(abandoned substack post)

solutions that extend beyond

One of my favorite blogposts by Venkatesh Rao was about the Iron Man movies. He describes how Tony Stark had two problems – (1) how to keep the shrapnel out of his heart, and (2) how to get out of the Afghan cave that he was being held hostage in – and he came up with a remarkable solution of building a miniature arc reactor to power the Iron Man suit. Venkat points out that Stark’s single creative insight “creates potential far beyond the immediate problem”.

This post has been on my mind for a very long time (10 years!), in part because I must admit there were things about RDJ’s portrayal of Tony Stark that I really related to – I wasn’t born wealthy and I’m not a physics/engineering genius, but there’s something about Tony’s vibes – creative, ENTP, free-spirited, irreverent, silly, ‘fatherless’ in a sense, showman/diva personality, tinkering, witty – that really resonated with me. In Iron Man 2, Tony describes his suit as a high-powered prosthetic, which draws laughs, but it’s also true. In Iron Man 3, his prosthetic fails on him, and the scene where he drags it through the snow was something that moved me deeply – I felt that way about my own mind, my own writing, this elaborate superstructure I built around me to help me take care of myself, to get things done, that became burdensome at times, that mostly protected me but occasionally failed on me, that I needed to tend to.

I know there’s something kinda pretentious and tacky about relating oneself to one of the most popular genius-billionaire-playboy-philanthropist fictional characters… but it is what it is, if there were a better example I would pick one, but this is the one I got, so I’m going to be earnest about it and I’ll eat the cringe that comes with it.

Another reason why that post stayed with me is that it seems to have some useful things to say about how to solve problems, and I have had problems that I’ve wanted to solve.

why I wrote friendly ambitious nerd

So. While I’ve never personally been taken hostage by murdersome terrorists or have had shrapnel in my heart – (I would say though, that the ADHD-related symptoms I’ve had kinda map reasonably well onto ‘shrapnel in my brain’ – it won’t kill me, but it can certainly leave me very incapacitated), it occurred to me while I was in the shower earlier that my first book, Friendly Ambitious Nerd, is itself possibly a candidate for an example of “a single creative insight that creates potential far beyond the immediate problem”.”

The main reason I wrote Friendly Ambitious Nerd was really just to have some substantial-ish piece of writing that was available for sale. I had been blogging and tweeting for years prior to that, and I figured that if I wanted to “go pro” and take this seriously, that I ought to have something for sale. And every week or so I would hear from someone who said, “I really love your writing, you should write a book!”

I didn’t have a super clear vision in mind when I wrote it. I mainly wanted to “get out of the cave”, ie “stop being a writer who has nothing for sale”. But I wouldn’t say “there was no vision”. It was vague, and hard to discern, but it was there, and I have gotten better at discerning it over time.

People will introduce you as the author of the book that you write

The problem I was trying to solve was this: I believe that, whatever is the first book that you write, will be a book that people will introduce you by. “Meet Visa, he’s the author of X”. And I wanted to make sure that the book would be something that I would be proud to be introduced by, y’know? Something of a promise, something for me to live up to. Part of how I went about piecing it together was, I asked my existing readers what they liked about my writing, and how they described it to other people. This is an example of what I call “paving the desire paths”, which I might write a separate essay about.

But the core idea is fairly intuitive: rather than try to come up with something out of the blue, simply pay attention to what already is there. And here I’ll note that you can’t really do this until “there’s a ‘there’ there” – you first have to have some body of work, which is why I rant so much about the power and value of “doing 100 things”. A body of work is a little universe that you can examine – to use Venkat’s phrasing, it “takes very little creativity, and a lot of energy, but leaves you with an essential strategic asset that will be useful in any solution to a broad class of problems”. By the time I sat down to piece together FAN, I already had hundreds of blogposts and about 100,000 tweets: a substantial body of work. Some people will say things like “Well, of course it’s easy once you’ve already…” yeah, so first do the thing that makes the harder things easier. I call this “thinking in dominos”, which I might write a separate essay about.

