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Monday, July 03, 2023

Dear Mark, Just Say No



A ‘Cage Match’ Between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg May Be No Joke Talks over a matchup between the two tech billionaires have progressed and the parameters of an event are taking shape......... In response, Mr. Zuckerberg posted on Instagram: “Send Me Location,” a reference to the catchphrase of Khabib Nurmagomedov, one of the U.F.C.’s most decorated athletes. ........... On Tuesday, he said, he was “on the phone with those two until 12:45 in the morning.” He added, “They both want to do it.” .......... The fight would be an exhibition match, Mr. White said, and outside official U.F.C. jurisdiction and rights deals, though he would help produce the event. The tech leaders have agreed there should be a charity component ........... One person close to Mr. Musk said that while he hated sports and didn’t appear to have the discipline to train regularly, no one could rule anything out with him. ........ If the matchup between Mr. Musk, 52, and Mr. Zuckerberg, 39, goes ahead, it would be a rare spectacle, even in the braggadocio-filled universe of the tech industry. While Steve Jobs and Bill Gates used to snipe at each other, the closest the tech world had before this to real sporting feuds was among billionaire yachtsmen like Larry Ellison of Oracle and Hasso Plattner of SAP. ........ But two wildly wealthy tech titans grappling, punching and kicking in a Las Vegas or Roman arena? No one would have dreamed it. ......... recently, Mr. Zuckerberg dispatched a team at Meta to build a competitor to Mr. Musk’s Twitter, code-named Project 92 ....... Apart from their 13-year age difference, Mr. Musk is said to be at least 70 pounds heavier than Mr. Zuckerberg. In official mixed martial arts bouts, athletes are generally matched up by weight. .........

“it will be the biggest fight in the history of combat sports.”

.......... Mr. Zuckerberg is especially familiar with the U.F.C. world. Over the past 18 months, he has embarked on a personal journey to bulk up and dove deep into Brazilian jujitsu, a grappling martial art in which competitors try to submit their opponent and which is used in U.F.C. fighting. ............. Mr. Zuckerberg started training on a lark mostly in his garage in 2021, where he built what he called a “mini academy” with a circle of friends who spar with him. He has said he appreciated that Brazilian jujitsu required “100 percent focus” and strategic thinking to defeat an opponent, rather than brute strength. .......... Mr. Zuckerberg has sought out martial arts experts, including Dave Camarillo, James Terry and Khai Wu. In May, he competed in his first public martial arts tournament in Redwood City, Calif., which he attended undercover — up until the moment he took off his hat and sunglasses to fight. He won gold and silver medals in the challenge. ......... Mr. Zuckerberg is likely in fighting shape. He has been on a strict workout regimen, going for runs and challenging friends and colleagues to beat his times ......... Last month, he posted a personal record for completing the “Murph” challenge, which requires completing a series of pull-ups, push-ups, running multiple miles and doing hundreds of squats, all while wearing weighted, military-grade body armor. ........ “Doing sports that basically require your full attention, I think, is really important to my mental health and the way to stay focused on everything I’m doing,” he said in a recent podcast episode. ......... Mr. Musk, on the other hand, has tweeted that he “almost never” works out and once suffered a back injury that required surgery after participating in an exhibition with a sumo wrestler. Last month, he said he had trained in “judo, Kyokushin (full contact)” — two Japanese martial arts — and “no rules streetfighting.” ......... “He made that very clear: ‘I’m not going to lose any weight,’” Mr. White said of Mr. Musk’s approach to the potential matchup. “‘Are we going to fight or are we not going to fight?’” Mr. White said Mr. Musk told him. ........ This week, Lex Fridman, a podcaster, posted photos of himself training judo with Mr. Musk. Mr. Fridman, who has also trained jujitsu with Mr. Zuckerberg

Last month, he posted a personal record for completing the “Murph” challenge, which requires completing a series of pull-ups, push-ups, running multiple miles and doing hundreds of squats, all while wearing weighted, military-grade body armor.

