Everything is black & white
“If you don’t work on important problems, it’s not likely that you'll do important work.” - Richard Hamming
There are two types of people in the world - the ones that follow the crowd and those that don’t. No one is born with either one of the personalities. They usually pick one and go along with it for the rest of their lives. Humans are very easy to comprehend.
Everything can be black and white. All your difficult decisions can be boiled down to a yes or no. Those who like to stay in the gray space are just not being honest with themselves. Being decisive is one of the hardest thing one has to do emotionally. But if you want to make bold decisions and move things forward, you have to be both decisive and honest.
I spent my entire first year in the university being insanely busy. Being busy is an incredibly easy thing to do but you don’t really want to do the easy things in life. Especially not when your time and cognitive output are on the line. Let me repeat it again - being busy is a VERY easy thing to do. All you need is 3 hours of sleep in a day, an illusion of being productive, and an unhealthy amount of caffeine. Actual productivity is tough to crack. Most people can’t sit down for more than an hour and be extremely productive. I haven’t figured out how to be productive yet but I have made exponential progress with my ability to differentiate between what’s productive and what’s just keeping me busy. It takes a lot of courage and honesty to tell yourself that everything you’ve done in your life so far is bullshit and it requires change. It’s difficult to accept that you’ve wasted time and potential. But I think it’s easier to be disappointed with your own actions than being disappointed with life itself.
Sam Altman’s essay “The Days Are Long but the Decades Are Short” talks about the importance of differentiating between being busy and being productive. The idea behind this completely changed the way I function.
I think the root cause of this problem is not having a vision in life. You know what the worst part is? - people fall into the trap of being busy when they are trying to tell themselves that they have something to chase after. When you have a vision, i.e. something you’re passionate about, then you won’t require any productivity hacks to keep you going. The sense of urgency to solve the problem would come naturally in that case. The popular opinion on finding your vision defines it as - “finding something that you’d want to do for the rest of your life”. I strongly disagree with that notion. We should have different visions for all of our projects and very frequently keep track of what we’re working towards. The half-life of any technical knowledge is 15 years. The technical world changes so rapidly. No way you should do one thing for the rest of your life.
here’s some math for this:
Productivity = Output/ Input
I like to assess productivity by comparing it to impact since there’s no use of doing something if it isn’t benefitting you or someone else.
I=ΔU×P
( I = Overall Impact, ΔU = improvement over the current state of the art (utility delta), P = number of people (or entities) affected by this change )
Combining impact with productivity:
for growing productivity, i like to compare how much more efficiently something can be accomplished using the new method compared to the old method.
The productivity for the old method:
Pold = Oold/Iold
Oold = Output using old method
Iold = Input using old method
Pold = Productivity using old method
The productivity for the new method:
Pnew=Onew/Inew
The difference in productivity (ΔP) would then be:
ΔP = Pnew−Pold
Finally the impact due to productivity change is:
I=ΔP×P
(P is the number of people affected)
maybe this was an insanely long way of saying - stop being busy, cut out the noise, and focus on finding what excites you the most.
Some topics that I am currently interested in learning more about:
Applied AI combined with robotics
Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF)
Quantum Computing
Poker. lol.
If you’re looking to be inspired, here’s some gold:
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering (Richard Hamming) both the book and the lectures are amazing.
One Giant Leap - Charles Fishman
live long and prosper :]