articles

“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

If someone asked me to give investing advice to a 30-year-old today who had just made their first million, I would first point them somewhere else. I’m not a financial advisor and don’t think I’m qualified to give anyone financial advice. The particulars matter too much. But if they insisted, I might say:

Read the full transcript of the speech "How to Guarantee a Life of Misery" by Charlie Munger.

Algorithms distort the world. They can trap us in local maxima, and restrict the kind of random serendipity that makes our personalities liquid. On Tuesday, I had lunch with a friend who invests in artificial intelligence startups. To my surprise, he doesn’t use any algorithms in his personal life. No Spotify Discover Weekly. No Netflix

The Steve Jobs Archive is building programs, fellowships, collections, and partnerships that reflect Steve’s values and carry his sense of possibility forward.

The original blog post from Adam Curry that gave birth to podcasting

The kindest thing you can do is get straight to the point. Make it clear what you want, what's next, and what you recommend.

A resource dedicated to establishing the field of formalised subjective effect documentation.

The integration of technique and intuition is a delicate process… but vital in the pursuit of excellence

See discussion on Hacker News (a) (610 points, 156 comments) I combed through several years of my private notes and through everything I published on productivity before and tried to summarize all of it in this post. If you’re unproductive right now Here’s what you should do if you’ve been procrastinating for an entire day: Accept that you won’t do anything today and try not to get angry at yourself Set the alarm for the time you will be preparing to go to bed today No, …

Your entire worldview changes when you realize you can *create luck*.

Today marks two years of not drinking. A few things I noticed: – our society revolves around drinking – not enough bars and restaurants offer non-alcoholic beers or mocktails – be…

Many people seem to think the 'good' state of being, the 'ground' state, is a relaxed state, a state with lots of rest and very little action. Because they think the ground state is the relaxed state, they act like maintaining any other state requires effort, requires suffering. This is

Family relationships are often unconsciously recreated at work

They apply to jobs, relationships, art projects and everything in between: The top right is the rare one–a car that goes fast but doesn’t feel like it’s on the edge. The hot rod i…

"Berkshire had a big task ahead. It solved that problem by avoiding bureaucracy and relying on one thoughtful leader as he kept improving and brought in more people like himself."

How to improve instead of atrophy

信息的高保真