Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 54
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 343
• Total audio recordings published: 103

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Book digests created: 0
• Blog posts published: 7
• Audio recordings published: 0

What I completed this week (link to last week’s commitments):

• Read Empire: The House That John H. Johnson Built, a biography about publishing entrepreneur John H. Johnson
• Got feedback from five people regarding alternative layouts for a list of entrepreneurs on my blog
• Selected one of those layouts

What I’ll do next week:

• Mainly, focus on helping my family resolve the medical situation
• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Make it possible for software to be hosted in the cloud instead of locally

Asks:

• If you know any full-stack developers interested in working on the software for my current project, please introduce us!

Week two hundred fifty-nine was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles this week

What I learned:

• This week, I helped one of my parents with a medical situation. I learned a ton about medicine, but not much related to this project.  

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week.

A friend sent me a video that Andrej Karpathy made about how he uses large language models (LLMs). According to his website, Karpathy was “a research scientist and founder member at OpenAI” before spending several years at Tesla as Senior Director of AI.

Karpathy shares lots of good info in his video, but it was one use case that prompted my friend to send it to me—and that stood out to me. Karpathy uses LLMs to help him read and understand books and research papers. Here are my takeaways:

• Nowadays, Karpathy mostly reads books using LLMs.
• Here’s his process:
  • Pull up the content (i.e., text) of the book.
  • Find the chapter he’s going to read.
  • The LLM likely knows what the book is about but won’t remember what specific chapters are about.
  • Remind the LLM about the chapter by pasting the chapter text into the LLM context window.
  • Ask the LLM for a summary of the chapter.
  • Read the summary.
  • Read the chapter.
  • If he has questions about what he’s reading, ask the LLM those questions.
• Reading a book with an LLM dramatically improves his understanding and retention of each chapter. It enhances his ability to understand material in fields he’s unfamiliar with or books written long ago.
• No tools exist that make it easy to do this, so he uses a “clunky and back-and-forth” process.
• He mentions that having the ability to highlight text and ask questions about the highlighted parts doesn’t exist but would be useful.
• Final thought: Don’t read books alone.

I’m glad my friend shared this video with me. It was useful to hear a detailed explanation of how someone leverages LLMs to understand book content. Although he has extensive experience with LLMs, his process is still cumbersome. The fact that he’s following this cumbersome process tells me that the value he’s getting from it must be immense.

The software I’m building will greatly enhance my understanding of the books I read with LLMs. Karpathy’s video confirmed I’m going in the right direction, that other readers are leveraging LLMs, and that they’re experiencing pain when doing so.

If you want to see this section of Karpathy’s video, it’s here. If you want to watch the entire video to see how he uses LLMs in life and work, see here.

On January 27, 2020, I had lunch with an entrepreneur friend. He encouraged me to share what I’d learned from scaling my bootstrapped company to over $10 million in annual revenue. I’m private and was reluctant, but I wanted to help others who were just like me when I started my company—people who didn’t know what they didn’t know. I agreed, and we began a 60-day challenge. We both posted content daily to help other entrepreneurs (see our challenge details here). That challenge began on March 9, 2020, and ended on May 10, 2020. I didn’t miss a day—and I learned to enjoy the habit of reflecting and writing every day.

That was five years ago. Since then, I’ve written and shared a post every single day. That’s over 1,825 consecutive days of sharing my thoughts. When I agreed to the challenge, I had no idea I’d still be posting five years later, but I’m glad I am.

Every March, I reflect on my writing journey. Here are a few reflections:

• Strike zone – I read a book a week, mostly biographies. I used to think of reading and writing as independent hobbies. But writing about the books I’m reading has enhanced my learning and thinking. Combining them feels like it’s put me in my strike zone.  
• Format – I’ve played with a few different formats for creating posts about biographies I’ve read. The format I like best is a deep-dive series about a biography (see examples here and here). I’m aiming to get back to that format, and I’m building software to help with the creation process.
• Luck – Bringing value to others by writing has increased my luck surface area and led to magnetic luck (more on luck types here). When I focused more on writing about biographies, it led to more magnetic luck. Entrepreneurs want to know what other entrepreneurs have figured out but don’t always want to read an entire book.
• Audio – Last year, I tested doing a solo podcast about the books I was reading. It was really an audio version of this blog. I did 100 episodes to get reps and learn. Audio is a powerful format but requires significantly more work than writing. Publishing a podcast episode daily wasn’t sustainable. I’ll revisit doing a podcast, but I’ll need more support next time, and I’ll test different formats.
• Level up – I want to take this blog to the next level and create more value for others. Adding a page detailing all the books I’ve read and creating a profile page for each book (see here) is an experiment and just the beginning.
• Annual contract – Every March, I’ve asked myself if I’m enjoying this and want to keep doing it. If yes, I re-up for another one-year contract with the option to renew. I’ve now signed through 2026.

Those are my reflections. I’m looking forward to the next year. I feel like year six will be epic!

My developer friend has been helping me, nights and weekends, to build the first version of my software. He has his own start-up but was intrigued by the challenge of my project and took it on as a side project. It’s been a great experience; we’ve both learned a ton. He’s deep into artificial intelligence (AI) and building systems to manage large data sets, so he was a terrific fit. It was great to have someone with the right technical experience who could complement what I envisioned. We should have a hosted version of that first product version done this week.

