FS | BRAIN FOOD

August 17, 2025 - #642 - read online - Free Version

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

Tiny Thoughts

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The person who cares the most beats the person who's just doing their job.

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Success is built in rooms no one would photograph.

The people who change things aren't at the parties, they're home on Friday night, obsessed with problems everyone else finds tedious. Their Instagram looks empty because their life isn't shareable. Just the same unsexy routine, day after day. They aren't doing anything glamorous. They're just consistently making steady incremental progress over a long period of time.

Success makes noise. Building doesn't. That's the paradox: Exceptional looks boring until suddenly it isn't.

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Telling someone to “work smarter” is useless because it assumes they already know what smarter looks like. If they did, they’d be doing it.

“Work smarter, not harder” is often framed as the opposite of hard work, but working smart is itself a derivative of hard work. You have to work hard just to figure out what working smart means.

Beginners can’t work smart because they don’t yet know what smart looks like. They have to work hard first, building the pattern recognition that makes smart possible. It’s like a chess master spotting the best move instantly; it looks like working smart, but it’s built on thousands of hours of working hard to earn that intuition.

Smarter approaches aren’t universal shortcuts, they’re contextual insights uncovered through deep, sustained effort.

Insights

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Physicist Marie Curie on looking to the horizon:

"One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done."

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Author Haruki Murakami on acquiring knowledge:

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

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Author Bob Goff on wanting the right things:

"I used to be afraid of failing at the things that really mattered to me, but now I'm more afraid of succeeding at things that don't matter."

The Knowledge Project [Outliers]

Sol Price invented the warehouse club and a philosophy that still runs Costco and Amazon. He's the most influential retailer you’ve never heard of.

This is the story of how a lawyer with no retail experience created an industry, mentored his competition, and proved that nice guys don't always finish last.

While I've summarized 13 takeaways, I suggest listening to this short episode yourself. You'll never look at Costco the same way again.

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

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Thanks for reading,

— Shane Parrish

P.S. When the kids can't agree on what takeout we should have for dinner, I tell them the high score gets to pick.

P.P.S. If you're wondering why these emails come from my name now, and not FS, I think things are changing. I've never wanted to be well known or to be recognized when I walk down the street. So hiding behind FS worked. The content was enough. However with AI generated content coming quickly, it's important we develop a bit of a relationship and you know there is a real person on the other side of this email. That's me. I'm always trying new things and you'll notice a few other changes and experiments - like Outliers and putting video on Spotify going forward. On that note, what do you think about the outliers series? What would make them more useful to you? Hit reply and let me know. I read every response personally, even if I don't always have time to reply.

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