Geoffrey Litt

Derek Sivers

Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.

Hi, I'm David Perell.

I write, host a podcast, and run a writing school called Write of Passage.

The best writing advice I’ve ever read comes from Robert Frost.

I write prose, not poetry, but the most helpful piece of advice I’ve ever read was written by a poet: Robert Frost, who was born 147 years ago today. In the second, expanded edition of his Co…

Indie Thinkers

A curated collection of quotes from the brightest minds on the internet.

William Blake: the scourge of the tyrants

Discover and share books you love on Goodreads.

Welcome

Visit the Doug Engelbart Institute to explore his remarkable legacy and all it inspires (official site)

Toward a durable writing stack – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

I have benefited over the years from others who have documented their writing setups, and so I feel some obligation to pay the favor forward by doing so with my own. The stack I’ll describe here is one I’ve been iterating on for about twenty years, starting from when I began discovering the pleasures of plain-text writing. Every aspect of it has changed over that period, but the some basic goals and flows have been with me through the writing of my college thesis, five books, and hundreds of articles. I am quite happy with where I am, and others might benefit from what I’ve come up with.

Reading philosophy for the examples

Philosophy books often have really good examples. Here are a few of my favourites.

James Bridle / ways-of-being

Artist and Writer | Portfolio

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Interesting Triad and an incredibly Complex Book

Book Review

Developing creative identity

I was a theoretical physicist from 1992 to 2007. It was a romantic activity, exploring the fundamental nature of the cosmos! I became a university professor, wrote papers and books, and got to explore some of the most beautiful ideas ever discovered. In parallel, I also developed a fascination with the social systems humanity uses to make knowledge. Systems like the university or peer review are immensely deep inventions: our discovery system is itself one of the great inventions of humanity! But I believed a radically better discovery system must be possible. I became obsessed with this idea, eventually giving up tenure to work on it1. My first big project was to write a book helping develop and spread the fundamental ideas underlying the modern open science movement.