visit: source

I went from being a bad writer to a good writer after taking a one-day course in “business writing.” I couldn’t believe how simple it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you don’t have to waste a day in class.

Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.

Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences.

Humor writing is a lot like business writing. It needs to be simple. The main difference is in the choice of words. For humor, don’t say “drink” when you can say “swill.”

Your first sentence needs to grab the reader. Go back and read my first sentence to this post. I rewrote it a dozen times. It makes you curious. That’s the key.

Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers aren’t as smart as you’d think.
Learn how brains organize ideas. Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains work”?)

That’s it. You just learned 80% of the rules of good writing. You’re welcome.

你成为优秀写作者的那一天

我从一个糟糕的写作者变成了一个优秀的写作者，只花了一天时间参加“商务写作”课程。我简直不敢相信这竟然如此简单。这里我会告诉你主要的技巧，这样你就不用浪费一天的时间上课了。

商务写作的核心是清晰和说服力。主要的技巧是保持简单。简单的写作更具说服力。一个五句话的好论点比一个一百句话的精彩论点更能打动人。不要抗拒这个事实。

简单意味着去掉多余的词语。不要写“他非常高兴”，而是写“他高兴”。你可能认为“非常”这个词增加了什么，但实际上并没有。修剪你的句子。

幽默写作和商务写作很相似。它也需要简单。主要的区别在于用词选择。对于幽默，不要说“喝”，而要说“痛饮”。

你的第一句话需要吸引读者。回去看看我这篇文章的第一句话。我重写了十几次。它让你产生好奇心。这就是关键。

写短句子。避免在一个句子中包含多个想法。读者的理解能力并不像你想的那么强。学习大脑如何组织想法。读者更容易理解“男孩击球”而不是“球被男孩击中”。这两个句子的意思是一样的，但想象动作（击打）之前的对象（男孩）更容易。所有的大脑都是这样工作的。（注意我没有说“所有的大脑都是这样工作的”？）

就是这样。你刚刚学到了优秀写作规则的 80%。不客气。

中文：

• 产品沉思录

English:

• Paul Graham Essays
• Patrick Collison
• Stripe Press
• Leonard Cohen Files

Note: The source is unvisited now.

我曾经认为时间是最珍稀的资源。你无法存储它以备日后再用，每过一天，你所拥有的时间就比昨天少。无法制造也无法购买，它是有限的，并且稍纵即逝，这就是时间。

但是现在我发觉，有东西比时间还要珍稀，那就是你的注意力。注意力是时间的子集，所以它更加珍稀。也正因此，如何消费注意力比如何消费时间更重要。

注意力是一种专注、细致、思考的状态。

「有品质的时间」是宝贵的，但是我认为「有品质的注意力」是无价的。给予一个人你的注意力比给予一个人你的时间付出更多。

伟大的事情都是你投入了百分百注意力的。给你正在做的事情列一个清单吧，问问你自己你把最佳的注意力都花在了什么事情上面。你可以消磨时间，但是你必须好好消费你的注意力，如何消费你的注意力或许是最重要的事情了。

当你要「做」一件事情的时候，不妨问一下你自己这个「做」的意思，是「我可以做」还是「我会专注做它」。如果你并不希望花费你的注意力在这件事情上面，那么它还值得你去做么？也许值得，也许不值得，但是想一想这个问题总是好的。

Cherish your attention

I once believed that time was the most precious resource. You cannot store it for future use; with each passing day, the time you have is less than it was yesterday. It cannot be manufactured or bought; it is finite and fleeting—that is time.

However, I now realize that there is something even rarer than time: your attention. Attention is a subset of time, making it even more precious. Therefore, how you consume your attention is more important than how you consume your time.

Attention is a state of focus, detail, and thought.

“Quality time” is valuable, but I believe “quality attention” is priceless. Giving someone your attention costs more than giving them your time.

Great things are accomplished when you invest 100% of your attention. Make a list of what you are currently doing and ask yourself where your best attention is being spent. You can waste time, but you must consume your attention wisely; how you consume your attention may be the most important thing.

When you are about to “do” something, consider what “doing” means: is it “I can do it” or “I will focus on doing it”? If you do not wish to spend your attention on this task, is it still worth doing? It may be worth it, or it may not be, but it’s always good to think about this question.

