muizz
@ayokanme
We come and go, like ripples in a stream
muizz
ayokan.me
Recently I’ve gotten a lot of inbound from new grads asking for career advice, so I wrote down a list of things I wish I’d internalized sooner.
The key thing: being precocious has an expiration date. Threading the note in its entirety: https://t.co/dW7DAcmyng
Timeless advice:
You need to be good, not good for your age
Be wary of personal mission creep, both IRL and online
Prioritize finding friends and collaborators you'd like to have in your life for a long time
Avoid chasing the red herrings of success
Interesting life paths are generally non-repeatable
Keep your standards everything—but especially for your own conduct—high
Own your mistakes
Forgive your parents, and get to know them. Especially if you are the child of immigrants
Embrace commitment in work and personal matters
Mutual obligations are a gift—cherish them and run towards them
Take your work seriously, but yourself less so
An unofficial history of forms | fdiv.net
fdiv.net
Cognitive Revolutions and Agency
A good passage in continuation of the note on collective imaginations.
Responsibility that should be borne by an individual is dissolved amongst a group, who rely on the process of deliberation, passing on the responsibility to the organization.
Excerpt: “Committees are commonly used in our society because they create the illusion of avoiding risk. They are a wonderful device for avoiding responsibility while making the institution seem more rather than less accountable. Modern institutions have overloaded on actual risk while fleeing the appearance of it, especially if you count “failing at core mission” as a risk. Such aversion to the appearance of the unusual can’t be justified on economic grounds. Rather, it is a socially driven aversion.“
Interesting analogy for creating conditions for 10x work:
Limit drag. Reduce interruptions by working in extended periods of focus work.
Maximize thrust. Fill focus time with primarily long-duration tasks.
The reasoning is that the work that is highest impact typically takes a lot of reasoning / requires a lot of implementation detail. Minimizing distractions while doing such work allows you to do more of such work. You get marginally better at doing such work over time.
Leverage and Influences
This talks about value capture by focusing on the most critical point of leverage
Redefining Drone Control with Thrust Vectoring?
Mathieu Bresciani’s thrust vectoring drone highlights the potential of the technology in drones. Powered by @PX4Autopilot, this single-ducted fan design demonstrates impressive control and maneuverability.
Thrust vectoring’s emergence in UAV technology could offer improved stability and agility for ... See more
These aren’t sculptures, they’re maps of water. Navigators from the Marshall Islands made ‘stick charts’ to record wave patterns in the sea, treating the ocean as terrain—the shells indicate islands. Their methods and skills are the most advanced of any known for ‘reading’ water
It seems obvious in hindsight…
Island chains in the middle of the Pacific cause predictable disturbances in ocean currents. If you listen carefully, you can find the source of the perturbations.
Yep, this goes for just about everyone. The CEO of that hot shot new company that everyone loves? He’s probably never run a company before. That director who just started managing other managers? She’s probably only managed individual contributors before. We are all constantly being asked to step up to new challenges and help lead. This is just as ... See more
Makinde Adeagbo • Nobody Knows What They’re Doing
So there are fundamentally two mindsets about the future. A pessimistic one where we see the Earth as finite in resources and conclude that we must limit ourselves. And an optimistic one where we see the Earth as finite in time and conclude that we must grow our knowledge towards infinity. The former mindset is not only uninspiring but will ultimat... See more