• I was in the shower, as I often am when I get good ideas, and the phrase “sweet spots” jumped out at me in the middle of some monologue, which I no longer remember the specifics of. It’s often like that.
• Here’s something I’m sorta conflicted about. I have lots of twitter threads and old writing scattered around, that I know that people like. If I simply transcribed those bits into substack with some light editing, lots of people would like them. But I don’t want to do it. There’s a part of me that finds the idea of that task odious. And here I get to have this meta-conversation with myself about whether I should try and persuade myself to do it anyway, since it would be beneficial, or if I should consider that maybe there is some deeper wisdom in the aversion. I find myself more compelled to consider the “wisdom of aversion” path, in part because historically I got to where I am by following my gut, my taste, my nose, and it’s all of those things that are telling me that the most valuable thing I could be doing is to make sure that every piece of writing I put out is something truly heartfelt, something that I can say with conviction was something I really desperately wanted to put to words.
  • I know this can seem vaguely somewhat contradictory with the implied connotations of my general “do 100 things” principle. But actually, if you strip away the implied connotations, you can totally “ship 100 desperate, heartfelt essays” without any contradiction. Where things get messy is when you interpret a sense of urgency in “do 100 things”, such that you think “do 100 things (as soon as possible)”. But I think there can be a wisdom in taking your time. The problem is that sometimes it’s just avoidance. And the harder, meta-wisdom is trying to discern which is which. Concepts of emotional knottedness come into play here. And at some level I also think it can be the case that some things are very difficult if not impossible to know, in a general sense. You can’t really know in advance. The best you can do is some amount of investigation – but investigation has a cost too, in terms of time and resources. Feeling overly confident and certain about how things are has a way of working until it doesn’t, and then you might mess up in a horrific, game-ending way. You want to be careful not to drink your own kool-aid and think that you are the absolute master of reality. You can see this play out with successful players who have had hot streaks. Their friends and family tell them that something is impossible, but they manage to do it. Now they can no longer trust anybody who tells them that something can’t be done. But some things actually can’t be done. This is very tricky and dangerous territory to operate in.
• Sarah’s tweet about writing – there’s a sweet spot there.
• Wisdom is not evenly distributed. When I look back on my past writing, sometimes I find myself thinking, “damn, that kid was so wise” – and there’s a truth to that, but there’s also missing nuance. I often wrote in moments – sweet spot moments – when I was uncommonly feeling the spirit moving through me, and connecting dots, remixing the wisdom of others. But the rest of the time my baseline wisdom was often much lower. And I think it’s true that over time my baseline wisdom has gotten higher, through time and experience…
• Exercise. I used to go to the gym and do a little bit of everything. These days my workouts tend to be… either I go out for a short sprint, or I do some deadlifts at home. (I happen to have a squat rack at home, which was the result of some funny decision-making a few years ago.)
• An alternative title that I considered for this post – and am still considering – is “number go up”. When I was younger I was a lot more obsessed with the idea of “lets try to make the number go up as fast as possible”. I’ve come to see now that you can be overly, monomaniacally focused on this, to the detriment of the greater project. If you try to lift more weight as quickly as you can, you’re likelier to get injured or burnt out. You might subconsciously compromise on form, or not give yourself enough rest, and I don’t know how to talk about the precise specifics but vaguely I think there are things like ‘central nervous system exhaustion’, and all the auxillary/secondary muscles that come into play. At some point I did a “do 1000 pullups (cumulative)” challenge for myself. It was cool to have done it, it was cool to have finished it, but I don’t think I was left much better off for it. I didn’t integrate that project into my everyday life very well. I took long breaks that were maybe too long. It’s better than not having done it, but it’s not the best thing I could have done. That said, trying to do the best possible thing you can do in an abstract sense can be a trap. It depends on your definition of what “possible” means. And here I think what matters is your time horizon. What’s the best thing you can do today, versus what’s the best thing you could theoretically do on a perfect day with unlimited resources and clarity of mind and all of those things. It’s worth thinking about the latter from time to time, but not all the time, not to the point where it distracts or discourages you from taking immediate imperfect action.
• I wrote the MVP thread 9 years ago. I’m glad I wrote it. It’s still useful to consider to this day.
• I want to think about sweet spots at many different levels. There’s a sweet spot with eating. When you’re hungry, food is delicious. As you keep eating, eventually it starts to lose its taste, largely because you now start to feel full. I’m sure you can find essays about this from centuries ago. What’s interesting with the specific example of food is we now have a bit more insight into how hunger works, but I’m not sure that we understand it very well yet. And a little bit of understanding can be a dangerous thing. (know when to abandon what you know).

I got distracted halfway when writing this because of a pradyu tweet about asian kids complaining. but then afterwards… nah i lost it lol