1. 加强思想修养。人的自制力在一定程度上取决于他们的思想素质。一般来说，具有崇高理想抱负的人决不会为区区小事而感情冲动产生不良行为。因此，要提高自制力最根本的方法是树立正确的人生观、世界观，保持乐观向上的健康情绪。
2. 提高文化素养。一般来说，一个人的文化素养同其承受能力和自控能力成正比。文化素质比较高的人往往能够比较全面正确认识事物，认识自我和他人的关系，自觉地进行自我控制、自我完善。
3. 稳定情绪。用合理发泄、注意力转移、迁移环境等方法，把将要引发冲动的情绪宣泄和释放出来，保持情绪稳定，避免冲动。
4. 要强化自我意识。遇事要沉着冷静，自己开动脑筋，排除外界干扰或暗示，学会自主决断。要彻底摆脱那种依赖别人的心理，克服自卑，培养自信心和独立性。
5. 要强化实践锻炼。一方面要加强学习，积累知识，开阔视野，用知识来武装和充实自己，提高自己分析问题和解决问题的水平，并通过学习别人经验来扩展自己决断事情的能力；另一方面，要积极投身到部队生活实践中去，刻苦锻炼，不断丰富经验，提高自己的适应能力。
6. 要强化意志力量。要培养自己性格中意志独立性的良好品质。对自己奋斗的目标要有高度的自觉。只要你经过自己的实践认准的事，就应义无反顾地走下去，想方设法达到预期目的。不必追求任何事情都做得十全十美，不必苛求自己没有一点失败，不必过多地注意别人怎样议论你。
7. 调整好需要结构。当需要不能同时兼顾时，抑制一些不可能实现的需要。如古人所云： “鱼我所欲也，熊掌亦我所欲也，两者不能兼得，舍鱼而取熊掌也。 "
8. 要强化积极思维。俗话说： “凡事预则立，不预则废。 “平时注意经常思考问题，增强预见性，关键时刻才能及时、果断、准确地做出选择 。

How to Improve Self-control

1. Strengthen ideological cultivation. A person’s self-control is partially dependent on their ideological quality. Generally, those with lofty ideals are unlikely to act impulsively over trivial matters. Therefore, the most fundamental way to enhance self-control is to establish a correct worldview and outlook on life, maintaining an optimistic and healthy emotional state.
2. Improve cultural literacy. Typically, a person’s cultural literacy is proportional to their capacity for endurance and self-control. Individuals with higher cultural quality can often comprehensively and accurately understand things, recognize their relationship with others, and consciously engage in self-control and self-improvement.
3. Stabilize emotions. Use methods such as reasonable venting, attention shifting, and changing the environment to express and release emotions that may trigger impulses, maintaining emotional stability and avoiding impulsivity.
4. Strengthen self-awareness. Stay calm in the face of challenges, think independently, eliminate external distractions or suggestions, and learn to make autonomous decisions. Completely rid yourself of the mindset of relying on others, overcome inferiority, and cultivate self-confidence and independence.
5. Strengthen practical exercise. On one hand, enhance learning, accumulate knowledge, broaden horizons, and arm yourself with knowledge to improve your ability to analyze and solve problems, while also expanding your decision-making capacity through learning from others’ experiences. On the other hand, actively engage in practical life experiences, train diligently, continuously enrich your experience, and improve your adaptability.
6. Strengthen willpower. Cultivate good qualities of independence in your character. Be highly self-aware of your goals. Once you have recognized something through your own practice, you should pursue it resolutely, finding ways to achieve your intended purpose. There’s no need to strive for perfection in everything, nor should you be overly harsh on yourself for any failures, or overly concerned about how others might judge you.
7. Adjust your needs structure. When needs cannot be met simultaneously, suppress some unrealistic needs. As the ancients said, “I desire both the fish and the bear’s paw, but I cannot have both; I will give up the fish to take the bear’s paw.”
8. Strengthen positive thinking. As the saying goes, “Preparation leads to success; lack of preparation leads to failure.” Regularly reflect on issues to enhance foresight, so that you can make timely, decisive, and accurate choices at critical moments.

by Slava Akhmechet

I try to read a lot, though I’m not nearly as voracious a reader as people who have a reputation for it. I have no idea how Marc Andreessen or Patrick Collison read as much as they do, especially given the enormous demands on their time. The most plausible explanation is that they’re aliens with ungodly information processing abilities. I’m human, so I shoot for 40 pages every day, and fail maybe a third of the time. That works out to about 10,000 pages or ~20 books every year.

