It’s been a crazy 10 days. I’ve graduated (big post coming on that topic), have one of the biggest decisions of my life on hand, had a few fantastic meetings with some great people, have been working really hard on a few other side projects, and have spent 25+ hours traveling this week. On top of that, I’ve finally scheduled programming into my life and have been going through Learn Python the Hard Way for an hour each day this week.

I don’t like doing these posts but want to stick to the habit of posting on Tuesday nights, even if it’s something short. That said, here are a few things I read this week that were fantastic:

Paul Graham’s essay on what you can’t say. This is one of my favorite PG essays, and one I hadn’t read until this week. He is brilliant, and I try to apply his philosophy when thinking about new startup ideas or really anything relating to startups.

Sebastian Marshall’s post on the Equal-Odds Rule. Basically, the idea is that if you want to make excellent stuff, you’ll also need to make a lot of crap. I think Seth Godin is a perfect example of this – tons of pithy, almost useless posts. But, every now and then, he has a post that is absolutely brilliant and has a major impact on tons of people’s thinking. He also has several million readers, and is likely the most influential marketer alive – I think he’s doing ok. By the way, point 16 especially resonated with me.

Robert Greene’s Tactical Hell or Strategic Heaven post isn’t my favorite by him, but his description of strategy was important for me to think about after graduating and with a big decision on hand.

Blake Master’s class notes on Peter Thiel’s startup class. The entire series is brilliant (Peter is one of my intellectual role models), but this post especially made me think about how movements are a reaction to past events. I’ll have a larger post on this later, but I think there’s something to the idea that the Lean Startup movement is a reaction to the startups lacking any sort of a business model in the dotcom boom.