Every Sunday I go to a coffee shop in Japantown with my laptop to write. And I write! I have no trouble writing. The writing isn’t the problem. The problem is that when I’m done, I look at what I just wrote and think this is definitely not good enough to publish.

This didn’t use to happen. A few years ago I used to publish all the time. I’d write something, feel pretty good about it, and then hit publish without a second thought. I knew nobody really cared about what I was writing, so it didn’t matter if it sucked. And honestly, a lot of what I wrote really did suck. But I published it anyway. And yet I’d somehow occasionally write a good post.

Fast forward to today: I have no trouble writing, but I've now developed this fear of hitting publish. I’m older and objectively a better writer, with supposedly better ideas. So where did things go wrong? Why’s it so much harder to share my ideas now?

1.
There’s this unfortunate pattern that happens when someone wins a Nobel Prize. They tend to stop doing great work. Richard Hamming talks about this in You and Your Research:

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.

Before the Nobel Prize, nobody really cares who you are. But after the Nobel Prize, you're a Nobel Prize winner, and Nobel Prize winners are supposed to have Good Ideas. Every idea, every paper, every talk at a conference is now being evaluated against the standard of your Nobel Prize-winning work. Everyone is asking, “is this worthy of a Nobel laureate?” It’s a high bar to clear. So instead of trying and occasionally failing, they just... stop trying. The fear of making something bad is worse than producing nothing at all.¹

2.
Many good ideas come from young and unproven people. The Macintosh team’s average age was 21. Most researchers at Xerox PARC were under 30. Some of the best research work I’ve seen at OpenAI has come from surprisingly young people. I don’t think young people are smarter than old people. I don’t think they work that much harder either. It mostly just seems that nobody really expects much of young people, so they're free to follow their curiosity into weird, silly, and seemingly-bad-but-actually-good ideas. They're not afraid of looking stupid. Good Ideas, and I mean this in the broadest sense – research directions, startup ideas, premises for a novel – almost always sound stupid at first. They often make the person who came up with them look stupid. So if a truly Good Idea always starts out by looking unserious, then the only way to have one is to get comfortable producing stupid things.

3.
A few weeks ago my friend Aadil and I were at Whole Foods buying a birthday cake for a friend. We wanted to write something clever on the cake but couldn’t really think of anything. We stood around thinking for a few minutes before Aadil said "Let's just say a bunch of bad ideas out loud so we can get to the good ones." And it worked! We all said a bunch of terrible ideas, and eventually we landed on a good one – a pretty clever pun based on our friend’s longtime email address.

This sounds silly, but I think it captures the entire creative process well. You start by coming up with bad ideas. You will probably look stupid. That’s inevitable. But once you’re comfortable looking stupid, you can produce the bad ideas which will eventually lead to the good ones. If you don’t have the courage to look stupid, you’ll never reap the reward of having good ideas.

It feels like there's something like a conservation law at work here: the amount of stupidity you're willing to tolerate is directly proportional to the quality of ideas you'll eventually produce. I'll call this Aadil’s Law.

4.
Yesterday, I visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium and could not stop thinking about the jellyfish exhibit. They are seriously weird creatures. Jellyfish have no bones, brains, teeth, or blood. Some are bioluminescent for reasons we don’t fully understand. They’re pretty much sacs of jelly contained within a thin membrane, drifting aimlessly at the mercy of ocean currents. Yet somehow, jellyfish have been around for over 500 million years. So by most definitions of evolutionary success, jellyfish are a great idea.

But how was evolution able to get to the jellyfish? The evolutionary process is pretty simple: generate a ton of random mutations and then let natural selection filter them. The overwhelming majority of mutations end up being harmful or neutral. An exceedingly small fraction are beneficial. If you could somehow give evolution a sense of embarrassment, so if every time it produced a fish with no fins or a bird with no wings, it felt a deep sense of shame and promised to be more careful next time – evolution would no longer work. It needs to be able to explore the fitness landscape with bad traits in order to produce good traits, and this exploration requires a willingness to produce unfit organisms. The only way evolution could get to the jellyfish was by being willing to produce the countless jellyfish-adjacent organisms which went extinct.

5.
There might be a good reason why smart people want to avoid looking stupid. I’ve spent a long time thinking about what this reason could be. The only plausible explanation is that our egos are fragile, and by not sharing any work at all, we never have to risk our egos being damaged. If we never share anything, then nothing bad can ever happen to us. But the flip side to protecting our egos is that we never end up making anything worthwhile.

I think there are two very different failure modes here, each at an opposite end of the spectrum:

1. Overshare, but look stupid: You have lots of ideas, and you share them indiscriminately. You look stupid because you don’t really care about what you share, and people eventually learn to tune you out.
2. Undershare, but never do anything interesting: You have lots of ideas, but share almost none of them. You’re afraid of looking stupid, so the exceedingly few ideas that you do share end up being incredibly bland. You never look stupid, but this comes at the expense of never doing anything interesting ever again.

Knowing myself, I’m definitely more at risk of undersharing my work. I’d also bet that the most people reading this blog post are prone to undersharing as well.

6.
So where do we go from here? I think the answer is actually in that Whole Foods story. Aadil's implicit goal was to “think of something clever to write on this cake" but none of us could do it because cleverness was the standard and none of our ideas met it. But when Aadil said "Let's just say a bunch of bad ideas," he changed the frame entirely. We were now playing a game where the only way to lose was by saying nothing at all.

I think that’s the key here. Your goal shouldn’t be to share something good. It should just be to share something at all. Even if it isn’t good. A half-baked blog post. A silly demo. A weird project. I’ve been doing too much selection, and not enough production.

