Influences

What moves people to action? That question runs through almost everything I write.

This is an inexhaustive list of the people, books, and ideas that have shaped how I think about the answer. Some are specific works, while others are entire bodies of thought I’ve absorbed over years.

• Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies — The book that articulated what I already believed: that the philosophical battle lines aren’t between left and right but between those who embrace dynamism and those who favor stasis.
• Flint McLaughlin — His framework reoriented how I think about marketing. Clarity of offer matters more than persuasion technique. The customer’s journey isn’t a funnel gravity does the work on — it’s an uphill path they can abandon at any point.
• Friedrich Hayek — His work on the limits of what any one person or institution can know informs how I think about nearly everything — and why I’m skeptical of imposed solutions.
• Aaron Ross Powell — Reframed how I think about small-l liberalism — not merely as a political program but as a comprehensive way of thinking about how people should relate to one another and to power.
• Jonah Goldberg — It’s hard to identify his specific influence given how long he’s been part of my information diet. He’s got sharp things to say about progressivism, the conservative movement, or the news of the day— and will follow it with a pun or a podcast episode about New York City rats.
• Tim Kachuriak — Applies rigorous marketing thinking to nonprofit fundraising, and introduced me to a compounding logic: small improvements in traffic, conversion, and average gift multiply against each other in ways that dwarf what you’d get from optimizing any one variable alone.
• Dan Pallotta — His argument that nonprofits handicap themselves — through artificial limits on compensation, overhead, and risk — reframed how I think about what it means to do the most good.
• Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson — Their argument for distraction-free work pushed me to deliberately curate my environment — and to treat the always-on, meeting-heavy norm as a choice rather than a given.
• David Allen, Getting Things Done — His core insight: your brain is for thinking, not storing. Get every commitment out of your head (and out of your inbox) and into a trusted system, and make each item actionable. I don’t use the full framework, but its logic shapes how I work every day.
• Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics — Intended as a warning about deception, it also serves as a how-to guide for persuasion. It showed me how framing, selection, and presentation shape what people believe.
• George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” — Clear writing is clear thinking. Vague language almost always conceals vague ideas.