No. 625 – April 20, 2025
Welcome to Brain Food, a weekly newsletter full of timeless ideas and insights you can use in life and work. (Read the archives). Not subscribed? Learn more and sign up.
Tiny Thoughts
What you’re taught isn’t always what matters.
Persistence isn’t just continuing to try—it’s the runway that gives your talent time to take off.
Truth trumps narrative. You can temporarily rally people around what sounds good, but reality eventually imposes its verdict.
A company either generates cash or it doesn’t, regardless of how compelling the story. Financial statements reveal truths that even the most charismatic management teams cannot talk their way around.
Insights
Anaïs Nin on why your world grows or shrinks with your nerve:
“Life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage.”
Apple co‑founder Steve Wozniak on why invention is a solitary sport:
“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”
Carl Jung on why mortality is the catalyst that lets life ripen:
“If you accept death, it is altogether like a frosty night and an anxious misgiving, but a frosty night in a vineyard full of sweet grapes. You will soon take pleasure in your wealth. Death ripens. One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningless, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being.”
The Knowledge Project
Bret Taylor once rewrote a mapping tool that annoyed him. That weekend project became Google Maps.
What’s interesting isn’t just his path through Facebook, Salesforce, and OpenAI, but the pattern underneath. Good software often starts as something quick and embarrassing—a reaction to what doesn’t work rather than a grand vision.
Companies follow a similar arc. They begin by solving problems in unconventional ways, then gradually calcify around their initial insights.
Now with AI, we’re seeing another shift: from software as tools to software as collaborators.
The best conversations leave you wanting to build something. This one did.
“If you’re responding to the facts in front of you and not thinking from first principles… the likelihood that you’ll make the right strategic decision is almost zero.”
+ Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Web | YouTube
The Repository
Stanley Druckenmiller with an example of second-order thinking:
“If you’re early on in your career and they give you a choice between a great mentor or higher pay, take the mentor every time. It’s not even close.”
+ The repository stores highlights from everything I read—fully searchable and always growing. Sign up for access.
Thanks for reading,
— Shane Parrish
P.S. When Zeus fights.