I read this wholesome post about how a husband and wife created a sense of community by starting to have coffee outside their home. Fast forward a couple of months, they now have regular local community events and a buzzing WhatsApp group. Reminds me of the Derek Sivers story about the dancing man and the first follower.
The concept of agency has been on the top of my mind for the last two to three weeks. If you want to read more about the concept, check out this amazing resource by George Mack.
One of the high agency things you can do is creating something and sharing it to the world.
I spend a lot of time coding. I want to have a creative hobby outside coding and have been thinking about this for sometime.
For now, I’ve narrowed it down to two things:
I’m comfortable with writing. Podcasting, not so much. It’s the opposite of who I am. I listen to many podcasts and I have always wanted to do one but something intrinsic always stops me.
I want to push myself and see if I can do things that are out of my comfort zone.
To be able to do that, I have to read and research for the initial bunch of episodes. I don’t want to have a situation where I start a podcast and have only one episode.
So this week, I spent much more time reading than usual and it was mostly books, which I’m extremely happy about.
Generally, I tend to read more blog posts and watch YouTube videos but the high value is usually in books and research papers.
Andrej Karpathy has this tweet on learning where he makes this point:
Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn’t have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that “10 minute full body” workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It’s not that the quickie doesn’t do anything, it’s just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn.
And he goes on to write:
So for those who actually want to learn. Unless you are trying to learn something narrow and specific, close those tabs with quick blog posts. Close those tabs of “Learn XYZ in 10 minutes”. Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don’t just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn.
One of the books I’m reading right now is The Anthology of Balaji by Eric Jorgenson in which he also makes the same point while going one step further:
The newest technical papers and the oldest books are the best sources of arbitrage. They contain the least popular facts and the most monetizeable truths.
Once you decide to create, there are a couple of things that can happen:
The first thing to remember is (as a reminder for myself): You are doing this for yourself. In the book Keep Going by Austin Kleon, he talks about daily practice:
The truly prolific artists have figured out a daily practice,,, a repeatable way of working that insulates them from success, failure, and the chaos of the outside world. They have all identified what they want to spend their time on, and they work at it every day, no matter what, Whether their latest thing is universally rejected, ignored, or acclaimed, they know they’ll still get up tomorrow and do their work.
I’m no artist, let alone a prolific one. But this thought process shields you from the outcome.
And if you are creating art that expresses a strong opinion, you will likely hear negative feedback. Balaji has some advice for this in the book The Anthology of Balaji:
But conflict is attention, and it’s very easy to just default into responding to negativity. This is partly because negativity is louder than positivity on the internet. Those who like what you’re doing will just hit the like button, but those who dislike it will send angry missives. To not get trapped in being reactive, you have to intentionally focus on the positive.
As I start making things, and as you do, there are two things to keep in mind to really standout:
1. Never go meta
People who start setting up a note taking system often create content about the note taking system instead of letting the note taking system help them in creating meaningful work.
I have to constantly remind myself to never go meta. This post is likely as meta as it is ever going to get.
2. Create something you want to be known for
Aaron Francis, in his talk at Epic Web Conference, talks about this.
You want to be known for a thing. You can do this in three ways:
The most effective way is #3 which is becoming known for doing a thing.
And when you become known for a thing, people will remember you first when they see anything related to the thing you are known for and send you those things. You become a magnet.
If you are, like me, looking to get started creating stuff, having high agency,and pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, I want to leave you with this line that Balaji says in his book:
To feel no hesitation to start small and no shame in dreaming big.
Dream big and take that first step. You can just do things.
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