Thread by @david_perell

~ New long-form essay ~

It's an 8,000-word deep-dive, where I talk about every aspect of my business.

I've never talked about online learning, content production, or company operations in this much detail.

perell.com/blog/mid-year-…

Here are the highlights, beginning with hiring an assistant.

We have two weekly meetings. Together, we draft standard operating procedures for course operations, newsletter editing, and podcast production. In her first 3 months, she’s written 30+ standard operating procedures.

As humans, we should do as little work as possible.

Our minds should be occupied by systems design, so software can execute tasks on our behalf in a much more cost-effective way. Everybody on our team should look for ways to automate their own work.

Everybody on our team is an architect with a huge influence over 1000s of students’ experiences, so we must hire brilliant people.

As Alfred Whitehead once said: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them”

Why I write: You can’t write 10,000 intelligent words about a topic until an idea has lived in your mind for a long time.

Whenever I start an essay, the main idea is tangled like a pair of old headphones. I don’t find momentum until I can summarize it in the length of a tweet.

Angel investing: I don’t know what my investing future looks like, but I enjoy doing it.

I don’t really invest to make money. I do it to learn and support admirable people who work in my areas of interest: education, productivity, and the creator-economy.

My investment thesis is fueled by rapid improvements in creator-focused tools, such as Stripe, Shopify, and Teachable.

At the same time, intelligent people are under-served by the information economy. Information may be abundant, but high-quality public thinking is scarce.

Finding the time for deep reading: Building a business makes deep reading difficult because the move-fast neuroticism I need to build Write of Passage is the opposite of the slower, contemplative mindset I need to soak into a 17th-century work of philosophy.

Paradoxically, finding time to read begins with improving operations, which takes away time from deep reading. Or maybe, I’m caught in the same cycle that plagues our society: We keep inventing things that save us time, but it feels like we have less free time than ever before.

Write of Passage: The school has been a smashing success. I never dreamed that my work would be so fulfilling, especially as a 25-year-old. As a three-person team, we’ve already taught more than 500 people from more than 30 countries how to write this year.

Until now, Write of Passage has felt like an experiment. For most of 2019, I mumbled when I spoke about it because the student experience had so much room for improvement. Spurred by the intimidating quality of people in the course, I now speak confidently about the business.

I now have a 10-year vision for Write of Passage, which will become the business school of the future.

I want the community to have the camaraderie of a CrossFit gym, the commitment of CrossFit participants, and the global reach of the CrossFit brand.

Email: Most businesses have one core metric, where everything else works out if you get it right.

For me, that metric is the number of quality email subscribers. Quality is measured by email open rate, the quality of email responses I get, and likelihood to join Write of Passage

The Write of Passage moat is exceptional students.

Our school can only compete with traditional MBA programs if the study body is superb because post-collegiate education is as much about the network you build as what you actually learn.

To give you a sense of the global flavor, we have people from Panama, Bahrain, Singapore, Holland, South Africa, Germany, India, Hong Kong, Australia, England, Scotland, Portugal, Spain, Thailand, Nicaragua, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Guatemala, Belgium, and the United Arab Emirates.

Working with @anafabrega11: We want to help kids explore their curiosity by helping them become prolific creators.

To do that, we're building an online camp and we launched a weekly YouTube show called Show & Tell where we talk about childhood education.

Online courses are like startups.

People in Silicon Valley talk about technical co-founders to complement a business-minded entrepreneur. Similarly, online courses demand a two-person partnership to cover as many parts of the skills listed below as possible.

At the beginning of Write of Passage, we ask every student to write down the 12 questions that drive their intellectual life.

As I look forward to the rest of 2020, here are the questions that are top of mind. Together, they hold the keys to my next creative breakthroughs.

Work ethic: We'd like to maintain our ship fast, ship often cadence.

We want to create a culture of excellence and we’re not even close to taking our foot off the gas. For now, we need to simplify our systems and make our operations more efficient without losing our soul.

That's a fraction of what I talked about in this essay.

If you're still curious, you can read the full mid-year review here.

perell.com/blog/mid-year-…