why were you late?
Here’s a story that I often tell people, and it’s useful enough that it’s worth writing up to share with more people. I started my first real adult job in early 2013, working in marketing for a software company. I think both my ex-boss Dinesh and I would describe myself similarly: 22-year-old Visa was a […]
it’s just math
when I was at 50 or 500 followers if I said I was going to have 50,000, people wouldve said I’m arrogant. (I didn’t say exactly that, but I’ve had enough similar conversations to be sure.) it’s not arrogance it’s just simple math, managing psychology & solving for distribution ✱ Sometimes ppl who interpret me […]
seek excellent peers
Whenever people ask things like “your best advice in 3-4 words” etc, I always go with “seek excellent peers”. Because when you surround yourself with good people, they have a positive effect on everything else in your life. Some people find this directive too vague. “How?” Well the first thing is to evaluate what you […]
influences
Sometimes people wanna know who my influences are. It’s tough to assemble a perfect or exhaustive list, but here’s an attempt that I’ll update from time to time. When I was really young, I read Charlie Brown’s ‘Cyclopedia. I think it influenced some of my aesthetic sensibilities. More broadly, I read everything I could get […]
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 […]
📚 the library ethos
John Locke: “Books seem to me to be pestilent things, and infect all that trade in them… with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind that they have a way of dealing peculiar […]
🙏🏾 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 […]
🍀 the 4 kinds of luck
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” – apocryphal quote typically attributed to Seneca I’ve been thinking long and hard about luck for many years. I’ve done lots of experiments, big and small. I think I’m pretty decent at getting lucky. Some examples of me getting lucky: I’m sure I’m missing out lots of […]
➡️ 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 […]
💬 practice good reply game
There is an art to replying and commenting, and probably like 60-70% of people I’ve seen on the internet fail at it. The important thing is not to speak your mind, but to “support” the OP. You can support them by disagreeing well & you can “mis-support” them by agreeing stupidly. Every “utterance” (status, tweet, […]
👫 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 […]
🙏🏾 an oral history of my relationship with religion
Thought I’d write about my thoughts about religion, and how my perspective on it has changed from my childhood to the present day. I was raised in a Hindu household. We didn’t eat any beef. We went to the temples on special occasions. My mum had an altar with a pantheon of gods, and she’d […]
Politics and the English language [2016]
The following is my attempt to update George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language [1946] for modern reading. I’ve tried to follow his own principles to make his words sharper and clearer where I can. This is meant as a supplement to the original essay, not a replacement. English is suffering, and we’re not doing […]
⛰ 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 […]
🤝 how to build and maintain communities
This blogpost started out as a bunch of notes and links, and I found myself sharing it with people over and over again so much. Here are a list of things that I recommend reading if you’re interested in communities. Read about the evaporative-cooling effect by Xianhang Zhang – “If anyone can join your community, […]