10 great articles – Kevin Kelly’s The Third Culture, Mark Manson on India, Jesse Plemons and more

Check out my new linkblog. It includes every article I’ve read in November, with highlights. It’s a neat conversion of my public Evernote notebook, and I’ll be using it to share what I’m reading.

Recommended reads:

  • Mark Manson (the PostMasculine guy) on happiness. Great insights
  • Reid Hoffman’s cups of water metaphor to understand business strategy
  • Buffer explains why 8-hour days are no longer relevant
  • These monks must complete a 1000-day, 7-year challenge which includes running 52 miles/day for 100 straight days. And if they fail? They commit suicide…
  • Mark on the chaos and poverty he experienced in India. Oddly, now I want to go
  • Kevin Kelly describes a third culture, driven by technology and not traditional science or art
  • How could I not include Murakami’s new short story? Here, his protagonist wakes up to discover he has become Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in a reverse-metamorphosis
  • Thanks to Dan, fascinating Reddit thread (among many)
  • Todd Alquist (played by Jesse Plemons) was one of the most interesting storylines from Breaking Bad’s final season
  • Reid Hoffman’s entire Series B fundraising deck for LinkedIn (which raised $10mm from Greylock); here are my notes

November Quotes: “I am the one who knocks.” – Walter White in Breaking Bad

Tucker Max’s monthly quotes post is full of gems.

A CEO’s job is to interpret external realities for a company – A. G. Lafley

Courtesy of Venkatesh Rao, whose writing will change your view of human nature and how you interpret motivation and behavior. Powerful, powerful stuff.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. – George Bernard Shaw

Ironic.

You ok? – Butch
No, man. I’m pretty far from okay. – Wallace

A great movie reveals itself in layers. You notice beautiful new details with every viewing.

Only men need to be loved, sweetheart. Women need to be wanted. – Gemma to Nero

Yes, I streamed all 5 Sons of Anarchy seasons. As a friend told me, sometimes you want steak, and other times you just want McDonald’s.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass. – William Faulkner

Definition of happiness […] is the moment before you need more happiness. – Don Draper

Dr. Drew says something similar. That if you want to know happiness, look at a heroin addict.

I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger. A guy opens his door and gets shot and you think that of me? No. I am the one who knocks! – Walter White

I wonder why they use “of me” and not “is me”.

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters. – Neil Gaiman

If you’re new to Gaiman, I recommend reading Graveyard and How To Talk To Girls At Parties.

It doesn’t matter how you get knocked down in life; that’s going to happen. All that matters is you’ve got to get up. – Ben Affleck (Oscar acceptance speech for Argo)

The best lovers do not have the best bodies. They are not the best-looking, and they do not have the largest respective body parts. What they do have is the best attitude: they are completely enthusiastic. – Lou Paget

[When Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore. – Kurt Vonnegut

I love how Vonnegut writes. A style and voice so crisp, memorable, and yet completely unique. Good writers follow the rules. Great writers know when to break them, to beautiful effect.

My complete list of quotes is here.

The Evan Williams formula for getting rich online

Evan WilliamsFrom a Wired review of an Evan Williams speech.

The main point: Stop creating things cause they’re new and cool. Instead, find something everyone OBVIOUSLY wants, see how they’re currently getting it, and make it easier, faster and cheaper.

…the internet is “a giant machine designed to give people what they want.”

Williams created Blogger and Twitter and will be a billionaire soon…so he knows how to give people what they want.

“We often think of the internet enables you to do new things,” Williams said. “But people just want to do the same things they’ve always done.”

The Internet will become a digital representation of the real world. If you carry that thinking far enough, we may cease to exist as physical organisms (see Tron).

Increasingly, everything that happens and everything we do, everyplace you go and check in, every thought you have and share, and every person who liked that thought… is all connected… and it keeps multiplying relentlessly.”

The Internet is about convenience, and convenience is speed and “cognitive ease”.

In other words, people don’t want to wait, and they don’t want to think — and the internet should respond to that.

See Google (finding things), Amazon (buying things), Apple (communicating things), and Facebook (also communicating things?).

The key to making a fortune online […] is to remove extra steps from common activities as he did with Blogger.

See also Uber (getting somewhere). Chris Sacca calls it closing the loop.

The Internet is not utopia. It’s more like…modern agriculture:

“[Agriculture] made life better. It not only got people fed, it freed them up to do many more things — to create art and invent things.”

Modern agriculture has downsides (eg, animal abuse, overeating, environmental damage) and so does the Internet (eg, mental health, media addiction).

A Dave McClure quote sums it up:

“Great companies do 1+ of 3 things: Get you LAID (= sex). Get you PAID (= money). Get you MADE (= power)”

1-Read-A-Day: what I learned running a newsletter, October edition

Every month, I share what I’ve learned running the 1-Read-A-Day newsletter. Here’s the first month.

How well is it doing?

  • Subscribers: 230 (only 10 new subs since September)
  • Open rate: 22.6%
  • Click rate: 2.5%
  • Most opened email: Lesson 5, Making Yourself a CEO by Ben Horowitz
  • Most clicked email: Lesson 39, How Mint beat Wesabe by Noah Kagan

What did I learn in October?

