The Tim Ferriss Show Ep 39: Maria Popova on Writing, Work Arounds, and Building BrainPickings.org
Reading for a Good Life
- Read widely and across disciplines, from art and science to philosophy and history.
- Focus on material that illuminates the question of how to live a good life.
Brain Pickings' Origin
- Maria Popova started Brain Pickings as a personal email newsletter for seven coworkers.
- It now has millions of monthly readers, but she still writes for an audience of one: herself.
Resisting Buzzfeed-ification
- Resist the temptation to dumb down content or chase buzzworthy headlines.
- Create the kind of content you want to exist in the world, regardless of commercial pressures.
This episode is sponsored by 99Designs and ExOfficio.Maria Popova has written for amazing outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times, but I find her most amazing project to be BrainPickings.org.Founded in 2006 as a weekly email that went out to seven friends, BrainPickings now get more than 5 million readers per month (!). I read very few blogs regularly, but BrainPickings is one of the few. It is a treasure trove.BrainPickings is Maria's one-woman labor of love — her subjective lens on what matters in the world and why. It's also an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life. From Mark Twain to Oscar Wilde and everyone in between, Maria finds hidden gems to share.And that's what I hoped to do in this episode. It takes me a few minutes to warm up in this interview, but as soon as we get going, we geek out like crazy, talking about almost every aspect of her life, her site, her business, and her writing. I loved doing this interview, and I hope you love listening to it. There are a lot of valuable nuggets.
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