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Book Notes: “This is Marketing” by Seth Godin

Check out the full notes for “This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn To See” by Seth Godin

Hulk Hogan told millions of kids to eat their vitamins. Stone Cold didn’t. They were both wildly popular wrestlers. I learned everything I know about marketing by watching 90s wrestling.

I should probably learn more, so I picked up Seth Godin’s This is Marketing this week.

Here are some takeaways.

Find a focus and ignore the rest

I took my first physics class in college. Going over the syllabus, I learned about the bell curve for grading and standard deviation. It didn’t really matter because I bombed the exams and barely passed.

Anyway, good to see a standard deviation curve that isn’t showing me how terrible I’m doing. Seth explains that a part of the curve (left of where most people clump together) represents neophiliacs. Focus on them. And what about the rest of the curve?

From This is Marketing:

Good marketers have the humility to understand that you shouldn’t waste a minute (not of your time or of their time) on anyone who isn’t on the left part of the curve.

You can’t change their mind. What you make is not for them.

That’s okay. Spare your energy.

Most people don’t know most people

“I don’t think about you at all.”

It’s one of my favorite lines from Mad Men. I try to remember it whenever I worry that I said something dumb in front of a group. Or when I think someone might be upset with me.

Ok so that’s not exactly the point of this section, I just wanted to share that. Mad Men itself is the point. Or the popularity of Mad Men. Or, one more try, the lack of popularity of Mad Men, depending on how you looked at it.

At its peak, it seemed like every pop culture critic wrote about or referenced Mad Men. Which is great but it didn’t mean that everyone beyond that was actually watching Mad Men.

From This is Marketing:

Today, though, popular culture isn’t as popular as it used to be. Mad Men, which was hyped by the New York Times in dozens of articles in just one season, was only regularly seen by 1 percent of the U.S. population.

On Tim Ferris’s podcast, Seth points out that most people don’t know Tim Ferriss. Of everyone you walked past today, 99 out of 100 people don’t know who Tim is. Still, he’s wildly successful. (Same goes for Seth.)

NBA players are really popular on social media. Until you start comparing them to global soccer stars.

Here’s the good thing. You don’t have to be nearly that popular to have an audience to build a career around.

Mad Men didn’t need to be seen by as many people as Johnny Carson. You don’t need to be known by as many people as Tim Ferriss.

You can start by aiming for something much smaller.

SEO is one thing, but it’s better for people to be searching for you

I used to be the first image search result for “machete costume”. It was a fun icebreaker when joining a new team.

SEO is useful, but It’ll be a long, hard battle if you’re trying to make it to the first match of any generic search term.

Why try showing up for “blog” when you can have people just search for your name?

From This is Marketing:

The path isn’t to be found when someone types in a generic term.

The path is to have someone care enough about you and what you create that they’ll type in your name. That they’ll be looking for you, not a generic alternative.

Yes, you can find my blog by searching for “blog” in Google.

But I’d rather have you search for “Seth” instead.

How do you get there? It’s simple, not easy: be good enough. You get good enough by showing up frequently and building trust.

(I also just want to explicitly acknowledge that “first image search result for ‘machete costume’” isn’t exactly the same in value as being the first search result for “blog”.)

What brands are around you? Why? (You probably like them.)

A brand isn’t just a logo. But a logo can be an important element.

From This is Marketing:

Here’s a simple exercise: Make a list of five logos you admire. As a consumer of design, draw or cut and clip five well-done logos.

Got ’em?

Okay, here’s my prediction: each one represents a brand you admire.

I looked around at the different things around me while writing the first draft of this. I wrote it at a gym. It wasn’t Equinox but if I said I wrote this at Equinox you might have a picture in your head of what my environment looks like. Their brand is clearly more than just their logo.

Oh yeah, the things around me.

I had multiple Nike things on. Easy to draw that logo from memory.