‘I Don’t Really Have a Business Plan’: How Elon Musk Wings It To a degree unseen in any other mogul, the world’s richest man acts on impulse and the belief that he is absolutely right......... He had no plan for how to finance or manage Twitter, Mr. Musk told a close associate. To push the $44 billion deal through, he turned to a small inner circle, including Jared Birchall, the head of his family office, and Alex Spiro, his personal lawyer. And when Twitter resisted his overtures, Mr. Musk pressured the company with a string of tweets — some mischievous, some barbed and all impulsive. ...... Tech billionaires such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Larry Page often make long-term plans and manage their affairs through a corporate machinery of lawyers, communications professionals and different advisers. Mr. Musk, 50, operates unlike any of them........... While Mr. Musk has successfully bet on electric cars, space travel and artificial intelligence, he often wings it in the biggest moments, eschews experts and relies almost solely on his own counsel ......... To operate this way, Mr. Musk has constructed an insular world of about 10 confidants who mostly agree with him and carry out his bidding. They include his younger brother, Kimbal Musk; Mr. Birchall; Mr. Spiro; and various chiefs of staff. To manage his many ideas, Mr. Musk continuously creates new companies, most of which are structured so that he remains in charge. His trusted lieutenants often work across his far-flung empire of businesses. .......... Relying on his small crew and hewing to his own thinking have enabled Mr. Musk to call the shots and conduct himself with few restraints, turning him into a Howard Hughes-like figure of the modern age — even as his seat-of-the-pants methods often create bedlam. ........... Mr. Musk works in a way that only the “most confident leaders do,” said Tim Draper, a venture capitalist who backed Mr. Musk’s electric automaker, Tesla, and his rocket company, SpaceX. “Think J.F.K., George Washington and Ronald Reagan.” ............ “I don’t really have a business plan,” he said. “I had a business plan way back in the Zip2 days. But these things are always wrong, so I just didn’t bother with business plans after that.” ........ In a live television appearance that year, Mr. Musk said the company would guarantee transactions on all auctions on eBay, the e-commerce site. It was the first time his engineers had heard about the feature, said a person who worked with him at the time. They had to race to make the feature a reality .......... In 2000, X.com’s board and the executive Peter Thiel ousted Mr. Musk over disagreements about the company’s direction. It was a painful exit for Mr. Musk, who soon embraced the idea that he — and he alone — should be in charge of future ventures. .......... “It’s OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket,” he told Inc. Magazine in 2007. ......... As Mr. Musk established more companies, he collected associates he could deploy across many of the endeavors. .......... “When Elon says something, you have to pause and not immediately blurt out, ‘Well, that’s impossible,’ or, ‘There’s no way we’re going to do that. I don’t know how,’” she said. “So you zip it, and you think about it. And you find ways to get that done.” .............. Mr. Musk also began treating his portfolio of companies as a single organization. .......... In 2015, he and Sam Altman, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and a group of researchers founded OpenAI, a lab developing artificial intelligence to benefit humanity. Within months, Mr. Musk enlisted several OpenAI researchers to help with Tesla’s assisted driving system, Autopilot, two people with knowledge of the work said. He later appointed an OpenAI researcher, Andrej Karpathy, as Tesla’s senior director of artificial intelligence. ............. By 2016, Mr. Musk’s business empire was sprawling. In pressure-filled situations, the billionaire sometimes showed an ugly side of his management style........ Mr. Musk erupted, four people with knowledge of the incident said. Screaming into the phone, he threatened to sue the regulator if the investigation went forward, they said. (Mr. Musk backed down the next day, and the agency proceeded with the investigation.) ........... At Tesla, Mr. Musk pushed to ramp up manufacturing of the company’s Model 3 sedan. Believing only he could get the task done, he fired the executive in charge of manufacturing and decided to revamp the entire assembly line of the company’s factory in Fremont, Calif., himself. Often, he slept in a conference room at the factory. .......... On Aug. 2, 2018, he drafted an email to the company’s board with the subject line: “Offer to Take Tesla Private at $420.” It contained few details about how the offer would be funded. .......... Despite the cheerleading from insiders, Mr. Musk’s effort failed. The funding he had counted on to take Tesla private didn’t materialize. Tesla shareholders sued him for securities fraud in August 2018. A month later, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Mr. Musk with securities fraud. ............. “Elon’s approach of doing business is minimum level of documentation,” Deepak Ahuja, Tesla’s then-chief financial officer, said in a 2018 deposition. “He really does do business based on a verbal commitment and a handshake.” ............