  • Readers were quiet this month. Several commented that they enjoyed the 10-question quiz after Lesson 50
  • I recorded three short audio summaries for Lessons 1, 2, and 3. Just experimentin’. They’re around a minute each. You can hear them by clicking the big blue button near the top
  • I published another 101, Startup Mistakes and Failures. 27 great links featuring Max Skibinsky, Siqi Chen, Derek Sivers, and more
  • I wish there was an easy, effective way to convert emails into blog posts. There are plugins that convert RSS feeds into emails, but I can’t find a good plugin to do the opposite. With email newsletters growing in popularity, I hope this problem is solved soon
  • I wish Mailchimp allowed me to better manage autoresponder emails in bulk. Right now, if I make a design change to one Lesson, I need to manually repeat that change more than 50 times!

What’s coming up

  • More 101s: Hiring, Product, and Stories
  • Once I hit 100 lessons, I’ll create a draft Startup Textbook (a well-designed PDF file featuring the 101s and the summaries). Hope we’ll be there by December
  • I haven’t marketed the newsletter (beyond blog posts and tweets), but subscribers are not growing (5% since September). I’ve been unwilling to make a big push, and I’m not sure why (perhaps I don’t think it’s good enough?)

Thanks to all subscribers for your feedback. It’s been a pleasure to do this. Here’s to showing up and getting to work. Cheers!

PS. If you run an email newsletter, I’d love to hear what you’re doing and what you’ve learned

What they talk about when they talk about writing

I write only when inspiration strikes me. Fortunately it strikes me every morning at nine o’clock sharp. – Somerset Maugham

There’s a deep satisfaction that comes from publishing a piece of writing, even if it’s seen by only a handful of anonymous readers.

That satisfaction comes from a basic human desire. It’s the desire to create something with our hands, something that we alone willed into existence, and something that has a chance – however small – of outlasting us.

I want to write more than I currently do, but it’s hard. The problem? Finding the right words and putting them in the right order.

But I’m determined to become a better writer. Writing is like a sport – it’s fun to play, but it’s more fun when you’re good.

I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day’s work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. – Murakami

As an avid reader, the writers I most enjoy (say, Orwell, or Hemingway, or Carver) seem to possess 2 skills: a mastery of style, which is like the foundation and walls of a house, and the ability to evoke emotion, which is like the furnishing and appliances.

You need the foundation and walls, but it’s the plush couch and comfortable lighting that make a place feel like home.

People ask me why I write. I write to find out what I know – Virginia Woolf

I have a lot of catching up to do. In 16 years of school, I barely learned the basics of writing style and certainly not the harder art of engaging emotion. Though we read Shakespeare and Twain and Achebe, I can’t explain how or why their work was so effective.

And though I wrote stacks of essays in response to various prompts, it’s the equivalent of a kid who, wanting to play in the NBA, practices by shooting free throws in the park.

This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an effect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic quality. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic. – Ernest Hemingway

After school, I spent 7 years in business. Here, quantity and speed are more important than style and feeling. We write a novella’s worth of emails every week, but it’s done on deadline and with competing priorities. Sure, we may type a thoughtful team email or diligent Board update, but it’s filled with jargon and lacks feeling. Good writing – to me – is all about feeling.

With the aim of becoming a better writer, I’ve set 3 priorities:

Priority #1 is to write more and write carefully. Like meditation, careful writing is tough because it feels like an absence of activity. You use the same amount of energy as composing a business email, but at half the speed. You need to carefully choose your words. Write and rewrite paragraphs. Minimize jargon and overused figures of speech. And above all, make sure you’re saying what you want to say, and you’re saying it clearly.

Priority #2 is to study the work of good writers. Writing is a vulnerable, visible profession. Writers may not appear in celebrity tabloids or reality TV shows, but their brains are on display with every sentence. To paraphrase V.S. Naipaul, a writer’s being is the sum of his work, and to understand a writer, you need to understand his writing.

Some writers even translate the work of others. Murakami translated Fitzgerald. Franzen translated Kraus. I have a weekly goal of rewriting – word for word – a famous short story or essay. I’ll share the details in a future post; it’s something Ben Franklin used to do.

Priority #3 is to read the advice of good writers. Their advice is not without cliche and repetition. As with any creative act, there’s a mystery which can’t be explained.

However, there are articles worth sharing. Despite each writer’s unique style and background, there is one consistent message: pick the right words, put them in the right order, and do so with a purpose.

Here’s a list:

Literature is not like music; it isn’t for the young; there are no prodigies in writing. The knowledge or experience a writer seeks to transmit is social or sentimental; it takes time, it can take much of a man’s life, to process that experience, to understand what he has been through; and it takes great care and tact, then, for the nature of the experience not to be lost, not to be diluted by the wrong forms. The other man’s forms served the other man’s thoughts. – V.S. Naipaul

Unlike learning Chinese or living longer, “writing better” is hard to measure. But sometimes you just need to do something, and keep doing it, and eventually you’ll know.