Signal
Books, essays, podcasts, videos, posts, and other references worth keeping. This is a running index of media that changed how I think.
Climbing the Wrong Hill
Chris Dixon · 2009
A hill-climbing analogy for careers: why talented people get stuck optimizing a local maximum, and when it's worth the short-term loss of jumping to a taller hill. I read it the year I decided not to Match.
Earnestness
Paul Graham · 2020
Paul Graham's case that earnestness, caring more about the substance of your work than how you come across, is an underrated trait of the people who do great things.
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter · 1979
The Pulitzer-winning braid of Gödel's incompleteness, Escher's impossible art, and Bach's fugues, on how mind and meaning emerge from self-reference.
How to Do Great Work
Paul Graham · 2023
Paul Graham's synthesis of how ambitious work actually happens: choosing what to work on, following curiosity, and compounding the luck it creates.
How to Get Rich
Naval Ravikant · 2018
Naval's framework for building wealth through leverage, specific knowledge, and accountability: seek wealth, not money or status.
Mastery
Robert Greene · 2012
Greene's study of how masters, from Da Vinci to Darwin, actually got there: apprenticeship, deep observation, and the long climb from following rules to transcending them.
The Beginning of Infinity
David Deutsch · 2011
A physicist's case that good explanations drive unbounded progress: that knowledge, once begun, has infinite reach. It shaped how I weigh problems, and underpins my 'it from bit' read of physical reality.
The Book of Mormon
Another Testament of Jesus Christ
The keystone of my faith, and the book I spent two years in Korea sharing on the streets of Seoul. More than anything else I've read, it shaped what I believe and the person I keep trying to become.
The Creative Act
Rick Rubin · 2023
The producer's reflections on creativity as a universal practice of attention, not technique.
A few institutions I take my bearings from, the ones whose best parts I'd build into anything I make. Orientation, not endorsement.
Bell Labs
Proof that the deepest tools come from sitting with a problem until you reach its floor, not from chasing a market. The case for working from first principles.
Costco
They refuse the 'best practices' that quietly corrupt a mission, and build the vision in too deep to optimize away. A reminder that how you operate either protects what you're for or erodes it.
MIT Media Lab
Built on the faith that the best ideas live between disciplines, and that you prove them by building something real, not just publishing about it. The case for the generalist who actually ships.
Neuralink
The clearest bet that the line between biology and computation is meant to be crossed, not guarded. The nerve to take on the hardest problems in medicine and engineering at once, right where the two fields I care about meet.
Patagonia
A business engineered so shareholder pressure can never wear down its reason for existing. The model for making a mission permanent: not just stated, but structurally protected.
PayPal Mafia
What a single room of relentless, technically deep people can set off for a generation. I'd rather earn a few of those than hire a hundred of anyone else.
Renaissance Technologies
Give the best people state-of-the-art tools, wall off a small garden where they can think, and resist the gravity of growth. A handful of A-players kept deliberately small beats a large team diluted with B-players, every time.
Santa Fe Institute
Polymaths who reason across domains instead of down a single track. The exact cast of mind I've tried to live by, moving between medicine, computing, and physics to get at one problem.
Skunk Works
A tiny team sealed off from the bureaucracy and trusted to move at the speed of the problem. Proof that the way to do the impossible on a deadline is to clear the room and get out of the way.
SpaceX
Proof that a goal audacious enough to sound absurd can still be reached, by reasoning from first principles and iterating in the open until the rockets land. The case for aiming far higher than seems reasonable, then building your way there.
The Luke Commission
The place that taught me to go where I'm needed most and look for solutions. Innovative, resourceful care for people in Eswatini, built around the reality of the people and constraints in front of them.
Xerox PARC
They saw the next era whole, decades early, by giving brilliant people room to build a future they could already picture. The standard for seeing far.