Throughout many ups and downs, Mr. Musk had one constant: Twitter.

........... He typically tweets a dozen times or more in a day .......... In 2020, he eliminated Tesla’s communications department, partly because he felt he could go directly to fans and customers through Twitter .



Mark Zuckerberg Would Like You to Know About His Workouts It’s been a tough run for Meta, and the boss seems to be getting out some aggression with military-style endurance routines and Brazilian jujitsu. ........... He looks — to use a scientific term — completely shredded. He also looks completely focused, like a guy in a Michael Bay movie who just finished a dangerous mission, or at least the Raya profile picture of the actor who plays that guy. .............. The challenge consists of a mile run, followed by 100 pull-ups, followed by 200 push-ups, followed by 300 squats, capped off with another mile run, all while wearing a 20-pound vest. ........... Just as eye popping as Mr. Zuckerberg’s arms was the time he said the brutal routine took him: under 40 minutes. That’s an elite time .......... That would be Brazilian jujitsu, the grueling grappling-based combat sport that is a fundamental part of mixed martial arts. In an August 2022 appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Mr. Zuckerberg said that he had taken up martial arts during the pandemic, training with Dave Camarillo, a well-known coach in the Bay Area........... “The crazy thing is it really is the best sport,” Mr. Zuckerberg told Mr. Rogan at the time. “There’s something that’s just so primal about it.” (Mr. Rogan is a martial arts enthusiast and Ultimate Fighting Championship commentator.) ............ sports like Brazilian jujitsu appeal to a desire among Silicon Valley types to reconnect with a primitive fighting spirit ........... “It’s like being on a playground with a bully but in this new framework,” she said. “It’s not quite choreographed but the stakes and the rules are unambiguous.” ......... On May 6, Mr. Zuckerberg competed in his first Brazilian jujitsu event, in Woodside, Calif., where he defeated an Uber engineer and won two medals, and lost consciousness. ............

a veteran Brazilian jujitsu fighter who refereed one of Mr. Zuckerberg’s matches, said that he halted the bout after he heard Mr. Zuckerberg start to snore, a sign of someone who has passed out in a choke hold.

........ For Mr. Zuckerberg, who has absorbed a number of metaphorical body blows over the past several years — including an election meddling scandal, a ghost town metaverse and widespread layoffs — it is perhaps a revealing time to start fighting back. ........... Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and chairman, has, in his 50s, developed remarkable biceps, linebacker shoulders and impressive vascularity. .

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Sunday, July 02, 2023

2:Happy 4th

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Saturday, July 01, 2023

1: India



How Can ChatGPT Provide Recommendations For Improving Website Design And User Experience?
How Can ChatGPT Suggest Optimization Techniques To Improve Website Speed And Loading Times?
How Can ChatGPT Analyze Website Traffic Data And Provide Recommendations For Improving Website Performance?
How Can ChatGPT Conduct Keyword Research And Suggest The Best Keywords To Target For SEO?
How Can ChatGPT Generate Content Ideas For Blog Posts, Social Media Updates, And Other Marketing Materials?
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Paul Graham's Best Essay To Date



How to Do Great Work The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work. ........

Some kinds of work you end up doing may not even exist yet.

.......... pick something and get going. ....... some of the biggest discoveries come from noticing connections between different fields. .......... Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own. It may be within some bigger project, but you'll be driving your part of it. .............. At 7 it may seem excitingly ambitious to build huge things out of Lego, then at 14 to teach yourself calculus, till at 21 you're starting to explore unanswered questions in physics. But always preserve excitingness. ............

There's a kind of excited curiosity that's both the engine and the rudder of great work.

