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Sunday letters to his newborn son
Talking to the baby
Sam Altman did this after his first child was born. He would get home at the end of the day and talk to the baby about what he was struggling with, what he was worried about, and what was happening at work. It was fun, and it seemed like something his son would find interesting to have someday.
Writing it down
He wrote only about eight of the letters. Writing to a child leaves nothing to hide behind, because he really cares what his kid will think of him. When something happened that didn't feel great, the letter pushed him to do it differently next week. He found it an extremely interesting mental framework.
Journaling at forty
Founders rarely write autobiographies at forty. They write them at seventy, wishing they had journaled. The Little Kingdom by Michael Moritz is a six-year history of Apple that ends before Steve Jobs was even pushed out of the company, so it shows what actually happened as it happened.
Why did The Little Kingdom stop before Jobs left?
Michael Moritz published The Little Kingdom in 1984, drawing on reporting he did while Apple was still young. Apple went public in December 1980, and the Macintosh launched in January 1984. Steve Jobs left the company in 1985, after the book had come out. A record written before the ending is known is not shaped by what happened later.
How does writing for an audience change thinking?
Psychologists have long observed that people shape what they say to fit the person they are speaking to. In a 1978 study, Tory Higgins and John Rholes found that people who tailored a description for a listener later remembered it in line with the version they had told. Writing to a specific reader works in a similar way, because it forces choices about what to include and how to frame it. The study's title, Saying Is Believing, became a standard name for the effect.
Why do memoirs written late drift from events?
Memory is reconstructed each time it is recalled rather than replayed like a recording. Elizabeth Loftus's experiments, beginning in the 1970s, showed that small changes in how a question was worded could change what witnesses remembered. Over decades, a person's later experiences and successes tend to color how earlier events are told. Diaries and letters written at the time are therefore treated by historians as stronger evidence than recollections written long afterward.
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