No. 683 – May 31, 2026
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
If everyone agrees, you won’t create much value. Deviate when you have an edge.
Being around successful people shifts your ambition because extraordinary success feels attainable.
And when success feels attainable, you lock in and work longer, harder, and with more focus.
Most people give soft feedback because they care more about how the conversation feels than about whether the problem gets solved. This is selfish.
Another thought on this… A lot of people don’t actually want direct feedback; they prefer something softer. When they hear direct feedback, they focus on how it makes them feel and not the substance. If you’re focusing on how feedback makes you feel and not its accuracy, you’re robbing yourself of the opportunity to get better.
Exceptional results happen when people are willing to give direct feedback and to hear it.
Insights
Publisher Felix Dennis on believing in yourself:
“Without self-belief nothing can be accomplished. With it, nothing is impossible.”
Poet David Whyte on the relationship between self-belief and confidence.
“Confidence and self-belief are contagious; they are not a matter of pure arrogance or overweening egotism, they are the sense of being part of a greater story others have not yet discovered and giving off an almost physical sense of invitation to join that story, that disarms and then changes potential enemies into allies.”
Commentator Ezra Klein on reading:
“Part of what is happening when you spend 7 hours reading a book, is you spend 7 hours with your mind on the topics in the book, grappling with them, drawing connections, having thoughts you would not otherwise have had. And so without that process of grappling, without those hours inside that book, it doesn’t get inside you. It doesn’t impress itself upon you. It doesn’t change you. What reading and writing and processing information is supposed to do is change you.”
This is fascinating to think about through the lens of AI. You can get the answer without much effort, but you can’t get the understanding.
The Knowledge Project
The extended version of the episode with Mark Pincus is now available to members. (Public access is on Tuesday.) Pincus is the creator behind Farmville and Words with Friends.
We should resume a regular release cadence soon, and I appreciate your patience. While it doesn’t feel like it, we’ll have maintained our biweekly pace through Q2.
Thanks for reading,
— Shane Parrish