It will not only drive you, but if you let it have its way, will also show you what to work on. ......... What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for. ........... Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps. ........... Many discoveries have come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted. .......... Great work often has a tincture of strangeness. You see this from painting to math. ......... Boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people aren't interested in them — in fact, especially if they aren't. If you're excited about some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you have enough expertise to say precisely what they're all overlooking, that's as good a bet as you'll find. .........

Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone who's done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.

........... It may not be possible to prove that you have to work hard to do great things, but the empirical evidence is on the scale of the evidence for mortality. ............ The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is the most powerful of all. .......... The big prize is to discover a new fractal bud. You notice a crack in the surface of knowledge, pry it open, and there's a whole world inside. ......... when it comes to figuring out what to work on, you're on your own .......... When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions. .............. What mathematicians do, for example, is very different from what you do in high school math classes. So you need to give different types of work a chance to show you what they're like. But a field should become increasingly interesting as you learn more about it. If it doesn't, it's probably not for you. ............ One sign that you're suited for some kind of work is when you like even the parts that other people find tedious or frightening. ............ the most exciting story to write will be the one you want to read ............ Following your interests may sound like a rather passive strategy, but in practice it usually means following them past all sorts of obstacles. You usually have to risk rejection and failure. So it does take a good deal of boldness. ................ The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance. ....... I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. ...... You don't just put out your sail and get blown forward by inspiration. There are headwinds and currents and hidden shoals. So there's a technique to working, just as there is to sailing. ......... while you must work hard, it's possible to work too hard, and if you do that you'll find you get diminishing returns: fatigue will make you stupid, and eventually even damage your health. The point at which work yields diminishing returns depends on the type. Some of the hardest types you might only be able to do for four or five hours a day. ........... Ideally those hours will be contiguous. To the extent you can, try to arrange your life so you have big blocks of time to work in. You'll shy away from hard tasks if you know you might be interrupted. ............... It will probably be harder to start working than to keep working. ......... When I'm reluctant to start work in the morning, I often trick myself by saying "I'll just read over what I've got so far." Five minutes later I've found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, and I'm off. ............. In many projects a lot of the best work happens in what was meant to be the final stage. ......... One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that it usually camouflages itself as work. You're not just sitting around doing nothing; you're working industriously on something else. So per-project procrastination doesn't set off the alarms that per-day procrastination does. You're too busy to notice it............. Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in. ............... Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but if you do it every day you'll write a book a year. That's the key: consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing..............

If you do work that compounds, you'll get exponential growth.

........... Learning, for example, is an instance of this phenomenon: the more you learn about something, the easier it is to learn more. Growing an audience is another: the more fans you have, the more new fans they'll bring you. ................. The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn't; it's still a wonderful exponential curve. But we can't grasp that intuitively, so we underrate exponential growth in its early stages. .............. There's a kind of undirected thinking you do when walking or taking a shower or lying in bed that can be very powerful. By letting your mind wander a little, you'll often solve problems you were unable to solve by frontal attack. ............ if you don't try to be the best, you won't even be good. This observation has been made by so many people in so many different fields that it might be worth thinking about why it's true. It could be because ambition is a phenomenon where almost all the error is in one direction — where almost all the shells that miss the target miss by falling short. ............. In some ways it's easier to try to be the best than to try merely to be good. ........... just do the work and your identity will take care of itself. ............. If you're earnest you avoid not just affectation but a whole set of similar vices. ........... To see new ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You're trying to see more truth than others have seen so far. And how can you have a sharp eye for the truth if you're intellectually dishonest? ........... Be aggressively willing to admit that you're mistaken. Once you've admitted you were mistaken about something, you're free. Till then you have to carry it. ........... any energy that goes into how you seem comes out of being good. That's one reason nerds have an advantage in doing great work: they expend little effort on seeming anything. In fact that's basically the definition of a nerd. ............ It's not learned; it's preserved from childhood. So hold onto it. Be the one who puts things out there rather than the one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticisms of them. ......... I doubt it would be possible to do great work without being earnest. It's so hard to do even if you are. You don't have enough margin for error to accommodate the distortions introduced by being affected, intellectually dishonest, orthodox, fashionable, or cool. ......... Mathematical elegance may sound like a mere metaphor, drawn from the arts. That's what I thought when I first heard the term "elegant" applied to a proof. But now I suspect it's conceptually prior — that the main ingredient in artistic elegance is mathematical elegance. At any rate it's a useful standard well beyond math. .................. some of the very best work will seem like it took comparatively little effort, because it was in a sense already there. It didn't have to be built, just seen. It's a very good sign when it's hard to say whether you're creating something or discovering it................ Try thinking of yourself as a mere conduit through which the ideas take their natural shape. ................ The best ideas have implications in many different areas. .............. If you express your ideas in the most general form, they'll be truer than you intended. .............. Original thinkers throw off new ideas about whatever they focus on, like an angle grinder throwing off sparks. They can't help it. ................. One of the most original thinkers I know decided to focus on dating after he got divorced. He knew roughly as much about dating as the average 15 year old, and the results were spectacularly colorful. But to see originality separated from expertise like that made its nature all the more clear................... Original ideas don't come from trying to have original ideas. They come from trying to build or understand something slightly too difficult. .......... Talking or writing about the things you're interested in is a good way to generate new ideas. When you try to put ideas into words, a missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you.

