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Study Hacks Blog

Let Brandon Cook

I recently listened to Tim Ferriss interview the prolific fantasy author Brandon Sanderson (see here for my coverage of Sanderson’s insane underground writing lair). Tim traveled to Utah to talk to Sanderson at the headquarters of his 70-person publishing and merchandising company, Dragonsteel Books.

The following exchange, from early in the conversation, caught my attention:

Ferriss: “It seems like, where we’re sitting –and we’re sitting at HQ — it seems like the design of Dragonsteel, maybe the intent behind it, is to allow you to do that [come up with stories] on some level.”

Sanderson: “Yeah, yeah, I mean everything in our company is built around, ‘let Brandon cook.’ And take away from Brandon anything he doesn’t have to think about, or doesn’t strictly need to.”

As someone who writes a lot about knowledge work in the digital age, I’m fascinated by this model of cooking, which I define as follows: a workflow designed to enable someone with a high-return skill to spend most of their time applying that skill, without distraction.

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The TikTok Ban Is About More Than TikTok

On Saturday night, in compliance with a law that the U.S. Supreme Court had just upheld, TikTok shut down its popular video-sharing app for American users. On Sunday, after an incoming president Trump vowed to negotiate a deal once in office, they began restoring service. It’s unclear what will happen next, as some lawmakers in the president’s own party remain firmly in favor of the divest-or-ban demand, while some democrats seemed to back-pedal.

From my perspective as a technology critic, the ultimate fate of this particular app is not the most important storyline here. What interests me more about these events is the cultural rubicon that we just crossed. To date, we’ve largely convinced ourselves that once a new technology is introduced and spread, we cannot go backward.

Social media became ubiquitous so now we’re stuck using it. Kids are zoning themselves into a stupor on TikTok, or led into rabbit holes of mental degeneration on Instagram, and we shrug our shoulders and say, “What can you do?”

The TikTok ban, even if only temporary, demonstrates we can do things. These services are not sacrosanct. Laws can be passed and our lives will still go on.

So what else should we do? I’m less concerned at this moment about national security than I am the health of our kids. If we want to pass a law that might make an even bigger difference, now is a good time to take a closer look at what Australia did last fall, when they banned social media for users under sixteen. Not long ago, that might have seemed like a non-starter in the U.S. But after our recent action against TikTok, is it really any more extreme?

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Lessons from YouTube’s Extreme Makers

In 2006, a high school student from Ontario named James Hobson started posting to a new platform called YouTube. His early videos were meant for his friends, and focused on hobbies (like parkour) and silliness (like one clip in which he drinks a cup of raw eggs).

Hobson’s relationship with YouTube evolved in 2013. Now a trained engineer, he put his skills to work in crafting a pair of metal claws based on the Marvel character, Wolverine. The video was a hit. He then built a working version of the exoskeleton used by Matt Damon’s character in the movie Elysium. This was an even bigger hit. This idea of creating real life versions of props from comics and movies proved popular. Hobson quit his job to create these videos full-time, calling himself, “The Hacksmith.”

Around the same time that Hobson got started on YouTube, a young British plumber named Colin Furze also began experimenting with the platform. Like Hobson, he began by posting videos of his hobbies (like BMX tricks) and silliness (like a stunt in which tried to serve food to moving cars).

Furze’s relationship with YouTube evolved when he began posting record breaking attempts. The first in this informal series was his effort to create the world’s largest bonfire. (“I collected pallets for over a year.”) He drew attention from British media when he supercharged a mobility scooter to drive more than seventy miles per hour. This led to a brief stint as a co-host of a maker show called “Gadget Geeks” that aired on the then fledgling Sky TV. After that traditional media experience, he scored a hit on YouTube by attaching a jet engine to the back of a bicycle. He decided to fully commit to making a living on his own videos.

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The Tao of Cal

Between this newsletter, my podcast, my books, and my New Yorker journalism, I offer a lot of advice and propose a lot of ideas about how the modern digital environment impacts our lives, both professionally and personally, and how we should respond.

This techno-pontification covers everything from the nitty gritty details of producing good work in an office saturated with emails and Zoom, to heady decisions about shaping a meaningful life amid the nihilistic abstraction of an increasingly networked existence.

