Ribbonfarm

Ribbonfarm gave Tiago Forte a start, and he built a business simplifying its ideas. Venkatesh Rao invited Forte to write five long essays for $100 each, and Forte treated that as the start of 20 to 30 years of work.

Forte says his business is largely finding a good Ribbonfarm idea and explaining it more simply.

How I Write

Rao's moral framing move: ask what lens you are looking through. Forte, borrowing from Venkatesh Rao, ranks this among his top three intellectual moves. Ask whether you are seeing the subject as right and wrong, good and bad, or high and low status.

Forte says the framing is hard to spot because it is like a fish in water. Seeing manufacturing without the usual negative framing led him to Toyota and the theory of constraints, which backed his belief that quantity and quality work together. His question to himself: "What is the moral lens that I'm looking through?"

How I Write▶ 23:41

Compressing a dense idea makes it accessible but costs nuance and depth. Forte says distilling gains accessibility and understanding but loses context, subtlety and depth. He calls the trade-off painful but necessary for what he is trying to do.

Eight years after his Ribbonfarm essays, he says he has mostly been unpacking and unraveling them.

How I Write▶ 27:26