The honest read, four times a year.
A long-form letter from Tony Rivera. One idea each quarter, given the time and attention it deserves.
One idea, worked until
it is clear all the way through.
Subscribe to four letters a year.
We use your email to send The Letter four times a year. Every letter includes an unsubscribe link. Privacy.
The shape of it
One idea.
A little room to think.
Each quarter, The Letter follows one idea through the competing pressures, half-true stories, and details that make a situation worth thinking about.
The subject comes from the work: strategy, technology, building things, and making decisions when the answer is still taking shape. The aim is to leave you with something useful to think alongside.
You are on the board. Thanks for that.
Here is what you just signed up for, in plain terms.
Most of what lands in an inbox is noise, useful noise, sometimes, but noise. More inputs. More frameworks. More here-is-what-changed-this-week. I do not want to add to that. So The Letter is not a newsletter in the usual sense. It is a letter, one a quarter, four a year, written when there is actually something worth saying.
What I will write about is the same thing the work is about: the throughline. In any situation worth thinking hard about there is a lot going on, competing pressures, half-true stories, the slice everyone is optimizing while the system drifts. The job is to find the one line that runs through all of it. Not a line that connects the dots, a line that comes out above them. Once you have it, the next move is usually obvious. Getting it is the hard part. That is what each issue will work through: one situation, one line, taken until it is clear all the way through.
It will be long. It will be slow. It will not be every week, and I am not going to pretend it will be. Thoughtful, not fast, that is the whole point.
When the first real issue is ready, it lands in this inbox. Until then, this is it: the shape of the thing, and an open door. If at any point it stops being worth your inbox, the unsubscribe link is at the bottom of every one, no hard feelings.
Glad you are here.
Tony Rivera
True Line Collective
From the same practice
Ideas, put to work.