An online commonplace book
“for the vast majority of its history, Stripe has, I think, attracted people who are drawn to unglamorous infrastructure challenges and problems. We are not a company that specializes in making beautiful cars. We make roads“
Patrick Collison
Always encouraged to do better after hearing Patrick speak. Dwarkesh’s podcast remains underrated.
Full transcript here
Certainly read the whole piece, but here is the print-it-out-and-hang-it-above-your-monitor version:
Be audacious.
Do grunt work.
Do the boring things.
Learn undefined skills.
Work hard.
Bring a sense of urgency & move fast.
Improve things.
Ask your naive questions.
Simplify things.
Follow up.
Show up during the hard times.
Figure out the first step.
Finish things.
No excuses then?
Most people who are talented or smart are scared of doing things. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s more often than not the case. The ability to do scary things on their behalf is extremely powerful, both in terms of advancing the goal/project and also getting them to better utilize their talents.
– Adaobi
It’s early 2024, but Adaobi’s piece How to do things if you’re not that smart and don’t have any talent is my favorite on-line piece of the year.
Audacious: recklessly daring. – origin, from L. audax, audac- ‘bold’
I can’t help but think of this in terms of football, but I find being audacious helps build confidence. Having an approach of I’m going to take this defender on, regardless of the result, can help steady the nerves.
Applicable elsewhere I’m sure.
I tell people who want to write they should try to write every single day without exception. They don’t all like hearing that. Obviously, it’s not how every writer works, but it’s a good initial test to see whether you really want to be a writer.
– Tyler Cowen
This a good test of how badly one wants to write. Also, I’d take this as you don’t have to publish said writing.
You can keep it to yourself. Remember writing is a powerful method of thinking.
This from Tyler’s latest conversation with Rebecca F. Kuang:
The trunk of an elephant might feel cool to the touch. Not what one expects, perhaps, from 200 pounds of writhing muscle, strong enough to uproot a tree, which tapers down to two “fingers,” giving it enough delicacy to detect the ripest berry on a shrub, and pluck it. Feeling an elephant’s trunk draws you to her other great feature: melancholic eyes that are veiled by long and dusty lashes. This combination of might with the suggestion of serene contemplation is surely the reason that elephants seem to embody a special state of grace.
I appreciate this description of an elephant’s trunk. It’s a surprising, captivating way to open a letter. Note the focus, the detail. Wang could have described the entire elephant, but instead he honed in on one appendage.
Good writing is specific.
Also, he recounts this admonition about learning he wrote in his 2017 letter.
“Knowledge can compound. I’d like for us to think more about how to accelerate the growth of learning. The traditional method of reading more books and trying to improve professionally are good starts, but it’s not enough to stop there. One can learn more by traveling to new places, being social in different ways, reading new types of books, changing jobs or professions, moving to a new place, by doing better and by doing more.”
– Dan Wang
Learning can compound.
Dan’s letters are beyond bookmarking. They are worth printing out and reading in hand.
Skip to the full 2023 letter below:
Fate guides the willing; it drags the unwilling behind it.
Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt. (letters, CVII)
– Seneca
If reading Meditations seems like a slog, maybe Sentences from Seneca would be more accessible.
It’s pamphlet sized, with some of Seneca’s most revered tweets, sentences.
A good entry point if you’re stoic shy.
Every great movement in history has been prepared for and partly carried out through preaching.
Martin Luther King Jr.
It’s easy to dismiss this idea, but the text book Dr. King annotated from lists the following movements:
– The Christian church
– The Crusades
– The abolition of slavery
– The reformation
– The labor movement
– Marxian Communism
Read the insightful post in full here
Hess, J. (2024, January 22). Martin Luther King Jr.’s Organizational Strategies and Tactics. [Blog post]. Jillian Hess Blog. Retrieved from https://jillianhess.substack.com/p/martin-luther-king-jrs-organizational
Most of all, at Harvard, John Adams learned to be a child of the Enlightenment. What does that mean?
Thomas E. Ricks
Many books are filled with answers. I like the ones that ask questions.
Ricks, Thomas E.. First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country. United States, HarperCollins, 2020. pp55
The recent tracks of the fox or otter, in the yard, remind us that each hour of the night is crowded with events, and the primeval nature is still working and making tracks in the snow.
Henry D. Thoreau
Nature doesn’t pause. This is something we inherently know, but it takes a keen observer like Thoreau to call our attention to it.
Thoreau, Henry D.. Essays: A Fully Annotated Edition. Italy, Yale University Press, 2013. pp28
Floodlights and Goalposts 