flâneur

Kelvin Zhang

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on the atlas — 5

highlights — 20

  • Go back further. Watch old movies. Read old books. Explore mediums that barely exist today- magazines, VHS tapes. When you tap into content outside your 'for-you' feed, an entire world opens up. Different output starts with different input.
    How to Be Different (Without Being Lucky)
  • Because the most important thing the chef knows that the cooks don’t is that real life and Grand Theft Auto aren’t actually that different. Grand Theft Auto is a fun video game because it’s a fake world where you can do things with no fear. Drive 200mph on the highway. Break into a building. Run over a prostitute with your car. All good in GTA. Unlike GTA, in real life, the law is a thing and jail is a thing. But that’s about where the differences end. If someone gave you a perfect simulation of today’s world to play in and told you that it’s all fake with no actual consequences—with the only …
    The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce — Wait But Why
  • These are the reasons I believe so many of the world’s most able people are stuck in life as Self-Loathing Cook, one epiphany short of the promised land. The challenge with this last epiphany is to somehow figure out a way to lose respect for your own fear. That respect is in our wiring, and the only way to weaken it is by defying it and seeing, when nothing bad ends up happening, that most of the fear you’ve been feeling has just been a smoke and mirrors act. Doing something out of your comfort zone and having it turn out okay is an incredibly powerful experience, one that changes you—and eac…
    The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce — Wait But Why
  • Because not only does it amp up our fear in general to “shit we botched the hunt now the babies are all going to starve to death this winter” levels even though we live in an “oh no I got laid off now I have to sleep at my parents’ house for two months with a feather pillow in ideal 68º temperature” world—but it also programs us to be terrified of all the wrong things. We’re more afraid of public speaking than texting on the highway, more afraid of approaching an attractive stranger in a bar than marrying the wrong person, more afraid of not being able to afford the same lifestyle as our frien…
    The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce — Wait But Why
  • To swing the balance, we need to figure out how to lose respect for the general public, your tribe’s dogma, and society’s conventional wisdom. We have a bunch of romantic words for the world’s chefs that sound impressive but are actually just a result of them having lost this respect. Being a gamechanger is just having little enough respect for the game that you realize there’s no good reason not to change the rules. Being a trailblazer is just not respecting the beaten path and so deciding to blaze yourself a new one. Being a groundbreaker is just knowing that the ground wasn’t laid by anyone…
    The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce — Wait But Why
  • When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
    The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce — Wait But Why
  • The thing you really want to look closely for is unjustified certainty. Where in life do you feel so right about something that it doesn’t qualify as a hypothesis or even a theory, but it feels like a proof? When there’s proof-level certainty, it means either there’s some serious concrete and verified data underneath it—or it’s faith-based dogma.
    The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce — Wait But Why
  • Stephen Hawking meant when he said, “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
    The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce — Wait But Why
  • It’s an unfortunate catch-22—we continue to think like cooks because we can’t absorb the epiphany that we live in an anomaly world where there’s no need to be cooks, and we can’t absorb that epiphany because we think like cooks and cooks don’t know how to challenge and update their own software. This is the vicious cycle of our time—and the secret of the chef is that they somehow snapped out of it.
    The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce — Wait But Why
  • People believe thinking outside the box takes intelligence and creativity, but it’s mostly about independence. When you simply ignore the box and build your reasoning from scratch, whether you’re brilliant or not, you end up with a unique conclusion—one that may or may not fall within the box. When you’re in a foreign country and you decide to ditch the guidebook and start wandering aimlessly and talking to people, unique things always end up happening. When people hear about those things, they think of you as a pro traveler and a bold adventurer—when all you really did is ditch the guidebook.
    The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce — Wait But Why
  • The chef says, “Ugh okay, here we go,” rolls up his sleeves, and does what he always does in these situations—he switches on the active decision-making part of his software and starts to go to work. He looks at what data he has and seeks out what more he needs. He thinks about the current state of the world and reflects on where his values and priorities lie. He gathers together those relevant first principles ingredients and starts puzzling together a reasoning pathway. It takes some hard work, but eventually, the pathway brings him to a hypothesis. He knows it’s probably wrong-ish, and as ne…
    The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce — Wait But Why
  • The difference between the way Elon thinks and the way most people think is kind of like the difference between a cook and a chef. The words “cook” and “chef” seem kind of like synonyms. And in the real world, they’re often used interchangeably. But in this post, when I say chef, I don’t mean any ordinary chef. I mean the trailblazing chef—the kind of chef who invents recipes. And for our purposes, everyone else who enters a kitchen—all those who follow recipes—is a cook. Everything you eat—every part of every cuisine we know so well—was at some point in the past created for the first time. Wh…
    The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce — Wait But Why
  • There are all kinds of tech companies that build software. They think hard, for years, about the best, most efficient way to make their product. Musk sees people as computers, and he sees his brain software as the most important product he owns—and since there aren’t companies out there designing brain software, he designed his own, beta tests it every day, and makes constant updates. That’s why he’s so outrageously effective, why he can disrupt multiple huge industries at once, why he can learn so quickly, strategize so cleverly, and visualize the future so clearly. This part of what Musk doe…
    The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce — Wait But Why
  • so now I’m in SF, at least for the next few months. I handed off my new york lease and got rid of all my stuff, and found a sublet here. rather than insisting that any one place is the place I’m gonna be for the next decade, I’m leaning in to being a bit untethered for a while. the end goal is still to find a place and community for the long haul, but I’m no longer insisting that I have to know where that place is right now.
    why I left nyc
  • In an age of infinite leverage, judgment becomes the most important skill
    How to Get Rich
  • my personal learning has been that the principal-agent problem drives so much in this world. It’s an incentives problem. I’ve learned that tit-for-tat iterated prisoner’s dilemma is the piece of game theory that is worth knowing the most. You can almost put down the game theory book after that.
    How to Get Rich
  • Learn persuasion and programming Nivi: To lay a foundation for learning for the rest of your life I think you need two things, if I was going to try and sum it up. One, practical persuasion and two, you need to go deep in some technical category, whether it’s abstract math, or you want to read Donald Knuth’s books on algorithms, or you want to read Feynman’s lectures on physics. If you have practical persuasion and a deep understanding of some complex topic, I think you’ll have a great foundation for learning for the rest of your life. Naval: Yeah. In fact let me expand that a little bit. I wo…
    How to Get Rich
  • Read the original scientific books in a field Now, there is an exception to this, which is where I was hinting with what things you actually do want to learn, which is, at some point there’s too much out there to read. Even reading is full of junk. There are actually things you can read, especially early on, that will program your brain a certain way, and then later things that you read, you will decide whether those things are true or false based on the earlier things. So, it is important that you read foundational things. And foundational things, I would say, are the original books in a give…
    How to Get Rich
  • And it takes a lot of work to build even small things. I don’t think the corner grocery store owner is working any less hard than Elon Musk, or pouring any less sweat and toil into it. Maybe even more. But for whatever reason, education, circumstance, they didn’t get the chance to think as big, so the outcome is not as big. So, it’s just better to think big. Obviously, rationally, within your means, stay optimistic.
    How to Get Rich
  • Pick Partners With Intelligence, Energy and Integrity You can’t compromise on any of these three Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy and integrity Naval: In terms of picking people to work with, pick ones that have high intelligence, high energy, and high integrity, I find that’s the three-part checklist that you cannot compromise on. You need someone who is smart, or they’ll head in the wrong direction. And you’re not going to end up in the right place. You need someone high-energy because the world is full of smart, lazy people. We all know people in our life who are really…
    How to Get Rich