Category: unsorted

notesprawl

this was originally a bit of a joke, but i also knew when joking that i was going to want to revisit this (joke about outcomes you want), and sure enough, the concept has been growing on me over time. i found myself mentioning it in my latest wordvomit, which was reason enough for me […]

do less

this one is a bit counterintuitive: if you’re starting a youtube channel or a blog or something, i believe you shouldn’t put toooo much effort into your first post, because it’ll rarely do as “well” as you might hope. this isn’t even really about you or your work… it’s just sort of the nature of […]

again

Sometimes repetition is a sign that you’re returning to something important. Sometimes it’s a sign that you’re failing to learn something. Funnily, it can take some repetition to figure out the difference. But more importantly, it takes discernment. You have to stop and take stock of the situation, and ask, what’s really going on here? […]

sigh

I met an old friend for lunch a while ago. He observed that I was initially tense and weary, but that I then visibly relaxed over the course of the conversation. Particularly he noticed that I would do these big sighs. I thought about it again when hanging out with my 5-month-old son, who does […]

make yourself comfortable

“When we truly feel comfortable, the desire to improve is natural— no antagonism required, no debt incurred.” (deleted source) you can make yourself a little more comfortable, as a treat. you can take lil actions to make your environment a little nicer for yourself. that feels good. it’s nice to feel good. it’s nice to […]

quotes

I’ve thought from time to time that people don’t do a great job of quoting things. I figure I might as well make my own list. Here we go. “it’s unfortunate that so many players don’t realize that watching their own recordings or posting recordings for feedback could have saved 1198 hours of frustration.” – […]

my creative process

“social mistake i used to make a lot was, always engaging with everyone the way I wanted to be engaged with, which was to be taken seriously in a very particular way. turns out a lot of people just* be saying shit**, without necessarily like, putting heavy significance*** about it” I initially typed the above […]

deviants

(original 2018 thread) it’s funny to consider how much of the conversation around things like “what makes you unique, what makes you different” is dominated by people who aren’t really all that unique or different. I don’t mean this as a putdown or a jab, it’s just one of those optical illusions. people who are […]

people-shaped

This post is a quick sketch / copy-over of some tweets where I use the phrase “people-shaped”, which I think is something I want to revisit. A while ago (4 years ago, wow) I wrote a post after I had a conversation with a friend who was struggling with having a large writing project in […]

most shared

Here’s a list of my blogposts that have been most shared on Twitter. ✱ Here’s a list of my blogposts according to site traffic: ✱ Here’s a linkdump mainly for my own reference. Communities [Christine, Jubilee, amirbolous, gavinyua, auramarua, thatsnotoptimal, tjrwriting, aditipar, bardia, jamesoriel, jean-baptiste, snappercayt, lensofleo, metamitya, pesa_africa, rahul chabra, peter staal, jens thang, […]

so you’ve been main character’d

the hardest thing about dealing with being main character’d is managing your psychology, your emotional / physiological response to the feeling/perception of being attacked. I’d recommend writing down all of your thoughts and feelings in a notes app or something but do not post +1 to not replying, which is the most underappreciated thing. Replying […]

how to de-escalate tense situations

A thing i’ve gotten very good at that I just helped a friend in DMs with is de-escalating other people, eg someone DMs you a massive wall of text, how do you respond to that? I’ma try and share what I can without being too specific. If I get a huge wall of text, I […]

what’s it like to live your dream?

(nov 18, 2021 thread) there are a bunch of things i wish some earnest person would ask me about, tho if i talk about it now it would distract me from my book lol. but maybe a quick distraction as a treat (been working on it today!!). i wish someone would ask me about what […]

how to DM your heroes

How to DM your heroes when they follow you 1. specific proof-of-work: “I’ve been a fan of your work and writing since the livejournal days” 2. share something specific about yourself, their influence on you: “your work shaped the way I now do X” 3. ask easy-to-answer specific question. I would try to have a […]

Aug29: AGI fire alarm drill day

In October 2017, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a post on intelligence.org titled There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence. It occurs to me that, while there might not be a fire alarm, we could certainly do fire drills. A fire drill is when people practice how they would behave in the event of a fire. […]

I use scapple to do my think-out-loud maps

I’ve somehow become an unintentional advocate/evangelist for Scapple, which is a mindmapping tool made by Literature & Latte, the same people who make Scrivener. I just use it casually to help me think out loud, and I often post screenshots of it when tweeting. People then often ask me “how did you make that?” Eventually […]

thinking is easy, information architecture is hard

This has been a recurring thing for me. A lot of what I’m trying to do with my life is architect information in a way that is useful, pleasurable, lasting. There are lots of ways to rephrase this, reframe this. Coming up with the idea for a solution is relatively easy, implementing it is hard. […]

small talk

1jul2024: I have more to say about small talk. people who say they don’t like it, seem to misunderstand it… ✱ “What are you supposed to say if someone asks what’s new with you?” (original thread) This might seem odd but it totally works: say “let me check”, then open up your phone browser and […]

todo lists as narrative devices

every one of us is living in some kind of story. who are you? what is your name? where do you live? are you a student? what do you like to do for fun? oh you like football? what’s your favorite team? why? do you want to go to university? why? what would you like […]

