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Note to Self

9 min read

Notes from life.

Attaching my stories or comments in the footnotes.

  • You only count after it starts hurting.1
  • Action is the best self-help book.2
  • Writing is the best meditation.3
  • Possible than Practical.4
  • Play the fool.5
  • “Nothing is more important than seeing the sources of invention which are, in my opinion, more interesting than the inventions themselves.” – Leibniz (1646-1716) 6
  • This is water.7
  • Believe in others.8
  • Don’t care about the destination, enjoy the journey.9
  • Unhealthy obsession.10
  • Generalise and Unlearn.11
  • Uncertainty is better than discomfort.12
  • “Entrepreneur’s mind. Athlete’s body. Artist’s soul.” 13
  • “Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamity with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.” - Aristotle 14
  • “It never gets easier, you just go faster” - Greg LeMond15
  • “Don’t confuse familiarity with skill.”
  • “Breadth before Depth.”16
  • “You’re not stupid, you lack the basics.”17
  • Focus is all about cutting distractions. “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” - Steve Jobs. 18
  • “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” - Richard Feynman’s 1974 Caltech commencement speech 19
  • “Mid-curve is lack of second-order thinking.”20
  • “Let each thing you do, say, or intend be like that of a dying person” - Marcus Aurelius. You are going to be dead soon. No need to be shameful. You are already naked.21
  • “Singularity”: Everything leads to the One.

My takeaways from working on a early-stage startup:

  • Peers: Peers who push, inspire, build, and become a better version of yourself are much better than any community. Surrounding yourself with a room full of ambitious, slightly deranged people pushes you in ways you won’t even realise.
  • Belief/Conviction: You have to believe in what you’re trying to accomplish. Experts in the field will always be skeptical of new ideas, but fresh set of ambitious eyes can achieve a lot more.
  • Experimentation: as someone trying to create something new, you’ll obviously hit lot of walls, like a lot. Experiments builds the confidence, separates the fog, and shows you paths that you didn’t know existed before. It might feel slow to do more experimentation, but is actually much faster in practice.
  • Truth Seeking: Conviction doesn’t help if you don’t try to find answers, or you don’t accept that you were wrong. Iteration is inevitable, only thing that matters is how quickly you do it. Conviction can help you start, but truth (results) will make you powerful.
  • Feedback: Get feedback as early as possible, accept it, iterate on it.22
  • Speed: Whatever your timelines are, it can be twice as faster easily. You overestimate the amount of work required to be put in every time. Coupling with belief, speed can supercharge you in every field. To put it simply, you can accept that you’re wrong about your convictions quickly, perform experiments quickly, iterate on new ideas quickly, gain new skills quickly.
  • Users: Identifying productive users. Users who show enthusiasm to try your product might be very different than users who actually need it. Building a persona of those needy users helps to segregate users whose opinions are biased. Obviously, amount of feedback matters most, and that’s why not heeding much to those early users is key to not getting astray from the end product.
  • Marketing: Tell users what problems will get solved by using the product. Don’t go about boasting how powerful your creation is.
  • Founder/Leadership: Make sure that company has enough money to survive, and find hard problems for your team to solve.
    • Be a kickass generalist.
    • You are the upper bound of how much someone cares about the organisation. Make decisions accordingly.

Undiscovered but Intriguing

  • “Your worst sin is that you betrayed yourself for nothing.” - Dostoevsky
  • “Don’t be a career.” - Steve Jobs
  • “I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success… such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.” - Nikola Tesla

Footnotes

  1. I used to think doing 15 reps was okay and will lead me to gains, but discovered that first 12 of those 15 reps is just time waste. You do them for those last 3 reps. That’s when it matters. ↩

  2. God knows I’ve read so many self help books, articles about motivation which led me nowhere. Training my body has led me to believe that only action matters when you’re confused. Thinking is for a peaceful and calm mind. ↩

