The following post is a copy-paste of a Twitter thread. It will take some time before it turns into an essay of its own.
I’ve mentioned an essay idea to several people in the past week and have received a lot of positive feedback about it.
I call it the SLINGSHOT THEORY, loosely based on a sweet trick used by rocket scientists – using the gravity of a planetary body to add velocity to a spacecraft.
So here’s the fundamental idea:
Sometimes, if you want to get somewhere fast, the fastest way to get there isn’t to go there directly, but to first slingshot around something else. This can give you a dramatic increase in velocity that seems supernatural to everyone else.
Some egs.
Bollywood is a famously nepotistic industry. If you want to break into it, you’ll need a lot of connections, relationships, favors.
Unless you’re Sunny Leone. Sunny slingshotted past millions of hopeful starlets via an orthogonal path.
Lady Gaga similarly slingshotted around Planet Weirdo to accelerate dramatically towards A Star Is Born. She would never have made it if she attempted a direct path, and she knew this. She strategized over a decade.
As I go to bed tonight halfway across the planet from home, I find myself reflecting on how I’ve Slingshotted myself here, & onto the Following lists of ~10,000 people. It’s definitely been an unorthodox journey. People in the startup scene know me from my essay about Mean Girls
Looking at @vgr’s reflections on his own trajectory – I think it could be said that he slingshotted around Planet Office with The Gervais Principle.
Here’s another wild thing – I now have Singaporeans in my DMs who are asking me “how do I make friends with Silicon Valley people?”
1- My visit to SF is itself slingshotting me back to my hometown with increased velocity
2- The answer is “slingshot around interesting things”
Failure modes
We can dig a little deeper into the metaphor: there are several ways in which a slingshot maneuver can go wrong
- You miss the planet altogether and barrel off into deep space
- You get sucked into the gravity of the planet, and either get stuck in orbit, or crash into it
The thing that strategic artists like Gaga, Sunny and Venkat (now that’s a podcast! 😂) do really well is to seek out something interesting that they can do, and then leverage that into something else.
Importantly, they don’t chase incremental gains – they seek new games.
If you play a game for too long & you’re not mindful + intentional – you can get sucked in by its gravity. Sucked into the politicking, the positioning, the favor-counting, all that smarmy, tedious stuff. I felt it happening to me as a local blogger in 2013, so I cut & ran.
I am very grateful to my younger self for having the guts to do that. I think lots of people get trapped by the experience of some sort of success, and then they cling onto it desperately, trying to preserve it. You can’t. You have to evolve and move on.