My friend’s start-up is hitting a critical point, and he has less free time, so he won’t be able to devote programming time to my project going forward. I’m appreciative of what he’s contributed thus far. His expertise led to some valuable insights. In the beginning, we had a candid conversation and set clear expectations; we agreed this day would come eventually, and here it is.

He’ll still help with my project, but it will be more high-level as time permits. That being the case, I need to find a developer who can help us knock out the last few features I envision for this project so others can play with it. If you know a talented, full-stack developer interested in building the Bloomberg Terminal for entrepreneurs, let me know. A love of reading books is a strong plus.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 53
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 336
• Total audio recordings published: 103

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Book digests created: 0
• Blog posts published: 7
• Audio recordings published: 0

What I completed this week (link to last week’s commitments):

• Read The Man Who Sold America, a biography of advertising entrepreneur and political strategist Albert Lasker
• Published a profile of the above-mentioned book on my blog
• Completed follow-up with contacts from Newsletter Marketing Summit

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Make it possible for software to be hosted in the cloud instead of locally
• Get feedback from five people regarding alternative layouts for a list of entrepreneurs on my blog
• Pick layout for list of entrepreneurs and test live page with real data

Asks:

• If you know any full-stack developers interested in working on the software for my current project, please introduce us!

Week two hundred fifty-eight was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles this week

What I learned:

• Entrepreneurs who prefer listening to books struggle to create voice or written notes about important parts of books or their thinking around parts of the book they’ve listened to.
• It can be difficult to remember to review an annotation from a book. An entrepreneur requested the ability to set an automated reminder that prompts him to do so.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week.

It’s only been a few days since I shared my blog’s new pages (see here, here, and here), but I’ve been gathering feedback. Today, chatting with an entrepreneur, I showed him the searchable list of all the books I’ve read—or My Learning Library, as I call it now. I showed him how he can see each book's profile page and the connections between books on a profile page.

His initial feedback was that My Learning Library is a well-curated list of books. Having all the books on one page eliminates his usual need to search for and research books, which adds friction to his process of finding books to read. Instead, his mind went straight to wanting to purchase a few of the interesting books using the links on my blog.

Selling books isn’t my goal. I want to make it easy for entrepreneurs to find books that can help them solve problems faster or that they’ll enjoy reading for pleasure. It’s early days, but providing a curated list of what I’ve read seems to be accomplishing this.

I like the connections between books and blog posts on the profile pages. Building this out was a decent lift. I think it’s great for discovery. It’s an easy way to follow breadcrumbs between books. I want to get more feedback from people to find out if they see this feature as valuable.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 52
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 329
• Total audio recordings published: 103

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Book digests created: 0
• Blog posts published: 7
• Audio recordings published: 0

What I completed this week (link to last week’s commitments):

• Read Growth Levers and How to Find Them, a framework book about finding the right strategy to acquire customers by Matt Lerner
• Attended Newsletter Marketing Summit
• With the help of my developer friend, finished the first version of the software; although it ran locally on his computer, we couldn’t get it to run on mine, so I couldn’t demo it at the conference
• Finalized descriptions of all the books I’ve read so far and updated them on this blog
• Published my 2024 Reading List page on my blog; see here
• Published a searchable library of all the books I’ve read, which I’ll update weekly; see here
• Published a book profile page for each book I’ve read showing the connections between books, blog posts, and more; see here
• Showed the pages on my blog to several people at the conference and got feedback
• Pitched the software idea to roughly twenty people and obtained contact information of five people interested in seeing the software

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Conference follow-up
• Make it possible for software to be hosted in the cloud instead of locally

Asks:

• None

Week two hundred fifty-seven was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• At the conference I attended, the goal was to show off an early version of the software and an MVP of a book directory built on my blog (My Learning Library). The blog feature was done, and people were impressed when I showed it to them. The software was finished the morning of the conference, but it was designed to run locally, and we couldn’t get it to run on my computer. It was frustrating to not be able to show it to people. I had to pitch it without demoing it, which went over decently. A few people are interested in seeing the demo.

What I learned:

• I tested a name at the conference, “I Study Entrepreneurs,” and it did well. I’m definitely using that name in the future.
• Discovery platforms and relationship platforms are materially different. Discovery platforms have algorithms that help people find you. Think TikTok or Instagram. The downside is that you don’t own the relationship with the user. It’s borrowed distribution, meaning someone can change your ability to reach people anytime. Relationship platforms give you a direct relationship with a user that you own, but discoverability is much harder. Think blogs, newsletters, or SMS. This is owned distribution, meaning no one but you can change your ability to reach users (mostly).
• Several entrepreneurs’ entire business model revolves around creating content that’s a deep dive on a person, industry, or topic. I met a few of them at the conference.
• Buying local newsletters that people are running as side projects and scaling them is a strategy that can do well.
• A newsletter can be a great growth engine if you sell products or software. If you’re savvy, you can convert your newsletter marketing from a cost center to a profit center by paying to acquire subscribers and getting paid to make them aware of other products or services.
• I learned a ton more from conversations and presentations!

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week.