Hello!
I’ve been pretty quiet on the blogging front for a while, but there’s a reason for that. For almost 3 years now, I’ve been hard at work on the biggest and most challenging project I’ve ever had the foolish luck to be a part of.
The Great Mental Models: Systems & Mathematics, written by Rhiannon Beaubien and myself, is now out. It’s unreal to see the Google doc I stared at for countless hours turn into a real, physical book you can buy and hold and spill drinks on and maybe even read. It’s the third volume in the Wall Street Journal bestselling Great Mental Models series.
This email is NOT going to be an extended advert for the book and this is the only time you’ll hear about it here; it’s a personal reflection on the experience of writing TGMM3 and a few things I learned from it.
Most things are a lot more complicated and difficult than they seem from the outside.
Writing a book — especially of this kind — is no exception. It is a staggering amount of work.
Rhiannon and I read hundreds of other books. We debated everything. We killed so many darlings. I raided every corner of my brain, filled notebooks with brainstorming, scoured library shelves, overloaded my laptop with PDFs of random research papers and old news articles, left a trail of post-its and index cards, spent weekends on Khan Academy maths, sketched diagrams when I ran out of words, and leeched material from everywhere.
One thing I learned from this project was just how capable we can be of making things happen. Writing a book involves a lot of moments where someone has to decisively make the call, shoulder the blame, and dictate the next irreversible step. Publishing is just too much of a swamp to allow anything else. It was incredibly impressive to see Rhiannon doing this again and again.
A few people have asked why we made The Great Mental Models a series instead of just one long book. The reason is that we had to write the books before we could publish them. And that takes a while.
At a certain point, a book shifts from the digital realm to the physical.
It goes from a Google Doc so long your laptop crashes if you try to scroll too fast, to a mass of physical objects which need to somehow transmit themselves across the globe.
As the saying goes, the first 80% of a project takes 80% of the time. The remaining 20% takes the other 80% of the time.
We’re a tiny team and we self-published the series, which was awesome for having full control. It also meant figuring out all of the parts of bringing a book into existence that happen after the writing.
That meant we enlisted the help of a lot of people along the way. It truly takes a village to fact-check a book. If you assembled everyone we contacted while getting rights to the images it would be on par with the original music video for ‘All You Need Is Love.’ We tried to constantly get outside eyes on each new bit of writing, meaning my ears would prick up anytime someone in a five-mile radius mentioned offhand having expertise relevant to any of the chapters.
The physical book functions as an unexpected memory palace for me.
Many of its tiny details recall elaborate associations.
The historical examples are always an enormous challenge to find and we discard at least as many as we end up including. In the harder cases, it’s a matter of reading a lot, talking to people, discussing it, taking a lot of notes, and exploring until we find a thread to follow. For me, the easiest way is to just flood my brain with a lot of mixed-up snippets of information until something clicks.
When something clicks at last, it’s a moment I always remember. I look through and recall where and when.
One thing I learned from this project is the tough reality that creative processes require at times doing the opposite of what feels productive.
There are parts you can’t force. When I got stuck on a few of the historical examples, I ended up only making progress by spending what felt like a lot of time doing what would have looked to anyone else like falling down information rabbit holes.
Anyway, if you read it, I hope you like it. We’re already hard at work on the 4th book, which will be about economics and art. You can send feedback to me by replying to any of my emails.
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Other stuff
As today is John Lennon’s birthday, here’s a love letter to The Beatles I wrote a while ago.
Back in August, I interviewed science journalist and author of Breath James Nestor as part of my work at Farnam Street. This breathing technique for relaxation has since genuinely helped my insomnia more than any other method I’ve tried.
I’m considering trying out hosting a kind of office hours, but for reading. The idea would be: a regular video call of a couple of hours, devoted to silent reading which anyone can drop in for any part of, with an optional few minutes at the end of chat about what you read. If you like the idea of a social accountability mechanism for focused reading time, hit reply and let me know! Please include your timezone & typical availability.
Three good documentaries watched lately: The Story of ‘Common People’, Turning the Art World Inside Out, An Ecology of Mind.
How’s your autumn/fall going?
See you soon.
All the best,
Rosie