A sample letter
A morning letter, previewed
This is what arrives in your inbox each morning, set out the same way as the real thing. Imagine that yesterday you saved six things: two essays, a talk, a classic, a list, and a New Yorker piece you don't subscribe to. Here is the letter you would get.
Tuesday, September 29
6 saved · ~123 min
Editor's note
Paul Graham and Steve Jobs make the same case twenty years apart: follow what you can't stop thinking about. Read Graham if you have an evening, watch Jobs if you have fifteen minutes.
Must-read
How to Do Great Work
45 min · paulgraham.com · Paul Graham
Great work comes from choosing a field you're obsessed with, learning your way to its frontier, then chasing the gaps you notice.
- —Curiosity is the engine, so follow what interests you excessively, even when it looks like a distraction.
- —The best ideas often start out looking like toys or side projects.
- —Steady daily progress compounds, and beats occasional heroic bursts.
He compresses the recipe to four steps: choose a field, learn enough to reach the frontier, notice gaps, explore the promising ones.
Must-read. A long, dense essay for anyone deciding what to work on.
Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
15 min · Stanford · Steve Jobs
Three stories from his life make the case for doing work you love, because time is short.
- —Dropping out of Reed let him sit in on a calligraphy class that later shaped the Mac's typefaces.
- —Being fired from Apple at 30 freed him to start NeXT and Pixar.
- —Remembering he will die is his best tool for ignoring fear and other people's expectations.
He closes on the farewell line of the Whole Earth Catalog: stay hungry, stay foolish.
Must-read. A short speech whose value is in the delivery.
Worth reading
1,000 True Fans
18 min · The Technium · Kevin Kelly
A creator can make a living from about 1,000 true fans who each spend $100 a year on their work.
- —A true fan buys everything you make, from the deluxe edition to the merch.
- —The math only works if you keep most of the money by selling to fans directly.
- —The internet makes small, scattered audiences reachable for the first time.
1,000 fans at $100 each is $100,000 a year, a modest living for one person.
Worth reading. A classic argument for independent creators, still current.
As We May Think
33 min · The Atlantic · Vannevar Bush
With the war over, scientists should build tools that make humanity's growing record usable, not just bigger.
- —Research is published faster than anyone can find or absorb it.
- —He imagines the memex, a desk that stores a person's books and notes on microfilm.
- —Its key feature is associative trails: links a reader builds between documents and can share.
Written in 1945, it sketches something close to hypertext decades before the web.
Worth reading. A founding document of computing, for the historically curious.
Skim
68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice
12 min · The Technium · Kevin Kelly
On his 68th birthday, Kelly offers 68 one-line lessons on work, money, and kindness.
- —Enthusiasm counts for more than raw talent, by his estimate 25 IQ points.
- —Habits work because they take a choice out of daily negotiation with yourself.
- —Professionals are amateurs who have learned to recover gracefully from mistakes.
Skim. A list of aphorisms. The summary covers it.
Couldn't write a summary
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web
The New Yorker · Ted Chiang
This one's for subscribers. Open the original to read the rest.
until tomorrow