Indeed, there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.

........... Changing your context can help. If you visit a new place, you'll often find you have new ideas there. ............ But you may not have to go far to get this benefit. Sometimes it's enough just to go for a walk. ............. It also helps to travel in topic space. You'll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas. ............ Be professionally curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more. .......... Curiosity is itself a kind of originality; it's roughly to questions what originality is to answers. And since questions at their best are a big component of answers, curiosity at its best is a creative force.............. Having new ideas is a strange game, because it usually consists of seeing things that were right under your nose. Once you've seen a new idea, it tends to seem obvious. Why did no one think of this before? ............. new ideas can be both obvious and yet hard to discover: they're easy to see after you do something hard. ................ To find new ideas you have to seize on signs of breakage instead of looking away. That's what Einstein did. He was able to see the wild implications of Maxwell's equations not so much because he was looking for new ideas as because he was stricter................ it took the greater part of a century for the heliocentric model to be generally accepted, even among astronomers, because it felt so wrong. ................ Often ideas that seem bad are bad. But ideas that are the right kind of crazy tend to be exciting; they're rich in implications; whereas ideas that are merely bad tend to be depressing. ................ The aggressively independent-minded are the naughty ones. Rules don't merely fail to stop them; breaking rules gives them additional energy. For this sort of person, delight at the sheer audacity of a project sometimes supplies enough activation energy to get it started. ............. in questions that really matter, only rule-breakers can be truly strict........... Every cherished but mistaken principle is surrounded by a dead zone of valuable ideas that are unexplored because they contradict it. ........... People who'd never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems. ............. Originality in choosing problems seems to matter even more than originality in solving them. That's what distinguishes the people who discover whole new fields. So what might seem to be merely the initial step — deciding what to work on — is in a sense the key to the whole game. ............ People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight was in the question. ............... Part of the reason we underrate questions is the way they're used in schools. In schools they tend to exist only briefly before being answered, like unstable particles. But a really good question can be much more than that. A really good question is a partial discovery. How do new species arise? Is the force that makes objects fall to earth the same as the one that keeps planets in their orbits? By even asking such questions you were already in excitingly novel territory. ................. Sometimes you carry a question for a long time. Great work often comes from returning to a question you first noticed years before — in your childhood, even — and couldn't stop thinking about. ............ the more puzzled you are, the better, so long as (a) the things you're puzzled about matter, and (b) no one else understands them either ............ It's a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions. And this is one of those situations where the rich get richer ............... Questions don't just lead to answers, but also to more questions................... Great things are almost always made in successive versions. You start with something small and evolve it, and the final version is both cleverer and more ambitious than anything you could have planned. ......... Use the advantages of youth when you have them, and the advantages of age once you have those. The advantages of youth are energy, time, optimism, and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge, efficiency, money, and power. With effort you can acquire some of the latter when young and keep some of the former when old. ............ The young often have them without realizing it. The biggest is probably time. The young have no idea how rich they are in time. The best way to turn this time to advantage is to use it in slightly frivolous ways: to learn about something you don't need to know about, just out of curiosity, or to try building something just because it would be cool, or to become freakishly good at something. ............ You arrive at adulthood with your head full of nonsense — bad habits you've acquired and false things you've been taught — and you won't be able to do great work till you clear away at least the nonsense in the way of whatever type of work you want to do. .......... Much of the nonsense left in your head is left there by schools. ..... schools have all sorts of strange qualities that warp our ideas about learning and thinking. ............. neither classes nor tests are intrinsic to learning; they're just artifacts of the way schools are usually designed. ............... If you're still in school, try thinking of your education as your project, and your teachers as working for you rather than vice versa. ................. In real life you have to figure out what the problems are, and you often don't know if they're soluble at all............