I assembled all of the descriptions that people gave me, and I laid them out – maybe in a google doc or spreadsheet, I can’t quite remember – and then I moved them around, looking for patterns, similarities. I eventually found that they tended to fall into the 3 major buckets that constitute FAN: “Visa is very friendly, pro-social, pro-community, earnest, optimistic, encouraging…”, “Visa is really prolific, dreams about the big picture…” and “Visa is so curious, always asking questions, goes on these delightful quests of wikipedia rabbitholes, trivia-seeking”.

I liked the phrase enough, it felt like a good-enough introduction to my style, my goals and interests, and it felt like there was something compelling about it (after all, if people were already introducing my work to others based one 1/3 of FAN, surely all 3 at once would be even more potent?)

So. I wrote the ebook. If you ask me, it’s conceptually pretty good, but it’s not actually very well-written. I intend to update it. I’ve vaguely held on to the intention of updating it every since I shipped it – embarrassingly, I said that I would update it “within a week” or something like that. It’s been 2 years. I’m now starting to feel a stronger compulsion to update it, particularly with what I’ve learned since writing it, since witnessing what other people think about it, observing how it responds… like smoke in the air

anyway if i’m being honest all of this is just me repeating myself – I guess it was interesting that dinesh was sort of surprised/intrigued by the bookwriting point – but mainly the thing is that I want to be writing FAN 2.0. I have been wanting to write FAN 2.0 for some time. And I just had this euphoric thought in the shower a few hours ago… that I want to give an excellent presentation at Thesis in February in New York, and I want it to be about FAN, obviously. And… how can I make that presentation be truly excellent? Well for starters, someone described it as “Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations for Twitter Addicts”, and I think that’s a great starting point. I also came up with Thinking In Dominos after writing FAN, so maybe I should publish that post before this one.

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also note to self somewhere that i meant to write polytribal weirdheart as an essay somewhere

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I published a 100-page ebook in February 2020 titled Friendly Ambitious Nerd. As of October 2022, it’s since sold 2,694 copies. I will be the first to say that it’s a rather janky, chaotic “book” – really more of a collection of essays and fragments. It was my first time trying to put together 100 pages on anything, and I have a long list of criticisms and frustrations that I hope to address in v1.1 (I will be gifting v1.1 to readers of v1.0 for free, as appreciation for them taking a chance on a relatively unknown author.)

BORING I’ve wanted to be an author for a long time. I loved books as a kid, but it didn’t fully occur to me then that I could one day write my own book. I didn’t personally know anybody who’d written a book, though intellectually I figured that all the wonderful books I loved must’ve come from somewhere. When I discovered the internet, I was ecstatic, because I could now publish directly to the web – participate in forums, and have my own website and blog. It still delights me 20 years later.

For many years, people told me that I ought to write a book, based on the writing that they’d read so far. This boosted my confidence tremendously, and has a huge role to play in the fact that I eventually wrote one, and then another.

I used to work in marketing – and I used to play in bands before that – and both of those things taught me showmanship. I knew intuitively that whatever book I wrote, would come to define me – and probably more than I would like. People will introduce you at parties and events as “the author of X”. And so I flinched from the idea of writing about, say, ADHD, or marketing, or any of the myriad of topics that I enjoy, but wouldn’t want to be defined by. So then I wondered, how would I like to be introduced? And I figured that rather than try and make something up, I could actually just ask people how they already introduce me. (Pave the desire paths!)

I collected I think dozens of anecdotes, and I tried to group them by similarity, and I found that broadly they fell into what I would come to categorize as “friendly” (kind, sociable, cares about people), “ambitious” (prolific, sometimes dramatic and grandiose) and “nerdy” (curious, asks lots of questions, explores interesting ideas). The phrase “Friendly Ambitious Nerd” is so strong for me now that it’s hard to remember what other titles I had in mind. I was vaguely attached to the phrase “polytribal weirdheart”, which was my Twitter bio for a while, and I might still write an essay about sometime.

So what’s the fucking book about, man? All this preeamble feels good to write but it’s not particularly interesting to read.

FAN is…

an operating system, a way of being. a way of moving through the world, a way of perceiving. why should you read it?

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