--- ## Notes/Brainstorming ### **✨** In My Life - Published Tiago Forte video - Hackathon so didn't make last ### **🔗** Links to Thinks - Counter-position themed - Against note-taking - [x] [[Against Authenticity]] - Alex Hormozi on content creation - [Neophelia](https://robwalker.substack.com/p/neophilia-and-its-discontents?utm_source=email) - [[Nuance]] - 12 favorite problems ### **🚀** Actionable Tingz - Establishing an online presence - Was planning on quitting Twitter but found myself naturally gravitating to chat with someone because of the way they presented themselves - Fairly similar position as me :p - Finished 50 days of writing, ended up skipping some of the more obvious things but still came away with a few gems. - Caught myself stuck in shallow work ### **🤔** Food For Thought “I now have a very simple metric I use: Are you working on something that can change the world? Yes or no? The answer for 99.99999% of people is ‘no.’ - Tools of TItans I need to read this every day. ### 😤 My Ramblings ## Publishing Copy Welcome to another edition of _Weekly Wondering_, a sacred time where I share the resonating links, reflections and learnings from my past week to influence your next one ;) ### **✨** In My Life My collaboration with Tiago Forte has finally completed, to which you can watch it [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz99I7apNLI&ab_channel=TiagoForte)! It was cool seeing how an online team went about the content creation process, and I'm hoping the video helps spread awareness for my precious purple child ;) I was at the hackathon I mentioned last newsletter throughout the entire weekend, so I didn't find the time to write up last weekl's edition :/ But in replacement, it gave me something to write about hehe ### **🔗** Links to Thinks **Authenticity is just a social construct!!!11one** I highly value authenticity, so I couldn't help but click on the article [Against Authenticity](https://quillette.com/2022/09/08/against-authenticity/?ref=refind) directly opposing my beliefs. Bo has two main claims: - Some amount of self-surpression is required for a functioning society, or else people would constantly act upon their negative beliefs and actions - We need to somewhat rely on societal standards and our environment as it comprises our "artificial" identity: > But to be human *is* to be artificial. And to contend that it is inauthentic to conform to one’s culture and to strive to suppress and overcome one’s natural tendencies is like contending that it is inauthentic for a mockingbird to imitate the song of another species. Paradoxically, the most authentic thing we can do is strive to transcend ourselves and become what we are not. I just found it refreshing to see the opposing extreme. [[Nuance]] [[Authoritative Content Creation]] [[Providing value to others]] ### **🚀** Actionable Tingz **Your 12 Favorite Problems** I've refrained from consuming much content the past week to prevent information overwhelm. Whenever I started consuming something, I question whether the content would genuinely have a future impact on me, to which I often assume not. Unfortunately, this led to a lack of new insights learned, so I decided to find a framework to help provide direction to what I should learn. Enter your 12 favorite problems, which you can learn more about in a thread I saw in the Obsidian weekly roundup [here](https://twitter.com/tsuzukinelson/status/1564721464317685760). To ensure the content you're consuming is relevant to your interests, you can refer to these 12 problems and see if it falls into a category. And so, I've been thoughtfully choosing my 12 problems, and so far came to the following questions: 1. How can I cultivate healthy time and productivity management for a fulfilling life 2. How can I balance my interests as a polymath with lots of varying responsibilities 3. What kind of content does the world need that I can provide, and how can I start branching out to it 4. How can I land a sustainable full time programming job without a college degree 5. How can I maintain my relationships with like-minded people while simultaneously finding more poeple to chat with 6. How can I be a stellar SaaS startup co-founder alongside Matthew 7. What products and services can I invest my money in to accelerate my personal and financial growth 8. How can I optimize my energy levels through physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wellness **Establishing an online presence** I was planning on quitting Twitter as I didn't find it a useful lead generation outlet. But after reading the tweet I linked above on the benefits of having 12 favorite problems, I found myself naturally gravitating towards the writer's profile thanks to their thoughts and bio. And that's where I remembered, I wasn't using Twitter to make money, I was using it to find kindred souls, an escape from more traditional values that I've slowly succumbed to. **Guilty of shallow work** A month ago, whenever I finished work I was eager to go home and continue working on my side projects, but recently, I haven't felt the same drive. Nothing's changed; I still have a startup to help run, a YouTube channel to operate, a product to sell, and books to read, but I just decided to cope by watching anime and entertainment YouTube. I guess a break was deserved, but as I write this, I realized I was lacking clarity and goals. My motto of just slowly chipping away by focusing on the process was clearly ineffective without some larger vision ### **🤔** Food For Thought > “I now have a very simple metric I use: Are you working on something that can change the world? Yes or no? The answer for 99.99999% of people is ‘no.’ - Tools of Titans Although I do now believe that some of the time you spend should also be for your own benefit, I still think it's an important reminder to contribute to the longevity of humanity, to give back to the generosity of the world. ### 😤 My Ramblings Hackathons are intense periods of problem solving and coding to create a product, and in the hackathon we went to, that problem was improving the social life of their company. Out of the 30 teams there, only the top 6 would make it to the finals, and the top 3 would have access to exclusive chats with hiring managers for internship or full time positions. They wanted something tangible, something that they would actually use, so we decided to create a casual events planner app with integrated analytics so Human Resources employees could analyze trends and see what events are most favored by workers. After 30 hours and a few cans of redbull, we built a functioning app and had a decent pitch to showcase its real-world use case (unoriginal but it got the job done; execution and presentation is what counts, right? right?) One by one, groups started pitching their products, but only two groups from our area would advance. Guess who made it to top 6? Not us :) I mean it did make sense, these were hand-picked computer science students in my province's top universities, so I wasn't expecting to win as a mere 2nd-year. I accepted the loss, and was eager to see the presentations of the projects that did make it. The first app was a gamified events platform for hosing eco-friendly challenges, which I didn't mind. They didn't showcase the actual functionality of the app but moreso the vision behind it, but I let it slide. Next up was a 2D social app with character creation and virtual spaces that represented places in the office. Although I questioned it's genuine adoptability by the corporation, I nonetheless admired the innovation. But as they presented, they only showed a static mock-up of their app as they jumped from page layout to page layout. Not once did they show their working app or code, and I'm not sure if they even did have one. Amplified by my loss, I was astonished at how the app went against my preconceived notions of a successful hackathon project. Instead of practical functionality and you know, an actual app, they merely had a vision and a few examples of their user interface. Yet they made it to top 6. Unfortunately, my frustration didn't end there, as future projects continued this trend of being more visionary than actually working. If the whole point of this event was to hire people who could fill your programming internship roles, wouldn't you want to put a bit more empahsis on that area? It's not hard to just copy visual layouts and pitch templates and claim you'll do something grand. And how is something like a 2D club penguin or app to send sticky notes going to be something that's adoptable by the company at a global scale? As I simmered down on the way home, I realized that there were lessons to be learned. With the abundance of coding tutorials and examples online, anyone can learn how to code, but not everyone has the creativity to come up with innovative ideas. What they looked for was someone with critical thinking, someone who could stand out from the same old boring event planners to bring life to their solutions and the company. And I failed miserably at that. I guess it's times like these where you get to see your flaws and work towards them.