A major meme in tech circles - lots of good stuff recently about having agency, and just doing the thing.
LLMs in particular are rocket fuel for this idea - in 30min, you can just get a convo together to dive deeper and accomplish something, but with the bias of hallucinations present, be sure to check up with actual humans so you’re not off into the wilderness.
Pretty decent book on this idea
Rather than go through the “Front Door”, you end up going through the third door.
Very closely tied to things-that-dont-scale
Great example here from Ryen Russilo talking about how to get into media. Basically, see what niche needs attention, start a podcast, see if you can get media credentials, and then you’re starting to meet people.
One other point worth bringing up here is the idea of knowing what you want to do. For me, it’s easy enough to except I can do things, but knowing what specifically I want to do is a bit trickier. There a form of planning (the oft annoying 5-year plan comes to mind) that really is around thinking-better
Wrote a short note on this, but thought Patio11’s tweet on The Essay Meta gets to a bit of this too. You can just buy a domain name, have claude bang out some CSS and send it to a Thought Leader. It’s that easy!
Really liked this post from Daniel on Levelsio’s first project:
What Interior AI by @levelsio looked like in its first iteration.
No landing page, no login, no monetization, no marketing copy. Just drag & drop an image, and it generated some interior ideas with AI.
Then once people started using it, he added the paywall, and access control, and the credits system, and the landing page, and marketing copy, and the legal stuff, and so on.
The order matters.
Think there’s a lot of wisdom here.
Really good tweet thread about getting a job with Kalshi.
High level: saw a posting for Marketing & Stunt Man, decided rather than applying to go the world series and wear a lime green hoodie with “$YES” on it. All in, $5700 for tickets behind home plate, hotel, plane etc was $1000 so $6.7k all in. Lime green goes against the Dodger colors so you really see it.
MLB tiktok posted him twice, loads of views (1.3m + broadcast)
And then his twitter thread about it went mega viral, got him a bunch of offers. Super smart kid.
Money line:
“I proved I’ll actually DO the thing instead of talking about it in a deck, which was the whole point.”
– Similar story of doing things
In my 4th year of grad school I told my advisor I didn’t want to do Physics for the rest of my life (didn’t love it enough, and wasn’t good enough at it, to enjoy being a lifetime academic migrant, which is what I would have been) and he told me, ok, take your time, and spend the next year figuring out what you want to do.
So for a year, in the morning I wrote my thesis, and at night, in my row-house basement, I taught myself first hurricane research, because the Department of Defense was hiring on campus, and eventually wrote a paper on some esoteric modeling issue, but after three months I found the subject too boring, static, and bureaucratic .
Then I ran into a post doc who told me he heard a rumor that Wall Street hired physicists – But I didn’t know anything about banking, at all, as in even the difference between stocks and bonds – but I went to the library, found a pile of books on finance, and started reading them, and realized it had greater depth than I had thought. I also biked a few nights a week down to the continuing education school and sat in on evening finance classes, read the WSJ and FT every day, and even put together and tracked a play portfolio of commodities derivatives.
Eventually I realized that the American Mathematical Society listed all its members by geography, and even the institution they worked for, such as JP Morgan, and so I got the 1990 AMS almanac, wrote down all the Math PhDs I could find working in Wall Street banks, and began cold calling them – all from the library. They all answered, and all told me about their careers, and what I would need to know to get a job in finance. They wanted to brag, and all I had to do is set them off with a “How did you get to Wall Street?”
Then, based on suggestions by a few of them, I wrote a paper solving a pricing problem they were currently working on (something to do with barrier options), and used that to set up more interviews.
So for three months I would do weekly trips up to NYC, where I would take the early train from Baltimore, meet people in Manhattan all day, which morphed into official interviews, and then take the train back home at night. … He got 8 interviews! Just hop on the phone, do the work, and then show the people the work you did.
And another good one
I got waitlisted for my dream university so I flew there, walked into the admissions office and was like “you should let me in here’s why.” I was accepted a day later.
With an agreement. Hard to turn down people in person? Shows agency?