. Since they’re willing to move to achieve their goals, they don’t value their hometown or for that matter, any particular place as much.

Somewhere People are different. They tend to be more rooted and less career-driven. They aren’t as formally educated either. Resulting from the ties they feel to a specific place, they tend to value security, familiarity, and national or local group attachments. Much of their identity is tied to the place they were born and the ways of life that are attached to it.

Though Somewhere People outnumber Anywhere People by a factor of 2-1, Somewhere People control the media and hold the highest positions of power.

Photo of the Week

I attended the Van Gogh immersive experience last week. It’s worth seeing for two reasons: (1) the 360 room of projectors where you lie down on bean bags as Van Gogh’s art shines on the screens around you, and (2) the virtual reality experience of Van Gogh’s hometown.

Before attending, I didn’t understand how Van Gogh’s colorblindness contributed to the uniqueness of his paintings. A researcher named Kazunori Asada discovered that with the way Van Gogh wouldn’t have seen the “incongruity of color and roughness of line” that characterize his style. Instead, his paintings would have looked much more delicate to him.

If you’d like to learn about the way he used color, I recommend this YouTube video.