Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

In my Annual Review at the beginning of the year, I solidified my plan to make studying the Bible my top learning priority for 2022. To make it happen, I started looking for a Jewish and Christian guide. Two and a half months later, I’m working with a Chabad rabbi in town every Thursday and on Saturdays, a Christian guide whose been leading a weekly Bible study for more than 20 years now. For a window into my motivations, check out my essay: Why You’re Christian.

If you’re itching to escape the corporate world and leap into the creator economy, this is the last week to apply for my Production Operations Lead position. Here’s the job description and the application.

Here’s what I want to share this week:

1. Practice Analytically, Perform Intuitively: A motto for improving at any skill. When you’re away from your craft, you want to be scientific and left-brained. But in the heat of performance, you want to be artistic and right-brained. I explain why in this YouTube video and this essay.​
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2. Interview about Business Writing: This one has been a surprising hit. Sam Corcos, the founder of Levels, interviewed me about how to communicate inside a company, both to build relationships and be more efficient. Watch the interview here.​
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3. René Girard Lectures: Earlier this year, I spent three days with Johnathan Bi recording 70,000 words of scripts about René Girard. The first lecture will go live in two weeks, and if you’d like to receive it by email, sign up here. ​
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Coolest Things I Learned This Week

​Working from Abundance​

I just received an advanced edition of Tiago Forte’s soon-to-be-released book, Building a Second Brain. It’s a masterpiece and I believe it’s destined to catapult the knowledge management space to the mainstream.

If you’re a knowledge worker, I implore you to develop a system for saving your best ideas. Once you do, you’ll be able to start projects with a giant list of relevant ideas you’ve collected over the years. Doing so is the difference between needing to make dinner and either running to Whole Foods or cultivating your food from scratch. Crucially, you don’t need to use all the ideas you’ve saved. But starting with something instead of nothing makes it so much easier to gain momentum on a creative project.

Working from abundance will give you a leg up in whatever line of work you choose. You’ll be people’s go-to creative partner if you can instantly gather the best ideas you’ve ever had on a subject. Pinterest users know this intuitively!

In my own life, I just saw this while designing my new production studio in Austin. Instead of building a mood board from scratch, I popped into my notes and instantly pulled together my favorite designs from the past five years. What would have taken me a month of research took ten minutes — and I apply the same principle to writing.

Note: If you’d like to learn how to capture ideas, you’ll like this workshop I hosted with Tiago.

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Writing from Abundance

I used to have terrible writer’s block. To me, there was nothing scarier than a blank white page. To solve this problem, I started writing from abundance. To light an intellectual fire and give myself writing momentum, I’d start by pulling the best ideas I’d ever come across on a particular subject.

Some of them were my own ideas. Things like diary entries I’d saved while traveling or summaries I’d written while reading. Other ideas were from other people, such as stories and statistics. Regardless of where the ideas came from, pulling them into a central location gave me instant momentum that hours of staring at a blank white screen could've never given me.

This calls for a point of clarification. Note the word "momentum." The point wasn't that I regurgitated existing ideas. The point was that ideas on the page were tinder for the flame of creativity. Like a campfire, getting the flame started is the hardest part. But once it's going, it’s fairly easy to keep it alive if you have the raw materials.

Thus, my screen looks something like this whenever I write. My latest draft goes on the left and my notes go on the right (which I outlined in this YouTube video).

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Breaking The Fourth Wall

In the movie world, there’s a concept called the Fourth Wall. Wikipedia defines it as a performance convention where there’s an invisible wall that separates the actors from the audience. Though the audience can see through the wall, the actors cannot. Whenever the actor speaks directly to the audience (like the interviews in The Office), the fourth wall is broken. As it happens, the relationship between the actors and the audience instantly transforms.

I noticed a similar phenomenon while watching the new Batman movie on Saturday night. Overtly political language shatters the fourth wall between fantasy and reality. When actors use politically correct language like “check your privilege,” you instantly escape the fantasy world you’ve been living in. Your CNN Brain turns on and you snap back into the culture war battlefield.

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​Apple Stores​

Shopping malls let Apple pay less for retail space than other stores. The typical tenant pays roughly 15 percent of its sales per square foot, while Apple pays roughly 2 percent.

Mall owners extend a special offer to Apple because their stores increase foot traffic by roughly 10 percent for all the other stores in the mall. Apple stores also change the composition of a mall by promoting upscale stores and causing midscale and discount ones to leave.

Source: Harvard Business Review​

Photo of the Week

With the SXSW conference in Austin this week, it was time to get some Write of Passage students together. This time, for a bunch of brisket and pork ribs.