siblings: visa is always in his own world, in books, and on the computer. also guitar.
friends: visa is a kind earnest optimistic prolific hyperverbal shameless nerd
joined first role bc I needed money, stayed 5+ years because it was a great work environment, my boss was like my therapist/mentor/coach, kept learning and growing
since leaving I’ve been working for myself bc I value creative freedom & personal autonomy more than anything else
“visa is excellent at synthesizing disparate points of view, he’s a marketer who understands engineers. very clear thinker & communicator. sensitive and sharp. A+ content creator. he’s also great at making people feel comfortable & at ease, resolving conflicts and arguments”
they’d have great project management skills. good with timelines & schedules, good at proceduralizing things, good at asking results-oriented questions, thinking about deliverables, naturally inclined to ask “why haven’t we shipped this yet”, persistent, industrious, disciplined
Dear Visa-28:
- (1) start texting / emailing the coolest people you know now
- (2) start making and uploading videos now
- (3) start a patreon and ebooks now
I learned all of these things through (A) trial and error and (B) exposure to excellent peers
1 → B
accelerate A
Roam, for the bidirectional links and the bullet-level linking. Why wasn’t this already a thing everywhere?
also Twitter threads and QTs which is why I’m on this product so much, though idk how deliberate the creators are. They’re prob just slowly learning from their users
It’s almost always people and relationships. For some reason people everywhere are always lonely and disconnected, and yet it’s rare that anybody takes the initiative to connect people. Generally also asking/answering “you know what would be cool...” and then following through
I’m always proud of every time I’ve persuaded anybody to make content and share their knowledge, expertise, insight, perspective with the world. It expands their career capital, their influence/reach, in a very real sense it expands their power and makes them wealthier
At my last job I was pretty blessed that we hired mostly great people who could have thoughtful conversations about conflict, I don’t think my work was ever adversely affected
I did have a shit boss in the military once but nothing I could do about that, simply cultivate zen
I’m probably underestimating the degree to which I’ve smoothed out conflicts over the years almost w/o realising I was doing it. I just approach things with genuine curiosity & try to figure out where everyone is coming from, what their constraints are, what they’re trying to do
if you want to hire me you have to convince me that
1- I’ll be working for someone that I respect/admire and will learn from
2- in a growing market/industry
3- to make a lasting dent in a meaningful problem that I can’t do better by myself
nobody has convinced me of this yet
fun! Feel like I just LARPed a DIY job interview. Haven’t had one of those in years
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always interesting to look at older characters and witness my brain parse them in terms of contemporary characters, archetypes. I’m seeing her as “Jennifer Lawrence x Taylor Swift”
mentioned this on a podcast yesterday and it struck me that it’s so much more powerful than I properly convey. Getting good at asking for help means you get a lot more help, it’s one of the major cheat codes of life. It’s kind of like actual free money but sometimes even better
this can be “duh” obvious to people who are good at it and shockingly counter-intuitive to people who aren’t:
giving people a discrete, specific, simple, finite, straightforward way to contribute to something... can be *you* doing *them* a favor. Even as *they’re* helping *you*!
Because most people love to help, and to feel like they’re helping! They just don’t want to be *responsible* for you. So you have to convey that you’re responsible for yourself, and the outcome, and that you won’t judge them. in fact you give them a space to experiment/explore
oh the shark is hypothesized, not part of the fossil
so maybe the shark got bored or something
the squid got killed while it was eating
F
oh man for some reason this gave me flashbacks to an game I played as a kid... googled "submarine shark educational game"... wow, this is amazing. it's several years older and way more pixellated than I guessed / remember...
I sometimes remind myself that there are lovely people in the world who are terrible at Being Online. One of my favorite dudes is this guy who ran a jamming studio – delightful, generous, sweetheart host vibes, but on the forum he would type things that made me wanna punch him
to be clear it's not like he was posting bad takes or anything – he was being his typical cheeky self, but in his plaintext voice it came across as obnoxious, rude. he would be great on tiktok or youtube or something, you can fall in love with him in seconds
actually he's kinda like michael pena's character in ant-man. imagine this guy posting tweets but everyone just dunks on him because he types like a fool
and then he chuckles and tosses his phone aside and is like "internet's crazy, man, what can you do. hey let's get ice cream"
Some interesting riffs from this blogpost by Mark Rosenfelder about Jane Jacobs' ideas: zompist.com/jacobs.html
1. "Western economists mistook the fitful but constant economic boom from Smith's time on as a permanent condition."
2. "Thinking in terms of national economies smears over the economic facts. Once we take off these lenses, we can see that the world consists not of developed and poor nations, but of dynamic and poor regions."