Jim Boulden: I often think about that alignment between the person and the work they're meant to do. Maybe I would put everyone on that search to pursue and find that thing for them. It's like Robert Frost, one of my favorite poets,. He said, my aim in life is to unite my vocation and abocation as my two eyes make one in sight.
Billy Oppenheimer is a researcher for Ryan Holiday. He is also known for his viral long-form tweets and Six at 6 on Sunday newsletter. Billy is insatiably curious. He is a master at drawing lessons from anecdotes from the worlds of sports, music, comedy, business, and more. He joins the show to discuss how to cultivate good taste, whether everything is a remix, why he learns through introjection, and a whole lot more. Important Links:
Show Notes:
- Focus on doing the thing
- SIX at 6’s origin story
- Learning through introjection
- Developing taste & cultivating curiosity
- “People don’t have ideas, ideas have people”
- How Billy practices his scales
- Fiction vs non-fiction
- Repetition, repetition, repetition
- Should we study more failures?
- Process compounds
- “Care, but don’t care too much”
- Has anyone succeeded without persistence?
- Conceptual ancestors
- Everything’s a remix
- Taste, tools, markets & feedback
- Finding your pain points
- MUCH more!
Books Mentioned:
- Trust Me, I'm Lying; by Ryan Holiday
- Psychology of Money; by Morgan Housel
- Atomic Habits; by James Clear
- The Immortality Key : The Secret History of the Religion with No Name; by Brian C. Muraresku
- Reality Hunger; by David Shields
- The Power of Myth; by Joseph Campbell & Bill Moyers
- Cloud Atlas; by David Mitchell
- The Great Gatsby; by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Da Vinci Code; by Dan Brown