I read a wide variety of material on the internet, including from a series of blogs and newsletters that I especially value. On this page, I’ll try to curate some of my favorites and categorize them by topic. I’ll particularly try to highlight evergreen material: writing that retains its value over long stretches of time and isn’t tied to present events.
Life Systems & Thinking
How to Do Great Work (Paul Graham): “Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone who’s done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.”
Mental Models (Shane Parrish): “Mental models are how we understand the world. Not only do they shape what we think and how we understand but they shape the connections and opportunities that we see. Mental models are how we simplify complexity, why we consider some things more relevant than others, and how we reason.”
Growth without Goals (Patrick O’Shaughnessy): “Inventing the future is another way of saying “setting goals.” Success, especially in the West, then becomes about achieving those goals. We accumulate accomplishments and call it success. Success means something very different to me, and I think being a great father will be about effectively communicating this different definition of success to my kids. Success is about building a set of daily practices, it is about growth without goals.”
How to Be Successful (Sam Altman): “I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up wanting the latter. Here are 13 thoughts about how to achieve such outlier success.”
The Top Idea in Your Mind (Paul Graham): “I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I’d thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I’d go further: now I’d say it’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.”
100 Blocks a Day (Tim Urban): “Let’s think about those 1,000 minutes as 100 10-minute blocks. That’s what you wake up with every day…Imagine these blocks laid out on a grid. What if you had to label each one with a purpose?”
Your Life in Weeks (Tim Urban): “Each row of weeks makes up one year. That’s how many weeks it takes to turn a newborn into a 90-year-old. It kind of feels like our lives are made up of a countless number of weeks. But there they are—fully countable—staring you in the face.”
The Tail End (Tim Urban): “When you look at that reality, you realize that despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life.”
Principles for Living: An Operating System for Life (Shane Parrish): “In Principles for Living, I lay out my operating system for life. The principles are clear, straight-forward, and help me live an effective life. All that I write about, think about, and strive to achieve is inspired by one or more of the following principles. I hope they offer some clarity and direction as you carve your own path.”
How to Remember What You Read (Shane Parrish): “Why is it that some people seem to be able to read a book once and remember every detail of it for life, while others struggle to recall even the title a few days after putting down a book? The answer is simple but not easy. It’s not what they read. It’s how they read. Good reading habits not only help you read more but help you read better.”
Habits
Habits Masterpost (James Clear): “What you repeatedly do (i.e. what you spend time thinking about and doing each day) ultimately forms the person you are, the things you believe, and the personality that you portray…When you learn to transform your habits, you can transform your life.”
Habits vs. Goals: A Look at the Benefits of a Systematic Approach to Life (Shane Parrish): “Habits are algorithms operating in the background that power our lives. Good habits help us reach our goals more effectively and efficiently. Bad ones makes things harder or prevent success entirely. Habits powerfully influence our automatic behavior.”
Monthly Challenges (Blas Moros): “In October 2013, I watched a brilliant and inspiring TED talk by Matt Cutts. He posits that anything you want to add to your life, learn, do or even not do can become a habit with a 30 Day Challenge. I loved this concept and decided to implement it into my life.”
Startups & Entrepreneurship
Startup = Growth (Paul Graham): “A startup is a company designed to grow fast…Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth…The good news is, if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place. Which means you can use growth like a compass to make almost every decision you face.”
Default Alive or Default Dead? (Paul Graham): “When I talk to a startup that’s been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die?”
Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company (Sahil Lavingia): “In 2011, I left my job as the second employee at Pinterest — before I vested any of my stock — to work on what I thought would be my life’s work. I thought Gumroad would become a billion-dollar company, with hundreds of employees. It would IPO, and I would work on it until I died. Something like that. Needless to say, that didn’t happen.”
It’s Time to Build (Mark Andreessen): “Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings…Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*.”