I was drawing on an iPad. I know the logo is an apple with a bite in it but I had to look at it to draw it. I had AirPods with me. Which are clearly apple and again go to show that brands go beyond logos.

Then there were a few other things with logos I couldn’t have drawn from memory at all.

I had a Uniqlo jacket and pants. Couldn’t describe the logo to you except that it’s geometric.

GORUCK has a logo but it’s not anywhere on the outside of my backpack. That said, I notice when other people have the same bag. And I always assume they must like their bag as much as I do.

I also had a logo on that I couldn’t draw from memory but can recognize on someone across the street: the Carhartt wave (?) on a beanie.

Give stuff away. If it’s good enough people will pay for your paid stuff.

This post is free.

I don’t sell anything.

If enough people read enough of my free things then some day I can sell something. (And hope that I’d be mentally strong enough to deal with some backlash.)

Anyway, many things you pay for are likely to be connected to something else that was free.

Ever watched a chef on TV?

From This is Marketing:

When a chef gives away her recipes, or appears on a podcast, or leads an online seminar, she’s giving her ideas away for free. It’s easy to find them, engage with them with frequency, and share them. But, if you want to eat that pasta served on china on a white tablecloth at her restaurant, it’s going to cost you twenty-four dollars.

The last artist you saw at a concert probably has a song for free on the radio. (Or there’s somewhere online where you can listen after skipping through a commercial.)

Did you ever have a Windows computer with one level of Doom on it? Free. If you beat it then you could pay for more levels. And it was completely worth it.

Podcast hosts have free interviews with people, but those people are often showing up to spread an idea. And you can get the premium version of that idea by buying their book.

Write 7000 posts

Why did I pick up “This is Marketing”? I trust Seth’s advice. I don’t know him but I’ve read and listened to a lot of his work. I’ve written a few times about how important his idea of “write in the editor” has been for me for finishing work. (He writes his daily blog post directly into TypePad. Because when he’s in there, his mind knows what to do.)

That trust was built up over time by reading his work regularly. He shares new things regularly. You don’t get to 7000 posts by posting 1000 posts a day for 7 days. You get to that by posting consistently year after year.

Show up. Finish. And show up again.

All I know about marketing I learned from pro wrestling

“Oh. Give me. A hell yeah!”

If you recognize Stone Cold Steve Austin you might have read that in his voice. He built that recognition by showing up.

Wrestlers show up. It’s fake fighting, yes.

People will say “it’s fake fighting” in a disparaging way. But imagine how hard that is.

There’s a stadium with 10s of thousands of people. Now go make that entire place pop.

With a fake fight.

And they do it. Night after night.

They’re serious athletes going through grueling work. They show up and travel town to town to put on a show. Night in and night out. They build trust with the fans. With that frequency.

Beyond the importance of frequency, here are some other ways wrestling applies concepts from “This is Marketing”:

  • Brands and logos: It’s not a logo, but whenever I hear a glass break in the kitchen when I’m sitting in a restaurant, I picture Stone Cold walking into the room.
  • Not for everyone: Stone Cold was for the kids who grew up and decided they’d start washing down their vitamins with a Steveweiser. If you were still saying your prayers and believed only in 100% good and 100% evil, he probably wasn’t for you. And that was fine by him.
  • Some free, some paid: You could see him on TV week in and week out. Want to see him fight for a championship? Fork some cash over for a pay-per-view. (And nowadays, The Network.)
  • Status: Pro wrestling is not an elite thing. The people that care about wrestling don’t care about what outsiders think. Outsiders don’t get it. But they do care about status relative to other fans. People that soak in New Japan Pro Wrestling shows and cruiserweight tournaments are different from the fans that are completely absorbed in mainstream storylines. If one of your favorite guys from the indie scene makes it big, then your status is raised for being an early adopter.

I’ve scratched the surface but check out “This is Marketing” for more.

