Apperceptive Mess #3: South Central LA, Complexity, and Clayton Christensen
Hello everyone!
I cannot believe it has already been a month into 2020. January has really been the month I start to find my rhythm around life here in Los Angeles and enjoy what the city has to offer.
I started meeting friends I’ve known for years on Twitter, began scouting for my favourite working cafes near school and home, discovered my favourite podcasts to listen to on my commute, and learned the roads enough to drive myself to school and back without guidance!
Ever since I got my driver’s license in 2015, using a navigator like a Garmin/Google Maps has always augmented my driving experience. This past week I did my commute almost exclusively without the use of any navigational guidance whatsoever; and it was REFRESHING.
It might seem a bit preposterous to some of my readers to attempt to drive without navigation guidance turned on, but I have grown to appreciate the quality of being freed from the anxieties of finding the “right time to leave” or “the fastest route to your destination”.
Don’t get me wrong, I do think it’s a bit silly to be vindicating a piece of technology that has saved millions of marriages from spiralling while Overcooked has only done the inverse, but I highly encourage you to try it some day.
Even if you get lost, I hope you find yourself.
Conversation of the Week: Anthony Ramirez
This week I got the opportunity to sit down with Anthony Ramirez, a freshman at the University of Southern California’s Iovine and Young Academy. Anthony is unlike the majority of his peers in college: he grew up around South Central LA where USC resides.
USC’s cohort has an average median income of $161,400. South Central LA? $32,791.
Granted this is not new information for many of you based in California, but this was pretty shocking for me; a new implant of Los Angeles. I am also told that this neighbourhood is sometimes called the “ghetto”.
Anthony and I sat down at a rather intimate diner which I am told he comes to as a child with his older brothers, and we talked about how growing up around the neighbourhood has shaped him towards having a differentiated vantage point towards his college experience at USC.
We talked about the kindest things people have done for him, and he was quick to mention a startup he worked at: Teens Exploring Technology (TXT); a youth development program for underserved teens to develop technical vocational skills. There, he got access to mentorship, learned to code, built apps, and tinkered with technology.
He shared with me his contrarian view towards South Central LA that his peers growing up did not share: South Central LA is not a place to get out of, it is a place that needs the people it raises to give back.
Attributing much of his success as an individual to his time in TXT and his desire to live by his words and leverage the opportunities and resources he now has access to, he is pulling all stops to bring maximum impact to his community.
This semester, as a member of USC’s entrepreneurship club SparkSC, Anthony will be running Project Launch, an initiative that helps connect underserved high school students in LA with student mentors.
You can’t fault people with the energy that Anthony possesses. Sitting across the booth from him I can almost feel his overwhelming desire to be the change he wants to see for his own neighbourhood. At TXT, his mentors helped him see the value in lifting people up, and I know for sure that Anthony is very much determined to make the same impact for many other younger members of his community.
Randy Pausch said it best: We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.
Meditation of The Week: Traversing the Planes of Quality
To determine what our time is worth spending on, we spend all our lives judging quality. Clothing, furniture, the new calendar app, or even a romantic prospect on a date.
Recently on the Invest Like The Best podcast, Vaughn Tan shared that the quality of any given thing can be measured on two planes: complex/complicated, and simple/simplistic.
Citing the example of making the perfect French Omelette; blonde on the outside, perfectly custardy on the inside, it is both simple yet complex to make. It is complex but not complicated because we know what is takes to make a perfect one: a combination of kitchen technique with experience (how it smells, how it sounds, how it looks). Not simplistic because the intricacies of getting the pan technique right requires a lot of time spent in the kitchen; but once mastered can make it simple.
It really makes you think: the north star of building products then really is about traversing not just a refinement of thought, but also action. An individual that possess the right duality of tasteful thought guided by an urgency and desire of getting things done and learning from trial-and-error, is sure to be able to achieve a level of quality that eventually becomes distinguishable.
Much of the work then trends towards abstraction, the reduction of parts, just like evolution. As described by Williston, a pioneering 19th-century paleontologist wrote about the evolution of water reptiles:
The course of evolution has been to reduce the number of parts and to adapt those which remain more closely with their special uses, either by increase in size or by modifications of their shape and structure
Just like how Richard Feynman could teach Physics with simple language without dumbing down the topics, a fundamental understanding of something helps us know how to get from A to B in the shortest way.
To put it simply (no pun intended), to turn many things into “few useful simple things” is what makes a perfect French Omelette perfect.
Read of The Week: How To Measure Your Life?
Professor Clayton Christensen, famous and influential in technology for his writing in Riding The Wave and Innovator’s Dilemma passed on Thursday, 23rd January 2020.
I will like to take the opportunity to share with everyone one of his essays that took a real hold on me when I read it 6 years ago.
Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.
Quote of The Week:
“The geometry of the heavens is not more astonishing than the geometry of the beehive, nor is the architecture of the finest city built by man more intricate and masterly.”
— The Quest of the Simple Life, William J Dawson