Substrate

Imagine reading a story titled “The Relentless Pursuit of Booze.” You would likely expect a depressing story about a person in a downward alcoholic spiral. Now imagine instead reading a story titled “The Relentless Pursuit of Success.” That would be an inspiring story, wouldn’t it? Maybe—but maybe not. ​ They (and sometimes I) would put off ordinary delights of relaxation and time with loved ones until after this project, or that promotion, when finally it would be time to rest. But, of course, that day never seemed to arrive. ​ Unfortunately, success is Sisyphean (to mix my Greek myths). The goal can’t be satisfied; most people never feel “successful enough.” The high only lasts a day or two, and then it’s on to the next goal. Success addicts giving up their habit experience a kind of withdrawal as well. […] Olympic athletes, in particular, suffer from the “post-Olympic blues.” […] They talked of virtually nothing but the old days. you are not going to find true happiness on the hedonic treadmill of your professional life. You’ll find it in things that are deeply ordinary: enjoying a walk or a conversation with a loved one, instead of working that extra hour More effective is simply to start showing up. With relationships, actions speak louder than words, especially if your words have been fairly empty in the past.

These metaphors make it hard for us to think of time as something to protect, care for, or cultivate. Time-to-yourself is often the exception rather than the rule. We usually don’t think twice about the design of [calendars] because they’re the invisible “water we swim in.” But their default settings/visualizations are shaping how we treat our time and others’—for the worse. Escaping the Gregorian grid They’re what designers call desire paths or free-will ways: “paths and tracks made over time by the wishes and feet of walkers, especially those paths that run contrary to design or planning. When we question the assumptions that are built into our tools, we can think more clearly about how they’re influencing us and how we can make them better.

I asked everyone what a successful outcome for them would look like…and what they would focus on, if they were doing my job. I want to gain some understanding of the choices that were made before I was employed at the company, but not to make any judgements about those choices. I might not necessarily be the smartest engineer in the room, and that’s OK. I know it takes a mixture of skill sets to build a great product. One manager admitted to me she was itching to see results, but admired my ‘maturity’ to do thorough research first.

After each draft, I found myself asking "...why?," and I scratched them out and started over. but the truth is that that's not really what's occupying my mind these days…so, this month, as with every month, I'll give you what's actually on my mind. It's August now, and I have so few memories of doing anything this year. I've had a lot of group chats, FaceTime calls, phone calls, video calls, and even a few trips out of town, but those memories all feel translucent somehow, like I could put my hand right through them.

Quiz bowl, like any good hobby, was something to center a community around and that community brought knowledge and fun to so many people.

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Highlighted practically all of this, but two I want to resurface for myself: You cultivate a culture of giving credit where and when it’s due. You allow and support your people to make their own decisions within the wide guard rails you’ve helped create, even when it’s not what or how you would choose.

280 is my entire baby life compressed into four lanes — my path to independence, my reliable commute, my refuge in restlessness and heartache.

personal writing is very scary! i hesitate to do it because it’s really easy to fall into the trap (at least i think it’s a trap) of self-narrative — constantly writing about Who You Are and How You Came To Be, constructing these self-reinforcing loops of story and definition around your own brain…but i am starting to think it’s ultimately limiting, even deceptive, when it comes to actual growth and self-awareness.

turns out most people who actually build things are thoughtful and sincere, and very few of them give a single shit about whatever bad takes are circulating VC twitter that day.

listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. Think how the friends that really listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius as though it did us good, like ultraviolet rays. This is the reason: When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life. You know how if a person laughs at your jokes you become funnier and funnier, and if he does not, every tiny little joke in you weakens up and dies. Well, that is the principle of it. It makes people happy and free when they are listened to. And if you are a listener, it is the secret of having a good time in society (because everybody around you becomes lively and interesting), of comforting people, of doing them good. Who are the people, for example, to whom you go for advice? Not to the hard, practical ones who can tell you exactly what to do, but to the listeners; that is, the kindest, least censorious, least bossy people that you know. It is because by pouring out your problem to them, you then know what to do about it yourself. When we listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We are constantly being recreated. Now there are brilliant people who cannot listen much. They have no ingoing wires on their apparatus. They are entertaining, but exhausting, too. I think it is because these lecturers, these brilliant performers, by not giving us a chance to talk, do not let us express our thoughts and expand; and it is this little creative fountain inside us that begins to spring and cast up new thoughts, and unexpected laughter and wisdom. That is why, when someone has listened to you, you go home rested and lighthearted.

Math, very broadly, is developed for two purposes: to better understand reality, and to better understand the math we’re using to better understand reality. There is likely a connection between that problem and a mathematical abstraction. If you can identify the corresponding abstraction, you can leverage what we mathematically know about those abstractions to radically simplify your problem. If you’re lucky, you can even reduce it to an already solved problem.