the worst thing schools do to you is train you to win by hacking the test. ..... You can't trick God.

.............. The way to beat the system is to focus on problems and solutions that others have overlooked, not to skimp on the work itself........... Don't think of yourself as dependent on some gatekeeper giving you a "big break." Even if this were true, the best way to get it would be to focus on doing good work rather than chasing influential people. .................. And don't take rejection by committees to heart. The qualities that impress admissions officers and prize committees are quite different from those required to do great work. The decisions of selection committees are only meaningful to the extent that they're part of a feedback loop, and very few are.......... Originality is the presence of new ideas, not the absence of old ones. .......... Some talented people are jerks, and this sometimes makes it seem to the inexperienced that being a jerk is part of being talented. It isn't; being talented is merely how they get away with it. ................ You can take ideas from quite distant fields if you let them be metaphors. .......... Most people who are very good at something are happy to talk about it with anyone who's genuinely interested. If they're really good at their work, then they probably have a hobbyist's interest in it, and hobbyists always want to talk about their hobbies............... People within universities can't say so openly, but the quality of the work being done in different departments varies immensely. Some departments have people doing great work; others have in the past; others never have. ............... Colleagues don't just affect your work, though; they also affect you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will. ............ the degree to which great work happens in clusters suggests that one's colleagues often make the difference between doing great work and not. ........... sufficiently good colleagues offer surprising insights. They can see and do things that you can't. ........... managing well takes aptitude and interest like any other kind of work. If you don't have them, there is no middle path: you must either force yourself to learn management as a second language, or avoid such projects .............. Husband your morale. It's the basis of everything when you're working on ambitious projects. You have to nurture and protect it like a living organism. ................ If you choose work that's pure, its very difficulties will serve as a refuge from the difficulties of everyday life. If this is escapism, it's a very productive form of it, and one that has been used by some of the greatest minds in history. ........... Morale compounds via work: high morale helps you do good work, which increases your morale and helps you do even better work. ........... One of the biggest mistakes ambitious people make is to allow setbacks to destroy their morale all at once, like a ballon bursting. ......... It's not necessarily a bad sign if work is a struggle, any more than it's a bad sign to be out of breath while running. It depends how fast you're running. So learn to distinguish good pain from bad. Good pain is a sign of effort; bad pain is a sign of damage. ............ a small but dedicated audience can be enough to sustain you. If a handful of people genuinely love what you're doing, that's enough. ......... The people you spend time with will also have a big effect on your morale. You'll find there are some who increase your energy and others who decrease it, and the effect someone has is not always what you'd expect. Seek out the people who increase your energy and avoid those who decrease it. Though of course if there's someone you need to take care of, that takes precedence. ................. Don't marry someone who doesn't understand that you need to work, or sees your work as competition for your attention. If you're ambitious, you need to work; it's almost like a medical condition; so someone who won't let you work either doesn't understand you, or does and doesn't care. ............. Ultimately morale is physical. You think with your body, so it's important to take care of it. That means exercising regularly, eating and sleeping well, and avoiding the more dangerous kinds of drugs. Running and walking are particularly good forms of exercise because they're good for thinking. ........... People who do great work are not necessarily happier than everyone else, but they're happier than they'd be if they didn't. In fact, if you're smart and ambitious, it's dangerous not to be productive. People who are smart and ambitious but don't achieve much tend to become bitter. ................... The prestige of a type of work is at best a trailing indicator and sometimes completely mistaken. ............. don't let competitors make you do anything much more specific than work harder. ......... Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to. ........... you can't command curiosity anyway. But you can nurture it and let it drive you.............. If you made it this far, you must be interested in doing great work. And if so you're already further along than you might realize, because the set of people willing to want to is small. .............. Can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest will combine to yield an explosion of new ideas? ............... Many more people could try to do great work than do. What holds them back is a combination of modesty and fear. It seems presumptuous to try to be Newton or Shakespeare. It also seems hard; surely if you tried something like that, you'd fail. Presumably the calculation is rarely explicit. Few people consciously decide not to try to do great work. But that's what's going on subconsciously; they shy away from the question. ............. A lot of standup comedy is based on noticing anomalies in everyday life. "Did you ever notice...?" New ideas come from doing this about nontrivial things. Which may help explain why people's reaction to a new idea is often the first half of laughing: Ha! ..................

