Apperceptive Mess #7: Taking Smart Notes, My Deepest Demon, and Hiring for Uncertainty
Hello friends!
This week, I started reading How To Take Smart Notes and am getting really positive outcomes out of it. In summary, the “Take Smart Notes” method is aimed at anyone looking to not only build a rich collection of notes and ideas, but also help facilitate greater frequency of idea-collision towards meaningful writing.
While I have always maintained a notes/highlights capture system within Evernote, it’s linear and “boxed off” nature has always felt limiting whenever a piece of idea changes it’s contextual existence in my head.
For example, if given the following idea: “Sturgeon’s law states that 90% of everything is rubbish”. I can use this idea to boost Visakan’s “Make 100 Things” argument, criticise the quality of science fiction, or even to explain the Pareto Principle in game theory. That’s how my brain works: I have poor long-term memory and rely on the indexing of these big “idea nodes” to store and retrieve information. Therefore, Evernote’s 1-note-1-notebook model just never helped me when I simply cannot remember or trust where I put those ideas and have complete inability to recall the names and labels like “Sturgeon’s Law”.
I describe my fundamental struggle with writing like this: “how do you translate a web of interconnected ideas into a linear-flowing, easy-to-follow essay?” Combined with a (hopefully) ever-expanding bank of knowledge, Evernote’s incompatibility with the unstructured nature of my brain made information retrieval at writing-time even more challenging for me.
Until I heard about Roam. With “blocks” representing nodes within your knowledge graph, the interaction primitive of organising these nodes works in close tandem with my brain: a constant re-indexing of thinking and ideas to make it easier to navigate them.
I’ve started using Roam for my classes in school and am already seeing it pay dividends in the way it integrates backwards with the rest of my pre-existing mental latticework and the reading I do on my own.
Can’t wait to keep the experiment rolling!
Conversation (and Meditation) of The Week: Inner Jurvis’ Deepest Demon
This week I sat down with my inner-most self. I am, to date, my own worst enemy and sometimes thinking a little too much about myself makes me sick to the stomach but that’s okay.
Full disclosure: I spent way too much time writing this for school and was lazy to write another thing. So here we are.
With the purpose of entertainment from an adventure tale, we love our heroes. From Gilgamesh and Herakles, through the Gospel’s Jesus to modern characters like Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter, we model our lives for the promise of kleos (“fame, glory”), and live in the fear of certain death in oblivion. Common to their stories is the injustice that starts in the middle, where the hero faces death and rebirth, to only find themselves transformed for another call to adventure with a new set of challenges and temptations.
When I was 10, I fell madly in love with computers. Armed with a desire to build a private game environment for my peers to play in, I taught myself how to code and set up servers to facilitate my own play. I did not even know there was a name to whatever I was doing. “Programming”, as people called it many years down the road, became my calling. I uploaded my first iPhone application on the App Store in 2013 when I was 16, became the youngest developer hired to build Asia’s largest online consumer-to-consumer marketplace, and won hackathons against open participants.
With my crosshairs set on furthering my studies in Computer Science at college, I laid my eyes on a national scholarship oriented towards “nurturing young talents in Information Technology”. The scholarship promises not only to pay for the rest of my time in high school and college but also to provide an allowance for books and daily expenses. I was over the moon. As a high school student, it felt like a genuine option for me to take a significant financial burden off my parents’ shoulders, and also access to resources to pay for books and online courses to advance my technical skillset. Given my track record and participation in providing value for the burgeoning start-up and technology scene in the country, the scholarship felt tailored just for me and I was filled with an overwhelming certainty at the odds of my acceptance.
But then, of course, that did not happen. Weeks of eager anticipation ended in the receipt of an email that read: “We thank you for your interest in this scholarship and wish you great success in your future endeavors”. I was broken. The discovery of the other people who got accepted only made my frustration grow stronger: none of them had any experience programming nor have had participated in extra-curriculars that indicated at the slightest skin in the game nor desire to make contributions to technology. And this was a scholarship that aims to be “nurturing young talents in Information Technology”.
