Bryan Johnson reads hundreds of biographies to understand how pivotal moments changed history. He uses a thought experiment: imagine it's 2500 and ask what you're doing right now that will matter then. That question drives him to cut through noise and build something worth remembering.
I love reading biographies. I've read hundreds, and my favorite is digging in and walking into their world. And they were able to see something no one else could, and it would be impossibly hard to try to do it. And they went after anyways. And so books I've re read in the past month. Magellan, which was circumnavigating the globe. I reread Claude Shannon on information theory, our modern infrastructure. And I love the perspective of if we have the thought experiment where we're in the year 2500, what did we do right now that changed the course of humanity? And that thought process motivates me that we could do something that would be relevant and worth mentioning in the 25th century, that we were able to see clearly through all the noise we have to quiet everything going on that doesn't matter and punch through and identify the thing that matters.