📱smartphones changed everything

The following is a set of notes for an essay I want to write. ✱ A common feature in fantasy fiction is powerful magical objects. A crystal ball, a magic mirror, the Palantir in Lord of the Rings. These objects allow their users to see the unseen, to extend their sight and minds beyond the […]

🧵hyperthreading

Do you have a single document that links to every single thing that’s important to you on the web? Why not? (2024nov: revisiting this, I realize I don’t currently have a particularly strong candidate. Once upon a time it used to be my bookmarks post, but that now feels clunky and dated. It’s tempting to […]

jinky, janky, junky

I think it’s cute how three different words – jinky, janky and junky – all have this venn diagram overlap that I like my work to be in the middle of. I might write an ebook someday titled “jinky janky junkyard” or something to that effect. I’ll start with this blogpost, and grow it from […]

dealing with losers

(2020nov5 thread) I’m not a fan of divvying people up arbitrarily into winners and losers – one should never be gleeful about this – but I do have a subconscious subroutine that does it for me, and it’s very useful mental machinery, even accounting for some small % of error rate (5-10%?) I am being […]

fumbling the bag

There’s an exchange on Tinder(?) that I once saw on Twitter that I think about a lot. Read this really slowly and closely because there is a lot to learn here. First of all, he opens with “there is no way you swiped right on purpose” – this is already a bad move in my […]

“Wrong.”

This is more of my personal approach to things rather than some kind of claim about how the world works, or even how it should work. It’s how I like to do things. I’m always kind of surprised when I see someone telling someone else that they’re wrong on the Internet. Not because that it’s […]

persuasion

— 1 — One of the most powerful skills you can learn is persuasion. Persuasion is how you convince people to join your team, give you what you want, and so on. You can do this in a way that’s not only non-threatening, non-coercive, but actually fun and compelling. It’s very strange to me that […]

pave the desire paths

(2024nov24) I’m in the process of once again trying to… organize my blog. It occurs to me that the desire paths post might be the best place to start trying something that I want to start trying. So… for starters, I’ll list out a bunch of other posts in this cluster: Why do I make […]

fuckability

fucking is labor, fuckability is capital many (most?) people wanna be fuckable more than they wanna fuck having good sex is a lot of work, you have to be attentive, you have to communicate, you have to respond to feedback ✱ this post exists mainly to be a catcher for the popular tweet: *taps mic* […]

books

Books I’ve written: The first book that I published is called FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD. The second book that I’m currently working on is called INTROSPECT. Introspect is about inner narrative troubleshooting. It’s about hitting Inspect Element on the story of your life. A skilled introspector achieves internal narrative clarity and resonance. Books I’ve spoken about:

⏱ 4 hours

Realistically, I can only ever be *truly* productive for 4 hours a day. Most days, I’m lucky to even have 2 truly good, productive hours, where I’m really moving the needle. And I get by with the output of those 2 hours! I wish somebody told me this when I was like… 10 “The trick […]

Most People

I’ve been sharing this set of notes more and more as time goes by. I suppose you could say most people care too much about what most people think. I don’t expect to be able to change most people’s minds on this. But I’m interested in getting to know the people who really manage to […]

do 100 things

“Do 100 Thing” is a phrase I came up with when riffing around the idea of being prolific, making lots of stuff. It’s obviously not an original idea – Nietzsche suggested it, /r/thexeffect could be thought of as “do 49 thing”. I was also influenced by the parable of the pottery class. But for some […]

talent is not rare, talent is clueless and scared

(see also: greatness is deviance) When I was younger I thought that talent was rare, but as I get older I realize that the answer is so much weirder than that. talent is not ~super~ rare. but talent hides, talent often doesn’t want to be found, talent is scared, talent is clueless you could revise […]

🎸 let’s jam!

dec2023 update: I should talk about wooten, werner, mayer, the beatles, paramore, guns n roses… In my cornerstone post The Library Ethos, I mentioned in passing that there’s a sideplot about music and musicians. I feel like I’m on a roll here so let’s write that one too, hot off the press. While both my […]

after gifted

AFTER GIFTED is an ebook that I’m working on to help formerly gifted kids find success and happiness in life. Optimistically, I’ll probably only start working on it late 2021 and it’ll probably be released around 2022. 2023 Update: lol. lmao

