…And I realise that I am actually doing something similar to what Peter Kaufmann, editor of Poor Charlie’s Almanack, had done.
So I discovered that on the Internet there were twelve years of Discover magazine articles available in the archives. So I printed out twelve years times twelve months of these interviews. I had 144 of these interviews. And I put them in these big three-ring binders. Filled up three big binders. And for the next six months I went to the coffee shop for an hour or two every morning and I read these. And I read them index fund style, which means I read them all. I didn’t pick and choose. This is the universe, and I’m going to own the whole universe. I read every single one. Now I will tell you that out of 144 articles, if I’d have been selecting my reading material, I probably would have read about fourteen of them. And the other 130? I would never in a million years read six pages on nanoparticles. Guess what I had at the end of six months? I had inside my head every single big idea from every single domain of science and biology. It only took me six months. And it wasn’t that hard because it was written in layperson’s terms. And really, what did I really get? Just like an index fund, I captured all the parabolic ideas that no one else has. And why doesn’t anybody else have these ideas? Because who in the world would read an interview on nanoparticles? And yet that’s where I got my best ideas. I would read some arcane subject and, oh my god, I saw, “That’s exactly how this works over here in biology,” or “That’s exactly how this works over here in human nature.” You have to know all these big ideas. Or there is an alternative, find somebody who did what I did and just get all the ideas from them. Now when I was your age and I was in school, I thought the asymmetry of it was very unfair because I had to do all the work. So every time I go back and meet with a group of students, I change the asymmetry around. I did all the work for you.