FS | BRAIN FOOD
June 1, 2025 - #631 - read online - Free Version
Welcome to Brain Food, a weekly newsletter offering timeless wisdom in an accelerating world.
Tiny Thoughts
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The shortest path is the one you don't abandon.
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Practice until you get it right, and you'll need perfect conditions.
Practice until you can't get it wrong, and conditions no longer matter.
***
Don't let your worst moments become your story.
You blow the presentation and spend the drive home scripting perfect comebacks to an audience that's already gone. Your relationship ends and you spend months replaying conversations that can't be changed. All the time spent perfecting the past is stolen from the future that's still waiting.
The past is a teacher, not a judge. Your next move matters more than your last mistake.
Insights
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Anna Wintour with a dose of truth:
"People respond well to those that are sure of what they want. What people hate most is indecision."
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Mathematician Jim Simons on being guided by beauty:
"You might think 'building a company that's trading bonds, what's so aesthetic about that?' What's aesthetic about it is doing it right. Getting the right kind of people, approaching the problem, and doing it right it's a beautiful thing to do something right."
***
The best storyteller in the world, Matthew Dicks, on the principle of but and therefore:
"A clear majority of human beings tend to connect their sentences, paragraphs, and scenes together with the word and.
This is a mistake. The ideal connective tissue in any story are the words but and therefore, along with all their glorious synonyms. These buts and therefores can be either explicit or implied.
"And" stories have no movement or momentum. They are equivalent to running on a treadmill. Sentences and scenes appear, one after another, but the movement is straightforward and unsurprising. The momentum is unchanged.
But and therefore are words that signal change. The story was heading in one direction, but now it's heading in another. We started out zigging, but now we are zagging. We did this, and therefore this new thing happened.
I think of it as continually cutting against the grain of the story. Rather than stretching a flat line from beginning to end, the storyteller should seek to create a serrated line cutting back and forth, up and down, along the path of the story. We are still headed in the same direction, but the best storytellers don't take a straight line to get there."
The Knowledge Project
I had the opportunity to interview the greatest football coach of all time.
I became a New England Patriots fan almost by accident; their games were simply the only ones broadcast in my area. Back then, the Patriots weren't much to watch, but everything changed when a certain coach arrived.
Bill Belichick has eight Super Bowl rings, but this conversation isn't about football. It's about the decisions that define greatness: why he kept Tom Brady when everyone said to cut him, why he sent a player home during the Super Bowl, and how four simple words—"control the game, not the score"—sparked the greatest comeback in sports history.
What follows is 90 minutes with someone who's spent five decades mastering the art of leading and winning.
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Thanks for reading,
— Shane Parrish
P.S. Prince Rupert's Drop vs Hydraulic Press
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