Traverse / Who I Read
Who I Read.
The people who shaped how I think and work, and what I take from each. Read widely enough and a few voices keep showing up in how you reason. These are mine.
Charlie Munger
Carry mental models from many disciplines and run every problem against all of them. Incentives first: show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome. That is the engine under There Is No Neutral.
Shane Parrish
Read wide, find the pattern that keeps repeating, and hand it over as one idea a person can actually use. When I write the Brief, I am trying to do what he does.
Leonardo da Vinci
Observe before you judge, and refuse to keep fields in their boxes. Get ground truth on how a thing actually works before you trust the story about it. The habit of carrying aviation into leadership and back is his.
Kevin Kelly
Read where technology is heading and treat it as a tool to point, not a threat to fear. Two things I take from him: 1000 True Fans, that you do not need mass scale, only a small base of people who truly value what you do, which is why I build a platform that draws the right few rather than pushing to sell to everyone; and the long view, judge a technology by what it lets people do. It is why I read the AI shift as a tool to aim, not a wave to survive.
Steve Blank
Get out of the building. A business model is a set of hypotheses to test against real people, not a plan to execute from a room. Validate the problem before the solution, and let evidence decide, not opinion. Testing who a membership organization actually serves, against who it says it serves, is that same discipline. His line on AI stuck with me: the technology accelerates building, not understanding. Name what the disruption cannot replace, and that is your durable value.
John Boyd
Get inside the other side's decision loop: observe, orient, decide, act, faster and truer than they can. Orient is the word that stuck. Most people lose because they are acting on an old picture of the world.
Michael Porter
Structure decides more than effort. Read where the power actually sits before you try to change it. That is the same move as reading the Force in an organization.
Clayton Christensen
Good organizations fail by doing everything right for the members and margins they already have, until something they dismissed takes the ground out from under them. And ask what job a member is really hiring the organization to do.
The Stoics Marcus Aurelius, Seneca
Spend your energy on what you control and let go of what you do not. Commit fully to the process and do not tie your feelings to an outcome you cannot command.
Warren Buffett
Patience and temperament beat brilliance over a long enough clock. Think like an owner rather than a renter: what makes this thing durable, and what makes it worth belonging to for the long run.
Robin Good
Curation as infrastructure. The one thing that cannot be faked at scale is a maintained, attributed body of judgment. This whole site is built on his model: state your positions plainly, show how you reason, leave the evidence visible, and date it.
Seth Godin
Write the way you talk, hold to one idea, and title it with a plain assertion that carries the whole argument. If the name needs a trick, the thought is not finished.
A living list. On the bench, written in as they earn it: Ravikant, Feynman, Taleb, Drucker, Deming.