  3. I just love writing my thoughts out into a plain paper, scribbling, drawing ↩

  4. Claude Shannon’s Creative Thinking is one of the most practical pieces I’ve read on Creativeness. Any other book, article, podcast never give you the path that they followed. This article has it. ↩

  5. Ethan Hawke: Give yourself permission to be creative. Introvertedness isn’t going to help you in any stage of life. Learn to put your opinions in public. ↩

  6. Have been like this from the start, but lost this somehow in this world. Always been interested about the why’s and how did something get created rather than creation itself. ↩

  7. Loved the David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech so much, watched it 5 times when I first watched it. ↩

  8. We are so much more capable of what we think of ourselves. Underestimating myself was like second nature for me. Never would have done anything if not for the people who believed in me. ↩

  9. You only realise the value of something you love when you let it go. When you love a thing so much, why would you ever want to leave it, right? LOVE YOUR OBSESSIONS. ↩

  10. Observed in me that things that I’m trying to learn stick with me for longer time when I am randomly trying to look through the details. Deadlines suck. Period. ↩

  11. Read somewhere the similarities between generalising and unlearning. Our brain unlearns by generalising, increasing it’s long term memory capacity each time. ↩

  12. More like, uncertainty houses discomfort. You can feel comfortable and uncomfortable doing uncertain things, but you won’t feel certain and uncertain when doing uncomfortable things. ↩

  13. Atomic Habits - James Clear ↩

  14. This video of Mathematician Prof. Andrew Wiles is perfect example of the quote Beauty is Suffering. ↩

  15. Have experienced this firsthand myself while learning almost everything. It’s a beautiful quote that summarises everything related to learning. It really is humbling, accepting yourself as a beginner, and asking dumb question, relearning things that you once thought are understood. ↩

  16. This is the single most important thing that I discovered while learning about Cryptography. Never start diving deeper into a new topic. “How it works?” should be the last question you ask. Assume the end state of things, and build a view of the world. For example: Before starting to dive deep into Starship, build the intuition of how space travel will look like once we have really really cheap cargo ship. Another example: Understand basics of docker, what applications to build using it, how can it be used in your areas of interest, before diving deep into how it works under the hood. ↩

  17. You’re Not Stupid, every sufficiently complicated thing will deceive itself as magic to eyes first looking at it. I made a mistake of assuming myself as stupid, when I was started learning cryptography, and that created a stigma in my brain where I rejected every idea I got without reason. Never look at experts in a domain when trying to learn a new topic. Start learning slowly, make mistakes, discover slowly. Never overstimulate the brain with overly-complicated topics in that field. ↩

  18. Raycast focus extension has completely changed how i work. Just small bit of distraction-less time, like 15 minutes, is enough to put me in the flow for 1-1.5 hours. Heavily recommended. ↩

  19. Hit a lot of this wall when self-learning a new topic. Recently learned about Lattices, and it’s so easy to convince yourself that you know something, when you won’t be able to retain most of what you read beyond few days. Learning how to learn, has never been more important, especially when we’re continuously barraging our brain with random nonsensical information. ↩

  20. I discovered that I lack second order thinking when playing a game of Chess with a bot, I was just using Greedy algorithm the whole way. Same with coding, or solving a math problem, I was so focused on fixing the immediate problem in my code, I never thought about what would this change unlock? Will it be easier to iterate upon? What’s the next problem that I’ll have to fix after this problem? What problems will this create further down the road? And the most important: What other solution do I have? ↩

  21. Understanding that you don’t have to prove anything to anyone. You’re just a moth flying endlessly in a dark night with all the world to explore is just so freeing. I think I was a prisoner of my own subconscious. Thinking about everything and everyone ↩

  22. you get sucked up in biases so deep when working on something for years, External feedback can mean a lot. Combine it with experimentation, and quick iteration, and you’ll inevitably eventually create a thing that people are willing to use and invest their time in. ↩

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