Aishwarya Goel

There are times when goals make sense. Training for a marathon. Preparing for an exam. Trying to ship a product by a hard deadline. In finite, controlled, well-understood domains, goals are fine.

But smart people often face ambiguous, ill-defined problems. Should I switch careers? Start a company? Move cities? Build a media business? In those spaces... See more

refusals shape lives just as powerfully as ambitions.

A goal is a win condition. Constraints are the rules of the game. But not all games are worth playing. And some of the most powerful forms of progress emerge from people who stopped trying to win and started building new game boards entirely.

The impact of an essay is how much it changes readers' thinking multiplied by the importance of the topic. But it's hard to do well at both. It's hard to have big new ideas about important topics. So in practice there's a tradeoff: you can change readers' thinking a lot about moderately important things, or change it a little about very important o... See more

Whatever you say should also be at least somewhat novel to you, however old you are. It's not an essay otherwise, because an essay is something you write to figure something out. But whatever you figure out will presumably be more of a surprise to younger readers than it is to you.

I call this the third labor — Relational Labor.

Relational labor is an essential layer embedded alongside manual and cognitive labor — rooted in presence, context, commitment, and care. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t always show up in metrics, but you feel it in morale, momentum, and trust. And it runs through so many modern roles: cofounders, ... See more

Here are a few ideas that many of our favorite emails have used:

• Ask someone a specific question. The more specific, the better.


• Ask for criticism . Tends to be more effective than asking for advice.


• Share something interesting. An essay. Video. Company. Anything they’d like.


• Say something funny.


• Say something useful. Maybe you noticed a typo on th

... See more

1. Don’t Mix High Fats & High Carbs — Avoid metabolic traffic jams


2. Treat Fat Like a Supplement — Saturated fats > PUFAs, time fat intake


3. Use the Fat Hierarchy —
   
   
   • S-tier: MCT, stearic acid (tallow, cocoa butter)
   
   
   • A-tier: EPA/DHA, lauric acid (coconut oil)
   
   
   • B-tier: Olive oil, mac nuts (sparingly)
   
   
   • F-tier: Seed oils, trans fats (never)


4. Leverage Starc

... See more