Reading

$2.5-billion Renaissance man’s advice for how to spend your evenings and afternoons

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Back in August, I wrote about Paul Graham. Graham is worth an estimated $2.5B.

That’s because a part of what Graham does is invest in early-stage startups, such as Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox. But Graham is more than just an investor.

He is also an entrepreneur himself — he started and sold multiple businesses. He is also a computer scientist and somewhat of an inventor — he created his own new programming language. He also paints paintings, writes books and essays, and for all I know, sings opera.

In other words, Graham is as close to a Renaissance man as you can get in 21st century.

Anyways, a couple days ago, Graham wrote a new essay in which he made the following argument:

In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge. Mysterious “tapes” would load it into one’s brain like a program being loaded into a computer.

That sort of thing is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Not just because it would be hard to build a replacement for reading, but because even if one existed, it would be insufficient. Reading about x doesn’t just teach you about x; it also teaches you how to write.

Would that matter? If we replaced reading, would anyone need to be good at writing?

The reason it would matter is that writing is not just a way to convey ideas, but also a way to have them.

Cue my Insights & More Book Club.

This is a bonus I am offering with the Age of Insight live training.

With the Insights & More Book Club, you can get exposed to new books that I will choose specifically because they are likely to be insightful and perspective-shifting.

You can also see the kinds of notes I take and ideas I have as I am reading the book — I will share them with you as I go along.

And of course, you can read yourself. ​And then, we can get on a call every two months to discuss what we’ve read and how to use it.

​​In this way, Insights & More is both a book club — with quilts and tea and cookies — and a mastermind where we can talk about ways to apply ideas from the reading to your marketing and content and even offers.

By the way, I’ve realized over the years I am very good at getting info and ideas out of books. But I am also very, very slow. Hence, only one new book for the Insights & More Book Club every two months.

So if you are interested in ideas, writing, or making money, then you might be interested in joining my Age of Insight live training, and the Insights & More Book Club.

Registration closes in three days, on Wednesday 12 midnight PST. But I am only making this training open to people who are on my email newsletter. To get in before the doors close, sign up for my newsletter.

It may be a long time since you read this subject line

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I was standing in the kitchen this morning, making coffee for myself, when I had the idea for this email. I had to stop the coffee making and go write the idea down. Here it is:

A few weeks ago, a science paper went viral on the internet. It was titled, “Consciousness as a memory system.”

The paper gives a new theory of consciousness:

We don’t experience reality directly, the paper claims. We’re not looking out through any kind of window onto the reality outside.

We don’t even experience reality in any kind of real-time but transformed way. We’re not looking at a colorful cartoon that’s generated live, based on what’s going on outside right now.

Instead, we only have conscious experiences of our memories and of our imagined memories.

What you’re really looking at, right now, is a sketchbook, full of shifting drawings and notes of things that happened some time ago, or that never happened at all.

Maybe this new theory turns out to be false or obvious. Maybe it turns out to be profound and true. I personally find it interesting because it speaks to a practical experience I keep having:

If you don’t remember it, it might as well never have happened.

​​That’s why I had to stop the coffee making and go write down my idea for this email.

I’ve been writing newsletter for four years.

It’s more difficult than it might seem to write a 500-600-word email like this every day.

There are lots of stops, starts, discarded sentences and paragraphs.

To make it more complicated, my best ideas don’t happen while standing at my desk and trying to work. My best ideas often happen in a dim flash, while I’m in the shower, while driving, while trying to make coffee. Sometimes entire phrases, arguments, outlines for things I want to say, names, product concepts, inspired analogies, light up in my head. A moment later, that dim flash fades away.

You’ve probably heard the advice that, if you’re trying to make a habit of writing, then take notes all the time of interesting thoughts or observations you have.

It’s good advice, so let me repeat it:

If you’re trying to make a habit of writing, then take notes all the time of the interesting thoughts or observations you have.

And then, figure out a way to organize and store those notes into something that will be useful tomorrow, a month from now, even a year from now.

Now, get ready, because you’re about to have a conscious experience of a memory of a sales pitch:

I write a daily email newsletter. Many people say it’s interesting and insightful.

Search your memory banks right now. See whether you have a conscious experience of a memory of wanting to read more of my writing. If you find the answer is yes, then click here and fill out the form that appears.

How to get all of Ben Settle’s best stuff for free

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A lot of value in today’s email. Let me set it up with a response I got to my email yesterday:

Not gonna lie, ever since you did that presentation about Daniel Throssel’s emails I’ve noticed you’ve been writing in a similar style.
But more subtle which is your approach.

This email had no value at all. But who cares? I was still reading all the way to the end. and I actually really liked it.

Hope the furnishing all goes well in Barcelona!

Let me tell you a personal, and very valuable story:

Many, many years ago, I subscribed to Ben Settle’s daily emails for the first time.

And right off, I was annoyed. Ben would send out emails claiming to be filled with “value,” which were just pitches for his Email Players newsletter, or testimonials which he slapped in and claimed were valuable in themselves.

What a crook.

Eventually though, all that shameless self-promotion wore me down. I got curious.

So I subscribed to Email Players see what Ben’s real secrets were.

I got his Email Players Skhema, the how-to workbook that comes with the subscription. I read through that.

I also finally remembered I had a free copy of the first issue of Email Players, which Ben gives away on his site. I read through that also.

And then I read the first month’s issue, which revealed the “secret” Ben had been teasing for weeks.

And you know what?

The damnedest thing happened.

It turned out Ben wasn’t lying all along.

His emails were packed with value. More often than not, the most valuable stuff in the paid newsletter was right there, in his emails, sometimes explicitly stated.

I didn’t see that before just because Ben’s emails are structured as infotainment. The value wasn’t bolded, highlighted, and explained as it would be in a textbook. It took what Ben likes to say “reading between the lines” or at least a slightly more careful reading than I was giving his daily emails, or to any emails for that matter.

Was there stuff in the paid Email Players print newsletter that wasn’t in Ben’s daily emails?

Sure. And by not paying for Ben’s newsletter, you will miss out on that.

At the same time, by a close reading of his emails, you will get the best stuff. You will also find stuff Ben doesn’t reveal in his newsletter, or probably even in his books, stuff that he wants to keep for himself.

So that’s my response to the claim above that my email yesterday had no value at all. And if you don’t see how that’s a response, well…

In any case, here’s another thing I learned from Ben Settle. It’s to end your emails with “Okay, on to business.”

If you want to get my best stuff for free, both stuff I’ve learned from Ben Settle, and from my own experience, working with 8-figure direct response businesses, and managing large and very profitable email lists myself, then you can sign up to my very valuable daily emails here.