Week 8, Summer 2023
The Inflection Point
I am officially more than halfway past my summer break.
I asked myself two very important questions at the start of this week,
“Am I making the best use of the time that I have?”
“What is the most important thing that I could be working on right now?”
Very soon I realized that I didn’t have satisfactory answers for either.
Reading an essay1 this week made me realize something very important: the lack of ambition in my projects. Even though I had a long list of projects at the beginning of summer, none of them were truly ambitious. Little did I know, but I had set the bar too low for myself.
When the summer started, I had no shortage of things to do. I was excited to do them all! But looking back, I now see that none of them seemed to be challenging or attempting to truly take me out of my comfort zone. I had too many projects that were doable and not many whose outcome was truly unknown.
I had too many projects that I would have been able to do. What a funny thing to say. Wouldn’t you want projects that you know you can successfully finish and accomplish? Well, not necessarily.
There used to be a time when I was consumed by physics. I lived, breathed, ate, and slept physics. After I had learned about the ideas of time and relativity, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I saw them in the smallest of my actions, from stirring a cup of coffee to the motion of the hands of my clock.
I would listen to conversations on Quantum Gravity and String Theory in the evening, and read Susskind’s lectures on Quantum Mechanics at night. The ideas intrigued me deeply because they felt unintuitive to me. I wanted to be able to visualize and understand these fascinating concepts. The question of the origin of the universe is an old one, yet still one of the most interesting ones.
These were problems that truly challenged me. They did not have any answer, and yet I was determined to find one.
This was when I was 17 years old.
Somewhere along the way, I lost these habits. I got consumed by the things happening around me and forgot all about the joy I derived from thinking about these unanswerable questions.
This week, I got drawn back to that younger self. I wondered, “What is a problem of that magnitude on which I am working on today? Something so bold and ambitious that I might not even know that I might succeed?”
I have crossed paths with many problems that intrigue me, such as Climate Change, Water, Energy, and Quantum Gravity. However, I have never tried to fully commit myself to them.
I have somehow gotten conditioned to working on things that have “easy” solutions. At some point, I stopped pursuing things that were very challenging.
And I think it is time to change that.
Weekly updates!
Music
I started working on a new song this week on GarageBand and seems to be coming along quite well. It is just an idea at this point, inspired by a melody that got stuck in my head. I will share more details about it as I am closer to completing it.
I also got some time to practice and continue learning Succession’s Main Theme on the piano. The part that follows the intro is quite exciting, and I am slowly starting to get the hang of it. At the same time, I feel like I am getting more comfortable playing the intro now. I can tell because I am no longer making the same mistakes that I used to two weeks ago.
This week, I discovered the wonderful music of Grover Washington Jr. If you are looking for some good work music, this won’t disappoint:
Reading
“Monopoly is the condition of every successful business”
I started reading 2 books this week: Zero to One by Peter Thiel and This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. It is funny how starkly opposite these two books are. While one talks about ways to take advantage of the capitalist market, the other talks about ways to curb it.
After reading India Unbound, I started to appreciate what a capitalist society can do for the people of a country. I used to view capitalism in a very negative light, derived mainly from the argument of capitalism vs the environment. I believed that the effects of capitalism did not justify the ever-lasting impacts that it left on the planet. But, I now realize that the picture is not as black and white as I had thought.
While capitalism puts no checks on the well-being of our ecosystem, it has undeniably raised people’s standards of living. India thrived in a globalized and capitalist market. On top of its socioeconomic improvements, there was a shift in perception and an increase in opportunities in the country as well.
One of the most important lessons that I learned from Zero to One this week is that a business shouldn’t strive for competition. While competition might be good for consumers, it can be quite unhealthy for a company. You want to be able to have a monopoly over what you do, i.e, be the only one doing what you do.
There are many nuanced ideas in this book and I am only beginning to understand them all. I think it will be fun to read it alongside a book that has such a stark contrast to its theme.
Learning Spanish
Starting this week, this section will be written in Spanish. Although I will be taking some help from Google Translate, it will be a good way to learn new words and the context in which to use them.