🗣 hecklers

I’ve been thinking a lot about hecklers lately. There are a bunch of related-ish words, with varying connotations: haters – simple, succinct, memorable, but can have the unfortunate side-effect of implying that the criticism is unfounded or unwarranted. (Kanye once said “haters are fans too”, which I reference often in conversations.) critics – doesn’t adequately […]

☢️ the apocalypse test

A thing I do that brings me great clarity is to focus on individual people over everything else. I don’t care much about your career, nationality, ideology, gender, etc. All I really care about is whether I sense that there’s a nourishing humanity in you. I do get it wrong sometimes. Some people seem to […]

cold emails

If you get really good at cold emails, comms and positioning, you can run circles around people who rely on warm intros in smaller networks. But at an individual, tactical level, a cold email will very rarely ever live up to a warm introduction. You have to be 10x more interesting. You can plead with […]

🙏🏾 how to ask for help

One of my new personal rules for myself is, if something annoys me, I’m going to funnel that into content that I can reference the next time I encounter it. Today I am annoyed by a very spammy, solipsistic request for help, that was effectively just “plz subscribe to my channel bc I need more […]

🗿 don’t pedestalize people

I use the term Pedestalization to describe the act of putting someone on a pedestal. Hero worship is pedestalization. Some people also pedestalize their friends or partners in a way that makes it impossible for them to see or acknowledge their flaws. Pedestalization is the inverse of demonization. Both acts are dehumanizing. If you intend […]

status and status regulation

2024oct15: there was a period of time where this seemed like one of the most important concepts I’d ever heard of, but I haven’t even really thought about it much recently. It feels like when I first learned about complex systems. I nerded out about it bigly, and then subsequently just internalized it into everything […]

elitism

It’s interesting how often the phrase “elitism” comes up when I solicit feedback from others. I’m aware that this will come across as defensive or denialist, but I have carefully considered it for quite a long time and I don’t really agree. We mean different things, maybe I went to school with some actual elitists, […]

learned catastrophizing

I get young people in my DMs all the time. A common thing I notice about their despair is that they do a lot of generalizing (“I can’t seem to study for this test” → “I can’t do anything”). Lots of catastrophic thinking, things get very grandiose. I remember this feeling too. I think there […]

listen to kids

About once or twice a week I get some long DMs, usually from a younger person, who’s all stressed out and wound tight about how they’re going about their lives. It’s really heartening and kinda sad how appreciative they are when all I do is say a few kind, supportive things. My sense is… lots […]

take deep breaths

The following post is an ongoing-work-in-progress. The goal is for me to make sense of my learnings about breath and breathwork. Disclaimer: I am not a doctor. I am not even some kind of athlete or knowledgeable person. I’m just some guy trying to figure this stuff out. There’s a very high likelihood that I’m […]

➡️ pay it forward

When I was a broke teenager, my older friends often insisted on paying for drinks or meals. I used to feel a potent mix of gratitude and shame at this. I deeply appreciated the help, but I often also felt embarrassed, like I was a helpless “charity case”. A few years later, I got a […]

🍵 empty your cup and allow life to surprise you

2024apr29: I think this wants to be a more substantial post about attention. consider my recent conversation with dinesh about focus and epistemology… letting go of preexisting frames and assumptions, being genuinely open and curious 2017feb23 wordvomit (0647) 2019may-thread I never really understood the whole “empty your cup” and “unlearn what you have learned” thing […]

👋🏾 everyone loves to make a great introduction

I think the big secret of social life is that everybody loves to make a great introduction. If you can become someone that people love to introduce to to other people, you’re “in the green” socially. Everybody loves to introduce a great hire, romantic partner, friend, co-founder. Talking about this can seem narcissistic (narcissists ruin […]

🔟 @visakanv’s top 10 lifehacks

(Originally posted on Twitter) 10. Do 1,000 of something. Anything, it doesn’t matter what. Really. When was the last time you did 1,000 of something? You will be a different person at the end of it. It’s one of the simplest ways to become an interesting person – there’s something interesting at the end of […]

📜 blogs that I like to read

In the old days, people used to have lists of links on their blogs to other blogs that they liked reading. Here’s mine. kalzumeus, by @patio11 ribbonfarm, by @vgr melting asphalt, by @KevinSimler morgan housel – 23 books that changed my life gwern.net ncase.me anna gat @webdevmason praxis, by @fortelabs devon zuegel knowing less, by […]

🇺🇸 San Francisco [2019]

Dear Visa-17, Visa-29 here. So I recently got on a Singapore Airlines plane (I know, finally!) and flew across the planet to San Francisco, California. It was, in my opinion, the best two weeks of my life. I have so much to say about it that I don’t know where to begin – until I […]

