About

I think a lot of the advice in self-help books is much older than the book, and Written Before is my way of showing that, with the dates and the passages.

I have a word for the pattern, Repetism: the same advice coming back in a new cover. Alex to write one line about why you made this.

So the site takes ideas about how to live, about 30 in the end and 12 at launch, and traces each one back to whoever said it first, with the passage to prove it. By first I mean the earliest source we can find, and if you know an older one, I’d like to hear it. Then it follows the idea through the later books: the ones that name the source (Cites), the ones that say the same thing and credit no one that we can find (Echoes), and the ones that argue against it (Conflicts). We’re starting with 12 ideas, 72 links and 59 books.

AI agents did all the reading, not me, and the How we read page has the method and the numbers. Nobody checked the quotes by hand either: a script checked each one against its source.

None of this is a complaint about the modern books, by the way. Some of their authors name the source, and the site shows that too.

Alex to write a line or two about you, whatever you want a stranger to know.

Alex Vita