About
I’m investigating how the smartest people in the world organize knowledge to do their best work. My name is Dan Shipper. I started and sold Firefly. I’ve spent the last two years or so writing a novel, investing in pre-seed...
When I was running Firefly I started to think of myself as a kind of information processing engine. I was taking a bunch of inputs — from customers, mentors, blog posts, books, and trying to transform them into outputs: decisions, code, slide decks, blog posts, etc.
But there’s so much information out there that I found myself spending a lot of time building a systems to make this process more efficient: helping me remember and apply what the things I was learning at the right time.
Practically, this means I take a lot of notes. But on a deeper level it means things like:
Being thoughtful about how to live
Defining core principles and ways of being
Generating real understanding and practical knowhow from books and smart people
I think most people look at this as a kind of nerdy hobby. But over time, I’ve come to believe that a lot of successful people do the same thing — not just nerdy programmers.
In this newsletter I examine people who do this well, and understand the systems and tools they’ve developed to support them in living their lives.
Additional information
Photos
superorganizers, by Dan Shipper