Hello, readers,
I say we dive right in this week. Live from New York, it’s Tuesday Morning.
Those of you who’ve proffered feedback, thank you very much! I’ve noted your remarks concerning the long-winded nature of the posts. I’m not really able to pivot this cruise ship, but it is a trend I’m forced to acknowledge. That said, but there’s a lot to get to, and not all that much time to do it in— so let’s synchronize our watches.
Mine (or, more accurately, the beginning of my set of alarms) has been set for 3:40 a.m. these weekdays; my roommates, suffice it to say, are not entirely pleased with me joining the crew team. My back is sore, my hands are beginning to blister, and it’s been barely a week. It’s great.
I estimate that practice is probably four hours a day, fully loaded, and the time that’s being fed into that endeavour is coming from sleep. Past!Orion, to give him some credit, expected this might be the case, anticipating the negative effects— as Present!Orion, soon to subsume again into the past, here’s my advice to you, Future!Orion: please, please find some way to sleep more.
That time estimate doesn’t include work outside scheduled practices, either, which I’ve been trying to do a few times a week— so it’s not everything, but it is a very real chunk of schedule to finagle. So what are the components of that sink which I’ve been redistributing? Let’s quickly go down the list:
1 —3:40-3:55— wake up, misery
2 —3:55-4:05— panic, change, hustle to subway
3 —4:05-4:25— invariably wait for the subway
4 —4:25-4:45— ride the subway
5 —4:45-4:55— sprint to garage
6 —5:00-8:00— drive out, practice, drive back
7 —8:00-9:00— breakfast & subsequent shattering of porcelain
8 —9:00-9:45— commute back to Brooklyn
9 —9:45-10:00— shower, change
1, 7, and 9 I’m doing anyway, just a little earlier (and we’ll circle back to food in a moment.) Exercise (6) eats up a solid hour on the days I do it— which I try to do a similar number of times per week. So we’re left in our calculus with (2+3+4+5+8) + (⅔)(6) = our four-hour figure. That’s the time Future!Orion has two objectives for managing: find twenty-ish hours a week elsewhere for sleep, and use those four hours as productively as possible. It’s not an entirely new challenge —it has elements of high school sports, for example— but grappling with college’s expectations sometimes feels like whack-a-mole. So much damn stuff to do, and I haven’t yet developed an algorithm for ranking it, much as I pontificated last week about. (Don’t worry, though— TUB isn’t on the chopping block any time soon. As hostile as I’ve been to plumbing, I’m not going to take an axe to it.)
In addition to my exercise, I’ve also repeatedly written about my diet: the knock-on effects of early morning practice are my compulsion to eat a lot very early in the day— I’ve taken the week off from tracking my IF hours to focus on moving it further towards breakfast and lunch, and keeping that consistent. The end goal at present is sixteen hours: 8 a.m. - 4 p.m. Similarly, I’ve again tried a new flavor of Soylent: Cafe Vanilla, which I found a little sweet and gas-inducing; still, it was better than Mocha, carrying actual flavor and more pleasant to drink slowly. Not sure I’d put either, though in the same category as Cacao, which is trying to be more of a shake than a morning drink; it would feel disingenuous to grade them on the same scale. [Update:] Cafe Chai is, in my estimation, the best one yet. Very smooth, somewhat banana-y but mainly reminiscent of coffee, milk, and tea.
Upper: the author having erg’d a 2:05-split 5k; Lower: same, having lowered it to 2:01.
In short, I’m tired.
Ruminations
Last week, I wrote about moonshots; this week: the remainder of work philosophy I’m attempting to put together. In other words, the ‘boring’ fundamentals which allow for riskier bets. The stuff that’s much more likely, when we’re being honest, to have positive second-order effects. The one piece that I earmarked for this section (though in the course of writing this episode I’ve ended up linking stuff from James Stuber and Tim Urban, because it’s both good and applicable) concerned Marc Andreessen’s thoughts on education, so we’ll start there.
As immediately becomes obvious when reading my writing or —more directly— my Twitter bio, I’m a college student studying mechanical engineering. It’s the mostly accurate natural inference, then, that I’m agreed with Andreessen concerning choice of major: I want to develop concrete, technical, applicable skills. I deeply enjoy writing, but doing it in a structured setting breaks my brain a little, the job prospects are lower, and liberal arts is something that I can in large part replicate on my own time. The structure of school is useful, and it’s a complicated problem to unbundle, but that problem is much harder for building things than for writing them. For the latter, all I need —in theory— is an Internet connection.
That I’m in college at all is a difficult proposition considering those last few sentences, maybe, for Bryan Caplan or other similarly-minded thinkers. In the short- to-medium-term, though, I think it’s a good bet, and in the meantime, that’s all I’m concerned with. Whether the institution is still alive or viable in twenty to thirty years is in my opinion largely irrelevant; by and large, nearly nothing I do at the moment will matter at that point. I want to learn how to solve problems and build things at a deep, widely applicable level. There’s a clear best way to do that (in my circumstances, anyway,) even setting aside a credential’s signaling value.