While you do that, I’ll pat myself on the back for showing up today. Then I’ll start thinking about how to show up tomorrow. And the next day. And the next day.

And I’ll say my prayers and express gratitude that the next days don’t involve taking chair shots to the head.

Use nature’s eyes (or the Hubble telescope) to remember your insignificance

We’re tiny.

The first time I saw Powers of Ten (1977) was in either middle school or high school.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, it can be useful to remember how small you are. In the big scheme of things, whatever it is that’s stressing you out just might not be all that important. Remember stressing out about a test in a class in the past? Did those results stick with you? Probably not.

I had a teammate once who had a personal mantra for work: “we aren’t saving babies here.” Always a good reminder it’s rarely worth burning out and sacrificing mental health. There’s always tomorrow to work on endless todo lists.

Here are some quotes that might help you feel uplifted by the insignificance of everything.

Nature’s eyes

From “Principles” by Ray Dalio:

However, when we look down on ourselves through the eyes of nature we are of absolutely no significance. It is a reality that each one of us is only one of about seven billion of our species alive today and that our species is only one of about ten million species on our planet. Earth is just one of about 100 billion planets in our galaxy, which is just one of about two trillion galaxies in the universe. And our lifetimes are only about 1/ 3,000 of humanity’s existence, which itself is only 1/ 20,000 of the Earth’s existence.

If you don’t change the world today, that’s fine. If you don’t change the world this year, that’s okay. And in your career, no worries.

Focus on being a good person in the day in front of you. Help another person today. That adds up a lot better than feeling like you missed on a home run swing day after day.

Seinfeld’s other techniques

In self-development books, people often refer to Seinfeld’s technique of writing jokes every single day and keeping the chain going in a calendar. The Principles quote above reminded me of something I read in Judd Apatow’s Sick in the Head (amazing book, by the way).

Seinfeld shares his technique for staying grounded:

Judd: How do you get over that hump?

Jerry: You look at some pictures from the Hubble Telescope and you snap out of it. I used to keep pictures of the Hubble on the wall of the writing room at Seinfeld. It would calm me when I would start to think that what I was doing was important.

It might be time to put a picture of the stars next to that wall calendar with all the Xs on it.

You aren’t that special

Ginsberg: “I feel bad for you.”
Don Draper: “I don’t think about you at all.”

That’s one of my favorite lines from Mad Men. We grew up thinking we were special and each and every one of us would go on to do amazing things. It can’t pan out that way. If everyone were amazing, nobody would be.

Remember that people don’t think about you all that often. Remember that what you do isn’t that significant in nature’s eyes.

And remember that this can be a great thing.

Atomic Habits: Initial Impressions

Check out the full notes for “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” by James Clear

I finished Atomic Habits yesterday and wanted to write some quick impressions. It definitely deserves a longer post. But I wanted to write something shorter because I’ve wanted to write long book notes posts for other books I really enjoyed and then never got around to it.

First, here’s a tweet from yesterday about one of the core analogies from the book.

The small things you do get stored and they add up over time. You won’t see the change for most things immediately but it doesn’t mean the effort is wasted.

Atomic Habits is great because it has (1) long-term strategy for building good habits and breaking down bad habits and (2) effective tactics that you can apply immediately.

  1. Long-term strategy: Re-framing your views around habits will not be an overnight thing. Just like overnight successes really have years of work backing them, it will take some time to change your views of habits. One big shift is looking at your systems instead of goals. (The NBA season just started. In every game, every team has the same goal—to win—and every game still has a loser.) Another big strategy change is to focus on identities. Knowing the magical “X” for changing a habit takes X amount of days won’t be as effective as focusing on your identity. You’re not a smoker who’s quitting temporarily. You’re not a smoker, period.
  2. Effective tactics: You can make changes today that will help you with your habits. What do you want to do tomorrow? Say it out loud. “I want to work out tomorrow.” Now add a time. “I want to work out tomorrow, first thing in the morning.” Now say what you’ll do. “I want to do a kettlebell workout tomorrow, first thing in the morning.” Now focus on the first two minutes, and make it easy. “Tomorrow, first thing in the morning, I’ll do some bodyweight get-ups for two minutes. Then I can stop if I want to.”

