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“Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.”
Seneca
Each book Neil Gaiman writes gets written twice.
He writes the first draft of each book by hand. A pen is slow enough that he can think a sentence all the way through. Then he types the whole thing up.
Once a month I write my principles out by hand. I copy the ones that still fit onto a fresh page, in order. The newest one lands at the bottom.
By 2019, I had 100 principles.
Lucretius wrote a poem saying the world is atoms and empty space, the soul dies with the body and no god is watching. It sat almost unread for more than a thousand years.
Poggio Bracciolini pulled a manuscript out of a monastery in 1417. He lent it to Niccolò de’ Niccoli, who copied the whole poem out by hand. The Swerve is Stephen Greenblatt’s account of the find.
Poggio’s manuscript is lost. Niccoli’s copy survived. More than 50 later manuscripts descend from Niccoli’s copy.
13 years later, my oldest principles are still on the page.
Peter and Rosemary Grant spent 40 years of summers on Daphne Major, an island in the Galápagos, measuring finch beaks. A drought hit in 1977 and much of the population died. The seeds left behind were big and hard, so the deeper a bird’s beak the better its odds. Jonathan Weiner wrote up their work in The Beak of the Finch.
The survivors’ chicks inherited the same deep beaks.
Chris Rock built a tour at a small club called the Stress Factory. He turned up unannounced 40 to 50 times carrying a yellow legal pad, ran 45 minutes a night and watched most of the jokes die. Peter Sims counted those nights in Little Bets.
A handful of those jokes made the tour.
The more a test costs to pass, the more its survivors are worth.
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Where could you add friction to see what survives?
