Minsuk Kang 강민석

Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious... See more

Yes. I was nineteen or twenty. Harry Adams, who was the master of Trumbull College, said, “Do you want to come to this tea? This missionary from Japan is coming.” And so this nice white guy, who helped poor Koreans in Japan, came and gave a talk. There were about two of us in the entire room, and I couldn’t leave. He told the story about, I guess,... See more

Content creators are essentially banking on the assumption that they can be creative for years on end. It’s not always sustainable. I, for one, have hit many creative walls and have had periods with absolutely no ideas for what to create.

Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone who's done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.

I don’t have to care about algorithms if I have people who care about me. And I get people to care about me by first demonstrating that I care about them. Some people I’ve talked with over the years have said that this seems like “too much effort,” but I counter with “it’s effort that actually pays off over time, contrasted with... See more