Reading twenty books a year gets you a lot. Consider: one book gives you more knowledge about a subject than almost every other person on the planet, because people don’t read. Two books on the same subject give you more knowledge than almost any reader, because people don’t read two books about the same thing. How many people who read The Power Broker went on to read a second book about Robert Moses? I’d wager not many.

Beyond two books on a subject, there is a long utility dip. People who bothered to read more than two books about Robert Moses, are either obsessed with him or study him for a living, which means they’ve read much, much more about him. So two books on a subject, at least with respect to competitive edge, is an inflection point. After you read two, you get diminishing returns.

There is a way to get around this limitation. A single book is a pinhole view of the world set up by the author. You have no input into its contents, and therefore cannot change the orientation of this view. But you do choose the books you select. That means you can stitch together multiple pinhole views into a unique lens to examine the world — one that no one else will have unless they use the same list of books to stitch together the same lens.

For example, you can look at the world through history of technology that became ubiquitous. Here is one possible list of books to stitch together this lens: The Victorian Internet, Empires of Light, The Wright Brothers, The Network, Hackers. Very few people in the world read all five of these books. Even within Silicon Valley, where everyone’s living depends on creating new ubiquitous technology, your understanding of how technology becomes ubiquitous will be in the 95th percentile (and likely higher) if you read these five. You will now be armed with a unique instrument that few others possess, and assuming twenty books per year, it only took you three months to acquire.

Another example is to look at American history and the dynamics of failure by studying biographies of U.S. presidents who sought reelection and lost. There were ten: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, Benjamin Harrison, William H. Taft, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and now Donald J. Trump. It may be difficult to stomach ten presidential biographies in a row, but it’s doable to read five. That’s enough to pick up a new lens. Another three months; another sophisticated instrument to examine the world at your disposal.

I settled on clusters of five and almost never read a single book in isolation. Less than five feel lacking; more than five gets repetitive. Every cluster has a goal of the form “study X through Y”. Study American history through technological expansion, or study failure through one term presidents are just a few examples. I try to be creative and make Y unusual. For instance, everyone likes to read about presidents who are believed to be successful. A simple trick is to inverse it and read about unsuccessful ones instead. Or skip the presidents altogether, and read about vice presidents. It doesn’t matter what Y is because you’re trying to study X, and it’s more fun to make Y unusual.

I don’t bother diversifying books within a cluster by time period, cultural or linguistic background of the author, or anything like that. I simply try and find the best books on the subject. Sometimes they turn out to be diverse along some axes; other times they’re homogenous. I never read forewords or prefaces and always finish every book in a cluster. I prefer paper to digital, and used books to new ones. I never take notes or, god forbid, create flashcards. My goal is to suck the juice out of a book, not to hold on to pieces of the carcass. If I ever need to remember a specific detail, it’s always waiting for me on the shelf.

This system gives me four new instruments per year, each capable of inspecting the world in a different way. Rather than pick the instruments at random I try to be strategic and collect them into a mental lab. I visualize the lab as a room with multiple stations. Each station has a collection of related instruments on it. When I’m faced with a problem I can go to the right station and examine the problem through the instruments available on that station. All this is physically materialized on my bookshelf. Some day when I become less mobile, I plan to dedicate a literal room to it.

I don’t maintain lists of books I want to read, and don’t plan a sequence of instruments to acquire in advance. Once I’m done reading a cluster of books, I ask myself: what instrument can I add to double the utility of my lab? Another way to phrase this question is “what is the most important subject that I know the least about?” It’s easy to think of many possible answers to this question; I then pick the answer that seems the most interesting, construct a new cluster of five books, and recurse.

Four instruments per year may not seem like much, but consider: in five years you will have about twenty mental instruments, all of which interrelate and reinforce each other. In ten years you will have an impressive lab of forty instruments. And it will be unique— no other mental lab on the planet will be able to inspect the world in the way that yours can.

Because the instruments are constructed from books, they are endlessly upgradeable. Sometimes you might choose to upgrade an existing instrument to increase its power and get higher resolution, rather than acquire a new one. You can do that one book at a time. To use the examples above, you can read another book about ubiquitous technology, or another book about a one term president.