7.
I keep thinking about the version of me from a few years ago. He was worse at almost everything. Worse writer, worse thinker, worse at making things. Nobody really knew him and nobody really cared what he had to say. And yet he had so much more courage. He’d write something in an afternoon and publish it that evening and go to bed feeling good about himself. He wasn’t performing for anyone. He was just a guy with a blog, putting his thoughts out into the world, mostly for himself. I miss that guy.

Evolution didn’t get to the jellyfish by being careful. Aadil didn’t come up with a good cake idea by trying to be clever. I think it's just about overcoming fear. Not a matter of talent, taste, or intelligence.

Just this: are you willing to look stupid today? That’s it. That’s all there is to it.

Footnotes

¹ My favorite counterexample to this is that Alec Radford (the researcher behind GPT-1) is still writing papers on cleaning pretraining data, arguably the most unglamorous thing you could work on in ML research in 2026.

If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed in life, it’s pain. Life is full of pain. Contrary to popular belief, not all pain is bad. Pain is not suffering.

You will feel pain. But you get to choose the type of pain.

If you don’t make a choice, life will pick for you. If you don’t choose the pain of a run, life will pick the pain of your body deteriorating. If you don’t choose the pain of vulnerability, life will choose the pain of loneliness. The pain of hard work or the pain of poverty. The pain of learning or the pain of making the wrong choices.

Pain is everywhere. Pain is consistent. But we get to pick our pain.

Your choice is between acute and chronic pain.

Acute pain is sharp and immediate. A workout. A resignation letter. A breakup. Chronic pain is dull and persistent. Loneliness. Apathy. Sadness.

Acute pain is getting rejected by a love interest. Chronic pain is wallowing in self-despair for years because you’re lonely.

Acute pain is going on a run at 7 AM. Chronic pain is a general feeling of malaise that never stops.

Acute pain is ending the relationship. Chronic pain is feeling lonely in an unhappy relationship for the rest of your life.

Acute pain is the discomfort of visiting your parents when you’d rather be somewhere else. Chronic pain is the regret you’ll feel when they’re gone.

Most people will choose chronic pain over acute pain. But you should seek the acute pain. What acute pain are you avoiding? What if you chose to lean into it?

The pain of your lungs burning on a run is noticeable. The pain of always being out of energy is hidden.

The pain of being lost is noticeable. The pain of wasting your career on something you don’t care about is hidden.

Not all pain is bad. But it is inevitable.

Please remember to choose your pain.

When I was 18, the first thing I said to convince my friend to be my co-founder was “Let’s become millionaires before we turn 20.” He agreed. That company did not work out.

I like to make things. I really enjoy making useful and beautiful things for other people. My original intentions for starting a startup was to get rich, but I quickly fell in love with the act of creating something new. It wasn’t long until my main source of motivation became making things. Money quickly became secondary. I still care about money, but only to the extent that it’ll let me continue to make things.

I’m not entirely sure why I find the act of creating things so enjoyable. Part of it is that I’m good at it. I’m pretty good at making software. I understand how computers work, and also how people use computers. But it honestly it goes beyond computers. I like making ice cream for my friends. I like writing blog posts that people might find helpful. I don’t know where this sense of duty towards people comes from. Maybe it’s innate? Maybe it’s heritable? My parents did spend a lot of time helping other people solely for the sake of helping them out. It could very well be heritable. And the way it manifests in me as someone who enjoys computers is that I enjoy making technology to help people live better lives.

That’s always been the unifying theme in everything I do: technology in pursuit of human flourishing. It’s never been about the technology. It’s always been about the people. I care about people. I want to use technology to make their lives better. To help them flourish. To achieve their potential. I always come back to that idea, though I’m not sure why. It just feels so obvious to me. We have the ability to shape our environment and create a future in which people live happier, healthier, and more fulfilling lives. That’s a beautiful thing to be able to do! It feels like I have an obligation, a duty. That seems to be the mark of a craftsperson: a sense of obligation to better the lives of those around them by making things for them.

Making things is a pretty broad statement. I don’t just mean making apps. You could make an institution. Or a pint of ice cream. Or write a story for them. I just have this urge to make. To create. I feel at ease when I’m creating something. Even if it’s not that useful. Or that pretty. Even assembling a LEGO set feels productive to me. Which is silly - there’s nothing useful about a LEGO set. (Or maybe there is?)

This makes me wonder to what extent my desire to make things is hardwired in my biology. What else do I like to do? I really enjoy talking to my friends. I really enjoyed chatting with Thariq. I also enjoyed chatting with Abe. Close friendships are one of the greatest joys in life. Some of the happiest moments of my life were not due to grand achievements, but rather an evening spent with friends where we had a good time just hanging out. I love people. I went to the optometrist recently and loved chatting with the nurse there. It was such a minor interaction, but asking about her vacation and seeing her smile was wonderful. I love being able to make people smile, to make them laugh. It feels great to be able to bring people together, to be included.

I guess it all comes back to people. Maybe the reason I enjoy making things is because I want to be accepted. I want them to care about me. I want them to respect me. I wonder if that’s the reason I find myself wanting to create. I don’t think that’s a bad reason. If anything, that’s the most human reason I can think of. Making things for the sake of making feels foreign to me. Making things for other people so they love and respect you feels more honest and true.

Do I really want to make things? Or do I just want to be accepted? Maybe it's both. And maybe that's okay.

I was lucky enough to make a few friends my first semester of college. We ended up hanging out quite a bit during those early months.

We’d all get excited for the weekends because Friday nights meant going out to party. Everyone except for Anna, that is.

Anna was quiet, shy, and a definitely a goody-two-shoes. She was from Alabama and spoke with a pronounced southern drawl I’d rarely heard in Maryland. She was reserved but friendly once you got to know her. Anna cared about school a lot. She was almost always studying whenever I saw her.

