Yu-kai Chou's Blog

Ang Lee spent six unemployed years writing scripts, then won two Best Director Oscars. His full OP Hero build.

In 1878, a twenty-four-year-old bank clerk in Rochester, New York started planning a photography trip and ran straight into the absurdity of his own hobby. Photography in 1878 meant fragile glass plates and chemicals mixed on the spot, because a wet plate had to be prepared, exposed, and processed before it dried. George Eastman looked […]

In January 1989, Czechoslovak police arrested a banned playwright at a street demonstration in Prague and a court sentenced him to nine months in prison. On 29 December of that same year, the Federal Assembly of the same regime elected that playwright president of Czechoslovakia. The vote was unanimous: all 234 ballots cast. Eleven months […]

On June 14, 1325, a 21-year-old law student rode out of Tangier alone, headed for Mecca. The pilgrimage was supposed to be one round trip. He came home 29 years later, having covered a distance historians reconstruct at roughly 117,000 kilometers, through territory spanning about 40 modern countries. His name was Ibn Battuta, and the […]

In 1889, a little-known Spanish professor packed his microscope and a stack of glass slides and traveled to a scientific congress in Berlin, reportedly paying his own way. Nobody there was waiting for him. Spain barely registered on the map of European science, and the man himself had spent years publishing findings that the field’s […]

In August 1966, a writer and his wife stood at a post office counter holding the manuscript of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and they could not afford to mail it. Postage to the publisher in Buenos Aires came to 82 pesos. The family had been living on credit for eighteen months while Gabriel García […]

Confucius died in 479 BCE convinced he had failed. Three centuries later, his ideas became Han state ideology. The OP-Hero breakdown of a Game that compounded across 2,500 years.

From selling newspapers in Rameswaram to launching India's first satellite: A.P.J. Abdul Kalam's complete OP Hero build across the 6 Steps.

From chess prodigy to Theme Park to AlphaFold: the 6-Step OP Hero build behind Demis Hassabis's plan to solve intelligence.

The Permanent Siege Trap: why the discipline that won Eritrea's independence now empties the nation, and which reform packets actually fit.