I have a confession.
I've spent an unreasonable amount of time studying people who are considerably smarter than I am.
Philosophers. Psychologists. Entrepreneurs. Copywriters. Spiritual teachers. The odd magnificent troublemaker.
And they’re fascinating.
Dangerously fascinating, if you’re the sort of person who can mistake a full bookshelf for a finished life.
It's a wonderful thing to borrow a better question from one person, a useful principle from another, and a story from someone who lived three hundred years before you were born.
But there's a catch. A $38,000 catch, in my case.
If you spend all your time collecting other people's answers, you can forget to ask yourself the most important question of all.
What do you think?
Not what the book thinks.
Not what the internet’s latest brilliant expert thinks.
Not even what a fellow with a website and a fondness for rabbit holes thinks.
You.
So I've been collecting and organizing the teachings that genuinely interest me, while trying to remember that the point isn't to surrender your judgment to anybody.
It's to sharpen it. Which is rather close to the oldest treasure-hunting lesson I know.
At some point the collection got big enough that I began organizing it into something other people might enjoy exploring, too.
There are thinkers whose ideas changed the way I look at money. Some who made me question what I believed about myself. Others who made me fall in love with writing, human behavior, business, and the peculiar art of being alive.
Forty-seven or so eventually found their way into a collection I’ve been putting together.
And here’s the ridiculous twist: after spending years studying extraordinary teachers, one of the most useful things I began to understand was the importance of not handing any of them the keys to my own judgment.
The mentors are the guests. You still own the house.
And once you see that, a library becomes a far more interesting place. Not a courtroom where experts deliver verdicts about your life. A room full of people worth having a conversation with.
I’ve also been putting together a more structured journey through the ideas—beliefs, attention, action, influence, generosity, the whole unruly family.
I’m not going to turn this page into a shelf of checkout buttons. That rather misses the spirit of the place.
But if you enjoy these kinds of things, some of the deeper projects and discoveries will eventually make an appearance in my letters.
Meanwhile, there’s a surprisingly good story about the world’s least sophisticated marketing advantage if you want to meet another delightful troublemaker.