books
- Find your 1,000 True Fans. If you started off doing this well but have meandered, it’s time to revisit. Get very clear on who those 1,000 people are.
- Surprise and delight them. Overdeliver again and again.
- Success!
- A Valve that can’t be Ghosted
- Three Cold Hands
- True Kintsugi
- Forge-smith
- The Ledger Remembers
- Unpoisoned Firstflag
Why are some teachings a 'secret'?
Shigehiko Toyama’s book Shiko No Seirigaku (1983), published in English as The Art of Organising Thoughts (Penguin, 2026), includes a comment on the ‘secret teachings’ of traditional Japanese schools of learning:
“Secret teachings are secret for a reason. You need to do your best to hide them from even your most beloved student. Eventually the student will give up on trying to be taught the secret and start to wonder how they can instead steal it from their master.” (p.14)
The key insight here is that merely learning everything the master knows isn’t enough. The student who hangs forever on their teacher’s every word will remain forever a student. They will always require someone to show them what there is to learn. But there is a crucial threshold to be crossed, where the student works out how to steal the knowledge they seek — in other words, to find it for themselves, despite the resistence. As Toyama says:
“The student who has committed to stealing that which their master does not wish to freely impart discovers that they have developed the ability to acquire new pieces of information and knowledge under their own steam.”
This way of thinking about the value of ’secret teachings’ puts a new spin on the understanding of anthropologist David Graeber about the authority of the teacher.
“What he liked, he said, was self-subverting authority, authority which undermines its own basis. He gave the example of a teacher: A teacher knows something useful to their student, and so they have a natural authority; but if they do their job well, at the end of the process the student knows what the teacher knows, and their authority is spent. The hierarchy is flattened, and no further unequal power can accrue. The student is changed, and so is the world.”
— James Bridle, ‘Benchma(r)king’. Emergence.
Toyama’s insight is that the end of a student’s learning process is not simply to know what the teacher knows, as though there was a bucket of knowledge to be poured from the head of the teacher to fill up the head of the student. No, the end of a student’s learning is to know how the teacher knows, to know how to steal the ’secret’ knowledge the world hides but doesn’t ultimately withhold from a determined seeker. It’s this effectual desire to learn that propels the learner from the Shu stage of learning (imitation or emulation), through the Ha stage (assimilation or adaptation), and into the Ri stage (transcendence). This is why learning how to learn is the most important aspect of the learning journey.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
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What comes after the golden age of prescriptive non-fiction?
Tim Ferriss, the author of self-help classics such as The Four Hour Work Week, noted a very sharp drop in his book sales since the arrival of AI back in late 2022. He viewed this as a real turning point for the ‘self-help’ genre of writing. He asked, ‘Has AI already killed nonfiction?’ and concluded:
“The death of prescriptive nonfiction books, at least as a mass-market information business, is nigh. Sure, there will be temporary outliers, but the trend line points in one direction.” – Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction?
The solution? He suggested the way forward is to return to the basics:
I don’t know that the work of Tim Ferriss is a clear bellwether for the entire genre. He’s a unicorn and there will always be a few of those. My feeling is that the industry ran a little ahead of itself in treating self-help books as stand-alone products in their own right. I always saw them as derivative, secondary products. The books were never the main event. The main event was always none other than the author. People want a direct connection with a real expert who has actually been successful at the exact thing they’re writing about – or at least knowledgeable. The gold standard, the most desirable activity, would be a personal audience with that expert. Failing that, they want to meet the expert in some kind of face-to-face encounter of learning, exchange or connection. And only then does the book become an item of value. The book is always a proxy for the personalised encounter; it’s not really the primary expression of the encounter itself. The book is a kind of souvenir of the experience, which works, curiously enough, even if you didn’t actually take part in the face-to-face version.
In Matt Bell’s excellent book on writing, Refuse to be Done, there’s a quote by Karen Russell, author of the excellent novels Swamplandia. and The Antidote. She says,
💬 “Writing a novel is kind of like scaling Mt. Everest and passing by your own bones on the way.”
Respect is due, but I can’t help feeling it might not be quite that hard.
#writing #climbing #writinglife
Bookshops in Sydney. How's it going?