If you organize your reading this way, your bookshelf won’t be arranged by genre like a typical bookstore. Rather than having sections for e.g. biographies, essays, novels, military history, all sorted by author, you will instead have sections for addressing different problems, likely sorted by clusters of books in order that you encountered them. The arrangement won’t make sense to anyone except you. But you’ll be able to find what you need instantaneously, and your capacity to examine the world from different perspectives will dramatically increase.

Waiting five, ten, fifteen years to build a mental lab may seem like an impossibly long time. But you don’t have to wait. It’s a pleasure to read about the Wright brothers, or proliferation of the telegraph, or early computer culture! And in a measly three months you’ll have acquired a fresh way of looking at the world. Already you will be a different person. Then you keep going, and keep looking for new instruments to double the utility of existing ones. And in one year? You will look back at today’s version of yourself and find it unrecognizable.

TL;DR: Read ~40 pages/day, assume 30% failure rate. That’s 10k pages and ~ 20 books annually. Pick a problem, and read clusters of five books to study that problem from a unique perspective. Visualize each cluster as an instrument to inspect the world. Collect instruments into a mental lab, with various stations for related instruments. You can upgrade the instruments one book at a time. Have your bookshelf reflect this mental image. Win the decade, not the day. Start now and never stop.

我是如何阅读的

我尝试多读书，尽管我并不像那些以此著称的人那样是一个贪婪的读者。我不知道马克·安德森（Marc Andreessen）或帕特里克·科利森（Patrick Collison）是如何在如此繁忙的时间中读那么多书的。最合理的解释是，他们可能是拥有非凡信息处理能力的外星人。我是人类，所以我每天的目标是读40页，但大约三分之一的时间会失败。这样算下来，每年大约能读到10,000页，或大约20本书。

每年读二十本书能让你获得很多知识。考虑一下：一本书能让你对某个主题的了解超过地球上几乎所有其他人，因为人们不读书。关于同一主题的两本书能让你获得的知识超过几乎所有读者，因为人们通常不会读关于同一主题的两本书。有多少读过《权力经纪人》（The Power Broker）的人接着又读过关于罗伯特·摩西（Robert Moses）的第二本书？我敢打赌，没多少。

在某个主题上，读超过两本书之后，知识的收益会迅速降低。那些愿意读超过两本关于罗伯特·摩西的书的人，要么对他痴迷，要么是以此为生的研究者，这意味着他们读过的书会更多。因此，在竞争优势方面，关于某个主题的两本书是一个转折点。读完两本书后，收益递减。

有一种方法可以绕过这个限制。一本书是作者设定的世界的一个针孔视角。你对其内容没有任何输入，因此无法改变这个视角的方向。但你可以选择你所选的书。这意味着你可以将多个针孔视角拼接成一个独特的视角来审视世界——这是其他人所没有的，除非他们使用相同的书单拼接出相同的视角。

例如，你可以通过普及的技术历史来观察世界。以下是一个拼接此视角的可能书单：《维多利亚时代的互联网》（The Victorian Internet）、《光的帝国》（Empires of Light）、《莱特兄弟》（The Wright Brothers）、《网络》（The Network）、《黑客》（Hackers）。世界上很少有人读过这五本书。即使在硅谷，那里每个人的生计都依赖于创造新的普及技术，如果你读了这五本书，你对技术如何变得普及的理解将处于95百分位（可能更高）。你将拥有一个独特的工具，其他人很少具备，而且假设每年读二十本书，这仅需三个月就能获得。

另一个例子是通过研究那些寻求连任但失败的美国总统的传记来观察美国历史和失败的动态。这十位总统是：约翰·亚当斯（John Adams）、约翰·昆西·亚当斯（John Quincy Adams）、马丁·范布伦（Martin Van Buren）、本杰明·哈里森（Benjamin Harrison）、威廉·霍华德·塔夫脱（William H. Taft）、赫伯特·胡佛（Herbert Hoover）、杰拉尔德·福特（Gerald Ford）、吉米·卡特（Jimmy Carter）、乔治·H.W.·布什（George H.W. Bush），以及现在的唐纳德·J·特朗普（Donald J. Trump）。连续读十本总统传记可能会让人感到难以忍受，但读五本是可以做到的。这足以让你获得一个新的视角。再花三个月；又一个复杂的工具供你用来审视世界。

