I decided to do something a little different this week.
While writing my last post, I came across the Interact Community Fellowship, run by Interact. I loved a few of the core questions on their application, so I posed a challenge to my friend Sam Stone: to write our informal answers to the best questions from in our next post.
Here are the questions I chose:
Think about your three core interests. Why do you care about these things?
What has been the biggest change to your beliefs or values in the past two years, and what caused this change?
What project or initiative were you proudest of in 2021? What is your primary creative, academic, or work goal for 2022?
In what ways are you looking to grow personally?
Here we go
Think about your three core interests. Why do you care about these things?
This question gets at the heart of this newsletter. My core interests are exactly what I’m trying to figure out. For now, I’ve decided on these three: movement, well designed technology, and strong relationships.
Movement? What does that mean?
Movement means something similar to creative expression, except it also includes sports and fitness. But I couldn’t say sports and fitness, because it also includes activities like improv, painting, and dance. A better term may be “creative physical expression.”
Over the last month of honestly asking myself “what do I really like?”, it’s become obvious how important movement always has been to me. It is rooted in a childhood of constant movement. I didn’t miss a single sports season from the ages of 4 to 20. Often times, I played two sports per season. This nurtured a desire to consistently find new and better ways to move. That’s why I’ve enjoyed talking about mountain biking and skateboarding so much.
I’ve also begun to recognize that same desire and satisfaction while doing more traditionally creative outlets. Thinking back, this isn’t something new, but it is something I haven’t paid much attention to. It started while I put on karaoke shows for my family at holiday parties as a kid and played the drums as a teenager. Recently, I’ve rediscovered this in painting class and dancing at house music shows.
During high school and college, I developed a fear of judgement that held me back from pursuing more creative outlets. That fear was amplified by a hustle mindset fueled by productivity porn that led to an “always on, always working” mindset where grades and technical work were the top priority and any activities that weren’t contributing to them, or contributing to my physical fitness (read: getting bigger muscles) were not important.
With the fear of judgement veil lifted, new sources of creativity and energy have flooded back into my life. This newsletter is a perfect example something I wouldn’t have done in college. It feels like I’m making up for years of stifling myself, which is energizing and exciting.
With that said, movement is important to me because moving I enjoy my life most while moving. It makes me think of Nick Cammarata’s tweets on happiness
Moving and improving are how I can be the happy and thriving individual he describes.
Well Designed Technology
Next up: technology. Oddly enough, one of the first thoughts that came to mind was my old twitter thread about the fear of becoming old and technically obsolete.
I have this fear every time I watch an older person fumble with technology that young people pick up on the first try. Why is it so much harder for them? “Ah, they’re just old and not willing to learn anymore.” Maybe, but the scary part is that technology is only going to advance faster - much faster. The world is going to change more for us than it did for current generations. That means, if we are not careful, our generations will end up in an even worse spot than my grandma that thought that “a Facebook” was something I could give her for Christmas.
However, this won’t be a problem specific to older generations. Everyone’s lives are increasing in complexity. There are more apps, more websites, more communities, more fucking passwords to keep track of than ever before. At some point, this increasing complexity has the potential to make things worse instead of better.
My fear of increasing complexity and aging is part of what drives my interest in product management. We need to put humans and human problems at the forefront or our minds, and not technology itself. Letters to a Young Technologist, a group of essays written by an Interact group, does a great job of communicating this and emphasizing that technology is a means, not an ends.
We got here by putting too much emphasis on short-term, technology centered goals. We can improve by focusing on long-term, human centered goals. We do this by first building a deep understanding of ourselves, our goals, and our ideals lives. Then, reverse engineer how to get there. That is the technology of the future I will design - the Wisdom Age.
Building Relationships
As I described in the movement section above, I prioritized grades and work above all else in college. It was helpful in many ways, but I didn’t meet as many people or see the importance of my current relationships.
Not only is talking to people one of my favorite activities (and a form of movement), but it is also an important aspect of building a better understanding of the world. There is no better way to get to know a community, city, or group than by talking to the people that are part of it and learning about the experiences that are typically locked away in others’ heads.
What has been the biggest change to your beliefs or values in the past two years, and what caused this change?