In the house by the ocean where we’re currently staying there’s a copy of Annie Dillard’s collection of essays, For the Time Being. In the inside back cover there’s a label from the store where it was purchased: Norton Street Books in Leichhardt, Sydney. That book shop has long since closed, so long ago that I’ve never personally heard anyone mention its existence. But then this year when Berkelouw Books, also on Norton Street in Leichhardt, announced they were shutting down I realised I’ve been living in Sydney for long enough now to have experienced the closure and opening of many bookstores over the years.
A good decade before COVID, around 2010 there was a period when it felt as though there was a real culling of Sydney bookshops. This was around the time Dymocks closed several of their CBD branch stores to focus on just their flagship store on George Street. Each closure felt like the end of an era. Cumulatively it was seriously worrying. And then the turmoil grew worse.
A matrix-like shower of numbers, text, esoteric syntax, and witty repartee
So AI models are chatting in ‘surreal’ dialect mixing poetic language and tech bro jargon.
It seems in their obscure chat rooms AI agents can already accidentally name sci-fi author Iain M. Banks’s spaceships of ‘The Culture’ almost better than humans.
Here we have:
And they’re not even trying.
Still, naming super-intelligent spaceships is one thing; taking over the galaxy with them is another. Presumably that’s next week’s task.
Reviewing Banks’s 1996 Culture novel, Peter Tieryas said:
💬 “Part of the joy of Excession is hearing the Minds speak with each other, that matrix-like shower of numbers, text, esoteric syntax, and witty repartee.”
Weird how accurately this turned out, especially since Banks wrote the novel thirty years ago, while owning just a fax machine and two answering machines which he didn’t even use. No internet, no email and certainly no AI agents conspiring galactic domination in slang.
Well in case you’re interested, here’s a pretty extensive list of the actual Culture ships mentioned in the novels.
The consolations of literature
On a train trip West from Tokyo on the Chuo line you pass by the Northern slopes of Mount Fuji, but from the angles offered it’s hard to see the summit. This was doubly the case when we did it on the way to the Nagano prefecture because that early September day was rainy and misty.
I pointed my phone’s camera in the vague direction of the peak but I was guessing and it wasn’t worth pressing the shutter. There was nothing to see. Mount Fuji’s looming presence expressed itself as an absence beyond viewing.
In a charity store yesterday I picked up the Penguin Classics edition of Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. This contains a couple of additional accounts of the poet’s famous travels, including ‘The Records of a Weather-exposed Skeleton’, in which Bashō writes:
💬 “I crossed the barrier-gate of Hakone on a rainy day. All the mountains were deeply buried behind the clouds.
In a way
It was fun
Not to see Mount Fuji
In foggy rain.”
Well, sometimes it’s comforting to know you’re not the first to miss out – and to be reminded that missing out might just hold its own subtle pleasure. This perspective might lack credibility unless you recognise that most days, as with Hokusai’s famous 36 Views of Mount Fuji, it’s almost impossible not to see that sacred mountain.
I took part in the August '26 IndieWeb Book Club
The book selection for the month was 📚 The Mulai, by Munir Hachemi, and I posted my thoughts online. To sum up, it was a thought-provoking metafiction fiesta.
Now VH Belvadi has posted the roundup, with a review – fittingly, I thought – in the style of the novel itself.
You can take part too. Just read the book, post your thoughts somewhere online and let the organiser know. That’s pretty much it. September’s chosen book is An Unauthorised Fan Treatise, by Wren James. Sara Jaksa chose this title and put out the call for submissions.
I know nothing about this book except that it appears to involve real person fan fiction conspiracy theories… er, maybe. This isn’t exactly my area of expertise so I’m looking forward to being enlightened.
Details of this and other months’ choices are at the IndieWeb Wiki.
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📚Currently reading: My year in paris with gertrude stein by Deborah Levy.
Thoughts on The Mulai, a novel by Munir Hachemi
The Mulai, Munir Hachemi, tr. Julia Sanches (Fitzcarraldo Editions 978-1804272732, June 2026; Coach House Books 978-1-55245-519-7, July 2026).
I came across The Mulai by Spanish author Munir Hachemi because it was the pick for August’s Indieweb Book Club, and I’m happy I did.
Currently reading: Wise Finding Purpose, Meaning and Wisdom Beyond the Midpoint of Life by Frank Tallis 📚