Outside of class, though, how am I improving? Andreessen links this Scott Adams blog post, adding
“You should view graduating from school as just the beginning of your development of a whole portfolio of useful skills.
One of the single best ways you can maximize the impact you will have on the world and the success you will have in your career is by continuously developing and broadening your base of skills.
My favorite way of thinking about this is:
Seek to be a double/triple/quadruple threat.”
A specific combination he highlights several times throughout the post is coupling an undergraduate degree with an MBA: “I’ll hire as many of those people as I possibly can.” An MBA, for me, would be three-and-a-half years away —at the moment I’m working on shorter timescales— but both the general philosophy and the skills he cites make sense to me. I can’t be among the best in the world at anything; it’s extremely hard for me to see any viable path there. What I can be is highly effective in several different areas, a generalist as a path to maximizing any underlying potential for specialization. The mortar.
There are a lot of paths to that nebulous concept; mine is to not overthink it and try things. I’m applying for internships, spending as much time interacting with the business school as possible, and writing as much as possible. I’ve mentioned spending some time putting together a resume —which is all well and good— but it’s not everything, and focusing exclusively on looks-good-on-paper is fundamentally misguided. Most importantly, I’m trying to do this at speed, because it’s much harder to start again than to keep something up. My writing patterns demonstrate this; so too do the first few strokes necessary to get an ergometer going.
Understanding the challenge of getting started through the lens of chemical activation energy, as in this Farnam Street post; developing a procedure for addressing this initial state is crucial. For me, it varies: the mise en place for waking up in the morning is a packed backpack and a thermos of lukewarm coffee, while for writing it’s a full bottle of water and a favorite album. [Writing this post, though it’s not a deviation from my usual patterns and thus Music Report-worthy, it’s the Marshall Mathers LP.] These rituals help us get in certain states of mind, which are legitimately necessary things— but in service, it’s important to note, of some end. Particularly with creative work, it’s easy to mythologize productivity, easy to worship the process in and of itself rather than the end product. Romanticizing this doesn’t help anyone— working on our biochemistry does.
I think understanding, though, that there may be fluctuations is crucial, particularly if the underpinning components don’t hold constant. Huan Ng has written about the idea of sleep, energy, and mood cycles in a post that makes significant sense to me: these ups and downs will happen —that’s unavoidable— but they can be managed, alleviated, worked around. So, as much as possible, I strive to say consistent, as much as it’s the most difficult part of the work, managing my defaults as a substitute for supplying willpower. Jon Bell’s idea of Cadence frames this well, I feel: there’s no substitute for habit and routine —he, as well, touches on setting productive defaults— but goals can be useful inasmuch as they’re pipelines for better system-thinking.
Certainly, that reverse-engineering is critical for me to continue, keeping in mind Andreessen’s final point, referencing an Atlantic article about college students’ schedules:
“What do I mean? It's possible you got all the way through those first 22 or more years and are now entering the workforce without ever really challenging yourself. This sounds silly because you've been working hard your whole life, but working hard is not what I'm talking about.”
Reading that, it’s obvious what he is talking about. He’s talking about me, right now. I may be pre- product-market fit, but I need a path to get there, to justify the world’s continued investment in my existence, even considering the nearly-two-decades-old article’s assertion that “There have been no senseless bloodbaths like World War I and Vietnam” for the college generation. Forty people signed up to stab Caesar. I don’t want to be one of the seventeen who didn’t; I want to be the only one whose contribution made a difference.
Links
If you’re interested in being kicked in the butt yourself, or understanding why you, too, might want to obsess over just getting concrete things done, Dive In.
[Earmark] If you have the weird friendships the rest of us do, let Tim Urban enumerate them while introducing an interesting physical metaphor for social interaction in the delightfully-listicl’y-titled 10 Types of Odd Friendships You’re Probably Part Of.
[Earmark] The ever-thoughtful Aaron Lewis writes about a type of interactions everyone has but few people note: solved conversations.
[Earmark] A long, rambling conversation with a few concepts I find salient. Chiefly, the transcript title’s: The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking.
[Earmark] Some impassioned advice on making your own friends, dammit— proactively.
Music Report
Recently I listened to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories for the first time. It’s —in my estimation— a little overwrought, but it’s a strong album. Favorite tracks: Within, Instant Crush.
This fantastic reddit post inspired listening to a few Disney themes, particularly this one, as I repeatedly ran late to things I didn’t allot enough time to get to and imagined how happy and forgiving others would be when I got there.
Top Ten: YouTube Videos, because it was channels last week and I’m lazy.
Thank you, as always, for watching. If you have questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to shoot me a Tweet, Letter, or email. Maybe the ideal mechanism to avoid the plague of parasociality is a newsletter with single-digit readership! There’s only one way we can find out.
Best wishes,
Orion Lehoczky Escobar