我选择五本书为一组，几乎从不单独阅读一本书。少于五本会觉得不够；多于五本则会显得重复。每组的目标都是“通过Y研究X”。例如，通过技术扩展研究美国历史，或通过一任总统研究失败，这只是几个例子。我尽量富有创意，让Y变得不寻常。例如，大家都喜欢读关于被认为成功的总统的书。一个简单的技巧是反向思考，转而阅读关于失败的总统的书。或者完全跳过总统，阅读关于副总统的书。Y是什么并不重要，因为你是在研究X，而让Y变得不寻常更有趣。

我不在一个组内按时间段、文化或作者的语言背景等进行书籍多样化。我只是尽量找到该主题上最好的书。有时它们在某些方面可能会多样化；有时它们则是同质的。我从不阅读前言或序言，总是完成每组中的每本书。我更喜欢纸质书而不是电子书，喜欢二手书而不是新书。我从不做笔记，也不，天哪，制作抽认卡。我的目标是榨取一本书的精华，而不是保留残余。如果我需要记住某个具体细节，它总是在书架上等着我。

这个系统每年给我提供四个新工具，每个工具都能以不同的方式审视世界。我不是随机选择工具，而是尽量有策略地将它们收集到一个心理实验室中。我将实验室想象成一个有多个工作站的房间。每个工作站上都有一组相关的工具。当我面临一个问题时，我可以去正确的工作站，通过那个工作站上可用的工具来审视问题。所有这些在我的书架上都得到了物理体现。总有一天，当我变得不那么灵活时，我计划为它专门腾出一个房间。

我不维护想读书的书单，也不提前计划要获取的工具顺序。一旦我完成了一组书的阅读，我会问自己：我可以添加什么工具来使我的实验室的效用翻倍？换句话说，最重要的主题是什么，而我对它了解最少？想到这个问题的许多可能答案很容易；然后我选择看起来最有趣的答案，构建一个新的五本书的组，并递归。

每年四个工具可能看起来不算多，但考虑一下：五年后你将拥有大约二十个心理工具，它们相互关联并相互增强。十年后，你将拥有一个令人印象深刻的四十个工具的实验室。而且它将是独一无二的——地球上没有其他心理实验室能以你所能的方式审视世界。

由于这些工具是由书籍构成的，它们是可以不断升级的。有时你可能选择升级现有的工具，以增加其能力并获得更高的分辨率，而不是获取新的工具。你可以一次读一本书来做到这一点。使用上面的例子，你可以再读一本关于普及技术的书，或者再读一本关于一任总统的书。

如果你以这种方式组织阅读，你的书架将不会像典型书店那样按体裁排列。与你的书架上没有传记、散文、小说、军事历史等分类，而是会有针对不同问题的部分，可能按你遇到这些书的顺序分组。这样的排列对其他人来说毫无意义。但你将能够瞬间找到你需要的东西，而你从不同视角审视世界的能力将大大增强。

等待五年、十年、十五年来建立一个心理实验室可能看起来是一个不可能的漫长时间。但你不必等待。阅读关于莱特兄弟、或电报普及、或早期计算机文化的书是件愉快的事情！而在短短三个月内，你将获得一种全新的观察世界的方式。你将成为一个不同的人。然后你继续前进，不断寻找新的工具来使现有工具的效用翻倍。在一年内？你会回头看今天的自己，发现自己变得面目全非。

总结：每天读约40页，假设30%的失败率。这每年大约是10,000页和约20本书。选择一个问题，阅读五本书的群组，以独特的视角研究该问题。将每个群组视为审视世界的工具。将工具收集到一个心理实验室中，设有不同工作站供相关工具使用。你可以一次通过一本书来升级工具。让你的书架反映这种心理图像。赢得十年，而不是一天。现在就开始，永不停歇。

Understanding is the thing. Being able to exercise judgment is the thing. Taste is the thing, and understanding, judgment, taste, these come out of having real problems and then solving them and then finding the commonalities.

• 分散的知识，没有被记录下来，只存在于个人之中，比如，某一个地方的环境、道路信息。
• 定量的信息，我们通常知道一些关于某事物的部分信息，诸如它们的构成等等，但是我们不知道其相互的比例。
• 实践的信息，知道某一件事和能够做某一件事，有着天壤之别。

What is hidden knowlege:

• Scattered knowledge exists only within individuals and is not recorded, such as information about the environment and roads in a specific place.
• Quantitative information refers to the partial information we usually know about something, such as its composition, but we do not know the proportions of their interrelations.
• Practical information is vastly different from merely knowing about something and being able to do something.