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Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

Farnham Street is an entertaining read, but the problem I have with it is that owner is compiling all this wisdom, these great techniques for life, and he's er, running a website about compiling wisdom and great techniques for life.

I guess at some level if this information was so valuable he'd have leveraged it into something even more powerful. Kind of like the people that, rather than (say) investing in real estate spend all their time teaching people how to invest in real estate.

Maybe the deciding factor isn't the advice, but the person?

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I call those type of businesses "recursive businesses."

Just like your real estate example, most multi level marketers make almost all of their money from bringing new sellers into the fold rather than selling to actual customers, or people doing webinars to teach people how to do webinars, or all of the web hosting affiliate sites that teach people how to make money from being an affiliate for web hosting sites(just sign up for Bluehost first!).

I don't think Farnam Street is recursive since he's not really recommending that people do anything with the knowledge. It's just a place with a bunch of interesting ideas, though sometimes it feels like he's picked all the low hanging fruit already.

I read FS regularly for months, but eventually had to give up on it because it started to feel like one big regurgitated self-help book. Maybe he really wants to talk to interesting people and this is his way of doing it, but to me it seems like mostly just noise.

I had to unsubscribe as well...

Same here. At first it was the unique "angle" that draw me. Then progressively it became repetitive.

I agree here - the first few weeks after I discovered FS, I read it regularly, but after that there were quickly diminishing marginal returns.

Once you are familiar with the core mental models, most of the intellectual self-help genre (FS, James Clear, Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferris, etc.) is just rehashing the same core ideas over and over again.

Good lord, I matched (as a reader / mailing list subscriber) all of your examples :D That said, it’s not bad to revisit existing ideas presented in an interesting manner. These aren’t concepts that one your hear them once you can easily start using them. Inertia is an incredible force.

Have you come across any blog or podcast which offered useful advice that didn't finally start feeling this way? Even something as well researched as Brain pickings seems to degenerate into repetitive fluff after a while.

sort of like:

Get Great Abs

http://www.menshealth.co.uk/building-muscle/abs-workout/

20 Favorite Sex Tips

https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/advice/a59/favorite-se...

Not in the "think/work smarter" genre. Taking in diverse content, like reading medium posts all by different authors, can inject new ideas. But it seems this genre has a limit to how much useful info there really is.

Agree. I subscribed to their paid membership plan and it's not materially better than the free content. Well, I paid for the full year already.

Those who know dont tell and those that tell dont know. You bet your ass if I ever find a sure fire, easily repeatable money making system Im not telling a soul.

Copy a successful business in another country - seems to work for some.

When Shane was first starting out with FS (I picked it up around 2013, and I don't think he was around much before that.), it was great. He explained his intentions with the blog as a way of writing down what he was learning and then sharing it with others as an accountability type device. I really do miss the FS of old. It has devolved into exactly what you describe. Shane has turned it into a business. I don't blame him at all for doing so. There was obviously enough demand to do so, and I'm sure the time commitment was ever increasing.

It only takes 4 hours a week to write a blog about how working 4 hours a week is awesome.

The irony of course is that Tim Ferris works really hard (way more than 4 hours a week) to promote the 4 hour work week.

Create 10 different "4 hour X" and next thing you know you're working 40 hours a week!

To play devil's advocate, I think there is a relatively small overlap of 1) very successful people in finance/tech/etc and 2) people that dedicate enough time to effectively communicate ideas in a book/blog

There are exceptions, Ray Dalio being a recent good example. But I think he is more the exception, not the rule.

Below is a related passage from Essentialism that touches upon this dynamic:

"Jim Collins, the author of the business classic Good to Great, was once told by Peter Drucker that he could either build a great company or build great ideas but not both. Jim chose ideas. As a result of this trade-off there are still only three full-time employees in his company, yet his ideas have reached tens of millions of people through his writing."

McKeown, Greg. Essentialism (p. 55)

Doesn't the ideas of book suffer from survivorship bias?

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