I’ll write more about the book in (hopefully) the next few days. I really enjoyed it.

P.S. I got through a good chunk of the book using a technique mentioned in the book called temptation bundling:

Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do. In Byrne’s case, he bundled watching Netflix (the thing he wanted to do) with riding his stationary bike (the thing he needed to do).

Listening to Atomic Habits (the thing I wanted to do) while folding laundry (the thing I needed to do).

Podcast Notes: Chase Jarvis and Tim Ferriss

One of my favorite audio duos got together again. Chase Jarvis interviewed Tim Ferriss for Creative Live’s podcast week. As always, lots of great insight into creating a successful podcast.

If you’ve listened to some of their earlier episodes together on each other’s podcasts, you’ll hear similar themes. It’s interesting to take this broader look at Tim Ferriss’s podcast and how it’s grown. It also helps highlight the things that Tim really credits with making it work.

  • First things first, aim to make it sustainable and consistent: There are tens of thousands of new podcasts launched each week. How many will get to episode 50? How many will even get to episode 10? When Tim started, he knew the power of consistency through the success of his blog.
  • Get there by making it easy: Tim edited the early episodes by himself in GarageBand. It’s not the best tool for editing conversations but it’s more than enough to do the trick. He knew he didn’t want to do it forever and now a few years later he’s able to just record, add a few notes, then share it with his team (of two) for taking care of everything else. He made systems for everything so he could focus on what was important.
  • Quality content is still the best SEO: It probably always will be. He’s been able to focus on being a good interviewer because he doesn’t have to focus energy on all the recording logistics anymore. And he knew that being a good interviewer was the most important part of creating quality podcast content. A good interviewer can get good stories from anyone. A bad interviewer can make the most interesting person tune out after the first few words are spoken.
  • Broad title, specific audience: Your title will act as a bit of an affirmation. You’ll grow into the full subject matter that your title might cover, with an audience to match. But when you start, start specific. His example topic is FinTech startups in Omaha. Then you expand to covering regional FinTech startups then national then just startups in general.
  • If you aren’t passionate about something, you have an uphill battle if your tactic is to be better than the best in that field: They have a head start. They will probably work as hard as you. And they’re motivated to continue working that hard for longer because they enjoy the topic. There’s too many other opportunities in the world to just keep grinding through something you hate.

Here are a couple other posts I’ve written about them:

Newsletter 00X: Books finished, books in progress

Last week’s newsletter ballooned quite a bit so this week I’ll focus just on a reading update: books I’ve finished and books in progress

Books I finished

I’ve been improving with listening to fiction audiobooks. Or it just might be that I’m doing it while walking more along fixed paths. (No automobile traffic and less bike traffic so I don’t need to be as aware of my surroundings.) I’m getting better at noticing when my attention has drifted and rewinding back to where I was. This is clearly not scientific, but I’m rewinding less often and the jumps are smaller.

The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

Really glad I picked this back up and finished it. I don’t read a ton of fiction so it’s been a while since I felt immersed in another world. Even outside of books, most movies I see are in one or the other comic universes. Or even catching up on Black Mirror it’s usually earth a couple decades from now. And now I join the others waiting for the third book in the series. I picked this series up after seeing it recommended in one of those “I like Game of Thrones, what should I read?” threads. If you’re in the same boat, check it out because it lives up to that and more.

It’s great how Rothfuss portrays the process of learning empathy for people in other cultures. Particularly realizing that the normal things you do seem just as odd from their perspective. (Pretty cool to see that things in the book like storytelling with knots isn’t fantasy at all.) Fun quips are utilized throughout:

I’d heard he had started a fistfight in one of the seedier local taverns because someone had insisted on saying the word “utilize” instead of “use.”