Every Friday night we’d make plans to go out together and party. But Anna would always refuse to come. She’d say something along the lines of “I have to study” or “I just don’t feel like it tonight.”

Eventually, we stopped inviting Anna out. Everyone except Alexei.

I liked Alexei the most in our friend group. He was valedictorian of his high school, played tennis at a competitive level, and was remarkably smart. If anyone deserved to have an ego, it was Alexei. Yet somehow he managed to be the kindest person I’d ever known. But my absolute favorite thing about Alexei was that he always invited Anna to come party with us.

One Friday night as we were all about to leave the dorms for a house party, Alexei stopped us. “Hold on, let’s invite Anna.” We headed over to her dorm and invited her to come with us. She said “Sorry, I have to study for my Arabic exam next week, but you guys have fun.”

Alexei continued to invite Anna every time we went out for the rest of the semester. And Anna said no every single time.

Curious about his persistence, I asked him “Why do you keep inviting Anna out when she’ll just say no?”

I’ll never forget what he told me: “I know she’s always going to say no, but that’s not the point. I invite her out so she’ll always feel included in the group.”

After that first semester, the friend group disbanded and we all went our separate ways. Many years later I ran into Anna and we ended up catching up. She told me how difficult her first semester of college had been. She was very close with her mom and sister and missed them terribly.

But then she said something that stayed with me: She was grateful. She was grateful to be part of that brief friend group because she felt like she had a family away from home. And that even though she never partied with us, she always felt included because we would stop by her room and invite her anyway.

HN discussion here

It's September 2025. We have Claude Opus 4.1. GPT-5. Nano banana. There has never been a better time in the history of computing to build software. Here are a few ideas I wish existed.

1. A camera app that uses nano banana to make my mediocre iPhone photos look like they were taken on a Leica.
2. A single-purpose AI agent that can take any frontend project and automatically add support for light mode, dark mode, and custom theming. It should be able to use vision to see the UI changes, and then iteratively make changes based on the rendered UI.
3. Another single-purpose AI agent that can decompile and debug minified code into an interpretable codebase. This also requires a strong code-then-debug loop.
4. A hybrid of Strong (the lifting app) and ChatGPT where the model has access to my workouts, can suggest improvements, and coach me. I mainly just want to be able to chat with the model knowing it has detailed context for each of my workouts (down to the time in between each set).
5. A recommendation engine that looks at my browsing history, sees what blog posts or articles I spent the most time on, then searches the web every night for things I should be reading that I’m not. In the morning I should get a digest of links. I also want to be able to give feedback on which were good suggestions and which weren’t to improve the next day’s digest.
6. A calorie tracking app that’s a chat app grounded by nutrition databases. Just minimize the cognitive effort it takes me to log a meal.
7. A minimalist writing app that lets me write long-form content. A model can also highlight passages and leave me comments in the marginalia. I should be able to set different “personas” to review what I wrote.
8. An AI agent that can build one-off specialized AI agents. I want to describe a task like “build me an agent that can decompile code” and this agent will go off and build a hyper-specialized code decompilation agent for me.
9. A minimalist ebook reader that lets me read ebooks, but I can highlight passages and have the model explain things in more depth off to the side. It should also take on the persona of the author. It should feel like an extension of the book and not a separate chat instance.
10. A Deep Research agent that can reason for multiple days. I want to give it very complex queries and let it know it can spawn hundreds of sub-agents and reason for 3 days before it needs to return a response.
11. A paint-by-number filmmaking app. I want to be able to brainstorm an idea for a short film in the app, have the model create a detailed storyboard, and then I just need to use my phone to film each of the storyboarded shots. Kind of like training wheels for making movies.
12. A local screen recording app but it uses local models to create detailed semantic summaries of what I’m doing each day on my computer. This should then be provided as context for a chat app. I want to ask things like “Who did I forget to respond to yesterday?” I've been using Rewind for a year now, and it's nowhere near as useful as it should be.
13. Semantic filters for Twitter/X/YouTube. I want to be able to write open-ended filters like “hide any tweet that will likely make me angry” and never have my feed show me rage-bait again. By shaping our feeds we shape ourselves.
14. An agent that can create a detailed curriculum for very niche topics. I should be able to say something like “I want to learn everything we know about the science of progress” and it would search the web for people, blog posts, YouTube videos, essays, and textbooks. Then it should read through all the content, and give me a guided curriculum that will take me from beginner to expert.
15. An actually good book recommendation engine that first quizzes you about things you’ve read in the past, what your goals are, and the sort of things you enjoy reading. Then once it knows a lot about you, another agent simulates what you might think of the books the main agent suggests. It only surfaces books that you’re very likely to enjoy.
16. A semantic search engine for TikTok and Instagram Reels. There’s so much useful information locked away in short-form videos. I want to be able to query it.
17. A sleep fitness app that pulls in data from my Apple Watch (HR, VO₂), Eight Sleep, Oura Ring, workout apps, and combines them to give me practical recommendations for how to improve my sleep and recovery. I want it to proactively message me. Something like “I noticed your HRV has gone down this week, maybe you’re overtraining?”
18. A massive component library designed to be rendered within the context of a chat interface. Most existing component libraries have primitives that are too low-level. Less customization, more high level widgets.
19. A minimal voice assistant for my Apple Watch. I have lots of questions that are too complicated for Siri but not for ChatGPT. The responses should just be a few words long.
20. A writing app that searches the web for the topic you’re writing about, then composes a “suggested reading” list based on what it thinks might be helpful for you to read. (Writing apps should never write for you.)
21. A running app that creates a personalized plan, tracks your running pace and heart rate, and then iteratively adjusts the training program based on real world data.
22. A nano banana photo-editing app where I don’t have to write a prompt. Just give me hundreds of templates from trying out different haircuts to seeing what you and your partner’s kid would look like to making me look like The Rock. A photo editing super-app.
23. Same.energy but for finding YouTube videos with similar vibes. Let me put in a URL and have it find similar videos. YouTube's algorithm today is not this.  It just tries to maximize the median user’s engagement.
24. A Sony Walkman-style device that you can give to children so they can ask questions to an LLM. It should be voice-first, and focused on explaining things. There shouldn’t be a single screen on the device. Offline-first would be a plus.
25. A search engine for biographies of people where the query is a questionnaire about the current problem you’re facing, your stage in life, your field, etc. The engine’s results should be chapters from biographies or autobiographies from great people throughout history who have gone through and written about similar circumstances.
26. A screen-recording agent that observes how I’m using my computer and phone. Each day it audits the content I’ve been consuming. Screen Time is not specific enough. I want to know the exact nutritional value of the tokens I’m consuming.
27. A marketplace for AI agents. I don’t think today’s general agents will be better than an agent designed for a specific use case. I want a hyper-specific agent catalog for niche tasks like finding an apartment to rent in San Francisco. There should be tens of thousands of these agents that I can use via the web or call via API.
28. A writing app that lets you “request a critique” from a bunch of famous writers. What would Hemingway say about this blog post? What did he find confusing? What did he like?