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Refusing To Pay (Short Story)



Deepak was a middle-aged man living in the bustling city of Mumbai, India. He had seen his fair share of changes over the years, as technology infiltrated every aspect of daily life. But one thing that always puzzled him was the way people in the West clung to their cash, even in the face of advanced payment systems. He considered it a thing of the past, a relic of a bygone era.

One sweltering summer day, Deepak found himself in a narrow alley lined with food stalls and eager customers. The tantalizing aroma of street food filled the air, mingling with the sounds of chatter and sizzling oil. As he strolled along the bustling street, his eyes landed on an American tourist standing in front of a colorful ice cream cart.

The American man, clad in shorts and a loose T-shirt, carefully reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. Deepak furrowed his brow, perplexed by the sight. In India, cash transactions had become increasingly rare. People simply whipped out their smartphones, scanned a barcode displayed on the vendor's cart, and completed the payment through digital wallets. It was quick, convenient, and left no room for error.



Intrigued by this oddity, Deepak lingered nearby, observing the unfolding scene. The American approached the ice cream vendor, who had a small mobile payment terminal next to his display of frosty delights. A confused expression crossed the vendor's face as the tourist extended his hand, offering the cash for the ice cream.

Deepak couldn't help himself any longer. He stepped forward, catching the attention of both the American and the vendor. With a friendly smile, he said, "Excuse me, sir. I hope you don't mind my curiosity, but we usually pay using our smartphones here. It's faster and more efficient. Would you like some help?"

The American looked surprised but grateful for the offer. "Oh, thank you! That would be great," he replied with a hint of embarrassment. "I'm not used to these mobile payment systems. I guess I'm just an old-fashioned cash guy."

Deepak chuckled warmly. "No worries. It's fascinating how our payment methods differ across cultures. Let me show you how it works."

Deepak took out his smartphone and opened his preferred mobile payment app. He swiftly navigated through the options and generated a barcode on his screen. Holding the phone toward the vendor's terminal, he scanned the code, and a satisfying beep confirmed the successful transaction.



The American watched in awe as the transaction took place within seconds. "That was incredible! So efficient and convenient," he exclaimed.

Deepak nodded, pleased to share a bit of his culture with the visitor. "Indeed, it has become an integral part of our lives. It saves time, reduces the risk of carrying cash, and offers various discounts and rewards. Plus, it helps in creating a digital record of transactions."

The American fished out his wallet and tucked away the cash. "You've opened my eyes to a new way of doing things. I guess it's about time I embraced this digital era."

With a newfound appreciation for the benefits of mobile payments, the American bid Deepak farewell and indulged in his chosen ice cream flavor. Meanwhile, Deepak continued his stroll, content that he had helped someone understand the changing dynamics of a cashless society.

As he walked away, Deepak couldn't help but smile, knowing that he had bridged the gap between cultures and made a small difference in the life of a stranger. It was a reminder that even in an increasingly interconnected world, there was always room for learning, understanding, and embracing new ways of doing things.

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