Talent

Summary

Quantity has a quality of its very own. Some writers are good - and they write all the time. The holy trinity of newsletter writers (Matt Levine, Byrne Hobart and Patrick McKenzie) write up to 700k words a year - so 2,000 words a day. I think Matt Levine’s schedule looks a little bit like waking up and doing 4000 words early in the morning about three times a week, then hitting send on his newsletter. Marc Rubinstein (another pretty prolific writer!) recently shared this Bloomberg profile of Jason Goldberg - “a Barclays analyst who has been writing a daily briefing note for 20 years”. It’s not just newsletter writers - for instance, Philip Kerr managed to write 42 books in 29 years by just working obsessively, writing on birthdays and Christmas. Paul Erdös had an even more insane work schedule: “Erdös first did mathematics at the age of three, but for the last twenty-five years of his life, since the death of his mother, he put in nineteen-hour days, keeping himself fortified with 10 to 20 milligrams of Benzedrine or Ritalin, strong espresso, and caffeine tablets. "A mathematician," Erdös was fond of saying, "is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." When friends urged him to slow down, he always had the same response: "There'll be plenty of time to rest in the grave." Erdös would let nothing stand in the way of mathematical progress. When the name of a colleague in California came up at breakfast in New Jersey, Erdös remembered a mathematical result he wanted to share with him. He headed toward the phone and started to dial. His host interrupted him, pointing out that it was 5:00 A.M. on the West Coast. "Good," Erdös said, "that means he'll be home." … Like all of Erdös's friends, Graham was concerned about his drug-taking. In 1979, Graham bet Erdös $500 that he couldn't stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdös accepted the challenge, and went cold turkey for thirty days. After Graham paid up--and wrote the $500 off as a business expense--Erdös said, "You'...