If you're building anything on this list, please let me know. I'd really like to use it.

You first need an understanding what it really is that you're trying to solve. This means breaking down the problem into its component parts, and figuring out which part is actually causing you difficulty. Oftentimes, this will involve getting rid of irrelevant information and assumptions that are just making things confusing. For example, Kepler's attempt to come up with his laws of planetary motion involved simplifying the problem enormously by making several key changes: that the planets move in perfect circles, and that their speed is constant. These assumptions were wrong, but they allowed Kepler to focus on the core of the problem of planetary motion and helped him understand it more deeply.

Look for similar problems that've already been solved, and try to find an analogy to your problem. If a hard problem has already been solved before (even if it's only approximate), you may be able to use that solution as a starting point for tackling your own problem. When the Wright brothers were first trying to develop a flying machine, they observed birds frequently – one day they noticed that whenever a buzzard would lift one side of the its wing up, it would bank and turn. This led them to add roll control into the original Wright Flyer using ailerons, which are still used in airplanes today.

Restate the problem in as many ways as possible. Try to look at it from many different perspectives. This can help you see things that you might have missed before, and it may also give you new insight into how best to solve the problem. Einstein's discovery of the theory of relativity can be traced back to a thought experiment where he wondered what someone would see if they were riding alongside a beam of light. He concluded “I should observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest”, or that the beam of light would appear stationary. According to Maxwell's equations this shouldn't have been possible. The shift in perspective provided by his thought experiment eventually lead to his discovery that the laws of physics are the same for all observers, regardless of their relative motion.

Generalize the solution to an already solved problem and see if it can apply to your problem. Universal explanations are at the root of all progress. By taking specific solutions and understanding their underlying principles, we can develop more universal theories that can be applied to a wider range of situations. Newton recognized that Kepler's laws of planetary motion were really just a special case of a more general law of gravitation. By generalizing Kepler's laws, he was able to develop a theory that explained the motion of all objects in the universe – the law of universal gravitation.

Divide and conquer. Another useful strategy for solving hard problems is to break them down into a series of smaller, more manageable sub-problems. By attacking each sub-problem separately, you can often make progress on the overall problem that wouldn't have been possible by trying to tackle it all at once. The Manhattan Project's goal of developing an atom bomb was complex, but could be divided into many less (albeit still hard) sub-problems: splitting the atom through neutron bombardment, understanding how to create a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, developing the technology to enrich uranium isotopes, engineering the detonation mechanism with traditional explosives, building the bombs themselves, and so on.

The best way to solve a hard problem is by understanding the system and the principles that govern it. Humans have attempted manned flight for at least 10,000 years, however most of those attempts were some variation of jumping off a cliff with wings – often ending with someone at the bottom of a cliff. Once we understood the requisite aerodynamic principles such as lift, drag, and thrust – it was within the relative blink of an eye that we were able to send a man to the moon.

Good explanations are the root of all progress. They're the single most powerful force in the known universe.

Getting into a state of flow is the only way I can make progress when writing complex software. I also think it's possible to structure your life in a way that maximizes the amount of time you can spend in a state of flow each day. Here's what I try to do to engineer flow for myself.

Sleep

Sleep is the single most important thing that affects my productivity. I would rather have a good night's rest than any other thing on this list. I have a hard rule where I can't take any caffeine after 4PM. If I make myself coffee at 3:45PM and I forget about it until 4:05PM, then I save it in the fridge for the next day. The marginal boost of evening efficiency isn't worth tragically destroying my productivity the next day.

On days where I'm over-stimulated, taking 0.3-0.9 mg Melatonin seems to help. I also think it's important to sleep in a cold room, the sweet spot seems to be about 60-65º F.

Caffeine

Unfortunately the human brain was never meant to write code for multiple hours a day, and the fact we've repurposed our primate brains to do so is honestly mind-boggling. To get around this, I consume a lot of caffeine. If you're reading this, then I'm sure you do too. In an ideal world, we'd all be caffeine-free while also still being able to solve complex problems. Unfortunately we do not live in that world.

The biggest downside to caffeine is the inverse correlation between the amount of coffee I drink and my sleep quality. It's important that I find a delicate balance between being stimulated while also not over-caffeinating. If I had to pick between caffeine and sleep, sleep wins every time.

