About

Hi, I'm Andie Redding.^[1]

I started The Blueprint because I love profile writing, and I love craft, but find that most profiles fail to dig into a subject's craft in a way that satisfies my curiosity.

Take every Taylor Swift profile ever penned. These pieces do an excellent job of exploring key events in her life, detailing elements of her psychology, and capturing the nuances of her personality... but why has nobody ever published a profile-length piece just about how she writes a song? About how she plans a tour?

I don't blame this on the profile writers, who are so great at what they do! I just think we need a new genre...one that's less human interest and more tactical. More genius-focused. More talent-driven. So if I may be so bold, I'd like to suggest one here. I'm going to call it: the expert interview.

The expert interview is an extremely in-depth profile not of a person, but of their craft, their expertise, their mastery. It digs into their heuristics, how they practice, how they learn, and how they improve. It details the metrics they track, how they evaluate their performance, and how they push the boundaries of their field. It's an obsessive genre. A curious one. And likely a very long one.

I'm going to let it unfold over time. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Why The Blueprint?

I'm drawn to greatness, and a blueprint is every engineer's partner in building something great.

It begins as a blank slate, allowing room for exploration, creativity, and the development of new ideas, before transitioning into a trusted guide that points to key materials and outlines the project's steps. As the project evolves, so does the blueprint, adapting to new insights and challenges while staying true to the vision. Ultimately, it functions as the bridge between ideas and reality, turning potential into something great, tangible, and enduring.

As the engineers of our own goals, careers, and lives, we benefit from both designing our own blueprints and drawing inspiration from those of others. For now, I'm helping you do the latter, by laying out in significantly too much detail how those who are the very best at what they do, do the thing they're the very best at.

I like to think that I'm giving you their blueprints in order to help you create your own.

And a few other notes about me...

• I am interested in everything - animal travel, kitchen tools, timekeeping. This is likely my fatal flaw (I hear focus is a virtue) but please send me niche books and essays and explainers that you love. Talk to me about the things you're obsessed with. Tell me who I should interview!

• I really, really like details. Reality has a surprising amount of detail, as they say.

• Despite the claim of impartial interest, here's a list of topics that I enjoy the most:

  • Sports & competition
  • High levels of human achievement, high performance, greatness (and figuring out what makes other people/systems great)
  • Strategy, process/systems, goal achievement, problem solving, complexity
  • Personal agency & development
  • Leadership & developing people
  • Thinking - mental models, decision making, game theory, behavioral economics, psychology, cognitive science, rationality
  • Learning, knowledge accumulation, expertise
  • Data & analytics, pattern finding

If you enjoy The Blueprint and want to be notified when new pieces are published, please subscribe! If you really enjoy it and would like to provide early financial support, you're welcome to do that too. Thanks for being here. We're building something great.

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1. This is a pseudonym. Not hiding! Just have a full time job (that I love) in a very different world and want to keep this work separate. If you can figure out where I got the name from, I'm impressed, and you'll learn something about me. ↩︎