Investing & Venture Capital
The Most Important Media Businesses of the Past and Future (Matthew Ball): “For decades, the only real way to experience a digital world with agency and an individual sense of self was to go to the theme park. Games have been on the cusp of these experiences for years, but in 2020, they’re well under way.”
The Metaverse: What It Is, Where to Find it, Who Will Build It, and Fortnite (Matthew Ball): “Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, many of those in the technology community have imagined a future state of, if not quasi-successor to, the Internet – called the “Metaverse”. And it would revolutionize not just the infrastructure layer of the digital world, but also much of the physical one, as well as all the services and platforms atop them, how they work, and what they sell.”
The Logic of Risk Taking (Nassim Taleb): “Now, when you read material by finance professors, finance gurus or your local bank making investment recommendations based on the long term returns of the market, beware…Literally, anyone who survived in the risk taking business has a version of ‘in order to succeed, you must first survive.’ My own version has been: ‘never cross a river if it is on average four feet deep.'”
What do I mean by Skin in the Game? (Nassim Taleb): “What is Skin in the Game? The phrase is often mistaken for one-sided incentives: the promise of a bonus will make someone work harder for you. For the central attribute is symmetry: the balancing of incentives and disincentives, people should also penalized if something for which they are responsible goes wrong and hurts others: he or she who wants a share of the benefits needs to also share some of the risks.”
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning for Humans (Vishal Maini, Samer Sabri): “Strong AI will change our world forever; to understand how, studying machine learning is a good place to start”
Design
Slack’s $25 Billion Dollar Secret Sauce (Andrew Wilkinson): “In July 2013, I got an email from Stewart Butterfield. I recognized his name immediately. I was a big fan of Flickr, which he co-founded and sold to Yahoo, and we were both based in the Pacific Northwest. He had big news: he was shutting down Glitch, the game he’d started in 2009, and was working on something new. He wanted us to design his new team chat app.”
Writing
How to Write Usefully (Paul Graham): “What should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That’s what a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we can aim for something more ambitious: that an essay should be useful…Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn’t already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible.”
The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online (David Perell): “We live in the Age of Leverage…Leverage is a force multiplier on everything you do and every decision you make, and once you gain it, you can achieve things that once looked impossible…But what we are talking about here is not physical leverage. It is the leverage of ideas.”
Miscellaneous
Fast (Patrick Collison): “Some examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together.”
The Fermi Paradox (Tim Urban): “…If we’re right that there are 100,000 or more intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, and even a fraction of them are sending out radio waves or laser beams or other modes of attempting to contact others, shouldn’t SETI’s satellite dish array pick up all kinds of signals? But it hasn’t. Not one. Ever. Where is everybody?“
How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) (Tim Urban): “When we leave school for the last time, the macro guidance we’ve become so accustomed to is suddenly whisked away from us, leaving us standing there holding our respective dicks, with no idea how to do this. Then time happens. And we end up on a path. And that path becomes our life’s story.”
Will an MBA help you get ahead in tech? (Nick DeWilde): “I get this question a lot. It’s understandable why people are confused….The point of this article is not to offer another opinion on whether an MBA is a smart career move. Instead, I want to walk you through how to think through this decision based on who you are and what you want.”
How All This Happened (Morgan Housel): “The short story of what happened over the last 73 years is simple: Things were very uncertain, then they were very good, then pretty bad, then really good, then really bad, and now here we are. And there is, I think, a narrative that links all those events together.”
Why You Should Stop Reading News (Shane Parrish): “We spend hours consuming news because we want to be well informed…Rarely do we stop to ask ourselves questions about what we consume: Is this important? Is this going to stand the test of time — say, in a week or in a year? Is the person writing this someone who is well informed on the issue?”
Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (Tulika Bahadur): “Anybody who has even cursorily browsed the greatest works of world literature will know that “gardens” occupy a singular status in the human imagination. Their repeated occurrence in tales across geographies and eras is not a coincidence but suggestive of something important and profound about our psychological and social situation.”
John Stone 