Well I havent posted in a while and I had been craving to do a 'sit down' writing apart from the random chunks of notes I was take as part of my research or while reading other blogs. I also maintain a journal where I jot down some random ideas throughout the day.

The purpose of this blog is to share some ideas / questions I have been thinking about recently. You might wanna check out my Rebooting post for some background.

1 Curiosity vs impact

I love reading advice posts and have observed two schools of thought in what should be done or how to choose the problems to solve -- follow ur curiosity or chase what could be impactful -- these are many times not conflicting, infact when they aren't they lead to Apples, Googles, Microsofts, etc

(I have read Sam Altman and Naval Ravikant emphasize on becoming the best at what you do -- something u r good at makes u motivated to do it -- but may not be something that u might be super curious about or lets say -- doing for fun, this is about that kind of a conflict.)

While what we are innately curious about might provide the drive and hence lead to great work, but it is not destined to have an impact. On the other hand, you might pour your blood and sweat into working hard on things that have an impact, gain fame or at the very least satisfaction from having contributed something meaningful, but is that a good way to do things? The down side is you have to drive yourself in a different way -- the push doesnt come from within -- of course it might with time, when u get good at things and see them working out, u do get dopamine surges, but the initial momentum has to be developed from a sense of ambition / vision or desire for money or anything else

2 Networking and Friends

Before I joined college, I had high hopes of being surrounded by the best and the most ambitious minds of the country and to my utter disappointment, things were quite the opposite.

Disclaimer: The following might not be true -- I have a bitch against IIT CS peeps in general :/

My peers in CS are simply interested in playing games of 'status' or 'security'. Those who are ambitious simply aspire to dominate others and try to actively develop an inferiority complex in the people around them -- I find this super cheap. Such a waste of time! College is meant to collaborate. The second kind is the 'secure' player gang -- the entire batch - 2 peeps (me included of course :P) have no ambitions in life -- all they want is to somehow fit in the molds designed by the system -- and most of them are simply burning themselves out :((.

I do not (at least any more) have problems with either of the two categories -- they are found almost everywhere and its fine to be the way u are. But for quite a long time, I could not fit inside the groups and always found myself disconnected -- I did not manage to find a true friend throughout the first year! Most of the time I blamed myself for not being able to adjust but now that I am finding people outside of CS who think like I do, I realise that you have to actively find the 'right' people and not make the mistake of fitting in -- leaving is good. Well finding people who resonate with you can be hard sometimes -- for me some of these guys just bumped in by luck and others, I reached out to.

In either case trying to proactively talk to new people outside of your current sphere can be really rewarding -- you end up vibing hard with some guys!

Following Near and Alexey I have been trying to find interesting people on the internet -- and I did not fail! Finding people is like a DFS you start with a node -- discovers its neighbors and their neighbors and so on ... this is how I been making my list of cool people (hoping to upload soon on the homepage)

3 Cognitive biases in interacting with people

I am a highly sensitive person -- the thing that I dislike about myself the most is that one bad interaction with a person makes me cognitively biased towards thinking negatively of them -- and avoiding contact / conversations -- this often bitters my relations with people and deprives me of the value they might add into my life. Sometimes this is also the result of some trait / habit / posts or tweets or to make things worse, a 'mental model' that I made about someone (by hearing from others) without even interacting with them!

Not sure if others have this problem too ... But I wanna get rid of this ASAP. It robs you of being a good communicator and is absolutely harmful for sales skills -- something that almost all the people I admire, think are important.

This I believe is the result of the instant cognitive action of the brain -- described as System 1 in the book Thinking, Fast and Slow

4 The importance of writing

This is also something that almost all the people I admire do and recommend to do. Writing somehow clears the brain -- some thought that had been hitting your brain (cache) once offloaded to the disk (paper / note-taker) allows space for more thought while preserving earlier thought. This not only helps you analyse your own thinking, but in the act you tend to think more -- as you keep writing thoughts come in your head and the random pieces of your blog / essay somehow seem to make sense.

As for new ideas, a lot of times I get new ideas while talking to interesting people -- writing also does something similar -- it helps you "think out loud". In fact I've observed that I tend to solve a hard problem / understand something I was myself not clear about, by explaining it to others. Yupp, reverberating your own thoughts works!

Would love to know what other people think.