Recommends The Power Broker.

Transcript context

…I only know how to do a handful of things in this world so I feel I should be doing the thing that I cannot help myself but do all the time. I don't have a very rosy relationship with writing to be perfectly honest. I hate writing. Writing makes me crazy. I don't find it to be enjoyable. It's always enjoyable once it's over but [unclear] that is a little miserable. You would think, why do you do this thing that makes you miserable? It's the thing I know how to do. I don't think there's anything glamorous about it. I don't think there's anything special. It might not be the best thing to do. There's probably more impactful things I could be doing with my time. But it's the thing I have to do and I think everyone should just be doing the thing that they absolutely have to do, whatever that is. It would make me happy if everyone in the world was just leaning into their obsession. So that's my obsession. I don't know how you think about it but when I think about my own impact, I want my ideas to be heard by people that I think can do something about them. So in other words, I care much more about quality than quantity. I'm not very active on Twitter. I don't really focus on needing to reach some kind of mass mainstream audience. When I published my book, I told myself, the people that need to hear about how open source works are people that work at tech companies, software developers that use open source software. It mattered less to me that this needs to be a book that an airport bookstore would print. With essays and stuff, it's much more important to me that people whose opinions I care about, read it. I make my essays public because I hope everyone reads them. But when I think about how do I measure my impact? It's not how many page views that I get on an essay. It's more of who ended up talking about it and are those people that I wanted to talk about it? And I think people really undervalue that. My personal pet peeve is that founders are always talking about building and that startups are so important but what are all of them doing in their free time? They're reading books, they're reading essays, and then those books and essays influence how they think about stuff. It is a very indirect influence. You can't have one mouth saying, the only important thing in the world is starting startups and then at the same time, talk about the cool new book you read at a cocktail party. Both those things are important in different ways. Yeah, I totally agree. I don't want to repeat myself, because I talked about this on my Byrne episode but we were talking about Robert Caro's books and one interesting thing is this guy was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize before he wrote The Power Broker. He was a top tier investigative journalist. Can you imagine crunching the numbers as a top tier investigative journalist at the peak of your career and you're like, “You know what would be a good use of my time? I'm going to spend the next seven years, in almost poverty, writing about this one guy who had a lot of influence in New York. I'm going to talk to any person who had conceivably even been in the same room as him or had been indirectly affected by his policies in any way. And I'm gonna do that obsessively for the next seven years.” There's no way the number crunching would get you there but it's probably been one of the most influential books in terms of how urban governance is done. Presidents have praised and read the book and said it changed how they think about politics. It is the kind of thing where you wouldn't have gone to that conclusion just from thinking about it beforehand and this is the most effective thing I could do. Yeah, totally.…

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