⚠️ how to get my attention

(There’s quite a bit of preamble in this post before I get to the answer – just scroll down past the hot dogs if you’re too busy for the backstory!) I have a happy problem. I have over 10,000 Twitter followers. I’d like to think that I’d like to meet every last one of them. […]

📱 screentime

I had a large amount of screentime as a child. And if I could go back in time and have a do-over, I would have liked even more screentime. If I had replaced my entire school life with screentime, I sincerely think I would be 10x to 100x more powerful. “So Visa what about when […]

👯‍♀️ make friends

I’ve kind of developed a name for myself as “the friendly guy”. My book is titled FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD. I like to go on the Internet and make friends. — 1 — You can spend years arguing with idiots, or you can spend years making friends. The idiots aren’t going to be there for you […]

🕸 VV’s memex – a map of directives to live well

I saw a picture of “Bay Area Memespace“, and for some reason I felt compelled to put together my own “@visakanv memespace”. It’s not exactly the same thing, but it’s basically a bunch of repeated motifs in my thinking and writing over the years. It might be accurate to call them directives. Anyway, when I […]

👫 relationships are challenging + a lot of work

Preamble: Hello everyone! This post has been getting shared a little bit, so I thought it might be worth taking some time to put together a bit of context? This blogpost is basically a “cleaned-up” or “unrolled” post of 5 of my Twitter threads. I put this together because I think it’s a useful thing […]

💃🏾 flirting is about signalling interest with plausible deniability

What I tell my nephews: flirting is basically this – give moderately strong signals of interest with plausible deniability (for you) and outs (for her), and then be attentive for returned signs of interest and riff off of that. If she plays with you, you can ask her out. It’s not actually that complex, any […]

#StrugglePorn – is it painting a false picture?

good conversation started here with Nat & Gary I’m not personally a fan of Gary’s overall brand, but I appreciate his willingness to engage and listen I think part of the mess is– there’s no generalizable advice that works for everyone; different people need different things I’ve personally experimented with several different attitudes and perspectives […]

🍱 I used to be a picky eater

I saw somebody make fun of picky eaters on Twitter, and I felt compelled to write about my own experiences. I was like this myself (picky eater) until I enlisted in the army and had no choice but to eat unfamiliar food or starve. Then I decided to teach myself how to food, and it […]

🚥 a system can only be improved at its tightest bottleneck

I’ve been thinking a lot about Tiago Forte’s point about bottlenecks – that the only meaningful improvement you can make in any system is at its tightest bottleneck. Progress at the second tightest bottleneck is unhelpful – you either just add extra stress on the tighter bottleneck ahead, or create capacity that goes unused. A […]

😈 sinister connotations allow people to be assholes with plausible deniability

I like words. It’s a big part of why I’m a writer. I like everything about them. Here are some interesting things about words: (TLDR if you’re too busy to read this: words are complex, multi-faceted, mean different things to different people, have multiple layers of meaning, and have a lot more power behind them […]

a list of some of my twitter threads

🚨 UPDATE: My book FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD is out! Buy it now: gum.co/friendlynerdbook Hello! I’m @visakanv, my friends call me Visa. I’m a 30yo Singaporean “digital native” who grew up on the Internet, writing prolifically across many mediums. I’ve gotten a bit of a reputation for my Twitter threads – check out Aaron Lewis’s post […]

🐉 Drogon vs Balerion size comparison

The fun thing about this post is I basically cobbled it together out of my own frustration at not having a simple, easy, straightforward answer. I found the answers in youtube videos, but I didn’t want to have to watch the whole video to find the answer. It doesn’t particularly fit with the rest of […]

🔬 a list of predictions, to test my understanding

Preamble Originally on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9325637  It’s always interesting to look at old predictions– there was that Newsweek article that predicted the Internet was never going to be a big deal [1] (amusing because now Newsweek is online-only), and there were all the negative comments on the launch of the iPhone. [2] Also I believe Drew Houston’s […]

🤯 ideas that expanded my mind

Disorganized notes. (Revisiting this again in 2023… I remember doing a twitter thread in maybe eigen’s replies… this could be a pretty great youtube video actually) The scale and scope of the universe Voyager 1’s Pale Blue Dot Neil Tyson’s Most Astounding Fact (we are in the universe, yes, and the universe is also in […]

⛰ one must imagine Sisyphus LOL-ing

Life, particularly in modern civilization, is an absurd circus. We’re all clowns living in boxes trying to amuse ourselves with elaborate games in the face of inevitable death and meaninglessness. What’s additionally absurd is that we go through a lot of trouble to avoid facing up to this fact. We avoid discussing it with children […]