The Unprofessional Boy #6
Sketches, Caesar, and Social Science
Hello, viewers. Here’s a Picture for you, if not a Place.
It’s not a usual one, maybe, because it’s another layer removed from reality. My cell phone camera has captured the pencil sketch, which is an approximation of the feeling of a specific moment. I’m a poor artist, and I’m a mediocre thinker. I’ve told a friend that I work with words, more than numbers or paint, and that feels closest to true. So those layers are maybe lossy, incomplete, even more so in a drawing I’ve made rather than a description I could muster. I’ll share my other attempt at elucidating this:
“it felt like a rare moment where I was actually centered. looked out of the boat and saw the picture straight out of a children's book, darkly wooded riverbed starkly splattered against the clean-cut sky; that was how I made it seem, anyway, dirty New Jersey.”
“Significant, I think, because I don't often look outward. sometimes painful to understand that everything around me was created by some worker not too dissimilar from me, and to square that with my own experience. this time, though, it wasn't. I was able to see it in its simplest”
“There was a feeling of ease I guess that sometimes can be hard to come by, given the endless complexity of our lives; I tried to represent that…”
Hopefully that makes sense; though I’ve ruminated about my past life in print, I’m never sure whether this sort of thought comes across with any utility. The saving grace here, I suppose, is that it’s not a newspaper. If it were, or something with any formality at all, we might as well call the upcoming section ‘Corrections’; as it is, we’ll rubber-stamp it Updates.
Firstly, I bought several new flavors of Soylent, mostly with the aim of committing to the bit in which I give quick reviews. Given that, I feel it’d be a shame not to share my thoughts. Let’s get one thing straight: there are no two ways about it; Original flavor is highly disappointing, and I can see why they branched out. It has no clear flavor, minus a very slight reminiscence of soap or bread. Vanilla, though, was a definite improvement: it has an extremely distinct (if slightly oversweet flavor.) I won’t stoop to Buzzfeed-style rankings, at least not until I gather a larger dataset, but it’s clear at which ends of the spectrum those choices will be going.
I’ve stopped my eating schedule— I experimented with shifting it earlier, but ultimately I don’t think it helps much with the intended purpose: to reduce my eating of unhealthy foods. If anything, the time compression sometimes caused me to eat an uncomfortable (though necessary) daily amount in a too-short stretch. I think I’m relatively conscientious when it comes to my diet, and that should be a simple enough heuristic; I shouldn’t be overcomplicating when there’s not a clear purpose.
Lastly, I’m doing away with the Music Report; I don’t think it adds much value (unless there’s a rousing disagreement from the email list,) and there’s not much I find interesting about the data. Maybe I’ll slice it in some interesting way for a future Ruminations or find some interesting patterns, and I’m sure I’ll continue to discuss music occasionally— but the section isn’t pulling its weight; it doesn’t deserve a bolded header for the time being.
(And yes, Past!Orion, you do manage to get a little more sleep this time around.)
With all that came before and all that follows constituted by ‘ado,’ let’s soldier on.
The most important thing in the vast majority of historical wars was the supply chain for your army. Caesar understood this, —De Bello Gallico is full of status updates regarding grain rations— as did Alexander the Great and anyone who ever carried out a siege. A consistent supply of food was often the determining factor in these conflicts. In the whack-a-mole game that constitutes modern life, with its varied deadlines and obligations, I often find it useful to compare this lens to the fundamentals I so often reference here. Both must be applied on a regular basis to receive any benefit and to maintain the morale of the forces in the campaign. Tired troops can still fight, but they won’t be as effective; we’re the same.
A different frame which I’ve continued to return to is the startup, particularly regarding resource management— but these analogies can feel incongruous despite their utility, because conquering territory and market share is about improvements, whether radical or gradual. Day-to-day life is often consumed by maintenance, by governing and by putting out fires, as much as we try to avoid it. One area in which they do apply, though, rather than productivity, is social engagement; it’s often harped upon that (in the United States, anyway,) there’s less personal interaction and more parasocial engagement, fewer indicators of connection and more time spent alone. It’s an area in which the majority of us aren’t looking to uphold what we already have.
We’re looking for growth, and that’s where the comparisons get more interesting. Along our axes, quality and quantity, the latter is easiest —in theory— to improve via one of two methods: use existing friends more effectively, or generate new friends. Either way, this necessitates creating new interactions, generally planning them; the approaches to this problem vary. The constant in that equation, though, is that it’s necessary to try, whether that’s conveyed via shouting and swears or calm rationalization. It’s a concept I’ve tried to take to heart more generally, accepting the indisputable fact that broadly, the default is that opportunities pass and come rarely. They need proactive effort to be properly developed.
