Pies para qué los quiero si tengo alas pa’ volar.
Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly.
—Frida Kahlo
Happy New Year! As you might have already told from the Frida Kahlo quote, I’m typing this up from Ciudad de México, a city with its distinct personality yet relatively under-the-radar (that will warrant its own blog post one day).
Consuming content has been a lifelong passion of mine. I buy more books than I could read and subscribe to more podcasts than I could listen to, hoping (wishfully) I’d come across a gem spontaneously. Over time, a large amount of disparate thoughts have found their place in my hippocampus, with an unknown rate of accessibility.
So for this year, to increase the bioavailability of my consumption, I’ve decided to turn the table and create more. Below are some of the best things* I’ve come across in 2022, broken into three sections — Life, Mentality, Misc. — in excerpt format. Hope you enjoy it!
*I’ve deliberately skirted software or any other tech domain-specific content, which I’ll be covering in other posts. You can read my prior thoughts on DevOps, AI/ML, Data Infrastructure, and Open Source.
Life
Life is short. “If life is short, we should expect its shortness to take us by surprise. And that is just what tends to happen… Cultivate a habit of impatience about the things you most want to do. Don’t wait before climbing that mountain or writing that book or visiting your mother. You don’t need to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn’t wait. Just don’t wait.” – Life is Short, Paul Graham
In order to find truth, you must want it more than you want to be right. “As a general thumb of rule, when people become absolutely certain they know they’re doing, their creativity plummets… The trouble is most people want to be right. The very best people, however, want to know if they’re right.” – Creativity, John Cleese
Passion & love what you do.
“So it’s a lot of hard work and it’s a lot of worrying constantly, and if you don’t love it, you’re going to fail. So you’ve got to love it and you’ve got to have passion. I think that’s the high-order bit.” – Steve Jobs, D5 Conference, 2007
“Everyone asks me what makes a great money manager. They’re always astonished at my answer: They’re all overly competitive. That’s rule number one. Which goes along with passion. They’re passionate about competing. They’re passionate about the business.” – See the Future Differently, Stanley Druckenmiller
“As you become an adult, you realize the things around you weren’t just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity *everything* requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.” – John Collison
“I think on some level the future sort of belongs to who believe in it more than others… I just think we care more, you know, I think we’re the company that cares about helping people connect.” – Mark Zuckerberg, SXSW, on why Meta will build the metaverse (Author’s comment: obviously verdict still out on metaverse)
“You say ‘Amateur’ as if it was a dirty word. ‘Amateur’ comes from the Latin word ‘amare’, which means to love. To do things for the love of it.” - Mozart in the Jungle
Observe with focus. “…in our pursuit of the emotionally stimulating, we are systematically desensitizing ourselves to life. These days, every week sees an escalation of emotional bombardment as businesses vie for our attention… I might fly to Berlin and make the kind of journey that, a few hundred years ago, would have been the adventure of a lifetime – a story I tell my grandchildren. Now, it is just another forgettable business trip. Among all this, what still moves me? What moves you? What will we care about?” – How People Learn, Nick Shackleton-Jones
Why you want to read fantasy (for context, I’ve largely only read non-fiction books). “You will live many challenged lives, and you will emerge more appreciative of your fellow man.” - Michael Burry
Mentality
George Soros in ‘87 - up 60% entering Q4, down 10% after Black Monday, and finished the year up 13%. “But his nerve was not in doubt, not in 1987 nor, indeed, at any time, and among the community of Soros fans, the manner of his recovery after the crash ranks among his greatest accomplishments.” – More Money than God, Sebastian Mallaby
Going through market downtowns. “Years later, Rowan recalled that when he had joined Drexel, he believed he was 5 years too late – all the money had been made and all the fun had. What he said he had learned from the Drexel blow-up and the subsequent birth of Apollo was that, ‘you want chaos, you want things to be shaken up, you want the system to be brought down and built up again. Just when you think the world is coming to an end and things are never to going to get better, that is the time to build a career and build the next great fortune.’” – The Caesars Palace Coup, Sujeet Indap & Max Frumes
Dealing with success. “One of the most difficult things to do is dealing with success… Sometimes when you win, you lose respect for winning. But really what you lose respect for is what it takes to win, what it takes to prepare to win.” - The Quarterback Club conference, Nick Saban
Not being fixated on winning. “…obsessing about winning is a loser’s game: The most we can hope for is to create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome. The ride is a lot more fun that way.” - Eleven Rings, Phil Jackson
The right way is the hard way.
Harvard Business Review to Jerry Seinfield: “You and Larry David wrote Seinfeld together, without a traditional writers’ room, and burnout was one reason you stopped. Was there a more sustainable way to do it? Could McKinsey or someone have helped you find a better model?”
Seinfield (after asking whether Mckinsey was funny): “No… I don’t need them. If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show was successful because I micromanaged it—every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting. That’s my way of life.” - HBR Interview, Jerry Seinfield
Misc.
Surviving & thriving in an AI world. “The dream of any computer-savvy player is to discover a string of moves that an engine doesn’t necessarily favor, yet taps into a line that their opponent hasn’t prepared.” - WSJ, Magnus Carlsen
The importance of experimentation. “Many people have asked, “Why don’t you make another Mary Poppins? Well, by nature I am a born experimenter. To this day, I don’t believe in sequels. I can’t follow popular cycles. I have to move on to new things – there are many new worlds to conquer.” 1966 The Walt Disney Company Shareholder Letter, Walt Disney
Transparent feedback loop. “At the monthly all-day operating-committee meeting of the top 15 executives, the atmosphere is variously described by the participants as “Italian family dinners” or “the Roman forum–all that’s missing is the togas.” Dimon will throw out a comment like “Who had that dumb idea?” and be greeted with a chorus of “That was your dumb idea, Jamie!” …Bill Daley, 60, the head of corporate responsibility and a former Secretary of Commerce. “People were challenging Jamie, debating him, telling him he was wrong. It was like nothing I’d seen in a Bill Clinton cabinet meeting…” – Why Some Firms Thrive While Others Fail, Thomas H. Stanton
Why firms hire math Olympiad medalists doing simple math. “…so here’s a kind of non-secret about what we did at Renaissance: in my opinion, our most important statistical tool was simple regression with one target variable and one independent variable… Any reasonable smart high school student could do it. Now… we have string theorists we recruited from Harvard, and they’re doing simple regression. Is this stupid and pointless?... And the answer is no. And the reason is nobody tells you what the variables you should be regressing [are]. What’s the target. Should you do a linear transform before you regress? What’s the source? Should you clean your data?... And the smarter you are the less likely you are to make a stupid mistake. And that’s why I think you often need smart people who appear to be doing something technically very easy, but actually usually not so easy.” – AI Safety and the Legacy of Bletchley Park, Nick Patterson, RenTech
Physical strength and perceived limitations. “…you are already stronger than you think you are. This is because our muscles almost never use 100 per cent of the force that is potentially available to them. Some is always left as a back-up in case we have miscalculated the stresses that are about to be put on the muscle. Because of this, the first thing that happens when we take up weight-lifting has nothing to do with adding more protein fibres to the muscle. Instead the body, rather sensibly, releases spare capacity it already has. Once you get used to lifting heavier weights… this natural brake is released a little, unleashing a bit of latent power.” – Move, Caroline Williams
2023 LFG!
To my grandma, who taught me how to stay positive and kind even when life dealt bad cards. This one’s for you.