If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.
— Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo
A couple years ago, I was rejected for something that I very, very badly wanted. I was rejected because I wasn’t far enough along. “We want someone who has already hit the zenith of their career, and you’re still climbing,” my rejector, someone I deeply respected and admired, said. I was devastated.
Later on, this person came back to me and said that they’d like my help with something. I was furious. Maybe I’ve finally matured into something useful for you, I thought, but I’ll never forget that you didn’t recognize my potential when I needed your help. When I started to feel less angry, I finally gave them a polite and neutral denial.
Ultimately, it was my fault for being angry. As Van Gogh said in his letter to his brother Theo, “If I make better work later, I still won’t work otherwise than now; I mean it will be the same apple only riper.” I too have rejected unripe apples for my consumption, only to pick them up a couple days later. It’s nothing personal, it is simply a statement of fact. But it’s still hard to control my feelings about it. It’s hard not to take rejection as one of potential, not of my readiness.
Here’s some things I found interesting on this topic:
Alexander Chee, “On Turning Writing…into a Life”
I particularly liked this quote because I’m trying to learn how to write better, but I think it applies to everything you would like to professionalize in your life. Get into the practice of betting on yourself by taking smaller leaps. Inure yourself to rejection, but also use it to take an objective lens on yourself.
Out of context, that advice does sound like taking moonshots before taking more moonshots, and to some extent, it is. And you need to get into the practice of betting on yourself. Applying for something makes you organize yourself in relationship to your dreams and plans. Submitting work makes you read it as a stranger might and to see what you’re doing in some new way.
Venkatesh Rao, Striver, Seeker, Icon, Leader
This post touches on the emergent “literary identity” of Substack, and includes a personality test for what type of writer or creator you are. In classic VRao style, you have to take it with a grain of salt and look past the hyperbolic branding for insight. If you create stuff, which one are you?
I think we probably unnecessarily demonize meetings, because they’re better than endlessly Slacking! But even I found this crazy:
In 2022, Microsoft researchers published a study that anonymously tracked workers using the company’s software. They discovered that, in fact, a miniature workday was forming in the late evening. About one-third of the workers in their study were as likely to work at 10 p.m. as they were at 8 a.m. The reason? When the pandemic sent knowledge workers home, official meetings replaced casual interactions and made it impossible for many people to get things done unless they found time to log back online after dinner. In further research, Microsoft has found that, since 2020, workers in their sample have tripled the time they spent in meetings.
Byrne Hobart posted the question, but the best answer was this Vulture article from Michael Wolff’s personal experience.
My own favorite theory, however, for what caused business to become such a compelling sport and transforming experience was the advent of the spreadsheet (in ‘82 or ‘83, shortly after the introduction and widespread adoption of the IBM PC). First VisiCalc, then Lotus 1-2-3, and then, of course, Excel. If you could work a spreadsheet, money suddenly became a highly fluid concept – the buck never stopped anywhere (oddly, during the eighties, bottom line became a metaphor for something absolute and irreducible when, in fact, the bottom line was becoming ever more elusive). Financial strategy became like a war game. If you played it one way, you risked the end of the world, but if you changed a variable, you were safe and secure. Business reality became wonderfully plastic (running numbers has about the same relationship to actual business as sex fantasies do to sex – indeed, running numbers gets to be a sort of fetish).
This is hilarious and devastating, and kind of shows that code-gen is the only thing that’s really taken off. (Make sure you have images enabled!)
Airtable created a product meant to get new people in the door: it allows you to write a prompt, specify some small details, and then get a fully functional Airtable built for your purpose. In theory, great! In practice, the “single shot” approach doesn’t actually help users build something useful while learning Airtable’s product at the same time. I imagine it’s a not-so-sophisticated template matching and customization engine? I need to write a longer review of this product. However, I appreciate that it’s a start, and think that if they’re able to do something beyond single—shot prompting here, it’ll perhaps work.
Whatever you think about unions aside, this is absolutely hilarious.
So Apple rolled out Slack in 2019, a decision, I have to imagine, executives truly regret at this point. But before Slack, essentially each team had its own way of communicating and a lot of teams had used iMessage to communicate. It was pretty clunky and pretty siloed. When they roll out Slack to the entire company, each org has its own Slack instance, but, crucially, employees can create channels for the entire company as well. So Slack becomes a really important way for employees to suddenly create channels to talk about things like, “I don’t want to go back to the office,” and find 7,000 other people who also don’t want to return to the office. That’s never happened before in Apple history.
The Myth of Making It (Interview by Anne Helen Petersen)
This interview between Anne Helen and Samhita Mukhopadhyay about her time as editor in chief of Teen Vogue and her consequent firing was fascinating. An excerpt:
I think you and I have similar thinking when it comes to hustle: we both think it’s a broken ideology, and we both understand that our past hustle, as soul-compromising as it often was, has also made us who we are today. As you put it: “I’d be disingenuous not to admit that my hustle helped me get to a place where I could have more control over what I was doing with my life.” Also like you, I realized during the pandemic that I didn’t want to work as hard as I was — I wanted life to feel more sustainable. I really struggle with how to hold both things as true and give advice to others. How do you think about these ideas, and what advice have you found yourself offering?
As someone who loves getting dressed and fashion in general, this was the piece that most spoke to me about what it feels like to get dressed, and how it’s kind of a creative act. It’s a silly piece that is making fun of itself, while being deeply sincere, while acknowledging how much getting dressed relates to gender, while laughing at how trivial it all is…
When I get dressed, I become a philosopher-king—not in the sense of presiding over utopia, but in the sense of trying to marry politics and intellect in the perfect imitation of God. Political considerations might include: destination, company, self-image, self-regard, in-group and out-group arrangements. The intellectual ones might involve: the weather, the way I am always too cold no matter the weather, the subway, the blisters on my feet, the laundry.
I think this tweet from Jason Liu exactly describes what I feel about these incredibly general and horizontal AI tools. Maybe I’m just being hidebound, not really seeing the vision for the big general tool?
My thesis is clearer now. I'm short on "complex reasoning and agents" because it is often a scapegoat for poorly described problem spaces. My thoughts on capabilities are about figuring out the 80/20 and baking "complex reasoning" into specific tools, so you put fewer requirements on the AI. This approach mirrors the use of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in business. Just as companies prefer employees to follow well-defined processes rather than reinventing solutions, we can create "AI SOPs" in the form of purpose-built tools. Owning a product and wanting Complex Reasoning Agents is often a symptom of lacking user empathy and actually building something useful or know what your users want
loved all these links (from Paris Review first-person essays on fashion to critiques of hype-driven but not quite valuable AI tools!)