The issue is that quantity isn’t exactly what we want in our day-to-day life; we want also to optimize for the best interactions possible, avoiding solved conversations and awkward, lingering friendships. Those are branches to prune from our decision tree, if at all possible; we want our relationships’ positions on our life mountain to correspond to their productivity and enjoyment.
I’ve elaborated before on Moonshot Theory, the belief that most people aren’t weird enough as a general matter of principle, and that for me one major sticking point is similarly-thinking friends; considering this even separate from other second-order effects, it’s clear that it’s an important problem. I’m trying to solve it gradually, following a few guidelines. Firstly, requests need to be specific. That makes them easier to respond to and less of an imposition to put forward. Secondly, to have weird friends, I (and, by extension, we) need to do weirder things. Thirdly, —and I’m repeating this again for emphasis— be proactive.
That’s a quasi-set of heuristics for managing our existing friends; for gaining new friends, I think those principles apply, but I’d like to propose another basic model. When we strengthen relationships, we’re asking for the reciprocator to contribute social capital as well— to see the value in a relationship and invest in us. We’re an unproven, slightly risky organization with the potential for outsize returns; what if we return to that startup mindset?
Paul Graham, in his post How to Raise Money, enumerates a set of basic rules for fundraising; below are a few which resonate with me in this instance.
“Don't raise money unless you want it and it wants you.”
Don’t force it.
“Get introductions to investors.”
Leverage your existing social network into ideal connections.
“Do breadth-first search weighted by expected value.”
Meet people who you think are cool; prioritize!
“Be profitable if you can.”
Being ramen-profitable in a social sense —i.e. secure, at ease, not desperate— helps.
“Be nice,” and “Don’t make things complicated.”
It’s really not all that hard to pitch yourself, particularly in these sorts of informal settings, or if you can indicate that you’re cool— sending signals that you have utility of some sort.
One little initial value-add that I think is neat: if you try and learn a lot of different things from various specific areas and look for the connections (in other words, use a multidisciplinary approach to thinking,) you can quickly find the things which overlap and inform each other. (One simple way to internalize this is using the example of music.) I’ve found that this is a pretty simple/achievable way to develop a decent level of expertise, and therefore being fairly high-percentile both at giving good feedback, and at having conversations in areas the other person specializes in.
Enough about other people, though; back to my
Work
Last week, I didn’t include this section for the simple reason that I was fairly overwhelmed, and I didn’t manage to get much done (in terms of end product, which I’m thinking should be what’s featured to the exclusion of standard homework, etc.) besides TUB #5. That, hopefully, shouldn’t happen again.
This week, I at least managed to crank out a book chapter —a slightly longer one, too!— over the course of a few days.
Links
I found this story by Zero HP Lovecraft to be striking and poignant, even if I couldn’t exactly place why: the green new deal
Relevant, maybe, to last week, is the idea that it all does or doesn’t tend to line up productively from bottom to top; in other words, All or Nothing Productivity: How Excellence Creates Excellence by Charles Chu
Similarly, I found this short summary of an Isaac Asimov profile to be nothing but compelling, particularly this section which mirrors my thoughts last week on flitting procrastination:
“One of Asimov’s best methods to keep the work flowing was to have more than one project going at a time. If he got writers’ block or got bored with one project, he simply switched to another project, a tactic which kept him from stopping work to agonize and procrastinate. By the time he came back to the first project, he found the writing flowed easily once again.”
[Earmark] Babak Nivi has his own advice for writing, delivered in the form of a list of elaborated bullet points, which I have recently found to be useful in my thinking: How to write like the great entrepreneurs.
[Earmark] The way in which Jeff Bezos uses writing as a tool within Amazon remains endlessly fascinating to me, as do so many things about the company; next week I’ll touch on How Jeff Bezos Turned Narrative into Amazon's Competitive Advantage
If you’re finding the wait until then difficult, maybe take a spin around the
Top Ten: Newsletters
Don’t forget this one, though; I’ve got to pump up my readership. Those are rookie numbers!
If you see something, say something— here’s my Twitter, or if you’re stuck in the sixteenth century, Letter. Alternatively, for the non-time-traveling, corporate suits out there, drop an email, and say hello for me when you see the Vice President of Marketing.
All the best,
Orion Lehoczky Escobar