Software for the Mind

In 1971 a young traveler lay drunk in a field near Innsbruck. On the youth’s chest rested an old travel guide to Europe. While flipping through the musty pages and staring up at the stars the boy amusedly thought to himself that someone should write a travel guide for celestial destinations. And in this drunken stupor was born the idea for The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy details the travels of a refugee from Earth named Arthur Dent. After the Earth is destroyed by alien bureaucrats in an effort to make way for their galactic expressway Arthur and his friend, Ford Prefect, escape on a spaceship where it is revealed that Ford is an alien reporter who writes The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a travel guide for intergalactic tourists.

The novel is characterized by random, absurd events that highlight the universe’s indifference toward humans. Instead of reacting to these horrific events as a tragedy, the book pokes fun at the absurdity of life and views the universe’s indifference with hilarity.

A young South African read The Hitchhiker’s Guide in the late 1980s after coming out of a Nietzsche induced state of existential depression. The Hitchhiker’s Guide brightened his depressed spirits and taught him that instead of focusing on our insignificance we should laugh at the absurdity of the universe and spend our lives asking the correct questions of life. 

This young boy was Elon Musk and to this day Musk references THGTTG as the book that shaped his worldview and inspired him to ask meaningful questions of the world that he could solve for the betterment of mankind.

The final scene of Walter Isaacson’s Musk’s biography perfectly captures the books influence on Musk.

That is so incredible to me. A book that was conceived of during a drunken trek through Europe during the 1960s later influenced a young boy who used it to inform a life philosophy that guided him to build technology and companies that actually did end up changing the cosmic trajectories of human beings. That will never cease to amaze me.

Writing is a lot like software for the mind. Similar to how coders write scripts that inform the way a program behaves, writing informs our worldviews, knowledge sets, and moralities in a way that profoundly influences our behavior. 

James Clear is a fantastic example of this. As a young boy, Clear experienced a near fatal injury induced by a teammate’s reckless throw of a baseball bat. The injury caused severe setbacks for Clear who dreamed of one day being a professional baseball player like his father. 

While he experienced humiliating failures after recovering from his injury like not making the varsity team his junior year, he ultimately landed a spot on the Denison University baseball team where he became a team captain and All American after his four years. He fulfilled his potential by practicing and studying habits all of which he committed to paper in his extremely popular book, Atomic Habits.

Atomic Habits has sold millions of copies since its publishing. As a result of reading this book millions of people have worked out, cooked, played an instrument, and practiced various other activities for hundreds of millions of hours all because of reading that single 250 page book. Atomic Habits was an incredible catalyst for action in people all over the world. It was a powerfully positive piece of software for human behavior.

People underestimate the power of books because of how old they are as a technology. They aren’t sexy and are perceived by most as boring. Yet books have survived for millennia and will surely survive for many millennia more - the ultimate lindy object. But more importantly as long as books survive, the ideas contained within them will endure as well.

Marcus Aurelius, an unlikely emperor wrote down his thoughts and feelings in a book meant for himself. In this diary of sorts he detailed his daily tribulations with things as small as fighting the urge to stay in bed and as large as leading armies into battle and staving off political rivals. 

Though this book was intended solely for him, it was published centuries later and now informs the behavior and philosophy of many 21st century leaders today. That is so mind boggling to me. By keeping a personal journal to himself Marcus Aurelius inadvertently influenced millions of people hundreds of years after his death.

In this sense books allow for a sort of immortality. Though Marcus’s physical body is long departed, his thoughts still course through the minds of millions of Americans today. Meditations is a #1 bestseller on Amazon as I write this on 2/9/2024. Aurelius originally had these ideas in 170 AD.

Many people today aspire to become coders. It’s the sexy new job that’s in high demand. It’s accompanied with the prestige of a FAANG company, cushy benefits, and jaw dropping salaries to boot. But in my mind the ability to influence people in mass through your words will always be more awe inspiring than influencing the behavior of machines. 

So if you learn any skill, learn to write. Learn to spread your ideas with the world so that they can inspire and influence others. Learn to commit to paper ideas that can influence human action at scale. Learn to put your thoughts into the physical world so that they can endure long past yourself.

A book about intergalactic space travel inspired a man to build rockets, electric cars, and moral AI. A book about habits inspired millions to improve their lives, one small change at a a time. A book about an ancient emperor’s struggles to meet the daily trials of life inspired millions to face their problems with courage. Words are powerful - like software for the mind.