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Learn how to discover your visual style so you can make timeless design decisions for your personal brand or business

One of the common questions I’m asked is how I create the …

Once I was complaining to Arun about how hard it is to come up with ideas, and he pointed out that coming up with ideas is actually very easy––what makes it hard is that we’re aiming for good ideas. The next time you're coming up with ideas, tell yourself, Forget about good ideas, let's come up with a list of ten bad ideas. The dumber the better! I bet you’ll find that easy. And once you loosen up your brain by coming up with ten bad ideas, some good ideas may follow.

Counterintuitively, escalating is good for relationships and very good for demonstrating responsibility.

Matthew Mercer takes D&D very seriously. But he never thought he'd become its biggest superstar.

The other day the low tire pressure indicator came on in my car. I didn’t see an obvious flat, so the likely explanation was some ... Read more

Hollywood and tech firms want to reduce culture to a slurry of interchangeable bits. Let’s not help them out

We’ve lost far too many hackers to suicide. What if Satoshi was one of them?

Frustrated? Procrastinating? Stuck? You've scrolled through all the timelines, checked your email 10 times, and now what? You don't feel like working...

比特币思想的中文集结地

According to BlockWorks Group analyst Jake Levison, you only need 0.28 bitcoin to be in the top 1% richest of the world (in BTC terms).

... And what exactly is a 'Debt-Like' item anyway

The current talent market is full of contradictions. Candidates getting multiple offers while companies conduct sweeping layoffs. People “quiet quitting” in droves while there’s more opportunity than ever for flexibility. Yet one thing hasn’t changed: the mistaken belief that hiring “A-players” will solve everything. Steve Jobs famously insisted on hiring A-players. This philosophy had enormous […]

A little plea to stop judging art by what the dullest take away

This, by one Jash Dholani, has been provoking much derision on Twitter over the past few days. The easiest and most obvious response is t...

We know, "no idea is a bad idea," but brainstorming is often unsuccessful. These prompts actually work. They could even lead to a unique business model.

It's not an anti-NATO, it's not going to replace the dollar, and it's not going to control global economic growth.

Novel news; a review for the NYT.

My friends at Six Apart recently asked me to make a list of blogs that I enjoy. I think they're planning to use it for their new Blogs.com project. Unfortunately, I'm late getting it to them (typical), but if it's still useful, I'll post it here in a day

It’s a weird thing to say, but I guess I’m a professional reader. That’s really what authors are. A book is made of books. “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading; a man will turn over half a library to make one book,” Samuel Johnson said. I’ve written 15 books now, which has meant reading many thousands of books in the process. Once a month for the last 15 years, I’ve recommended many of those books in the Reading List Email. And in 2021, I opened my own bookstore filled with my all-time favorites. So the question I am asked most often is: How do you read so much? What’s the secret? The answer is not “I’m a speedreader.” As I’ve written before, speed reading is a scam. The answer is that I have a system, a process that helps me be a productive reader. It’s not my system exactly, as I’ve taken many strategies from history’s greatest readers. Nor is this a system designed around speed or quantity. Reading is wonderful in and of itself, why would I try to rush through it? No, I try to do it well. I try to enjoy it. In this email, I thought I would detail some of the rules I’ve come to follow over the years. They don’t all make me faster, but they do make me better. –Do it all the time. Bring a book with you everywhere. I’ve read at the Grammy’s and in the moments before going under for a surgery. I’ve read on planes and beaches, in cars and in cars while I waited for a tow truck. You take the pockets of time you can get. –Physical books only. -It’s not that I have a problem with audiobooks–if it gets you reading, I’m all for it. I just think there’s something very special about the physical form. I just read a great book about this actually called Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf. –Hardcover over paperback. –Bring a pen with you too. Reading is better if you’re taking notes. –Keep a commonplace book. As Seneca wrote: “We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application—not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech—and learn them so well that words become works.” (Here’s a video on my commonplace book method). –Err on the side of age. Classics are classics for a reason. -Beat them up. Books are not precious things. As an author, I love it when people hand me a book to sign that has had real miles put on it. When people hand me a pristine copy and tell me it’s their favorite, I assume they are just flattering me. It’s obvious what my favorite books are…because they’re falling apart (here’s my copy of Meditations for instance). –In every book you read, try to find your next one in its footnotes or bibliography. This is how you build a knowledge base in a subject—it’s how you trace a subject back to its core. -Same goes when you find an author you love, read them ALL. I read Cecil Woodham-Smith’s book on the charge of the Light Brigade…only to find she had also written a biography of Florence Nightingale. It was that discovery that shaped a full third of my book Courage is Calling. -That comment from (the disgraced and indicted FTX founder) Sam Bankman Fried about how every book could be a 900 word blog post is preposterously stupid. The whole point of reading is to really understand something. So if all you’re after is the ‘gist,’ skip books and stick with blog posts. –If you see a book you want, just buy it. Don’t worry about the price. Reading is not a luxury. It’s not something you splurge on. It’s a necessity. Even if all you get is one life-changing idea from a book, that’s still a pretty good ROI. -That might sound privileged, but Warren Buffett considers the foundation of his multi-billion dollar empire to be a book. At 19-years-old, he bought a copy of The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. We don’t know exactly what he paid for it, but in the early 1950s, a hardcover typically went for $1.30–the best investment he ever made, he’s said. Today, Buffett’s worth $108.7 billion, having given away some $37 billion to charitable causes. Not a bad ROI! –Some people might recoil at categorizing a book that way, but as a lover of literature, I have no problem with it. I myself wouldn’t be writing this to you today if I hadn’t bought a paperback of Meditations in 2006 for $8.25 on Amazon. That book of philosophy taught me not just about life, but also schooled me in the art of writing, in working with and managing people, and gave me the speciality which I now write my own books about. Again, not a bad ROI. –Don’t just read books, re-read books. There’s a great line the Stoics loved—that we never step in the same river twice. The books don’t change, but you do. –As I said, speed reading is a scam. You just have to spend a lot of time reading. –If a book sucks, stop reading it. The best readers actually quit a lot of books. Life is too short to read books you don’t enjoy reading. –The rule I like is ‘one hundred pages minus your age.’ Say you’re 30 years old—if a book hasn’t captivated you by page 70, stop reading it. So as you age, you have less time to endure crap. -Embrace serendipity. So many of my favorite books are just random things I grabbed at bookstores (this is why I say don’t sweat buying a book–just roll the dice). That’s what bookstores are for, what I’ve tried to build mine around. It’s a discovery engine better than any algorithm. -Don’t just build a library, build [...]

The creator of Brain Pickings on what she’s learned about living a good life by tracing trails through “humanity’s common record.”

I’ve been reading and rereading biographies of Bach lately (for some podcast prep), and it strikes me he might count as the greatest achiever of all time.  That is distinct from say regarding him as your favorite composer or artist of all time.  I would include the following metrics as relevant for that designation: 1. […]

They're designed for storage, not sparking insights. Can AI change that?

Hint: I start with hyperbole.