Tallinn, Estonia
It’s 3:39AM here in Tallinn. Lately, I’ve been waking up between 2AM and 4AM. I’ve been training my physical health and tuned my diet precisely, and I nap mid-day, so my sleep needs have fallen.
This lets me sit and think deeply of the world, synthesize operations and recent lessons, and — of course — write.
Before anyone wakes up.
Kai Zau, my business partner at Ultraworking and long-time friend, will wake around 7AM and we’ll do some physical fitness together. But by the time he wakes, I’ll have already gotten more work done than the typical office worker does in an entire day.
Progression — the book you’re reading — is being released tomorrow, 16 June 2016. I’m trying to resist the urge to fuss with it; it’s ready for release. I’m ticking off final details.
But you know, it wasn’t always like this.
Progression contains the edited and tighten-up versions of the weekly essays published in The Strategic Review , which comes out for free every Thursday to readers around the world.
I originally started The Strategic Review back in 2013, and people loved the pieces on how Meyer Rothschild founded the Rothschild Banking Dynasty, how “Staying Power” was the key to George Washington’s successes across his life, and the precise and actionable points about how Sam Walton built his little variety store into the largest company in the world.
But back then, I didn’t have the operations, bandwidth, self-discipline, and systems to ensure I could produce writing of that caliber regularly.
I committed to getting TSR going again in mid-2015, and it took me a number of months to write and edit eight entire issues (two months) of backlog before releasing the first one — Upstream Effects #1 — right before Christmas 2015.
When I started TSR again, I still wasn’t tight : a good issue took an unpredictable amount of time. It was often 15-30 hours to write, but sometimes 50 hours.
It took a lot of work and focus to get those hours down while keeping quality up.
Over time, through tightening down my writing process, taking better notes and studying history during leisure time, and regularly doing short bursts of outlining and capturing ideas, I’ve gotten the time-per-issue down to 5-15 hours… and I think the quality has dramatically increased too.
This book opens strong, and then there are great pieces blended in the various series… but it maximally hits its stride in Section III, Uncommon Virtues.
The pieces on Aristotelian Friendship, Higher-Order Thinking, Romantic and Aesthetic Sense, Loyalty, and Generational Focus all got astounding responses from the readership. If you’re in a hurry, or if you start a lot of books and don’t finish them, I’d recommend you start by opening up to Section III and begin reading “Mere Competence” which is the first issue of Uncommon Virtues.
Of course, that section is more philosophical and wide-ranging. If you’re looking for immediate productivity gains, start with Upstream Effects #1 to #4. Those four are rather tight and give you a new way to see the world. The basic idea is that the current moment was created in the past , by you upstream , and flowed down into the current month, week, day, and minute.
You change your life, not with a desperate struggle in the moment, but by setting things up now so that they flow into a more pleasant and thriving downstream from you.
Most writers represent all of their work as equally good and valuable; I won’t do so. Some of the chapters here are better than others.
The pieces that got the largest amount of “wow oh my god” type response — not necessarily the most praised or popular, but the ones that led to the most epiphanies, were —
Upstream Effects #2: Entrainment
Upstream Effects #6: Avoidance
Toughness #4: Religio
Toughness #6: Historical Sense
Uncommon Virtues #2: Aristotelian Friendship
Uncommon Virtues #3: Higher-Order Thinking
Uncommon Virtues #6: Romantic & Aesthetic
Uncommon Virtues #8: Generational Focus
My personal favorite is Generational Focus, the second-to-last chapter of the book.
This journey has been immensely pleasurable for me. It’s a joy to get reader feedback every week from people doing hard and important things around the world. We’ve gotten public praise from some people in very high positions, and I’ve got nice personal letters from an incredibly diver range of people: elite soldiers — both enlisted and officers, medical doctors, attorneys, accountants, startup founders, senior managers and division chiefs, and all manner of people doing creative and innovative work.
I’d very much welcome your feedback. You can write to me at editor@thestrategicreview.net — I read every message, and reply to 99% of them or so.
If you don’t already have a free weekly subscription to TSR, you can get yours for free — we publish once per week, a single deep issue every Thursday.
That’s yours for free at:
http://www.thestrategicreview.net
Beyond that, the birds are chirping here in Estonia and the slow pre-dawn of Northern European summer is emerging. The skyline over the city is a beautiful spread of blue, purple, and pink, lighting up Tallinn’s mix of ancient and hyper-modern buildings.
Life is glorious, is it not?
Thank you for joining me, wherever and whenever you’re reading this — whether it be tomorrow when Progression is released, or decades into the future.
Across time and space, wherever and whenever you are, you have my respect and salutations.
Yours,
Sebastian Marshall
Editor, TheStrategicReview.net