A fresh webcomic stuffed with absurdity, sprinkled with friendship, and topped with buckets of fun!

These wrongs are part of why I talk about my practice the way I do - I want to “bring more rigor to people’s curiosity.”

(Dropbox mirror: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3k81gi7m03m72ua/Follow%20your%20heart%20%E2%80%94%20with%20caveats.pdf) The longer you sit and theorize the further you get from actually finding the answer. You need to get into the brute force business. And that’s something that I had to learn first-hand. One of the ways I’ve been able to tell if I’m doing something primarily out of a sense of obligation to someone else is to use the “relief” test: I imagine that the other person came to me and said, “I don’t think we should do this anymore.” If my anticipated reaction to that event is a sense of relief, then I know I’m holding on for the other person. If my anticipated reaction is sadness or regret — then I know there’s something else going on.

A little bit of fear is motivating. It doesn’t mean you're scared. It means you’re smart. I didn’t try to push the stress out of my mind. It felt right to be anxious about an interview, to me, it signaled that I cared. Care is an essential part of doing anything worthwhile. I also owe it to my partner at El Cap to do my best work, over communicate, admit mistakes openly, celebrate wins, and reflect on how we can improve together.

Constructing proof is an art, checking them is a science. Making a distinction between the statement of a theorem and the proof is important. It means that if we have a proof of P, we can make a proof of Q. It is a function from the proofs of P to the proofs of Q. It is a function sending an element of P to an element of Q. It is a term of type P → Q. …This is why in the natural number game we use the → symbol to denote implication.

Tied up in patience is also setting healthy boundaries, and sometimes impatience is an expression of enforcing those boundaries. Let me start by validating what I suspect you already know: … “A lot of people’s pain comes from not being able to accept the story that they’re in.” My second piece of advice is to give yourself the space to mourn, …it’s okay if it takes some work to move forward.

Here in America we would rather a business swoop in to save the day, instead of look closely at ourselves and the qualities that the virus has latched onto. The qualities that are in such short supply today; trust, honesty, courage.

When it comes to early drafts, this is often the only editorial guidance I need.

And yet it somehow got me out of a rut, because here I am. Blogging. And remembering I do have a voice, and thoughts to share.

A long time afraid of the filigree of light, what you imagine to be the wing of a bird cleaving your face, air on your eyes before you can shut them. It's the only thing you see. It's the kind of wick you cannot lick your fingers to put out. --- the filigree / of light

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Product-minded engineers like to understand the "why?" behind all things. Why build this feature for the product, why not the other one? ​ Product-minded engineers like talking with people outside engineering, learning about what and why they do. They are smooth communicators, making it clear they're interested in learning more about how other disciplines work. I frequently see them grabbing coffee, lunch, or doing a hallway chat with non-engineers. ​ Juggling both the product and engineering tradeoffs and the impact of each is a unique strength product-minded engineers have. ​ After rollout, they still actively engage with product managers, data scientists, and customer support channels, to learn how the feature is being used in the real world.

I typically engage students in this model by asking them to draw their own Comfort/Chaos Circle. This is a great activity to get students to check with themselves and communicate where they are with me.

it can be a difficult transition from essential to adjacent. ​ This transition requires learning to deliberately create space for the team around you, and comes down to actively involving them in discussions, decisions, and ultimately substituting sponsorship for repeating the successes that got you to Staff in the first place. ​ When you make a key contribution, feel good about it, and then think about what needs to happen for someone else to make that contribution next time. ​ Be the one to take notes, this helps destigmatize note taking as “low status” and also frees up an alternative would-be notetaker to contribute more instead. ​ If you need a rule of thumb, keep a sponsorship journal and ensure you’re sponsoring others at least a few times a month – if you find yourself sponsoring less frequently than that, dig into what’s stopping you.

And social media is playing a role, allowing them to distantly observe people they once truly felt connected to, which opens up the gap between their wishes for those friendships and the more anemic reality ​ our lives are not as easily separated into pots that can be placed on separate burners. Extinguishing friendship has consequences for every other aspect of life. ​ As anyone who’s taken time out of the workforce to be a full-time caregiver knows, it’s not always easy to switch a burner back on after it’s been extinguished for a long time. ​ We’re more interested in resilience. You can’t stay truly connected without some level of misunderstanding or conflict, so the real Big Friendship goal is just to stay in it. Instead of pretending we won’t be challenged, we want the ability to bounce back and heal our inevitable wounds. ​ “Friendships don’t have the hallmarks,” Langan says. “They don’t have the milestones.” So it’s up to the people in the friendship to create them. ​ Langan says that another key to staying attached is to find verbal and nonverbal ways to tell each other you plan to be there in the future. ​ Usually the only way through it is to acknowledge it’s happening. And yes, it’s hard. ​ No one human can meet your every single emotional need.

of the foot’s silver prayer.