A Complaint Free World by Will Bowen

Last week I mentioned I complain too much. I still haven’t go the purple wristband but I’ve noticed this week that I really do see when I’m complaining. When I do, I’m able to re-frame it. (Usually using Jocko’s “Good.”) Getting those reps in is valuable. From A Complaint Free World:

It takes time and conscious effort to make it through that first complaint-free day. But once your habits and your thinking start to change, it becomes easier. The key is to keep trying. For me, this challenge was not just about stopping complaining; it’s about turning the complaints into gratitude for the blessings that I have. I see the good instead of only seeing things to complain about.

I started writing daily gratitudes down (with the 5-Minute Journal) and it’s one of the best habits I’ve started and kept in the last year. Writing down good things helps you recognize other good things that happen in the day.

I really like the idea that Bowen presents of flipping the modes of thinking when it comes to luck. Often we credit our hard work and complain when we have bad luck. Instead, if something goes wrong take ownership and see where you can improve. If something goes right, be grateful for your good luck.

Books in progress

The Mental Game of Poker by Jared Tendler

I hung out with a full-time poker player once. Not someone collecting bracelets regularly or anything. He was just making enough to replace his day job that he decided to do it full time. The thing that’ss stuck with me is that he said it’s a grind. It can be draining. I sit at a desk on most days for most of the day. The work can be mentally draining.

I haven’t played poker since the games for fun with friends here and there in college. I haven’t played at all for years. I thought it’d be interesting to learn about how poker players think and what issues they face and how they can improve.

I was guessing a lot of the mental game applies outside of poker with just a little bit of abstraction and have been really enjoying this book it for that. For example, here’s a note about variance:

The problem is that because of variance, monetary results alone are unreliable measures in the short term of how you played. Here are a few better ways to evaluate how you played: Look closely at tough decisions to see how you played them. Estimate how much variance influenced results. Calculate whether you accomplished the qualitative goals you set before the session.

It’s really valuable in so many other ways to just look at how you played a situation instead of focusing on the outcome. You can make the right play and still come out on the losing end of things. Looking forward to reading the rest of this and will probably pick the second book up as well.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

The middle of a venture is like a lengthy road trip without windows. It is psychologically torturous to travel without any sense of where you are along the way—no sense of progress or landmarks—and without a sense for how many miles remain. Your concept of time becomes warped, and impatience stews.

I heard something recently on a podcast and will now butcher it: you can feel like you’re failing for a long time but then succeed because the consistency pays off. You only felt like you were failing the entire time because you were stretching just enough and growing slowly.

On the other hand, you can also feel like you’re succeeding for a long time and still fail. What worked initially eventually turned into consistently treading water until you were passed by others.

So far I’m enjoying how focused The Messy Middle is on the truths of the journey. Starting is fun. Finishing is a great peak. All the rest of the time is going to be in the middle. It’s worth learning how to navigate through the mess.

The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson

Every few minutes I smile because some recent technology I’m enjoying right now is being described in a book from 1995. For example, here’s a description of personalized news:

Now nanotechnology had made nearly anything possible, and so the cultural role in deciding what should be done with it had become far more important than imagining what could be done with it. One of the insights of the Victorian Revival was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning; so the higher one rose in the society, the more similar one’s Times became to one’s peers’.

We’re able to curate the media we consume pretty specifically these days. For a few seconds anytime I walk into a book store I remember that there are so so many more books than what I see in targeted experiences online. (So you’re telling me there’s more books than just “Subtle Art…”?)

It felt like a good idea to try and read all of Neal Stephenson’s novels and as I get further into The Diamond Age, that feeling is even stronger.

Coming up

Next week I’m really excited to check out James Clear’s Atomic Habits. In the meantime I’ll be reading the books above.

And I’ll leave you with some more photos from a recent walk. That post about these very long walks is coming… eventually.

