The Chomp #054

Annual Review, Mr. Jaynes' Wild Ride, and More...

Hey Everyone,

Welcome back to The Chomp—your weekly dose of the best strategic thinking content and top emerging business trends from the internet and beyond. Merry Christmas to all who celebrated this week!

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With that, let’s dive into it.

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Annual Review

The Ultimate Annual Review

At the end of last year, I committed to completing an annual review for the first time. I found it to be an extremely valuable and worthwhile exercise. I ended up using a template created by Steve Schlafman, and am running it back with the same version for year two. In the intervening time since I shared Steve's article outlining his template at the end of 2019, Steve went on to design an entire website dedicated to completing an annual review. Included on the site are three pre-built templates to download and use via Notion, Google Docs, or PDF.

All in, completing the review should take you somewhere between 3 to 6 hours—depending on how deep you want to go. I recommend completing it over the course of a few days or a weekend and breaking it up into smaller chunks of uninterrupted time for each section. While this isn’t the most fun activity, it’s one you won’t regret spending time on—especially with the year that 2020 has been.

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Deeper Dive

Mr. Jaynes' Wild Ride:

A couple of weeks ago, Austen Allred tweeted out the below:

Austen Allred @Austen

What can I read that will break my brain and cause me to never see life the same way again?

This, naturally, piqued my interest and led me to discover a host of wild books I’ve never heard of. Amongst the replies, one that caught my attention mentioned Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The tweet stated, “It's a long read though, and you can get 90% of it in 1% of the time reading this article: Mr. Jaynes Wild Ride.” In response to this came the following tweet:

Chris Lewicki @interplanetary

@DiracWinsAgain @Austen Intriguing! Love this testimonial: "Probably wrong — but worth reading anyway. Preposterous — but worth taking seriously."

At this point, I was sold (on at least reading the article): “Probably wrong — but worth reading anyway. Preposterous — but worth taking seriously.” Seeing something labeled as preposterous immediately raises my antenna. Preposterous is analogous to blasphemy, which relates closely to heresy. Heresy is a basis for things you can’t say, which is a root cause of conformism.* If someone or some group of people feel strongly enough to coin something as preposterous, I want to know why. Why does said idea cause so much strife that it's considered utterly absurd?

Most of the time, it turns out that said idea or thing actually is truly absurd and is deserving of that label. But every so often, you come across something that’s discarded as preposterous for no good reason other than that people have deemed it as such. It’s in this space where some of the most interesting, sometimes world-changing, ideas exist.

So it is with that mindset that I dove into Mr. Jaynes’ Wild Ride. Had I not, I probably would have stopped reading about five minutes in. Instead, I found myself devouring both this and the three subsequent essays in Kevin Simler’s four-part series on Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind. And how glad I am that I did.

Despite, on the face of it, Jaynes’ theory being preposterous and lacking irrefutable scientific evidence, it’s worth taking seriously. It's not something one should write off at face value. And even if at some point I do decide to write it off, I’ll be grateful for the fact that I didn’t discard it right away. Regardless of whether Jaynes’ theory is ultimately right, it’s incredibly thought-provoking and leads to endless double-takes.

Tying this all back to Austen’s tweet, reading Julian Jaynes’ theory will likely break your brain. In my opinion, it’s worth the pending malfunction.

*This tangent ties back to Paul Graham’s article What You Can’t Say, which I mentioned back in issue #006 and is one of the best essays I’ve read in recent years.

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Chum Bucket

• Stripe: Platform of Platforms (Stratechery)

• A Travel Manifesto: 5 Ways to Be a Better Traveler (AFAR)

• Platforms, Bundling, and Kill Zones (Benedict Evans)

• The New Consumer: Consumer Trends 2021 (Coefficient Capital)

• Under Pressure: Why Atheletes Choke (The Guardian)

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Tweet of the Week

Packy McCormick @packyM

I ran 2020 through GPT-3 and it’s telling me the hottest startup of 2021 is going to be a social audio-embedded neobank that issues debit cards every time someone takes a note remotely in the metaverse, built no code but with all the dev tools. Raising $100(m) on $100(b), pre.

Song of the Week

Apple Music Link

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Books

Currently Reading

Recently Read

• I first learned about Mike Duncan when I came across his podcast, The History of Rome. After listening to the first episode, I was awed by his unique storytelling ability. Through a combination of wit and dry humor, Duncan makes history straight-up fun. When I learned that he followed up his podcast series with this book, I knew I had to read it. My love of Roman history might make me a bit biased, but I thought this book was a blast. It’s also incredibly timely. Despite focusing on the events of two millennia ago, The Storm Before the Storm unveils a host of parallels with our contemporary world. Any fans of history will have trouble putting this book down. (4/5)

• I decided to dive into Seeing Like a State after reading Venkatesh Rao’s excellent article summarizing the main concepts of the book. I went into reading the book with expectations that it would be a bit dry and academic, but that I’d discover a plethora of useful insights. After finishing it, I’d say my expectations were pretty spot on. Seeing Like a State isn’t a page turner, and it won’t be the most exciting thing you read, but it’s densely packed with unique and novel insights into the concept of authoritarian high-modernism. Reading this will certainly leave you with a new perspective on state-level programs and top-down thinking. (4/5)

Parting Thoughts

This Week in History

• On December 22, 1882, Edward Johnson, an associate of Thomas Edison, had walnut-sized bulbs made specifically for him to wire his Christmas Tree with electric light. The 80 red, white, and blue bulbs formed the first set of electric Christmas Tree lights in history. (Source)

“Procrastination is the thief of time.”

— Edward Young

If you found something that piqued your interest this week, please help me out in expanding the reach of The Chomp by forwarding it along to a friend or sharing it with others in your network. Until next week.

-CM