Week 1154

I had an interesting conversation with my manager this week. She was giving me life advice about how to approach my early 20’s. She encouraged me to maximize fun and not care at all about how much things cost. Even to the extreme of taking money out of retirement accounts if I need to. I should explore new things and meet new people and spend as much time as I can with my friends. This is a special time where I will have the least dependencies in life and be in peak physical shape. I’m a bit skeptical about her take on retirement accounts but I agree with her general perspective of optimizing for life over money while I’m still young. I’ll hopefully have significantly higher income when I’m older so the little bit of money that I save now will be inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

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I didn’t do much focused exploration as I have in the past few weeks. I spent this week just trying to get my PR’s pushed on time and doing random stuff outside of work.

Here’s some of the random stuff I’ve been up to:

• Spent a bunch of time playing around with Midjourney. I learned about prompt parameters and discovered there is a /describe command that generates sample prompts based on an input image.
• Watched a ton of golf swing tutorials and spent a few hours at the Presidio driving range. I feel like my consistency is starting to improve and I’m not whiffing the ball as much.
• Bought a tennis racket and played with some Retool friends. They are significantly better than me but hopefully I’ll catch up to their skill level soon.
• Played a few hands of Tractor while listening to Chinese pop music.
• Came across this archive of high quality writing on the internet — https://www.readsomethinggreat.com/
• Watched a bunch of podcasts:
  • Sam Altman on the YC podcast talking about how to choose projects
  • Haseeb Qureshi with Scott Melker
  • Miles Grimshaw on 20VC
  • Emil Michael on 20VC
  • Emil Michael with Aarthi and Sriram

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I finished reading The Biggest Bluff by Maria Konnikova. I really enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it. I appreciate Konnikova’s storytelling of all the emotional highs and lows she went through. I had similar takeaways while learning poker myself but she articulated them much better:

• Poker is very similar to life in that both skill and luck play a big role in the final outcomes.
• People often don’t give enough credit to luck for the things that happen in their life.
• Realizing how much luck plays into life helps me be less emotional about bad results.
  • As long as I do my best to control the things I can control, then I don’t have to worry too much about the outcomes. Of course, it takes a lot of effort to optimize the things in my control and I can’t give up or become demotivated just because luck is unpredictable.
• Tilt is very real. One exercise from the book that I want to try is to reflect on situations where I acted irrationally based on my emotions. The goal is to identify what my emotional triggers are and create a rational plan for how to deal with them when they come up in the future.

Stories like this make me wonder if I should try playing poker full-time. I think it would be a fun exercise, but being a professional poker player is all about maximizing expected value, and this would certainly be a lower EV decision for me compared to staying in tech.