Newsletter 000: If I had a newsletter

While starting this draft I’m currently waiting for the Khabib/Conor fight. (Writing this with the undercard in the background.) 

What kind of value could I create if I had a weekly newsletter? I’ve tried it in the past. What could I share that’s unique?

  • I read a lot of books: This isn’t particularly unique but it’s a start. There are quite a few people who read more than me who are also happy to write and share what they’re reading. Still, it’s worth putting a circle down for the venn diagram.
  • I listen to a lot of podcasts: This is more and more common but I really just listen to a ton and always have. That’s why I think doing the book + podcast pairings would be good. Using podcast interviews in place of my own interviews probably gets me 80% of the value. Because it’s often just a few sentences that don’t appear in a book anywhere that make calling someone up and talking to them so good. (The other 20% would be that you get some street cred for having access to them. Which also could be the 80% if that’s more important—it very well could be.)
  • I use an iPad (just about) every day: Of my top 5 most viewed (which isn’t saying much!) videos on YouTube, 3 are about making presentations with an iPad. I’d be happy to make more of them, too. I’m typing this on an iPad right now. I really like the thing. I use the Pencil pretty much daily.
  • I write (just about) every day: I’m not publishing things every day but I do have a habit of writing small things here and there. I have outlines of future posts that I’ll never get around to finishing. I have full drafts that I’ll never get around to publishing. And that’s fine. I’d like to finish more though. But I do write regularly. Maybe now’s the time to treat it with a little more respect.
  • I live in New York: It’s… a pretty popular place for writers to live. So it’s not really unique but still it’s worth putting down. As long as I do things that make it uniquely New York. Or start putting some more of that day to day life into the posts.

So there we go. I always want to get away from writing about writing and blogging about blogging. Then I just keep blogging about blogging, like right now. Anyway. I’ll try to write this newsletter with each of those 5 elements. First up. A venn diagram of those 5 intersections.

Oh yeah… I just remembered that it needs to be that weird shape so that all the combinations of intersections show up.

Anyway, I think only the center really matters for trying to make this stand out. (brb i think i need to read Purple Cow)

So I’ll just fill this newsletter with a little bit of each.

  • Books: I’ll share what I’m reading
  • Podcasts: I’ll share some of my favorites from the week
  • iPad: I’ll share more bad venn diagram drawings
  • Writing: Maybe that’s sort of implicit since this is a written newsletter
  • New York: I took a very long walk today so I’ll share that (Update: Moving that to a separate post.)

I’m 600 words in… Let’s get started!

Books: Still skimming too many

I’d love to have a book tracking section on the site. Mostly because I need a better system for picking books. That said, I need to apply some of the ideas from @sirupsen’s “How I Read”:

Inevitably, it grew into a large number of unread books on my Kindle, which made me often dread opening it. It felt like an ever-growing to-do list (where each item takes many hours to complete).

Until I have anything more elaborate, I’ll just share books I finished, books in-progress, and books I plan on reading. And also books I’m sort of reading (things I know I won’t read cover to cover or books I’m re-reading parts of).

Books I finished this week (didn’t necessarily start this week):

