Postcard 7: Helpful
Hi Friends,
Hello from New York, hope you had a great week.
This week I was thinking a lot about some of the people that helped me throughout my life. People that believed in me when I didn’t necessarily even believe in myself. I am certain we all know people like that. None of us will ever forget those people.
My recent article touches on this topic, of being helpful, it's disguised as Resume advice that I got when I was much younger. Most importantly, if we can find a way to live a life where we can help a few other people, we won't have to worry about writing resumes; they'll write themselves. The world cares deeply about what we can do for it and not at all about what we want from it.
My article titled "What have I done for you lately?"
The top tweets from this week:
THREAD: I didn’t start participating on Twitter until I was 40 years old.
When you learn things in your 40s, it’s not too late to pretend like you figured them out in your 20s.
Here's 1,000 words on what I’ve learned about writing, creativity, and putting yourself out there:— Justin Mikolay 💻 (@jmikolay) May 6, 2021
An incredible thread with so many great insights. While it’s long it’s also worth it.
For only the second time (that I can recall), I've had a confirmed talk cancelled due to my slides being heavily critical of Google & Facebook.
I won't out the organizer, but I thought I'd share the offending slides here. pic.twitter.com/tk1p31Ldv8— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) May 3, 2021
Fascinating thread about how the tech giants silence and stifle dissent. As the voices get louder, I fully expect big tech to resemble the cigarette and oil companies and the worst of the industry to defend their positions.
Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class, and there was a semester-long factorization contest that we could participate in. I implemented a distributed multiple polynomial quadratic sieve (MPQS) for the Mac, and I needed a cluster of computers to run it on.
— Eric Lengyel (@EricLengyel) May 3, 2021
Any good engineer would have had to have hacked something at some point to run their code; this was a fun thread about hacking the system to run your software.
Top 3 Articles:
Crazy New Ideas by Paul Graham
Making new things that people actually want to use is incredibly hard, the easiest thing is to attack crazy ideas. Paul gives us a decent framework for evaluating crazy new ideas and how viable they may be.
Staying on the path to high performing Teams by Will Larson
Will wrote a great book on engineering teams; I am deeply interested in this topic because I run a few myself. Although this post is a little old, the framework is sound; it is about where to place new hires when everyone is behind and needs to hire.
Purchase future cash flow to get wealthy... Stop buying more stuff by themdpreneur
Interesting story about two different paths by people who earn a high income, one invests and buys cashflow the other buys cool things. I know a lot of engineers need this sort of advice, I know I did for a long time. A fun read.
Please reach out if you want to discuss any of these articles, ideas, or any of my other writings. My inbox is open and I love talking to people; feel free to reply.
Sincerely,
Louie