Upset, I submitted a formal appeal to the Secretariat to gather information about my rejection. And was only met with a response that read, “we looked at your academic results and did not feel confident about your ability to succeed academically in courses related to Information Technology”. I felt betrayed. These are the same people who show up in parliament claiming the use of this scholarship as a means to spot and support outlier talent in Singapore; leaving their promises at the podium and turning around to hand the scholarships to people who fall within their best-fit line.
Like a hopeful boy having been turned down by a girl on his ask for a date, I lamented, “Was I not good enough? Have I been wrong to place my bets on practical skills as a competitive edge?” None of my life made any sense. I love programming, I love building tools for people that make them smile, and it hurts to know that my abilities and passions were reduced to a number that fell short. Then it became evident: Singapore is a meritocracy, but only so far as academic and quantifiable interests are concerned for bureaucrats to meet their key performance indices. Which, coincidentally as you may have it, measures in direct correlation with their bonus checks. At 17, I made the mistake of binding the quality of my work with the perception of a group of people and their personal interests.
Like Pandora opening her box out of curiosity, my desire for something my identity could hang on to only revealed the burden of reality. From that day on, I never applied for anything ever again in good faith and confidence with a government organization. It became increasingly evident with each intake that they will always seek to protect their way of life and status quo: disproportionally favoring students who test well from “elite” schools. I mistrusted anyone who flew their banners.
Filled with angst and hate, I resolved to prove them wrong and more. And it worked. In the 3 years that followed my rejection, I started a company that built mobile applications hundreds of thousands of people use today, was awarded a coveted conference scholarship with Apple, worked with some of Asia’s largest companies, and flew across the world for an engineering internship in San Francisco as a senior in high school. I made a lot of friends, met my current partner, and did many things for the first time from skydiving to acro-yoga. I am suppose to be happy.
In my final semester of high school, the same scholarship I was rejected from opened up for graduating seniors. And of course, I submitted an application. This time I knew it wasn’t worth putting too much hope into it. Like a lottery, I cared little about the outcome: and I was accepted. Because I am now a student at Santa Monica College, you already know where this story ends. I replied to the email with a single line, “I don’t want it.” I was supposed to have been completely happy with life. But at that moment, I did not get the closure I wanted.
While I certainly did no such thing as slaughtering 108 suitors, my story in hindsight reveals how my fixation pursuing the “heroic” ideal has confined me to an implicit suggestion that the best option is to work in service on someone else’s narrative. It makes me uncomfortable knowing that my success may have been the indirect result of a desire for petty vengeance, and I’m still not completely free of the chains I banded myself to with the rejection 6 years ago.
Read of The Week: Negotiated Joining
Vaughn makes my read of the week very often for the plethora of great ideas for an uncertain world he explores in his newsletter. This week, he goes into “negotiated joining” — a hiring practice used by elite culinary kitchens in the world where roles are intentionally left partially undefined to be built later.
By keeping the roles malleable and responsive, an organisation grants members full latitude to use small and successive experiments to negotiate the undefined parts. Contrary to traditional hiring where there is little incentive to evolve yourself to stay relevant, “negotiated joining” incentivises it to be an active part of your role to constantly find ways to stay relevant within the organisation.
This type of structure also confers antifragile properties for an organisation too: by allowing smaller subsystems of experiments to fail at an employee level, you invariably ensure the better well-being of the larger whole.
I’ve always been a little obsessed with what we can learn from observing high-performing culinary kitchens — a high-failure rate industry, with a cutthroat pressure for product iteration cycles tighter than technology itself, negotiated joining is just one of the many ways they cope with staying creative and innovative.
Quote of The Week
It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.
That is all we have for the week! I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it. If you have any questions, suggestions, complaints, or feedback, please feel free to reach out by replying directly to this email!
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