SEO today, CEO tomo?
Life update — I moved to NYC 3 months ago! I had the option of going fully remote and leapt at the chance of living in one of the most storied, written-about, and sung-about cities in the world.
Clever title credits — Navaneeth Krishnan
I’m currently reading an audiobook — A Trader’s Guide to Better Decision-Making for Everyone — by Agustin Lebron. I’ve been interested in the mispricing of resources in inefficient markets like housing and labour, and I wanted to understand how financial markets manage to efficiently communicate pricing information. Fascinating read overall, definitely altered my perception of the social utility of financial markets (more on that some other time), would recommend.
Anyways, the first chapter of the book focuses on the importance of having clarity regarding the underlying motivations for investing. Ofc, this is applicable to all aspects of life, and got me pondering what exactly my motivations were for pouring time into maintaining this blog.
Amos Tversky once said — “You waste years by not being able to waste hours”. He stresses the importance of being slightly underemployed for producing high-quality work. I take this to have a broader implication — spending some buffer time diversifying my avenues of creating value may potentially expose me to a much greater upside. My primary value creation vehicle presently is being good at programming robots, but I’m also fond of pondering broader issues and penning down (hopefully) thought-provoking articles, and I should look at that as an opportunity.
Certainly to some extent, my motivations behind this project are memetic in nature. A lot of the smartest and most interesting public figures that have influenced me intellectually — some famous, some less so — maintain a written body of work in some easily accessible form. This helps people like me find them, read their articles, and thus engage with their ideas. Not only that, I then have the urge to reach out to them, talk to them, fantasize that I’ll meet them at a dinner party and witness in person how their brains work. Even if I’d never heard of someone or knew what they looked like, reading their blog posts transmits enough information to evoke the same reaction.
In an important sense, a well-maintained blog is a way of finding the right people for you. If you’re like me and relish discussing ideas and making meaningful connections with a variety of people, there’s a distinct advantage to having years’ worth of thoughts — condensed into a few pages — that this new person can then read through and understand you better. Conversely, if you find someone you are impressed by and resonate with, having a proof-of-work that captures your own intellectual journey gives you way more credibility in reaching out and making that connection.
Plus when your friends read your latest article and send you compliments and/or rebuttals, ngl it feels pretty good :)
It is also an excellent opportunity to do some deep thinking about your subject matter. I’ve observed that the written page demands a lot more intellectual rigor than the angels and devils on your shoulder. What may have sounded like a solid argument in my head diminishes in persuasiveness by the time it’s all inked out. Treat this as an opportunity to flesh out your thought process. It’s like writing code, what started as a seemingly bulletproof approach in your head almost certainly is morphed beyond recognition by the time you’ve merged. This is doubly true when there’s emotional baggage involved. A dose of long and hard introspection followed by writing down your observations is just what the shrink ordered. Helps you take a dispassionate view of what’s going on in that pretty little head, untie some of those knots, and offload that shit onto paper for your readers to deal with.
The writing process is the final thing to emphasize here, when I write an article it’s about something that’s been running for a while as a background process — when I’m on autopilot — in the subway, at the gym, while making dinner, etc. I will usually reserve a weekend night (when I don’t have plans), pull an all-nighter, go into flow and hammer this shit out, and publish usually by sunrise. Sometimes I go for an early morning run before crashing. Haven’t had many occasions to pull all-nighters since graduating, so these nights are always memorable.
In summary, I do hope I am more regular, perhaps with shorter articles that don’t take all night to write. One of my faves — Tyler Cowen — has blogged every day for the past 17 years, and virtually everything he writes is insightful and original. There’s much to write about folks, this past year taught me a lot about what I want out of life, with plenty of tangled emotions in there, so stay tuned for more brain dumps, and as always thank you for listening to my Ted talk.
