the purpose of the story is to take a character from ignorance of the truth of the theme to embodiment of the theme through action

Usually we think of an idea. And that’s fine. But when you think of the idea the very next question you should ask is what central dramatic argument would fit really well with this? And ideally you’re going to think ironically.

Break that question down into smaller questions until you can actually answer it in one sitting. For example: “How can you blog more?” is too big a question. In this post, I want to focus on just “How do you get past having lots of ideas that you don’t turn into blog posts?” Make the question as small as you can. You can always write another blog post answering the next question, and the next, and the next.

When you find yourself getting stuck, wrap up there. That probably means that your question was too big to begin with. Break it down even further. Figure out the question that your blog post answers, and revise your post a little so that it makes sense. Post. You can follow up with a better answer later. You can build on your past posts. Don’t wait until it’s complete. Post along the way.

Pick one idea and turn it into a question. Pick the idea that you’re most curious about, perhaps, or something that you’re learning. Turn it into a question so that you have a focus for your writing and you know when you’ve answered it.

“Oh no! Now I have this huge list of unfinished ideas!” Don’t be intimidated. Think of it like a buffet – you can choose what you want, but it doesn’t mean that you have to finish everything.

Before you write a single line of code, start verifying that you can connect to the target audience and their understanding of the problem. If you can't write Why Hiring For QSRs Is Broken then you have absolutely no business trying to solve that problem. So write it.

Something big is finally coming together: the initiating forces behind great storytelling are extremely simple. You just focus on those and they in turn take care of everything else:Blow your own mindThink of yourself as smiling ear to ear

Think of yourself as smiling ear to ear

ason exudes charisma. This is the state of projecting three qualities at once: confidence + joy + love for your audience. When you embody all three, you put listeners at ease. Because they feel embraced by your warmth. They feel like you want them to be there. And when that happens, your thoughts flow into listeners’ minds without friction. Listeners lower their guards and judgment. They're no longer focused on your eccentricities, insecurities and weird hand movements. Instead, they’ve opened their minds to you. Like hypnosis.

I was so preoccupied with keeping a list of ingredients that I missed the most important thing: Just blow your own mind. Then the rest falls into place.

One way I leverage duping quickly is to build a scratchpad slide at the start of my slide deck. It has big chunks of things I might use later in the deck. Here’s a quick example of one:

Here’s all that you need to know: you can’t go too big, use a ton of contrast, don’t use many words, and choose a solid font. More than anything else on this entire site, doing those four things right will put you in the top 10% of speakers out there.

I usually don’t get much further than three tiers: top tier is the slide introduction to the section, the second bullet level is a slide and large point inside that section, and the third level of bullets tend to translate to multiple slides supporting the #2 level of points.

It depends on the talk, but I think generally most talks are best served if you can deliver them in three sections. It’s limiting, to be sure, but it creates a much more cohesive narrative if you can lay down your main argument with three distinct sections, each with supporting details.

The healthier you are, the more activities you can attend. 

Later on, when I asked him how he came to start his company SpaceX, the audacity of his answer startled me. “For a long time,” he answered, “I’ve thought that it’s inevitable that something bad is going to happen on a planetary scale—a plague, a meteor—that will require humanity to start over somewhere else, like Mars. One day I went to the NASA website to see what progress they were making on their Mars program, and I realized that they weren’t even thinking about going there anytime soon. “I had gotten $180 million when my partners and I sold PayPal,” he continued, “and it occurred to me that if I spent $90 million and used it to acquire some ICBMs from the former USSR and sent one to Mars, I could inspire the exploration of Mars.” When I asked him about his background in rocketry, he told me he didn’t have one. “I just started reading books,” he said. That’s how shapers think and act.

Enjoy the process. Enjoy the relationships you will develop along the way. Enjoy building something.

We want AI agents that can discover like we can, not which contain what we have discovered.

The benefits of Software 2.0

I make sure to attempt every project idea that can be done in two hours or less. Whenever I’m bored I look at this document and see if there’s something I haven’t tried yet, and I take a stab at it.

Every time I get an idea for a project (the idea can be as vague as, “this Twitter search gives funny results, build something with it”), I pull out my phone and jot it down in the document.

Reasoning in terms of deep versus shallow work isn’t the best framework for maximizing impact.A much more powerful framework is leverage, which measures the impact that you produce per time spent. The highest-leverage activities — the activities with the highest return on your time investment — may include deep work, but they also include logistical-style tasks such as planning, prioritizing, and coordinating your highest-impact projects. These logistical tasks might be shallower, but they can significantly amplify your impact.

A “concept handle” is a memorable noun phrase representing a complex, often abstract topic.

I used to not really like debugging. But I started being able to solve harder bugs, and now when I find a thorny debugging problem it’s way more exciting to me than writing new code. Most of the code I write is really straightforward. A difficult bug is way more likely to teach me something I didn’t know before about how computers can break.

Understanding the structure of the system I’m trying to debug and what some of the common failure modes are has been really indispensable to me.

Feature vectors are the equivalent of vectors of explanatory variables that are used in statistical procedures such as linear regression.

5 Every mathematician has only a few tricks    top A long time ago an older and well known number theorist made some disparaging remarks about Paul Erdos' work. You admire contributions to mathematics as much as I do, and I felt annoyed when the older mathematician flatly and definitively stated that all of Erdos' work could be reduced to a few tricks which Erdos repeatedly relied on in his proofs. What the number theorist did not realize is that other mathematicians, even the very best, also rely on a few tricks which they use over and over. Take Hilbert. The second volume of Hilbert's collected papers contains Hilbert's papers in invariant theory. I have made a point of reading some of these papers with care. It is sad to note that some of Hilbert's beautiful results have been completely forgotten. But on reading the proofs of Hilbert's striking and deep theorems in invariant theory, it was surprising to verify that Hilbert's proofs relied on the same few tricks. Even Hilbert had only a few tricks!