Underrated essays that'll help you with your career
Ideas that'll help you clarify your thoughts
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Reading a useful essay can go a really long way at helping you clarify your thoughts and make important life decisions. I put together a collection of essays that have helped me in the past, and imagine they could be helpful to you. Especially people thinking about their career in some way: starting a new company, switching jobs, trying to level up at work, etc. Hope it’s useful! Email me hi@nextplay.so if you have any feedback or suggestions. Enjoy :)
Staring into the abyss as a core life skill
By Ben Kuhn
Recently I’ve been thinking about how all my favorite people are great at a skill I’ve labeled in my head as “staring into the abyss.”
Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner. It’s common to procrastinate on thinking hard about these things because it might require you to acknowledge that you were very wrong about something in the past, and perhaps wasted a bunch of time based on that (e.g. dating the wrong person or praying to the wrong god). However, in most cases you have to either admit this eventually or, if you never admit it, lock yourself into a sub-optimal future life trajectory, so it’s best to be impatient and stare directly into the uncomfortable topic until you’ve figured out what to do.
The advice I would give on a mentorship call
By Avital Balwit
Value your free time. While it may not feel like it, you will have some of your most free time during university. You likely don’t have kids, you likely don’t have a full-time job and a full-on life, you may live in a dormitory. In general your life will be simpler than it will be at other points. It also will be one of the few protected times for learning and so there is an argument that you should spend it doing that, but if you want to fill it with other stuff.
Cold emails. As someone who gets a lot of cold emails and doesn’t reply to most of them, it might be odd for me to tell you to do cold emails. I do actually read all of my cold emails. The ideal cold email is sweet, specific, and shows that the person values my time. They explain who they are and why I should care about them, what they want from me and why me specifically, and ideally they have a doable ask. Maybe they have a question that they want answered in that email, or maybe they have a specific reason they want a short call. It’s probably good for these emails to be somewhat flattering to the person. And they should never be essay-length. I have sent many cold emails. I have not gotten responses to all of them, but I have gotten responses to a few that turned out to be helpful or at least deeply encouraging. Cold emails are a good way to search out internships, though probably your first ask should not be an internship. It should be something else that is more manageable.
Radical Responsibility
By Andrew Bosworth
When presenting work I have a simple rule: never let anyone outflank you with criticism.
I don’t want anyone to be more critical of my work than I am. If I did something wrong I want to be the one to say it. If there is a risk I want to highlight it. If there is conflict I want to expose it. I recall one particular review when someone raised a concern about a bug they had read about. I quickly assured them: “oh no, it is much worse than you think” and proceeded with a litany of related mistakes they hadn’t read about. I adopted this approach early in my career and feel it is a major contributor to the roles I’ve been trusted to take on. Many people have a strong instinct to present their work in a favorable light. It seems like the obvious thing to do to ensure continued support. Unfortunately that introduces an antagonistic dynamic to reviews as people feel compelled to dig to get to the truth. When they discover they were presented an optimistic view, reviewers will inevitably wonder whether you were dissembling or unaware of the challenges. Paradoxically attempts to bolster trust tend to undermine it.
You have more than one goal, and that’s fine
By Julia Wise
I have lots of goals. I have a goal of improving the world. I have a goal of enjoying time with my children. I have a goal of being a good spouse. I have a goal of feeling connected in my friendships and community. Those are all fine goals, but they’re not the same. I have a rough plan for allocating time and money between them: Sunday morning is for making pancakes for my kids. Monday morning is for work. It doesn’t make sense to mix these activities, to spend time with my kids in a way that contributes to my work or to do my job in a way that my kids enjoy.
But when you make a decision, be clear with yourself about which goals you’re pursuing. You don’t have to argue that your choice is the best way of improving the world if that isn’t actually the goal. It’s fine to support your local arts organization because their work gives you joy, because you want to be active in your community, or because they helped you and you want to reciprocate. If you also have a goal of improving the world as much as you can, decide how much time and money you want to allocate to that goal, and try to use those resources as effectively as you can.
I could do that in a weekend!
By Dan Luu
I can’t think of a single large software company that doesn’t regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviously lean, so the general response is something like “oh, sure maybe Stack Overflow is lean, but FooCorp must really be bloated”. And since most people have relatively little visibility into FooCorp, for any given value of FooCorp, that sounds like a plausible statement. After all, what product could possible require hundreds, or even thousands of engineers?
Businesses that actually care about turning a profit will spend a lot of time (hence, a lot of engineers) working on optimizing systems, even if an MVP for the system could have been built in a weekend. There’s also a wide body of research that’s found that decreasing latency has a significant effect on revenue over a pretty wide range of latencies for some businesses. Increasing performance also has the benefit of reducing costs. Businesses should keep adding engineers to work on optimization until the cost of adding an engineer equals the revenue gain plus the cost savings at the margin. This is often many more engineers than people realize.
The Mental Model Fallacy
By Cedric Chin
The upshot of this argument is this: don’t read blogs written by non-practitioners, spouting insights that aren’t related to their field of practice. Don’t read Farnam Street. Don’t read self-help hacks on Medium who haven’t achieved much in life. Hell, don’t read this blog — especially if your career goals diverge from mine. I have little to offer you that practice cannot.
