astukari Newsletter #60 - The Most Important Question of Your Life
Hello there,
Well as it turns out I wasn’t in bed sick for finals week, because the COVID vaccine I mentioned last episode was the JNJ variant. Yup, it got canceled. Still, it’s been a pretty good transition out of school — each hour I no longer have to use working on school I use to work on projects like these instead, projects I’d honestly much rather be working on. Anyway, let’s get into it!
🔨What I’ve Been Making
Making Mistakes, Post-Internet - Making mistakes is as easy as it has ever been. But have the stakes for making them gotten bigger?
Taste is not Tech - People have long called Coca-Cola “The Immortal Company”. Why is that? Because it focuses on taste, not tech.
📚What I’ve Been Reading
The Most Important Question of Your Life - tl;dr: Are you in love with the result, or the process? Those in love with the result tend to have a lot harder of a time motivating themselves to get the work done in the first place. On the other hand, if you’re in love with the process, then you’ll probably get to your wished-for result regardless of what happens.
Concept-Shaped Holes Can Be Impossible to Notice - This is a rather frightening realization that makes me realize just how little we know about our own reality. Those without sense of smell think talking about how something “stinks” is a metaphor. Those without a mind’s eye think imagination is just remembering things in different orders. How many parts of your life do you think you have the same experience as others, but don’t actually? Do you and I see the same red, or do we think we see the same red? When do these concept-shaped holes stop becoming trivial, and start getting serious?
Nobody Cares - The wide majority of the world doesn’t care what you do. They don’t care what you write, what you create, what you do. So why not do it?
Conflict vs. Mistake - Here are two perspectives on… well, perspectives. People either perceive conflict with others (assume the worst) or assume others make mistakes (assume the best).
66 Years Ago, Roger Bannister Became a Legend - More specifically, 66 years ago Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile record, when no one else in history had. Athleticism is interesting — it ought to be an immutable process, much like how height hasn't really changed all that much in the past few centuries. But athletes are getting… better. Why? Is it better nutrition, better data, better something else? Can this growth continue linearly, or is it logarithmic?