flâneur

Fatima Ali

2 followers · 11 following · 1005 views

on the atlas — 68

highlights — 174

  • If you cannot do great things, do small things a great number of times”.
    How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably
  • No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich”
    How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably
  • he best way to “success” is through consistency
    How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably
  • Now, as a disclaimer, I should remind you of the rule that anyone writing a blog post advising against X is himself the worst Xer there is. At work, I have a history of painful languished projects, and I usually have the most overdue assignments of anyone on the team. As for writing, well, I have been working on this little blog post, on and off, no joke, for six years.
    Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems « the jsomers.net blog
  • Being fast is fun. If you're a fast writer, you'll constantly be playing with new ideas.
    Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems « the jsomers.net blog
  • The prescription must be that if there's something you want to do a lot of and get good at—like write, or fix bugs—you should try to do it faster.
    Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems « the jsomers.net blog
  • Part of the activation energy required to start any task comes from the picture you get in your head when you imagine doing it. It may not be that going for a run is actually costly; but if it feels costly, if the picture in your head looks like a slog, then you will need a bigger expenditure of will to lace up.
    Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems « the jsomers.net blog
  • One way to tell a weak engineer in a discussion thread about some problem is to see who is bringing in specific facts about how the system currently works, and who is making purely general recommendations that could apply to any system.
    What can strong engineers do that weak engineers can't?
  • a weak junior is often given more opportunity to learn, because it’s socially acceptable for them to not know things. A weak senior has to conceal their lack of knowledge and learn in secret, which is much harder.
    What can strong engineers do that weak engineers can't?
  • Ironically, while people like this exist at almost all seniority levels, you’re more likely to encounter weak engineers in senior roles.
    What can strong engineers do that weak engineers can't?
  • People with this ambition tend not to care about what others think, they eliminate the noise and are often using their internal compass when deciding what to build, who to work with, what they want to do with their lives etc.
    Brooke Joseph
  • People with authentic ambitions tend to care a lot more about actually getting the work done.
    Brooke Joseph
  • what turned out to be my biggest blocker was a mental barrier — getting ok with being a beginner again.
    How I became a machine learning practitioner
  • So I’ve come to believe that becoming more willing to stare into the abyss is one of the most important things you can do to become a better thinker and make better decisions about how to spend your life.
    Staring into the abyss as a core life skill
  • I noticed that it wasn’t just Drew who is great at this, but many the people whose work I respect the most,
    Staring into the abyss as a core life skill
  • The first time I learned what really exceptional abyss-staring looks like, it was by watching Drew, the CEO of Wave.
    Staring into the abyss as a core life skill
  • I want to look back at myself two years prior and say confidently that my life is twice as good in the metrics that matter—that I am twice as smart, twice as capable, twice as excited to be alive. I want my friends to be two times as close and as cool, my projects to be twice as renowned, my expected value to follow not some sorry sigmoid but an ebullient exponential (that dictionary reading hasn't quite left me yet, has it?).
    On Doubling
  • To be sure, not all posts I wrote during this stretch are good. Some days I really did not want to write, and likely would have quit without external pressure. But I learned just how good of a forcing function publishing a post every day is. It enabled me to explore more ideas than a typical month of one or two posts, and now I have many more ideas I’m excited to explore.
    A Retrospective on 30 Days of Daily Blogging + Updates
  • “A lot” doesn’t mean 10% more, 25% more, or even 100% more. People who attain fluency practice about ten times as much as the typical person who is officially “learning a foreign language.” Sure, the quality of practice matters, too; immersion is the best method of foreign language acquisition. But unless you’re willing to give ten times the normal level of effort, fluency is basically a daydream.
    Do Ten Times as Much - by Bryan Caplan - Bet On It
  • Hobbies and personal interests should be cultivated deliberately, as they often provide the texture and meaning that make our finite weeks feel richer. Starting a creative practice or learning an instrument at 25 means you could have decades of enjoyment ahead, while the same decision at 45 comes with a different psychological weight.
    Your Life Is More Over Than You Think - Human Invariant
  • Don’t spread yourself too thin, but realize that there are unexpected returns to being a polymath and deriving cross-pollination insights. Choose 2-3 areas to do ten times as much in life. Deliberate practice over 2-3 areas for even a few weeks will put you at a massive advantage over the vast majority of the population. Compounding is still greatly underrated in practice, even though everybody knows about it.
    Your Life Is More Over Than You Think - Human Invariant
  • Intelligence is getting what you want out of life, and most people complain they aren’t getting what they want without any evidence of even a modicum of effort. You can get ahead of basically everyone in any field by putting in an ounce of effort. No one is even trying.
    Your Life Is More Over Than You Think - Human Invariant
  • Half the time I look back on my own decisions and cringe. But when I zoom out, the only choices I regret are the ones where I let fear or other people’s opinions shrink my bet size. The moments I went all-in still feel like the right calls.
    Career Advice That Doesn’t Suck
  • When talking to mentors and people older than myself, they almost universally cite that they wish they had taken more risk. Often, this sense of regret manifests itself in leaving their previous job sooner, getting divorced earlier, or moving cities earlier.
    Career Advice That Doesn’t Suck
  • Take more flights. Relocate to a frontier hub for a few months when you're young, at high energy and at peak fluid intelligence. You might not have the financial capital, but you can often compensate by convincing benefactors, participating in fellowships, or raising VC money.