Instead read from the source material of practitioners in fields you inhabit, copy their actions, climb their skill trees, and reflect through trial and error.
sparkly people and how to find them
By Anson Yun
Friends and I call it the “sparkle”. They reliably shine in every context. It’s a joie de vivre mixed in with a dedication to craft, lightly encased in wit. Chances are, they’ll become the best in their field (and have fun doing it). You just want to be around them. They have a good vibe.
Note that the “sparkle” is limited to people that are actively prosocial. Being nefarious, even in trace amounts, takes away from the bit.
I care a lot about is finding these people - particularly, picking them out early. Selfishly, they’re fun to be around. Tactically, I think more of them should know each other. I attribute most of any personal success to good luck and great friends. I’d like to enable that for someone else.
Why not to do a startup
By Pmarca
First, and most importantly, realize that a startup puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced.
You will flip rapidly from a day in which you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again.
Over and over and over.
And I’m talking about what happens to stable entrepreneurs.
There is so much uncertainty and so much risk around practically everything you are doing. Will the product ship on time? Will it be fast enough? Will it have too many bugs? Will it be easy to use? Will anyone use it? Will your competitor beat you to market? Will you get any press coverage? Will anyone invest in the company? Will that key new engineer join? Will your key user interface designer quit and go to Google? And on and on and on...
The Fishing Contest
By Quarter Mile
Late morning now. Still no fish. One of the other guys fishing down the pier comes up and asks me if it’s my first time at the fishing contest. “Yeah,” I tell him. He laughs and walks away. I’m not sure why he laughs. Later I will find out. For now I just keep casting and casting and casting.
What should we be worried about?
By Eric Weinstein
I know that those few of us actively involved in the struggle are deeply worried about the epidemic of excellence precisely because excellence compels its hosts to facilitate its spread by altering their perception of its costs and benefits. Most educated people have come to revere the spending of the fabled ‘10,000 hours’ in training to become respected jacks of one trade. Large numbers of Americans push their inquisitive children away from creative play so that they can excel in their studies in hopes they will become excellent candidates for admission to a center of excellence, to join the pursuit of excellence upon graduation.
The problem with all this is that we cannot excel our way out of modern problems. Within the same century, we have unlocked the twin nuclei of both cell and atom and created the conditions for synthetic biological and even digital life with computer programs that can spawn with both descent and variation on which selection can now act. We are in genuinely novel territory which we have little reason to think we can control; only the excellent would compare these recent achievements to harmless variations on the invention of the compass or steam engine. So surviving our newfound god-like powers will require modes that lie well outside expertise, excellence, and mastery.
The Idea Maze
By Balaji Srinivasan
One answer is that a good founder doesn’t just have an idea, s/he has a bird’s eye view of the idea maze. Most of the time, end-users only see the solid path through the maze taken by one company. They don’t see the paths not taken by that company, and certainly don’t think much about all the dead companies that fell into various pits before reaching the customer. The maze is a reasonably good analogy (Figure 1. Sometimes there are pits you just can’t cross. Sometimes you can get past a particular minotaur/enter a new market, but only after you’ve gained treasure in another area of the maze (Google going after email after it made money in search). Sometimes the maze itself shifts over time, and new doors open as technologies arrive (Pandora on the iPhone). Sometimes there are pits that are uncrossable for you, but are crossable by another (Webvan failed, but Amazon, Walmart, and Safeway have the distribution muscle to succeed). And sometimes there are pitfalls that are only apparent when one company has reached scale, problems which require entering the maze at the very beginning with a new weapon (e.g. Google’s Pagerank was inspired in part by Alta Vista’s problems at scale, problems that were not apparent in 1991). A good founder is thus capable of anticipating which turns lead to treasure and which lead to certain death. A bad founder is just running to the entrance of (say) the “movies/music/filesharing/P2P” maze or the “photosharing” maze without any sense for the history of the industry, the players in the maze, the casualties of the past, and the technologies that are likely to move walls and change assumptions.
How to make the best of the most important century?
By Holden Karnofsky
The path to the future that seems worst is Misaligned AI, in which AI systems end up with non-human-compatible objectives of their own and seek to fill the galaxy according to those objectives. How seriously should we take this risk - how hard will it be to avoid this outcome? How hard will it be to solve the “alignment problem,” which essentially means having the technical ability to build systems that won’t do this?9
Should we be expecting transformative AI within the next 10-20 years, or much later? Will the leading AI systems go from very limited to very capable quickly (”hard takeoff”) or gradually (”slow takeoff”)?12 Should we hope that government projects play a major role in AI development, or that transformative AI primarily emerges from the private sector? Are some governments more likely than others to work toward transformative AI being used carefully, inclusively and humanely? What should we hope a government (or company) literally does if it gains the ability to dramatically accelerate scientific and technological advancement via AI?
What should you do with your life?
By Alexey Guzey
Write down a shortlist of problems that seem exciting
Leave 1-3 most exciting and tractable problems via pairwise comparison of problems from the shortlist (like how tournaments decide on which team is the most “exciting”)
Start learning everything you need to start working on the problem.