  • It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and DHH: I don’t do this often, but I read this in a day. And not like listening to an audiobook at 3.5X. Or the “How to read a book in a day (aka just skim it!)” type of reading. I set a few hours in the morning and at night to finish it. Enjoyed every bit of it. If you like Jason Fried and DHH’s writing you’ll enjoy this book also. There’s no fluff. They’ll change your mind about something about the best ways to work. Calmness is worth practicing. (And check my post out for more about this book!)
  • The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation by Michael Matthews: Good book about motivation. It’s not as specific to workouts as you might guess from the title. I see that as a good thing. (You very well might see it as a bad thing.) He makes it stick with some science, interesting historical examples, and personal stories from starting out wanting to write a book to now having employees and running a big fitness business.
  • 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari: This is a collection of essays around some of the themes in Harari’s Sapiens (what happened) and Homo Deus (what’s can possibly happen) with a focus on what we can possibly do now to prevent some of those bad possible futures. Loved the heavy technology essays. I’m a sucker for any new discussion about whether we’re in a simulation or not. And he made politics and globalization issues approachable. (Not quite my strengths in subject matter knowledge.)
  • The Code of the Extraordinary Mind by Vishen Lakhiani: Biggest takeaway here is the idea of “brules”—I’ve seen them similarly called limiting beliefs or invisible scripts. If you work out regularly, you’ve probably made changes to your exercise approach to reach your goals. That kind of mindset can be applied to so much more than fitness. You’re allowed to be happy even if you haven’t reached your goal yet. You’re allowed to change careers. In many cases, you don’t need permission in the first place.

Books in progress:

  • The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky: Just started this. Like just started the intro. I want to start having a more focused rotation (probably something like one fiction, one business/self-development-y nonfiction, one biography/narrative nonfiction) of books I’m reading from start to finish. This will be my business/self-development-y book for the next few weeks. I’ll write some posts about it.
  • The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss: Picked this back up. I’ve been listening to it on long walks and am starting to really enjoy going through books this way. I have a hard time listening to fiction books during my commute. I think it’s because I’m focused on not getting run over. I’m about 3/4 through it now and probably liked the first book more but we’ll see how this ends. (There’s something great about first books in fantasy series and just learning what’s possible and seeing where the edges are.)
  • A Complaint Free World by Will Bowen: I complain too much. That’s something I realized this year. I want to complain less. Quick advice up front: get a wristband to give yourself a physical thing to do (move it to your other wrist) when you catch yourself complaining.

Next up (I think):

  • The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson: Something Yuval Noah Harari mentions in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is that science fiction is important. So much of our technology was first imagined in science fiction from decades ago. It motivated me to read more science fiction. Some of my favorite books ever (Enders Game, The Forever War) are science fiction. I don’t read enough science fiction considering how much I enjoy it. I read Stephenson’s Snow Crash a few years ago and read In the Beginning…Was the Command Line a few months ago. I want to read as many of Stephenson’s novels as possible. I think I’m gonna go with The Diamond Age, then Anathem, then Seveneves, then Cryptonomicon. As always we’ll see. But for now, I’m excited to start The Diamond Age.
  • Atomic Habits by James Clear: This comes out next week and I’m really looking forward to it. James Clear’s blog was one of the main inspirations for how I’ve approached my blog. He appeared on The School of Greatness and listening to that episode got me excited for the book. From a couple early impressions I’ve read, it’s a very practical book about habits.

Podcasts: Matt Damon, James Clear, and Ryan Holiday

Matt Damon (Bill Simmons Podcast)
They talk a lot about Good Will Hunting (and how the first draft was a college assignment), growing up in the industry with Ben Affleck (and hated the narrative that Ben took bad roles while Matt picked smart roles), Rounders (with a great John Malkovich impression), and a lot more. It’s almost two hours and great the entire way through.

Pairs well with… Principles by Ray Dalio

Matt Damon tells a bunch of stories about looking for jobs in the 90s. He was competing for the same roles that were going to Brendan Fraser, Ed Norton, and oh yeah his roommate, Ben Affleck.

Anyway, he describes a “come to Jesus” moments with him and Ben where they looked at the landscape and realized their strategy couldn’t be to wait around to get lucky. This led to them focusing on writing Good Will Hunting and insisting that they were the lead actors in it. Principles is about stepping back and understanding the bigger picture.

It’s interesting to hear Damon talk about his own career as a whole while going through a few individual movies and their outcomes. He knew that The Martian was high risk/high reward because a big percentage of the movie is just him, alone on screen.

