Wisereads Vol. 46 — Nat Eliason's Crypto Confidential, David Brooks on late bloomers, and more
Last week, we shared an epic book compiling over 200 essays by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham. This week, we're sharing a preview of Nat Eliason's upcoming debut, Crypto Confidential: Winning and Losing Millions in the New Frontier of Finance.
Because of the holiday weekend, this week's Wisereads edition is more streamlined than usual. But don't worry: normal programming resumes next week.
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Most highlighted Articles of the week
'I'm good, I promise': the loneliness of the low-ranking tennis player
"All serious tennis players – from gods such as Agassi to college players like I was at the time – have to grapple with isolation. For people who are comfortable with it, pro tennis can be a refuge: they find it behind a hotel door, with headphones on in a far-flung airport and, above all, inside the white lines of the court. The downside is that the victories are often private, too."
How to take the high road
"If someone throws a lit cigarette out the window of a moving car, what happens?... If it lands in a field of dry grass, we’re likely to see a wildfire spring to life. But if that same cigarette were to land in a field of green, well-watered plants, it would likely be extinguished without doing any harm. We can’t help that people will sometimes lob cigarettes – threat triggers – into the fields of our lives. But we can create an emotional context that helps us manage our reactions when it happens."
Life Secrets of the Late Bloomers
"Late bloomers tend to have a high tolerance for ambiguity, and can bring multiple ways of thinking to bear on a single complex problem. They also have a high tolerance for inefficiency. They walk through life like a curious person browsing through a bookstore. In old age, the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote, 'The amateur spirit has guided my thinking and writing.' He had wandered from subject to subject throughout his life, playing around."
Most highlighted YouTube Video of the week
Config 2024: In defense of an old pixel
"You can love pixels because they used to be something else and they carried a lot more responsibility than we think today. You can love pixels because they give you the sort of freedom to play with fonts with much more ease. It's so much easier onramp to typography, right? You can just love them because they mean something to you—it's so much easier to encode emotions and personality."
Most highlighted Twitter Thread of the week
40 things I wish I knew when I was 20
"There are only 3 methods to learning: 1) increase your exposure to new knowledge (blogs, books, etc.) 2) improve retention of knowledge (active listening, reflecting, etc. Increase your pace of personal experimentation. Most people focus on 1, but 2 and 3 yield more gains."
Most highlighted PDF of the week
Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?
"Many people attempt to compare AI today to the early days of the internet. But even in its infancy, the internet was a low-cost technology solution that enabled e-commerce to replace costly incumbent solutions. Amazon could sell books at a lower cost than Barnes & Noble because it didn’t have to maintain costly brick-and-mortar locations... While the question of whether AI technology will ever deliver on the promise many people are excited about today is certainly debatable, the less debatable point is that AI technology is exceptionally expensive, and to justify those costs, the technology must be able to solve complex problems, which it isn’t designed to do."
Hand-picked book of the week
Crypto Confidential
It was 2021 when Nat Eliason, seeking financial security for his soon-to-be family of three, plunged into the high-stakes world of crypto. Just months later, he found himself the steward of tens of millions of dollars, stuck in a chatroom with a hacker who stood to expose a vulnerability in what was only meant to be a small personal crypto project.
Crypto Confidential is Nat's story of making and losing millions on the new frontier of finance, a smart person's introduction to navigating crypto's next bull run that's as compulsively readable as your favorite thriller.
"This was the absolute worst-case scenario. The one I’d pushed to the back of my mind. The one I’d pretended was impossible so I could sleep at night. I had always accepted the risk that I could lose all of my money. But if I lost $100 million of other people’s money… "
We're over the moon that Nat is generously sharing an early look at his debut book with Wisereads readers. If you're hooked by the preview, we invite you to preorder a full copy to pick up where you left off when it releases Tuesday, July 9th.
Handpicked RSS feed of the week
Nat Eliason's Essays
Before becoming a published author, Nat Eliason built an audience through a newsletter where writes deeply personal reflections on storytelling, fear, meditation, and anything else that makes him uncomfortable. From On Writing Better: "A character should never get exactly what they want or what they're trying to get in a scene. Instead, they either SHOULD get what they want BUT it has some unexpected consequence. Or they should NOT get what they want AND it should have some additional unexpected consequence."