Continuation of the Paul Graham essay series from last week.

2019-09-23

• Learning from the "Copy What You Like." Essay:

  • "Copy only what you genuinely like."... compared to ... "I believed these things were good because they were admired." -> If a job looks prestigious to you... before wanting to do it.. ask yourself if you would do it if no one knew what you did for a living and you didn't get paid for it. If your day job would be spent waiting tables..... would you still be do the work of a banker, lawyer or doctor at nights?

  • "Another way to figure out what you like is to look at what you enjoy as guilty pleasures." -> Mine continues to focus on human behaviour, civilizations (i.e. ancient and modern) and the construction of organizations.

2019-09-24

• Learning from the "How to Make Wealth" Essay:

  • "I think everyone who gets rich by their own efforts will be found to be in a situation with measurement and leverage. Everyone I can think of does: CEOs, movie stars, hedge fund managers, professional athletes. A good hint to the presence of leverage is the possibility of failure. Upside must be balanced by downside, so if there is big potential for gain there must also be a terrifying possibility of loss. CEOs, stars, fund managers, and athletes all live with the sword hanging over their heads; the moment they start to suck, they're out. If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get rich, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage."-> The combination is 1) doing something that matters + 2) that people want. Depending on the scale and method, both are achievable in the smallest of scales. Seems to some up the learning of learning to find the product of 'me' and the current pursuit of identifying the market for myself.

2019-09-25

• Learning from the "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss" Essay:

  • "We've now funded so many different types of founders that we have enough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit from working for a big company. The people who've worked for a few years do seem better than the ones straight out of college, but only because they're that much older." -> Mental + experiential maturity.

  • "Having seen that happen so many times is one of the things that convinces me that working for oneself, or at least for a small group, is the natural way for programmers to live. Founders arriving at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three months later they're transformed: they have so much more confidence that they seem as if they've grown several inches taller. Strange as this sounds, they seem both more worried and happier at the same time. Which is exactly how I'd describe the way lions seem in the wild."

2019-09-26

• Learning from the "The Top Idea in Your Mind" Essay:

  • "I tend to think it's the idea I'd want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it's easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it's not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something." -> An experiment to consider, or even to be cognizant when going on my afternoon walks. The top of mind concept is very similar to Naval's belief of only having one desire to obsess over because that's the one thing that can bring about struggle and misery. desire. so have one. the overarching one right now. For me it's simple. It's to be able to work in a HCI capacity at a great remote organization.... everything has to be to achieve that desire at the moment.

2019-09-27

• Learning from the "How to Lose Time and Money" Essay:

  • The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. If I spent a whole day watching TV I'd feel like I was being unproductive. But the same alarms don't go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I'm doing stuff that seems, superficially like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It's not fun. So it must be work. This is an unconscious bias to be cognizant of.