My Influences
- Seth Godin: “Consider Writing”, Graceful, The Practice.
- Ayn Rand: Anthem, The Fountainhead, "Egalitarianism & Inflation".
- James P. Carse: Finite and Infinite Games
Almost everything I work on or say is now derivative of these underlying 7 source texts. Marvelous how my philosophy is so densely encapsulated in just three people, a couple essays, and a few easy-read books.
For some reason, not many others have gone as deep as I have in this cross-section of ideas. The above is just the tip of the iceberg. It's enough to get you 80-20 without the years I've spent studying and internet-surfing. You could be done in a single fun, life-changing week. What's not included above is enormous.
Of course, I myself am the biggest influence on me. After all, who chose how to whittle down my old influences page into this refined and consolidated list?
I'm very lucky to be me, of course. Warren Buffett is perhaps the most humble billionaire in this regard and spoke often about the luck of being him. Billionaires are just Leaders btw, in case you haven't ingested my influences so fully yet.
Read The Snowball and you'll see how—when you buy your first stock at age 11 and already own a pinball empire making you passively rich at 17, then beelining to Ben Graham—it's not so much luck anymore. Go listen to Bill Gurley's recent chat with Tim Ferriss on deliberate success stories.
Like everyone else, I was shaped by other people. Those three big ones above have mostly been anonymous elders, just words on the page to me. But I suspect, especially for a nerd, that my life was touched deeply and early by an order of magnitude more love from non-family members than other humans of my generation. My oh-so-strange peers. Thanks to all who sent love my way.
Somehow all this primordial soup allows me to become "the next Seth Godin" and embrace it while putting my own spin on things. Even as I'm but a wee 29 on 30-year-old nobody, still with 30 big years of becoming ahead. We'll see in the end how well cultural relevancy works out and who gets attributed which ideas in the fullness of time.
It's not a competition...or is it? Let's be rational.
Honorable mentions that I won't bother to link here include the All-In Podcast (hit me at the right time to frame the political-cultural problem space), Turning Pro by Pressfield (powerful subset of Seth above), 80000 Hours Podcast (applied mathematical philosophical thinking in action), Sapiens (stories shape us—this is what we learn in the long view of history), Asimov's Foundation (psychohistory is in a sense what I'm doing), Thinking Fast and Slow, etc.
See previous influences for more, and subscribe to this blog if you want ongoing. The ref engine don't stop.
Big thanks to each of the people who ambitiously pursued their life's work. It's not easy to make it your mission to tell the world about the work. Getting good enough to do the work itself is hard and all-consuming. We can learn so much from those who came before.
It's not survivor bias. They've made all our jobs a little easier through their intentional and laborious idea compression and artifact generation processes. Marketing done with generosity, a la Seth.
Even bigger thanks to the individuals who loom large in my personal past. You know who you are. I'm paying it forward based on your exemplar, as best I can.
Gratitude is the first component of Zaltiva and learning is last but never least. These concepts are not only tattooed on my legs, left to right, but also in my heart. And kidneys. Gotta use those to think properly too.
Why are you still reading my rambling blog when you could be reading the once-in-a-species unfathomably good reading material I linked up top? At least 4 are easily free PDFs right now. Go get 'em.