Friday Ideas 12/20: Stanley Kubrick on ideas and taste, Anthony Bourdain on enjoying the work, Kierkegaard on walking, microgrants and visas, Karpathy's advice for undergrads + more

Welcome to Weisser’s Multitudes.

Every other Friday I share a wide range of things I enjoyed in the last two weeks ranging from podcasts to articles, books, and music.

Curious to see what you think. If you enjoy any of the ideas in particular please let me know.

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“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”

- Richard Feynman

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Seems like your creative well has dried up? Here’s advice Elton John gave Chappell Roan:

“The advice he gave me was that the songs will come,” said Roan, adding that John spoke of the period after his first album. “He thought that he wouldn’t have the ideas, but they were absolutely there. He just had to let them come to him. So that’s a good reminder.” (source)

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Stanley Kubrick on the role of directors:

A director is a kind of idea and taste machine; a movie is a series of creative and technical decisions, and it's the director's job to make the right decisions as frequently as possible. Shooting a movie is the worst milieu for creative work ever devised by man. It is a noisy, physical apparatus; it is difficult to concentrate -- and you have to do it from eight-thirty to six-thirty, five days a week. It's not an environment an artist would ever choose to work in. The only advantage is has is that you must do it, and you can't procrastinate. (source)

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Anthony Bourdain on enjoying the work:

I suggested once to a maniacal barbecue professional that cooking well was not a profession, it was a calling. He laughed and went further: 'It’s an illness.' I knew just what he meant. You must like cooking for other people, even if you neither know nor like them. You must enjoy the fact that you are nourishing them, pleasing them, giving the best you’ve got." (source)

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Joan Didion developing as a writer through editing:

At the time, Talmey was more than 20 years into her writing career. Sensing Didion's eagerness to learn, Talmey would regularly give Didion practice exercises. Among others, Talmey would assign her to write a 300-word story, and when Didion submitted her 300 words, Talmey would tell her to pare it down to 50 words. “We wrote long and published short,” Talmey said, “and by doing that Joan learned to write.” Didion would recall Talmey telling her, “Run it through again, sweetie, it’s not quite there.” “Prune it out, clean it up, make the point.”

(source with even more interesting ideas)

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“Health and salvation can be found only in motion.”

Søren Kierkegaard’s 1847 letter to his sister-in-law who was often bedridden and suffering from depression:

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. Even if one were to walk for one's health and it were constantly one station ahead—I would still say: Walk! Besides, it is also apparent that in walking one constantly gets as close to well-being as possible, even if one does not quite reach it—but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Health and salvation can be found only in motion. If anyone denies that motion exists, I do as Diogenes did, I walk. If anyone denies that health resides in motion, then I walk away from all morbid objections. Thus, if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right."

Peter Thiel on maintaining close friendships

Shortly before graduating, I gave Peter a call for some advice about, among other things, relationships

‘How’d you manage to stay so close with so many college friends as you all got older and busier?’ I asked

‘Find a way to do business together’

(From Anjney)

Links and Ideas

• We launched the Merge Microgrant Guide — the v0 prototype has already helped people get >$100k in funding and this version is 10x better in every way.

• Big changes to H1-B from Homeland Security going into effect in January — deep dive into what it all means.

• My conversation with Cal.com CEO/Founder Bailey Pumfleet (YouTube / Apple / Spotify) — one of the fastest growing infrastructure companies in recent years.

  People are very willing to pay for things that they don’t want to tackle themselves.

  The thing which you’ll notice is whenever I pitch cal.com to customers is I almost always never say open source.

  

• The Cold Email Handbook — extensive and invaluable advice

• Fascinating AMA by a McDonalds franchisee

• Engineer by Day, Venture Capitalist by Night by Casey Caruso who just announced her new fund, Topology.

  I don’t think about my jobs as work. I think of them as structured ways to explore my interests.

• New essay by Michael Nielsen: "How to be a wise optimist about science and technology?"

• Tyler Cowen on how to read a book using o1

  The core intuition is simply that you should be asking more questions.

• Palmer Luckey’s revenge file folder

  

• I was just on a podcast talking about ODF, Merge, and more. YouTube / Apple / Spotify

  Our belief is that if you're super smart and ambitious and you are curious about the world, that no kid should be held back from being able to make progress because they have a thousand dollar barrier. (check out Merge for microgrants)

  We want to constantly be eliminating all of the barriers that are keeping people from making progress on great ideas.

  Focus in on the thing that aligns with whatever you want to do versus what other people think you should be doing.

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Karpathy’s advice for undergrads he wished someone had told him when I was one:

Undergrads tend to have tunnel vision about their classes. They want to get good grades, etc. The crucial fact to realize is that noone will care about your grades, unless they are bad. For example, I always used to say that the smartest student will get 85% in all of his courses. This way, you end up with somewhere around 4.0 score, but you did not over-study, and you did not under-study.

Your time is a precious, limited resource. Get to a point where you don't screw up on a test and then switch your attention to much more important endeavors. What are they?

Getting actual, real-world experience, working on real code base, projects or problems outside of silly course exercises is extremely imporant. Professors/People who know you and can write you a good reference letter saying that you have initiative, passion and drive are extremely important. Are you thinking of applying to jobs? Get a summer internship. Are you thinking of pursuing graduate school? Get research experience! Sign up for whatever programs your school offers. Or reach out to a professor/graduate student asking to get involved on a research project you like. This might work if they think you're driven and motivated enough. Do not underestimate the importance of this: A well-known professor who writes in their recommendation letter that you are driven, motivated and independent thinker completely dwarfs anything else, especially petty things like grades. It also helps a lot if you squeeze in at least one paper before you apply. Also, you should be aware that the biggest pet peeve from their side are over-excited undergrad students who sign up for a project, meet a few times, ask many questions, and then suddenly give up and disappear after all that time investment from the graduate student's or professor's side. Do not be this person (it damages your reputation) and do not give any indication that you might be.

Other than research projects, get involved with some group of people on side projects or better, start your own from scratch. Contribute to Open Source, make/improve a library. Get out there and create (or help create) something cool. Document it well. Blog about it. These are the things people will care about a few years down the road. Your grades? They are an annoyance you have to deal with along the way. Use your time well and good luck. (source)

Bonus — Karpathy’s book list: of ~200 books I've read, the few that stayed with me over time and I find myself often thinking back to or referring to, in ~random order (view list)

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My Old School by Steely Dan (Spotify)

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That’s it for this installment of Multitudes. Have a wonderful weekend.

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