What I Read This Week - 3.17.24
Weekly finds from across the internet.
Morning everyone!
Back again with edition #6 of What I Read This Week. Today, some finds on:
The worlds greatest CEOs as sloganeers
How the future of the internet will take lessons from its past
How (and why!) to turn yourself into a morning person
Why notecards are better than scripts for public speaking
and more
Hope you enjoy, and please feel free to share with anyone else you think might find these interesting.
- CG
Storytelling
Great CEOs are Great Sloganeers - David Perell (~3 min)
Loved this framing by David of how many great CEOs/leaders think about crafting a narrative: they take a simple, powerful worldview and repeat it over and over. Each time they do so presents an opportunity to refine its presentation, allowing them to distill their message to its essence. Reminds me of a phrase I once heard: you can never repeat the vision enough.
10 Masters Share 10 Ways to Improve Your Writing - David Perell (~3 min)
You can tell by now that I’m a big believer in David’s work on the art of writing & storytelling. I’ve been following along for a number of years now and have loved his new podcast How I Write, where he interviews some of the world’s best writers. The guest list has been excellent so far, and here he summarizes 10 of the most powerful lessons he’s learned from his conversations up to this point. Two of my favorites:
Don’t Be the Best. Be the Only. (Kevin Kelly) - Great advice for a hyper-specialized world: differentiate yourself. Shares some similarities to one of my favorite pieces of advice from Naval Ravikant: “Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.”
Quality Over Volume (Tim Ferriss) - An important recognition for where we are going. We can escape competition with AI in the future via authenticity - and doing so requires we hold a high bar for what we create.
The Future (AI, Tech, etc.)
The Future of Farcaster with Dan Romero - The Generalist (~22 min)
I shared a read on Farcaster in my first edition of this newsletter, and now Mario Gabriele from The Generalist has provided an excellent deep dive of the social media primitive. In this piece, Mario interviews Farcaster’s founder Dan Romero and gets deep into the philosophy informing his decision making. A couple of standout points from the read:
The novel concept behind Farcaster as a social network is that it is a protocol rather than an application. It is building a permissionless skeleton of the infrastructure that supports social platforms like Twitter, and then allowing the community and developers to decide what the end product looks like.
Dan makes an important clarification of crypto being in its infrastructure phase rather than its consumer phase. The inner-workings are still being ironed out, and mass adoption is not on the table yet. Many of the user experiences are still clunky - but with each bear cycle in which attention disappears and builders can go to work, crypto is getting closer to providing experiences capable of both capturing and supporting mainstream attention.
Farcaster is not playing the same game as other social networks. As Dan mentions, anyone trying to build ‘Twitter, but decentralized’ is going to lose. They are focused instead on offering consumers, developers, and creators a completely new experience - while also preserving the 80% that makes social networks tick.
The Internet of the Future Will be Built on Nostalgia - Digital Frontier (~5 min)
Chris Dixon, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz’s crpyto venture fund, is an expert on the history of the internet. A long time crypto proponent, he has used his experiences from the early Dot Com era to highlight how he sees crypto as the next evolution of our digitally native world (his new book Read Write Own discusses this at length).
I’ve long enjoyed Chris’s work, and found this interview to be an insightful summary of his bigger talking points. Especially loved his description of how he felt playing around in the early days of the internet - it was as if he was exploring a new city with something new and interesting around every corner. I haven’t found a better encapsulation of how I feel about the crypto landscape.
Personal Growth
How to Become a Morning Person - Sahil Bloom (~6 min)
Bias alert: I am a self-proclaimed morning person, typically waking up around 5AM at home (which turns into 3:30AM during Spring Training…). Sahil encapsulates a great deal of my rationale for being an early riser in this piece, namely:
I’ve rarely met someone that wakes up at 4AM that is not highly productive.
The early morning hours are the only true time period you have in the day where you have complete control over your focus. No texts coming in, no work emails demanding your attention. Just you and whatever it is that you want to accomplish.
The most important point here is that becoming a morning person is learnable. All it takes is a commitment on the front-end to reap the benefits on the back-end. The payoffs are worth it.
How to Be More Agentic - Cate Hall (~8 min)
Cate’s story fascinates me because she is a unicorn - a person that has shown the ability to take normally disparate traits and combine them together in one personality. As a result, she has experienced outlier success in a number of unique domains - professional poker, law, and medical startups.
I love her framing of using agency to acquire skills, especially as you feel yourself stagnating or falling behind. This is a great read on how to find real edges in today’s world by doing things others are not willing to do.
Mental Models/Principles
Memorize, Then Conversationalize - Kpaxs (~1 min)
I’ve gotten asked a good bit over the years for advice on public speaking. One of the most frequent responses I give is to study both the arts of storytelling and psychology.
When it comes to practical tips, I often tell people to ditch the script they have and use a small notecard instead. The rationale is exactly what Kpaxs hits on here: when we read directly from a script without pause, our voice loses its authenticity; we sound more like a machine than a human. And our listeners lose interest as a result.
So the next time you have to talk in front of a big group - choose a notecard over a script. Know the big pieces of what you want to say, and allow your mind to fill in the gaps in between. Preserve the soul of your voice by recognizing that the goal is not to be 100% perfect. Humans appreciate imperfection.
The Tower of Babel - The Cultural Tutor (~4 min)
An interesting historical lesson on the Tower of Babel from the Bible. The part I find most interesting is how the story highlights the importance of translation as a critical component of our world.
I’ve long thought of translation as an important mental model for crafting an advantage in a hyper-specialized world. The more we ‘niche-down’, the more we risk losing the connectivity that makes the world run. I think this is a powerful rationale for maintaining a wide breadth of knowledge so that we can bring multiple areas of the world together.