Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

I'm hosting a team retreat in town and have no new updates to share, so let's jump right into it.
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Here’s what I want to share this week:

1. ​The Price of Discipline: This essay is inspired by my childhood hatred of school and the story of former world #1 tennis player Andre Agassi, who was forced to play tennis against his will. That, though, presents a conundrum. When should we discipline people? And what are the costs of such discipline?
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2. Low-Status Projects: Many people prevent themselves from pursuing big projects because they feel like the project is beneath them. They should remember that every high-status project begins as a low-status one, and there’s tons of competition for basically every project that’s guaranteed to be high-status.

Coolest Things I Learned This Week

The 'Work Backwards' Method of Writing

Amazon has a philosophy called "Work Backwards."​

Employees start projects by writing the press release, which clarifies a bunch of product decisions.

Writers can work backwards too by writing the tweet people will use to share your article before you write the article itself.

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​How to Compress Ideas​

Compression is the essence of good writing. The more you compress your writing, the more quality ideas you’re able to share in fewer and fewer words.

How do you get good at compressing your writing?

By talking.

As humans, we have a natural talent for compression. Whenever we open our mouths to tell a story, we are compressing information by focusing on the dramatic parts and leaving out the boring ones. But the same people who are solid storytellers when they talk forget how to compress ideas once they start writing about them.

Whenever I talk to them, I tell them to set a 60-100 second time limit and speak out the entirety of what they’re trying to say. It’s like an elevator pitch. The time is limited and you have to tell the entire story. I’ve noticed that verbalizing ideas naturally helps people get to the point and identify the essence of what they’re trying to say. Once they’ve done so, I tell them to write down exactly what they said.

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The Problem with Most Online Communities

“Community” is the buzzword of the day. Surfing the Internet makes it seem like everybody’s trying to build one.

The issue is that too many people are building communities as an end in themselves. C.S. Lewis’ definition of friendship is a worthy guide. He wrote that the essence of friendship is the phrase: “You too?”

Lewis' observation hints at something important: friendship has to be about something bigger than itself. The best ones emerge not just when two people are interested in the same thing, but when they can work towards a common goal together. Military friendships are strong for precisely this reason. Companionship naturally emerges when two people grow together, fight together, and strive together.

I’m therefore skeptical of communities that exist solely to facilitate friendships. You need a shared mission. The more challenging it is, the better the friendships it'll tend to facilitate.

In Write of Passage, we create community by helping people write together — which really means exploring the mind, clarifying ideas, and pushing through the anxieties of writing online. But importantly, that community is a byproduct of our mission to teach people how to write online. Likewise, CrossFit is a strong community because the friendships are just a byproduct of people pushing themselves mentally and physically.

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Politics: The Bars of Conversation

While living in New York, I noticed something weird: Even though the majority of my friends wanted to drink less alcohol, the majority of group hangouts centered around alcohol.

This is because bars were the lowest common denominator option. As opposed to an activity like working out or going to a play, bars require very little planning and work for just about everybody. Drinking at a bar is the plan if you don’t have a plan.

Politics and sports play a similar role in conversation. When two people have nothing to talk about, they’ll debate sports or politics. Thus, the majority of people in my social circle spend much more time talking about sports or politics than they’d like to.

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Photo of the Week

On Friday, I publicly announced the release of the 7-part series about René Girard’s ideas I've been yapping about for a little while. Johnathan Bi, who has been studying his work for the past six years and will be sharing the ideas, wrote an overview of what we’ll be covering which got a surprisingly big response from people like Marc Andreessen.

If you’d like to receive an email when the introductory lecture goes live in April, click here.