Air Quality

You can dramatically improve your productivity by lowering the CO2 levels in the room where you work. By dramatically improve, I mean on the order of 20% or more. A study compared the cognitive performance of people working in a room with CO2 levels at 1,000 ppm (for reference, the ambient outdoor CO2 level is just 400 ppm) and people working in a room at with 600 ppm CO2. The people in high CO2 room scored around 20% lower on cognitive tests than those in the room with low CO2.

Until I got an air quality monitor, I assumed the room I worked in had low levels of CO2 since I opened the window often. It turned out my ambient CO2 levels were around 1,200 ppm – even higher than the levels used in the study! To fix this, I almost always keep a window cracked while I work which brings the ambient CO2 levels to around ~450 ppm.

Exercise

I suck at exercising. Seriously. Every time I exercise after not moving for a few days I always think to myself "this feels amazing, why don't I do it more often?"

Honestly just figuring out a way to move my body and elevate my heart rate works wonders. Ideally it's lifting weights, but it doesn't have to be. I've found playing Beat Saber for an hour just as invigorating as going on a run. I also just read a headline that said "Not exercising worse for your health than smoking, diabetes and heart disease". There's really no reason to not exercise, and I empathize with you if you're also an extreme hyperbolic time discounter.

Working Alone

I must work alone, or at least with other people who can also work quietly for an entire day. Being in an environment where nobody can disturb me is important because I lose my train of thought easily. Personally I find this to be the largest underrated benefit of remote work.

Uninstall video games

Valorant is my drug of choice, and it's a near-perfect match for brain type. I've learned from experience that I can spend the greater chunk of a waking day clicking on people's heads, so I set a Schelling fence for myself and just deleted the Windows partition on my computer entirely. Other people likely have better self-control than I do, but a video game once consumed the better part of a decade so I personally prefer to avoid them at all costs.

Block Websites

I have the unfortunate habit of aimlessly scrolling through Twitter whenever I get stuck on a hard problem, which is sort of like sticking a rod in my bike's spokes while I'm trying to ride it up a steep hill. I'll just lose the momentum I had and have to regain context all over again. To avoid this trap, I use Freedom and block all distracting websites.

Make a day plan

I have to make a list of the things I want to do before I start my day otherwise I won't work on my A+ problem. Letting my curiosity set my day's direction can be intellectually satisfying, but when I need to Get Things Done, using a list is a must. My tool of choice is Sunsama.

Music

I think deep house is my ideal genre for long periods of intense focus. Here's one of my favorite mixes (it's a live set on a hot air balloon!) I also use noise cancelling headphones and can't focus without them. Even if I'm in a quiet room, I find the insanity-inducing silence of noice cancellation to be wonderful.

Nutrition

I avoid sugar and processed foods out of habit, however I do that more for health reasons than productivity. I haven't really found a direct correlation between the food I eat and my productivity.

Pick the right problem

Finally, no matter how productive I am, none of it matters unless I'm working on the right problem. The countless astronomers who dedicated their lives to understanding the geocentric model of the solar system did little to progress science. Copernicus was far more productive because heliocentrism was correct.

Be sure what you're working on isn't geocentrism.

There've been countless nights where I've watched interviews of Steve Jobs until the sun began to rise, read many books written by anyone who's ever worked alongside him, and even gotten one of Steve's long-time confidants to invest in and advise my startup. Across space and time (and through the powers of computers) I consider Steve Jobs to be my mentor.

What Steve understood more than anyone else was that computing was never about the computers. Computing is about people. Good computing is leverage for the human mind, a way for us augment our creative abilities, and push the limits of cognition. He understood computers were no more than tools that should be wielded effortlessly by anyone while also being capable of being applied to a near-infinite set of problems. Steve understood that the brainpower computers required should never be wasted on the overhead of using the computer, but instead should be spent entirely on the task at hand.

In one of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes, he brings up a study he read in Scientific American that compares the energy efficiency of different species.

I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts. And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

A bicycle for the mind, what a damn elegant analogy! A car or train for the mind would've implied that computers do our work for us which is plain wrong. Instead, they're a force multiplier for our own existing capabilities.

Steve also understood that computers shouldn't require any effort to operate. There should be no computing overhead. Want to make things bigger? Pinch to zoom. Want to watch a video? Just hold your phone sideways. Need to scroll? Literally flick the page down as if it were a sheet of fucking paper. Steve dedicated his life to slowly sanding away the friction in computing so that we could give the problem we're working on as much attention as possible. He understood computers should just work, that they should do what you want them to, and that they should be a bicycle for your mind.

Through the power of computers, thanks for being my mentor Steve.

For my entire life my eyesight was so bad that I couldn't even read the license plate of the car in front of me. It seemed like the entire world was in on a cruel joke to make every sign just a bit too small. But last week I had my corneas cut open by a computerized femtosecond laser and reshaped by an excelsior laser. Today, I can look up at the moon and literally see the Sea of Tranqulity with near-perfect visual acuity. If LASIK isn't a testament to the feasibility of engineering the human body, then I don't know what is.

That got me thinking – what other aspect of being human might be a good target for augmentation? It might be useful to just look at what people are doing today which improve deficits in their biology, then design a way to make those augmentations less external. I went from wearing glasses to wearing contact lens to lasers shaving micrometers off the inside of my cornea. There's a clear progression from bulky and external to invisible and internal.

Computers also fit this bulky-to-invisible progression. We went from room-sized IBM mainframes to Dell desktops. Then from the Macbook Air to a 6" iPhone in our pocket. So, what computer comes after the iPhone?