With the end of year rapidly approaching, and people finding themselves with some spare thinking time as work winds down for the holidays, I thought it might be fun to try to summarize essentially every major idea I discuss in one short primer.

So that’s what I’m attempting below! I’m sure I’m missing some key points, but this should nevertheless provide a useful road map to my esoteric mental wanderings.

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After You Vote: Unplug

I’m writing this post about eighteen hours before the first polls open on Election Day, and it feels tense out there. The New York Times, for example, just posted an article headlined: “How Americans Feel About the Election: Anxious and Scared.”

Based on extensive interviews conducted over this past weekend, the Times concludes:

“Americans across the political spectrum reported heading to the polls in battleground states with a sense that their nation was coming undone. While some expressed relief that the long election season was finally nearing an end, it was hard to escape the undercurrent of uneasiness about Election Day.”

These results probably come as no surprise.

The question then becomes what to do with this anxiety. The first step, of course, is to vote — and not just vote, but to approach your decision honestly and dispassionately. By the time you read this, you’ve likely already completed this step.

But then what?

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The Perfect Cheating Machine?

Many predictions and concerns tumbled into the slipstream trailing ChatGPT’s dazzling, turbulent entrance onto the technology scene in late 2022. Few of these initial warnings felt more immediate than those of imminent disruptions to higher education.

“Could the chatbot, which provides coherent, quirky, and conversational responses to simple language inquires, inspire more students to cheat?”, asked an NBC News article, published only a week after ChatGPT’s initial launch. Several months later, a professor in the Texas A&M system took this warning to heart and failed his entire class after convincing himself that every one of his students had used AI to write their final assignments. (It turns out that his method of detection—asking ChatGPT itself whether it produced the submissions—was unreliable. He later changed the grades.)

“AI seems almost built for cheating,” explains Ethan Mollick, in his recent bestseller, Co-Intelligence. He predicted, in particular, that paper writing as a pedagogical tool might be on the way out, forcing institutions to adapt to other methods to teach composition: “In-school assignments on non-internet-enabled computers, combined with written exams, will ensure students learn basic writing skills.”

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost two years since we first started hearing these concerns about ChatGPT providing students the perfect cheating machine. As a professor and writer myself, these issues interest me, especially when it comes to academic compositions. So in my most recent article for The New Yorker, published earlier this month, and titled “What Kind of Writer is ChatGPT?,” I set out to understand how these tools are currently being put to work by students tackling writing assignments.

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When Time Management Was Easy

In 1973, an author named Alan Lakein published a book titled How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. It wasn’t the first book about professional time management — my library contains a first edition of James McCay’s 1959 classic, The Management of Time — but it’s arguably the first book to talk about the topic in a recognizably modern way, with a focus on personalized tools like daily to-do lists. It went on to reportedly sell more than three million copies, and was even shouted out by Bill Clinton, who cites its influence on his early career in his autobiography.

Revisiting Lakein’s advice today provides a glimpse into office life fifty years ago. And the encounter is shocking.

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Dispatch from Herman Melville’s Farm

Growing up in New York, first in the city and then later in Albany, a young Herman Melville made frequent trips to stay with his uncle, Thomas Melvill, who lived on a farm near Pittsfield, in the Berkshire mountains of Western Massachusetts. In 1850, Thomas decided to sell his property. Melville, now with a young family of his own, arrived that summer for what they believed to be his final visit to the area.

It was during this fateful trip that Melville learned that the Brewster farm, consisting of 160 acres abutting his uncle’s plot, was up for sale. Fueled by impulse and nostalgia, he borrowed $3000 from his father-in-law and bought the property. He would come to call it Arrowhead in reference to native artifacts he found in its fields.

Melville’s plan for his time at Arrowhead was to write. He had recently published a series of bestselling adventure novels, drawing from the half-decade he spent wandering the Pacific as a sailor. He felt confident that his literary success would continue and the time was right to fully invest in this vision.

A few days ago, I travelled down to Arrowhead, now preserved by the Berkshire Historical Society, to better understand the writing-centered life that Melville constructed.

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