articles

Writing about something teaches you about what you know, what you don’t know, and how to think.

I realize how it sounds, but I'm going to say it anyway because it's the truth. When I first clapped eyes on the World Wide Web, I fell in love. Here's how I described the experience in a 2016 post about Halt and Catch F

Here’s the secret, if you can bear it

Neil Gaiman gave this keynote at the thirty-fifth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, held in Orlando, Florida, in 2013.

Let's do more of those

You can’t give general advice. If I do, millions of creators are going to see this and then they’re going to do it and I’m going to fuck them over.

Ideas to help you make sense of the world

Never let a bad market go to waste

The best finance blog you've never heard of. 10/10 stories, 5/10 art. Check it out 👇🏼

The key to becoming anti-fragile financially is Multiple Income Streams. If you lose one income stream, there are others to make up for it. Most people have 1 (or, in corporate America, a weak 1+2 punch). This leaves a ton of exposure to your cash flow/income statement, as all of your eggs are in on

What we saw happen in the UK last week is the first shock, not the last, and all the massive pension funds and asset owners who have turned themselves into shadow hedge funds, full of swaps and leverage through the sweet whispers of Wall Street Wormtongue, will be our undoing. Read more

I know, these are weird and trying times. It all makes you wonder what the point of stock-picking is. What is the purpose of kicking the tires, looking under the hood, and doing our jobs?

Not everything can be explained by numbers. In recent times, two eminent academics, one a Nobel laureate – Robert Shiller and the other Aswath Damodaran, both known for their works based on extensive quantitative methods, have published books about the importance of stories in understanding economics and business alike – Shiller’s Narrative Economics and Damodaran’s Narratives and Numbers. […]

Creator spotlight: StrawberryMilkMob

There's a lot of talk right now about smaller, slimmer, tighter teams. Economics are forcing companies to cut back, and what they're finding is progress. Trim the overgrown crown, let the sunshine meet the ground, and all sorts of new life blooms on the forest floor. Even Zuck, master of a megacorp, is noticing it: https://twitter.com/...

I preach about the miracle of constraints and their ability to boost creativity in anyone. But I see un-useful constraints being used all the time by creators, so I wanted to make a small list of examples to clarify what a useful constraint looks like. There’s only two real

Another obsession. Do you read to signal or to learn?

“I just sit in my office and read all day.” - Warren Buffett

Why keep it to 30

Some percentage of you are your own boss, or work from home, or otherwise have a dangerous level of flexibility around when you actually get to work. Some of you also know you're especially prone to procrastination, even on a good day. If you’re both of these things, you know how deadly the combination can be. Severe procrastination isn’t just

A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept - slope_vs_starting.md

A simple exercise

Well, you can’t. Right? That’s the received wisdom. You have to post on social media to direct people to your blog because nobody has RSS feeds any more, nobody curates what we used to grudgingly c…

“Curation” shouldn’t be a dirty word, but it is. In the last decade, it has come to mean slapped-together-links, or outright-stolen content, used to fill space and capture just enough attention to convert free onlookers into consumers. There’s a lot of truth behind that association. In fact, I’

I know someone that spends close to $20,000 a month on a publicist. I know an author who spends something like that out of their own pocket each month on what’s called co-op, or extra prominent placement at airport bookstores. I know many people who spend more than that on advertising. I myself have hired publicists. I have paid for co-op. I used to spend six figures a year on Facebook ads for Daily Stoic. But several years ago I made a decision that changed my business and radically transformed my career. I stopped spending money on all of that. It’s not that I wasn’t getting a return on my investment. But it struck me just how empty it all was. I was putting all this time and energy and money into something, which were I ever to stop, would leave barely a trace behind! I was thinking of a wonderful quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, while criticizing advertising and publicity, pointed out that a person, “cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.” So I took that money and did something very different with it: I used it to start making stuff. I hired a videographer. I hired a social media manager. I hired another researcher. I hired a bunch of people. I took the entire budget that I had been putting into advertising and built a content team. We built the Daily Stoic podcast. We started making YouTube videos. We started cutting clips from the talks I gave. We wrote explainers and SEO pieces about philosophy. We launched DailyDad.com. We started @DailyPhilosopher on Instagram. Some people might shrug and say, “Yeah that’s called content marketing,” but it’s actually a deeper philosophical shift. Over the years, Daily Stoic has created hundreds of videos, articles and emails. With the 500-word daily newsletter, that’s a little more than two books a year of free content delivered straight to email inboxes around the world every morning. We’ve essentially created the largest Stoic library in the world. Hundreds of hours of video on the great Stoic works, the rules the Stoics lived by, Stoic habits, Stoic don’ts, and Stoic questions for a better life. Hundreds of thousands of words across articles on the Big 3 (Marucs Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus), timeless Stoic strategies for happiness, dealing with stress, getting and staying motivated, overcoming procrastination, and handling rude people. A lot of people have seen that stuff as a result. We’ve done something like 63 million views on YouTube (4.4 million hours watched), and we just hit 1 million subscribers to the channel last week. The podcast does around 5 million downloads a month (well over 120M downloads). The email goes out to nearly 600,000 subscribers every morning…and has been sent something like 450 million times. You can add on top of that this bi-monthly email you’re reading here, plus my monthly Reading List Email too. Some of the people that have found this content have gone on to be customers, sure. Advertising and publicity are largely used as a means of attracting attention for someone’s business. Content marketing is also a way of doing that. But I’m not saying you should trade Strategy A for Strategy B, or that Strategy B is more cost effective. It probably isn’t–making all this content has been an enormous amount of work and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. What I am saying is that instead of using your energy and resources and effort to make stuff that converts, you should use your energy and resources and effort to make stuff that matters. Because it is valuable in and of itself. Someone gets shown an ad and buys something, that’s great. But the people who get shown an ad and do nothing? What a lost opportunity! What a waste of their time and yours. It’s nice for the ego to get profiled in some publication…but it is quickly forgotten. Deciding to make videos, write articles, produce thousands of hours of audio–what I decided to prioritize my work around was making work. Creating value for others that lasts. I have a little notecard on my wall next to my desk that says “Am I Being a Good Steward of Stoicism?” I found I couldn’t sleep with myself knowing I was spending a bunch of money on extractive ads. But I can swell with pride knowing I spent the profits that my books have earned making content that millions of people have consumed for free, that has helped spread the ideas in Stoicism to people who would have never heard them otherwise. One helps the world, one helps no one but the ad network. I could stop making new content today…I could die tomorrow and the stuff we have made would keep on keeping on, reaching people, helping people. And this is really the best part: I would die a better person for having made it too. It was fun. It was educational. It was rewarding. I must say I wouldn’t go as far as saying all advertising is worthless (we have ads at the bottom of our emails a few times a week, including this one). At American Apparel, nothing was more rewarding than using our advertising budget to support causes like legalizing gay marriage or immigration reform. We also deliberately sought out publications that we believed were doing important work, that we felt contributed to the scene or the community–we put our money there, knowing that in addition to reaching people about our products, we were also helping that publication survive or thrive. The other reason I want to make it clear that I’m not just talking about content marketing versus ads is that I have very much stretched the definition of ‘content.’ The decision to open a small town bookstore in rural Texas? That’s not the same as a blogpost but it is doing stuff, it is making something that matters. The Painted Porch as a [...]

On the late American poet’s irrepressible confident weirdness