For many people, the next logical step seems to be wearables – smart watches, glasses, and even rings. I personally doubt the next iPhone will be a wearable because of one fatal flaw: they have a limited human I/O bandwidth.

Think of human I/O bandwidth as how fast your phone can get information into your brain, and vice versa. A large 4K monitor with a mechanical keyboard and a desktop OS will always be better than a 6" screen and touch keyboard.

Wearables won't replace the iPhone because they make it harder to get information in and out of them. Apple Watch wearers still carry their iPhone in their pocket, except in the rare case when a phone is too cumbersome to carry like going on a run.

Apple understands the concept of human bandwidth quite well because each iPhone generation gets a slightly larger screen. It's also why most high bandwidth work like programming is done on a desktop rather than an iPhone. It's not the computational power of the phone that prevents us from doing meaningful work. The constraint is the tiny screen and touch keyboard.

For all of computing's brief history there's been a clear correlation between the size of your computer and how useful it is. Today meaningful work is done on MacOS, Windows, or Linux while everything else is done on iOS or Android. Wearables don't really make a dent in the category of meaningful work. Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for WatchOS recommend developers avoid displaying more than 2 sentences on the watch's 44mm screen.

Getting information into the brain

Our brain processes visual input 60,000x faster than text, so the next iPhone must have a graphical user interface. When you have a conversation, 70 to 93 percent of all communication is nonverbal. Our brains love to process visual data, so it'd be a waste to let most of our neurons sit idle while working. Also – imagine the horror of being forced to communicate with your computer only via Siri!  

If the "next iPhone" must be capable of displaying a GUI large enough for serious work while also being significantly smaller, the only path forward is to depart from the concept a screen entirely.

The Optic Nerve Implant

The human retina generates electrical signals and sends them via the optic nerve to the brain. But, what kind of signals does it produce? The neuroengineering resesarcher Miguel Hernandez developed a neural implant that gave vision to blind patients by turning a camera's byte stream output into electrical signals the brain could understand.

If the basic idea behind Gómez’s sight—plug a camera into a video cable into the brain—is simple, the details are not. Fernandez and his team first had to figure out the camera part. What kind of signal does a human retina produce? To try to answer this question, Fernandez takes human retinas from people who have recently died, hooks the retinas up to electrodes, exposes them to light, and measures what hits the electrodes. (His lab has a close relationship with the local hospital, which sometimes calls in the middle of the night when an organ donor dies. A human retina can be kept alive for only about seven hours.) His team also uses machine learning to match the retina’s electrical output to simple visual inputs, which helps them write software to mimic the process automatically. (via MIT Technology Review)

Max Hodak, the president of Neuralink, also explains that the problem with neural implants isn't understanding the signal, but rather getting it in the first place.

Decoding the signals isn’t the hard part: getting the signals captive is. Current recording technology, put simply, sucks. Really, really badly. Current implants only pick up around 4 cells per electrode, last an average of 3 years before being encapsulated in fibrous tissue by the brain (hypothesized to be an immune response) and rendered useless. (via maxhodak.com)

Getting a reliable signal from the brain is really, really hard. But what if we could somehow get the signal before it got to the brain?  

A hypothetical device – the optic nerve implant – could intercept the signals sent from the retina to the brain via the optic nerve, and render a GUI over your vision. The optic nerve's bandwidth is only about 8.75 megabits per second, and decoding the optic nerve's signals could be done using modern ML techniques as demonstrated by Hernandez's artificial eye. More importantly, the optic nerve can be accessed without touching the brain at all which would be far less invasive than an implant that directly stimulates the brain.

The optic nerve implant would be the only way to increase the human bandwidth of the next iPhone while also making it smaller and more internal. The hypothetical screen size can be as large as our field of view – and the device powering it would be millimeters in size.

We still have to solve the second part of the equation – the "in" part of I/O. The ideal input system would have as much human information bandwidth as using a mouse and keyboard while also being invisible when in use.

The first solution that jumps to mind would be to use natural language input, or some variation of it, like a speech detecting wearable that captures your silent internal speech. However, natural language is a very bad idea for computer input. It's tedious and low-bandwidth compared to a mouse and keyboard or even touchscreen. Imagine being forced to control your car by having a conversation with it, or even worse, imagine using voice to navigate a modern JS-heavy webpage!

In addition to conversational input being slow, it lacks the many benefits of GUIs. It doesn't leverage the brain's predisposition to prefer the visual over the auditory. Natural language also makes situations which require continuous control like playing a video game or moving a cursor impossible.

Another way to get input into the device would be to use gestures, kind of like how we interact while using a VR headset. Gesture-driven input is better than speech, but it's pretty tiring reaching your arms out in front of you after just a few minutes. It also doesn't align with the goal of making this device more internal to the body – imagine having to wave your hands in a crowded NYC subway during rush hour, or while trying to fall asleep in bed.

Eye-based input

The ideal solution is to use our eyes as input. We have 6 extraocular muscles that are capable of incredibly fine-tuned movement, show no inertia when stopped suddenly, and almost never fatigue. Our eye muscles are the best way to control a cursor – possibly even more accurate than using a trackpad or mouse. The problem with eye-based input isn't that our eyes are inaccurate, but rather with eye-tracking cameras being unable to detect subtle eye movements.

In addition to rendering a GUI, the optic nerve implant can also use our gaze as a continuous input. It'd be like using a touchscreen, but instead of tapping with a finger you'd just glance at the UI element you'd want to interact with. Using the eyes for both input and output would free up our hands, so we'd be able to use a computer while doing almost anything.

Imagine if you could write code while running through the park. Or playing a competitive first person shooter that stretches across your FOV while sitting in a subway train during rush hour. You could stream your vision to your friends while on a trip to Japan. Or write a shader to make your vision look like a Pixar movie. Changing reality would become as easy as writing to your vision's framebuffer.

