FS | BRAIN FOOD

September 14, 2025 - #646 - read online - Free Version

Welcome to Brain Food, your weekly signal in a world full of noise.

Tiny Thoughts

*

Surround yourself with people who are thoughtful in ways you are not, because they see what you can't.

**

All the time you spend worrying about the opportunities you don't have comes at the expense of maximizing the opportunities you do have.

***

Anyone can move fast. That's the trap. Speed is cheap, but the ability to be fast without being reckless is expensive.

The chess master's lightning moves come from decades of slow study. The CEO who is in the weeds knows where the problems lurk.

Details don't slow you down; they speed you up.

Insights

*

Author Paul Smith, on seeing what we want to see:

“What we see in people is determined, in large part, by what we expect to find.”

**

Pico Iyer on different resolutions:

“It’s easy to feel as if we’re standing two inches away from a huge canvas that’s noisy and crowded and changing with every microsecond. It’s only by stepping farther back and standing still that we can begin to see what that canvas (which is our life) really means, and to take in the larger picture.”

***

Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing on reading:

“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”

The Knowledge Project

What if AI is just another platform shift like the iPhone rather than the civilization-transforming revolution everyone's claiming?

Benedict Evans, technology analyst and former partner at a16z, challenges the AI hype machine, arguing that while AI represents the biggest technological shift since the iPhone, it's only the biggest thing since the iPhone, not the new electricity or industrial revolution.

This episode will challenge what you think you know about AI.

+ Listen now on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Web/Transcript/Key Ideas | YouTube

+ I just did an AMA for members, it's in your private feed. Not a member? Join us.

SPONSOR

Basecamp is the no-BS project management tool that makes sense immediately. No onboarding saga. No notification hell. Just one clean place to see who’s doing what, what’s done, and what’s totally on fire. Everything — files, convos, context — stays where it belongs: in the project. Start using it for free. Stay because it actually works. Sign up for free at basecamp.com/knowledgeproject

Thanks for reading,

— Shane Parrish

P.S. Kids are incredible.

Want to share this edition with a friend? Use this link: https://fs.blog/brain-food/september-14-2025/

Upgrade Yourself

Members get access to all my reading highlights, ad-free newsletters and podcasts, hand-edited transcripts, early access, AMAs, and so much more. Join us → here.