    Career Advice That Doesn’t Suck
  • Leave your cushy job and relocate your family from California to an abandoned island in Malaysia to start a new YC for dark talent (and maybe a new country).
    Career Advice That Doesn’t Suck
  • There are thousands of writers who write 1000 words per day on useless marketing copy, thousands of senior engineers pushing 1000 lines of code per day tweaking button sizes. Most will spend their life not really working, getting anesthetized, never expending any of their life bankroll.
    Career Advice That Doesn’t Suck
  • Writing on the internet to sharpen my thinking and increase the surface area of serendipity. I write across a variety of topics and personas which allows me to have edges and peer groups at the frontiers of different subject areas. Take the initiative to meet people in person and learn about their production functions.
    Career Advice That Doesn’t Suck
  • Reading long-form books regularly, with 1-3 intensive subject deep dives per year on specific topics or classics. I schedule reading during lighter work periods since books become a major distraction during my high-output deep work sessions.
    Career Advice That Doesn’t Suck
  • This has enabled me to prevent myself from (1) being anesthetized by my job and becoming complacent, and (2) giving myself full latitude to work on projects in-depth, not as perpetual half-assed “side projects”
    Career Advice That Doesn’t Suck
  • Working multiple jobs for a period of time and using the earnings to have a period of unemployment (what I’m doing currently).
    Career Advice That Doesn’t Suck
  • Do STEM. It’s LLM-resistant. LLMs can retrieve and remix information, but do you know what to do with them? Like the dog chasing the car, what now? STEM teaches you that. It teaches you to think, to reason, to act. It gets you from information to wisdom. But only after you've mastered the foundations.
    What I'd do as a College Freshman in 2025
  • Explore random paths with focus changing questions: Why? Why not? How can I change that? How can I prove/disprove that? What am I missing here? What does this remind me of? What’s the best/worst-case scenario? Which strengths of mine can I apply? How would I describe this to my uncle? If I wanted to make a big mistake here, what would I do? What do I need that I don’t yet have?
    Book Review -- Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content
  • Your best thought comes embedded in chunks of your worst thought. Write a lot. Think quantity. If you temporarily run out of things to say, babble onto the page. Write as quickly as you can type, and continue to generate words without stopping: Your mind will eventually give you its grade A unadulterated thoughts.
    Book Review -- Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content
  • Your best thought comes embedded in chunks of your worst thought. Write a lot. Think quantity.
    Book Review -- Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content
  • If you think without writing, you only think you're thinking. --Lamport
    Book Review -- Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content
  • getting a 100 ideas is easier than getting 1. "When you need an idea, don’t try for just one.
    Book Review -- Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content
  • When you produce something every day, you never feel stuck.
    Optimize for momentum
  • The other reason my writing ends up being simple is the way I do it. I write the first draft fast, then spend days editing it, trying to get everything just right. Much of this editing is cutting, and that makes simple writing even simpler.
    Write Simply
  • Plus it's more considerate to write simply. When you write in a fancy way to impress people, you're making them do extra work just so you can seem cool. It's like trailing a long train behind you that readers have to carry.
    Write Simply
  • Self-actualization means, at least partly, that you have designed a life that fits you, that allows you to express your human potential.
    Becoming perceptive - by Henrik Karlsson
  • Life is short (or so I’m told) so why waste it doing something dumb? It’s easy to start working on something because it’s convenient, but you should always be questioning yourself about it. Is there something more important you can work on? Why don’t you do that instead? Such questions are hard to face up to (eventually, if you follow this rule, you’ll have to ask yourself why you’re not working on the most important problem in the world) but each little step makes you more productive.
    HOWTO: Be more productive (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
  • I had lived as if I realized it, but without knowing why. For example, I had avoided working for big companies. But if you'd asked why, I'd have said it was because they were bogus, or bureaucratic. Or just yuck. I never understood how much of my dislike of big companies was due to the fact that you win by hacking bad tests.
    The Lesson to Unlearn
  • When I was in college, a particularly earnest philosophy grad student once told me that he never cared what grade he got in a class, only what he learned in it. This stuck in my mind because it was the only time I ever heard anyone say such a thing.
    The Lesson to Unlearn
  • The first step is to have an explicit belief in change. People who fall victim to a monotonically increasing confidence in their opinions are implicitly concluding the world is static. If you consciously remind yourself it isn't, you start to look for change.
    How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
  • If a bunch of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, the first thing they'd do is form a union and renegotiate all the rules with the administration.
    What You'll Wish You'd Known
  • The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions it's too obvious to your brain that you're not doing anything with it, and you start to feel uncomfortable. If you want to measure how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment: set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think. You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books, newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a strong craving for distraction.
    What You'll Wish You'd Known
  • There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age.
    What You'll Wish You'd Known
  • A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad. [9] So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for the tiny number of good books.
    What You'll Wish You'd Known
  • Now I have enough experience to realize that those famous writers actually sucked. Plenty of famous people do; in the short term, the quality of one's work is only a small component of fame. I should have been less worried about doing something that seemed cool, and just done something I liked. That's the actual road to coolness anyway.
    What You'll Wish You'd Known