The signal processing techniques required need to convert our retina's electrical signals into a bytestream likely already exists today. We're also capable of manufacturing SoCs that are just millimeters in size, and the surgical techniques to access the optic nerve are minimally invasive and well-understood. The hardest part about creating this device seems to be getting a reliable signal from the optic nerve. It's likely only a matter of time before Apple's posts an opening for a neural engineer.

One of the most awe-inspiring things to watch is a skilled musician performing live music – especially when they play the piano or guitar while singing. How can anyone not admire that level of coordination? When I'm reading a great book and the author pulls off a masterful plot twist, I don't feel the same way about their skillful writing. When I'm watching an exciting movie, I rarely find myself thinking "Damien Chazelle's pacing for that scene was excellent!" It's not that I don't feel any less admiration for writers and directors relative to musicians – it's just that musicians seem to be deserving of an entirely different class of admiration. There's something more visceral about watching music get made. What do musicians do differently?

I think it's because musicians are the only craftspeople that get to create something at the exact same time their audience consumes it. Their vocals and chords are heard by their audience the moment they get played. Compare that to a director whose film gets watched months, if not years after it was created. The same goes for writers, chefs, artists, programmers and nearly every other class of creator. They don't get to stream their finished creation directly to their audience's senses as they're creating it. Unless they're a musician. That explains why there are no concert venues where a director produces a film right in front of you. The process of creation is just too time intensive to watch – a single minute of a film can take hundreds of hours of effort.

Musicians on the other hand get to experience the unique joy of creating music while having their audience enjoy it at the exact same time. That's why musicians are the luckiest people.

The popular adage "you're the average of your five closest friends" is extremely overlooked. The people I interact with the frequently tend to shape my worldview to a terrifying extent, however the amount of intention I put into selecting those few people is minimal relative to the impact they'll have on my life. Just think of the possibilities – there are 7 billion alive today, and ignoring time as a dimension, there's been over 100 billion people to ever exist. A modern remix of the saying would be "you're the average of the people whose content you consume the most".

When I'm watching a series on Netflix, I occasionally find myself speaking – and even thinking – like a character from the show. After reading a biography, the decisions I make tend to align with how the person I was reading would've acted. The same goes for watching YouTube videos. After watching a long interview, I find myself subconsciously making decisions similar to what the interviewee would've decided. It's almost like I can tap into the consciousness of anyone in the history of humanity by pseudo-emulating them in my head! How spectacular is that?

If I'm actually intentional about the type of content I consume every day, then I can pretty much mold my personality and become literally anybody I want. It's impossible for me to watch a few hours of Obama speeches without finding myself becoming a more eloquent speaker. The emulation isn't always constructive though. Sometimes I'll watch a Twitch streamer for a few hours, then find myself in a serious conversation where I have to actively suppress my urge to say "that is so poggers".

The malleability of my personality has a critical downside — if I'm unintentional about the content I consume, then I lose control over who I become. The people whose content I consume is hard to filter – even with active safeguards in place. I have a browser extension that strips YouTube of recommended videos and autoplay. On Twitter, most of the people I follow are muted. However even with safeguards in place, I still find myself unintentionally eating the junk food. I just find it so damn good.

In retrospect, many of my largest life decisions can be traced back to a single YouTube video popping up in my recommendations sidebar, or a book that I picked up by coincidence because it had an eye-catching cover. I'm still grappling with the idea that my laptop gives me the option to shape my personality to a terrifying degree.

Nonetheless, I think I'll have fun with it.

I believe Library Genesis is greatest hidden treasure of the internet. It's a database of books you can search, download, and instantly begin reading. However, it's horribly awful to navigate. So, I build Alexandria, a desktop-based ebook browser powered by Library Genesis. With Alexandria, you can search, download, and open any book within seconds.

Here's a demo where a friend told me about The Courage to be Disliked. Within just ~10 seconds of the recommendation, I can be reading the book.

Download Alexandria via GitHub

It's Mac only, but since it's an Electron app, it shouldn't be hard to build it for Windows or Linux.

Today's video calls suck for large group calls. When someone is speaking in a large Zoom call, they're the only person speaking in the entire room. They hold the metaphorical conversational lock and block any other people from speaking. Imagine if only a single person in a large room full of people could speak at any given time. That's the current state of large video calls today. Once a person is done talking, they release lock and the next person begins to talk. There can only ever be one conversation happening in a Zoom room at any given time. This single-threaded and blocking approach to conversation is the reason large video calls suck. A room where one person is speaking to 100 people is a lecture. A room where 100 people are speaking amongst themselves is a party.

Contrary to Zoom rooms, a real life room is fantastic for allowing parallel conversations. If I'm speaking with someone and I overhear a nearby conversation about something I'm interested in, I can chime in while continuing my existing conversation. If I want to join a new conversation, I can simply walk up to people and begin listening. Conversations aren't supposed to be discrete. They don't have a clear start or end, and the number of people in each conversation constantly change as people come and go. Two nearby conversations can merge into one large conversation, and a conversation of 4 people might split off into 2 one-on-one conversations.

I shouldn't have to invite a user to my conversation, or end a conversation when we're done speaking. There shouldn't be a conversation object in a database somewhere. I don't think the best way to allow parallel conversations is to build conversations as a discrete feature in your video chat app, but rather you should simulate the environment in which conversations can naturally occur.

The Solution

I think simulating a 2D, or isometric view of a large house and where each person has an avatar-bubble consisting of their video feed and can freely move the 2D space would be the simplest way to facilitate conversations in a large video chat. The friction between starting or stopping a conversation is equal to the amount of effort it takes to drag your avatar to a different part of the room.

