Whenever I’m stuck I read essays. Not just any essay but the right one. Usually something by PG or Naval. I'm not reading to get an answer. I'm reading to see things differently. The best essays do that. They make you stop and think, “Wait, maybe there's another way to look at this.” It's not the information that helps most. It's the shift in how you see the problem.
But here's the problem. Finding the right essay takes too long. You can’t just search a keyword like you do for a movie or a recipe. Essays are messy. They wander. One might look like it's about startups but really it's about how to do creative work. Another might start with painting and end up being about relationships. So searching by topic doesn’t work well. I’d waste time I didn’t have, clicking through blogs, hoping to stumble on the one that hits.
At some point I thought, why isn’t there a place where you just say what you're thinking, and it tells you the right essay to read? We have AI now. It understands language, tone, even context. We don’t have to rely on plain keywords anymore. If you say you're anxious about starting college, it should be able to point you to something on imposter syndrome, or an essay about making friends in a new city. That would be kind of perfect.
So I started building. A simple search bar on a minimal page. You type what you're dealing with and an AI looks through a small set of handpicked essays. No distractions just a way to find the one piece that might help right now.
But wait. Am I ruining the joy of discovery?
Part of what makes essays special is how you find them. You follow a link, then another, and end up with something you didn’t know you needed. This skips that. It won’t be for everyone. I might not even use it all the time.
But when you're short on time or really stuck, and you just want something to help you think clearly, it's good to have a way to go straight to the good stuff.
What’s under the hood right now?
This is still a work in progress. Sandeep Khanna and I are rolling it out slowly because we want to get it right. We’re always tweaking which essays to include and teaching the AI how to pick better ones. If something’s missing or off, that’s normal. It’s an early project. Just two people chasing an idea we can’t stop thinking about. You shouldn’t have to spend hours finding the right thing to read.
So that’s the story. I just wanted to share why this exists. Sometimes one well-timed essay can shift how you see things, and that can change everything. If this little tool can help you find that essay when you need it, that’s enough. I might not use it every day. You might not either. But now you know why we built it.