The Rainmaker seemed like a surefire hit (it wasn’t) because adaptations of John Grisham books were killing. And he didn’t expect Good Will Hunting to become what it became. (Their goal was to make something they’d be proud to have on their VHS shelf.)

Any of those single outcomes doesn’t define the bigger picture.

Ray Dalio describes this with a poker analogy in Principles:

For example, if you’re a poker player and you play a lot of poker, you will win some hands and lose others and on any given night you might walk away with less money than a lesser player who’s gotten lucky. It would be a mistake to judge the quality of a player based on just one outcome. Instead, look at how well someone does what they do and the outcomes they produce over time.

Damon talks about taking roles and how you sign up knowing the ingredients going in but that doesn’t guarantee that the end result will match what you’re visualizing. He’s had a good arc so check out that episode to hear more about it.

James Clear (School of Greatness)

Speaking of ingredients, there are a few different things that have motivated me to increase the amount that I walk. One of them is James Clear’s appearance on Lewis Howes’s School of Greatness. Clear’s book Atomic Habits is coming out soon and Lewis asks him what his five non-negotiable habits are. He starts with three:

  1. Exercise: He strength trains 4 days a week and finds a lot of mental benefits from it along with the physical benefits.
  2. Reading: He describes reading as the ultimate meta skill to improvement. So many things can be solved by reading. Most problems aren’t new so there’s something out there that will help you solve it.
  3. Writing: He says writing is thinking. If you hear something and reply to it right away then it’s an emotional reaction. If you write about it you’ll take more time to consider the idea and weigh it against ÷your existing frameworks.

Those three are his foundational habits. (The other 2 of 5 he picks are walking and sleeping.)

Oh yeah, so that was some inspiration for my walking routine because it combines those three core habits. Albeit in less effective ways but I’m hoping that the duration and consistency makes up for it. When I walk I’m able to (1) exercise — walking is healthy, (2) read — by listening to audiobooks, and (3) write — I’ll add notes to the audiobook and also stop for a few minutes to sit down and write a little bit.

Ryan Holiday (James Altucher Show)

I just hated all of that so I said, “Why don’t I just start a company where I only work on things that I like?”

This episode is a live recording from James Altucher’s 5-year celebration of Choose Yourself. They discuss one of Ryan Holiday’s recent purchases (an entire ghost town), why you absolutely shouldn’t start a podcast (and why you absolutely should), what went into publishing Choose Yourself (and some other titles like Pick Yourself), and what one of Michael Jordan’s weaknesses is (which used to be one of his greatest strengths).

Pairs well with… It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson.

Theres’s a lot of similarities in Ryan Holiday, Jason Fried, and DHH’s approaches to work. One important part of that is taking the time to identify what you enjoy about your work and trying to maximize the time you can spend doing that.

Part of that comes from keeping your company small. From It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work:

We decided that if the good old days were so good, we’d do our best to simply settle there. Maintain a sustainable, manageable size. We’d still grow, but slowly and in control. We’d stay in the good days—no need to call them old anymore.

I really like how Ryan Holiday frames it. A frequent twist is that your goal somehow becomes the opposite of your initial motivation:

The other interesting thing about so much of entrepreneurship is, like, people start their own company ‘cause they want to be their own boss. And then the exit strategy is you sell to another company which you then have to go work at for an extended period of time. So the success is that you end up doing the one thing that you specifically did not want to do.

Know yourself: learn what you enjoy doing and then shape your environment to be able to do it often. (Even if it means moving—Ryan hates New York and moved to Austin.)

What’s coming down the line

I finished this a full week after starting it. That’s too long and unsustainable for a newsletter. That said, what’s here is mostly what I wrote that night (update: Conor lost, bad) then I sat on this as a draft for the week because there was an entire section about the long walks I’ve been taking. I’ll make that a separate post and might focus the newsletter to just reading updates (finished, in-progress, upcoming) and favorite podcast episodes from the week.

I’ll leave with this collage from my walks.