You would only hear audio from nearby avatars, and each avatar's volume would be relative to its distance from your avatar. This means people could have one-on-one conversations, while also having large group conversations in the same call. An admin could grant access to a megaphone effect that would let anyone be heard at full volume no matter where they are in the room.

I've put together a quick mockup in Figma, and used Mii's as people's avatars. In reality, it can just be a bubble containing a user's video feed, with a solid border around the bubble whenever a person is speaking.

This solution wouldn't be ideal for smaller video calls, but it does a pretty decent job at simulating what real conversations are like in a virtual setting, with the least amount of effort. If this environment works well for large video calls, perhaps you could create always on rooms to let people freely chat with each other for fun. Something akin to a virtual bar or shopping mall. Once you have an environment that lets large groups to naturally have conversations amongst each other, the possibilities are endless.

I've used many productivity tools over the years, and I think I've finally been able to refine my workflow to 3 tools that each serve a specific need.

Roam Research

The first one is a note-taking tool called Roam Research. I'm a a longtime Evernote user, and before that I extensively used Google Keep. However, Roam's graph-based approach to linking similar notes has proven to be surprisingly valuable. Whenever I have a lot on my mind, I can quickly open up a Roam document and dump my thoughts into it, and link them to existing ideas using the simple [[bracket]] notation. The result is a highly organized and easily traversable graph of ideas, a modern day memex. While I still use Evernote because there's no iPhone app for Roam yet, I'm certain that'll change very soon.

Sunsama

My favorite productivity tools are ones that disappear into my workflow. The more effort I have to put into using a tool, the less likely I am to consistently stick with it. Sunsama is genuinely the most wonderful personal task manager that I've ever used. The UI is based around your week, with each day containing a column of tasks to complete. You can drag and drop tasks from one day to the next, and import tasks from existing tools like Asana and Todoist. Initially, I used Sunsama as a way to manage tasks from my Trello and Asana boards, however over time I've stopped using both of those tools entirely. If there's one tool that resulted in a noticeable increase in productivity, it would be Sunsama. It's gotten to the point where I make every person on my team use it because of how fantastic it is.

When it comes to tracking analytics for your startup, there are nearly infinite tools to measure revenue, retention, and even the slightest of anomalies in your users' behaviors. However, when it comes to analytics regarding your personal life, nothing quite exists. I can't install Google Analytics and have it explain why I've had an especially productive day, or I can't use Mixpanel to make graphs displaying my progress towards personal KPIs.

A big reason such a tool doesn't exist is because there's often not much personal data being collected about the specific items you'd like to track, and the friction in getting the data into such a system would prevent most people from using it. However, I still believe such a tool would be massively valuable and the data friction problem can be solved, so I built it.

Super

Super is a tool I made to ensure I'm continuously self-improving and making progress towards the aspects of my life I care about most. I've noticed I often fall into stretches of a few months where I seem to make remarkable progress on my productivity and fitness goals, whereas other times I just can't seem to move the needle forward. With Super, I can finally track every aspect of my life and ensure I'm making deliberate, consistent progress.

Understanding Problems vs Technical Breakthroughs

Something fun I've noticed is that none of the three tools mentioned in this article relied on solving hard technical problems or were built with an ingenious feat of engineering. The founder of Roam Research published an in-depth white paper explaining why traditional note-taking apps are broken, and he seems to have worked from first principles what an ideal note-taking tool would look like, resulting in Roam. Similarly, with Sunsama, the founders seem to understand better than anyone in the world what a thoughtful task manager would look like.

Personally, I've spent the past 5 years thinking about what an ideal system for tracking and managing my own personal growth would look like. The first prototype of Super was built in my bedroom freshman year of college, and was actually a hardware prototype of a device that would tell me how far away I was from reaching my daily MyFitnessPal calorie goal. This was far before I realized could achieve the same result, if not more, in just software.

As a productivity nerd, I can't wait to see what other insights people have regarding productivity and the tools they dream up.

This is an ongoing collection of various startup tactics that I think are particularly valuable.

• Build the absolute smallest thing that can be considered a useful application and ship it. Don't fall into the trap of intellectual indulgence with over-engineering.
• Product development doesn't start until you launch. Think of your initial product as a means to get your users to talk to you.
• Be willing to change your idea. Determination without flexibility is a greedy algorithm that will lead to a mediocre local maximum.
• Fast iteration on both your product (the solution) and market (the problem) is the key to success. You should adopt two day ship cycles to keep things moving fast.
• Create a product people love before you focus on growth. If your users are spontaneously telling other people to use your product, then you've built something people love.
• Find a hidden need; everyone will tell you the idea is dumb. If the need were obvious, then many people would already be working on it.
• Almost all CEOs know where the problems are, but only the truly elite ones run towards the fear. Run towards what you fear the most.
• Don't clone an existing product. Do work on something you believe will be a valuable and original contribution to the world.
• Don't worry if what you're building doesn't sound like a business. Nobody thought Facebook would be a $500 billion dollar company. It's easy to come up with a business model once you've made something people want. (You can even make pretty web forms and turn that into a 200+ person company.)
• You create value in proportion to how well you understand the problem you're solving, and the problems you understand best are your own. The most successful startups seem to have begun by trying to solve a problem their founders had. You must have a specific user in mind.
• The startup game is all about risks. If you aren't taking risks, and your startup already exists, then you're just copying something else. But if you're creating something new in the world, there shouldn't be a week that goes by without feeling anxiety about the risks you're taking.
• All startups that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people. If you want to be a great company some day, you have to build something so good that people will recommend it to their friends.