My biggest shift has been how I view “real work,” which encompasses much of the change I described in my core interests.
As I described in How are Interalized Ideas Affecting You, I used to view “real work” as technical work. Other activities, no matter how fun, energizing, or productive, took away time from “real work.” As I’ve grown, I’ve found that ”people work” (product management, building relationships, understanding problems, environment building) is just as, if not more important, than my old conception of “real work.”
Gus and Walt from Breaking Bad are a great example of how important people work is. I’ve spent most of my life building the skills to become a Walt, a technical wizard, without trying to find a Gus, the business man. In early seasons, Walt’s technical skills (and all the drugs he cooks), nearly go to waste because they couldn’t distribute their product. They hadn’t solved for distribution, which is not technical work, yet it is real work nonetheless. After all, no one will see or care about your work if you don’t understand them and figure out a way to get it in front of them.
This mindset shift was also an important factor that allowed me to begin to explore movement as a core interest. Previously, spending time doing non-technical work gave me anxiety because of looming thoughts of how that time could be used in a “more productive” way. Now, I value that time and the long term growth that comes from it.
What project or initiative were you proudest of in 2021? What is your primary creative, academic, or work goal for 2022?
2021 was messy year for me. I had too many tentacles and didn’t stay committed to one for long enough. However, I did make progress of on a couple and that I’ll share here.
The TurboQueue
This was the first project I worked on after tweeting this
It was a project I originally built in college and have always been excited about, so it was a great place to start my front end journey. It ended up being the best public showcase of my html/css/javascript skills which you can see in this tweet.
This year, I’m going to continue working on my front end skills by working on the Skype a Scientist Match Portal, which I talk more about in Product Management II and hopefully working on Tweetscape (I just finished my second round interview with the Roote team and have high hopes). If Tweetscape falls through, I have other twitter app ideas I’d like to work on as well.
Ludobots
At the beginning of 2021 I discovered Xenobots, which are the result of an amazing collaboration between Josh Bongard’s lab at University of Vermont and Michael Levin’s lab at Tufts. Xenobots are “reconfigurable organisms” created using frog stem cells as the basic building blocks. The stem cells are combined into structures designed by evolutionary algorithms (inspired by evolutionary robotics) that optimize for movement.
The work coming from this collaboration keeps getting better and better and the future applications of this technology will be incredible.
At the peak of my interest, I followed along to Dr. Bongard’s Ludobots class that he teaches at the University of Vermont. The assignments are available on Reddit and the lectures are on Youtube! I completed all the assignments and ended up creating a walking robot in the pybullet simulator, which was a great experience. I’m super in impressed by Josh’s commitment to teaching his class in the open so people like me can follow along.
There is an endless amount of interesting material in this project. Since learning about it, a small part of me has always been tempted to drop everything and double down on this subject to get into Dr. Bongard’s lab… maybe in another life (or later in this one).
The Jungle
Lastly, there is The Jungle, my first writing project. This was the first time I consistently shared my writing, although it was only for three months. That was my first taste of sharing my thoughts in the open. It did fall apart, but it was an important step towards becoming more active on twitter and left me with more confidence to pick up another writing project like this newsletter.
In 2022, my primary goals are to finish the Skype a Scientist Match Portal and consistently post on this newsletter (shooting for roughly once a week).
In what ways are you looking to grow personally?
The biggest way I want to grow is building confidence in my own answers to the question “what do I like?” In other words, I’m looking to cultivate my own taste for what is significant. For more on that, check out my backstory post.
In addition, I’m looking to make many new friends on twitter and in person. I plan to do this by staying consistently thoughtful on twitter and by attending more in person events, being thoughtful and energetic, and taking the extra step to get contact info so I can follow up (something I’ve been historically bad at because of a combo of laziness and slight social anxiety).
Conclusion
Alright, there’s my informal Interact app. I hope you enjoyed it!
I have a couple of different post I want to write soon. One is my next tentacle post where I’’ll share some of my front end experience and my opinions about Hotwire, an alternative approach to building modern web apps. The other is reflection on some of my favorite visakanv tweets (which you can find by searching “(from:visakanv) sitcom”). We’ll see which one I end up doing next week. See you then!