Tuve acceso breve a Super Duolingo esta semana durante un par de días y pude completar muchas lecciones durante ese tiempo. Hay algo en el tictac del reloj que te hace más propenso a hacer ciertas cosas. Sabiendo que este efecto solo sería temporal, pude terminar muchas lecciones y repasar el vocabulario antiguo. He comenzado a aprender plurales y tiempos continuos. Soy capaz de reconocer algunos patrones en la sintaxis y usarlos apropiadamente cuando formo oraciones.
(I got brief access to Super Duolingo this week for a couple of days and I was able to complete a lot of lessons during that time. There’s something about a ticking clock that makes you more likely to do certain things. Knowing that this effect was only going to be temporary, I was able to finish a lot of lessons and brush up on old vocabulary. I have started to learn plurals and continuous tenses. I am able to recognize some patterns in the syntax and use them appropriately while forming sentences.)
(Minor) Website update
There was an aspect of my website that had been bothering me for a while— its URL. There is no better way to say this, but it was just straight-up ugly. It had a .html suffix and every page had a /html in the front of it. For instance, if you were to open the Vertically Landed Rocket (VLR) page, you would see something like:
Or if you were to go to projects, you would see:
This was extremely unpleasing to look at, not to mention unnecessarily long!
I wanted to be able to go to projects if I just typed out:
aaryamanpatel.com/projects To make this happen, I had to employ some clever tricks.
With some minor adjustments to server-side rendering and the base code, I was able to fix this problem. Now, when you type out aaryamanpatel.com/projects, it should directly take you to where you want to (the same goes for the About page as well)
Also, no .HTML tag at the end of it either. Take a look:
Not all good things come without some compromise though. The catch is that I will forever have to live with my homepage reading this:
AAAHHHH!
It’s okay. Just ignore it.
Photo of the Week
This summer has been an experiment in learning. I have realized that the ocean is too vast to cover in 3 months—stretching out in more directions than I can cover. My mind is tempted to pursue every possible avenue and tends to do so when presented with the opportunity, forgetting that time is something we are all bound by. In a desperate need to search for meaning, it indulges in actions that provide temporary solace. Alas! Grappling with the fact that it was all but a momentary diversion.
“If you commit to nothing, you’ll be distracted by everything.”
This statement still holds quite true for me today, nevertheless.
I derive value from all the things that I do, rendering me incapable of committing to any one thing. I have often felt quite lost when asked about what I want to do in my life because I do not have any one answer for them.
I want to solve the mysteries of the universe, alleviate the extreme effects of climate change, spread joy and love through films and music, create technology for a more sustainable and equitable future, solve the water crisis, create things that improve the lives of millions around the world, and make the world more accessible for the common man.
The last seven weeks have been great, but I have realized that I need to start dreaming bigger—aiming higher—and working towards the things that I deeply care about. If I am only doing the things whose outcomes I have complete control over, I am probably not thinking big enough.
What am I most uniquely capable to do?
There is no reason for me to give up my passions for committing to my life’s goals, but it is important to realize that my work needs to lead to something—some semblance of what I wish to achieve in the course of my lifetime.
My countless hobbies and obsessions will continue to serve as the lifelines of my work. Without them, the joy of exploration would forever be lost.
This week will go down as one of the most important weeks of this summer. It is the week when I rekindled an old flame of chasing the unknown and found myself on a new path to exploration. The destination is no longer New York City, but Mars; not helping a hundred but a billion people; not cleaning up the neighborhood of plastic waste, but the entire world.
It is time to dream bigger.
I grappled with some of the biggest questions about my work this week, and it wasn’t easy to know that things will be different going forward. However, I have come out with a certain clarity that has given me the confidence I needed to pursue some of the most ambitious problems.
I see a light at the end of the tunnel, illuminating its path for me. It is time I finally go chase it.
¡Soñar en!,
Aaryaman
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How to do great work: http://www.paulgraham.com/greatwork.html
All these questions which you raised I’ve been asking myself for a while now. I’m curious about where you got them from.
Here’s the paradoxical nature: While It’s important to work on big ambitious things (at least have that goal in mind), big things often start very small and without trying.
The inclination to only work on big things is known as the Nobel prize effect in science.
From You and Your Research by Richard Hamming:
When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.
Highly recommend you read that essay as it as answers many of your questions.
In the end, it’s important to work with direction on big important problems and once a while distracting yourself with something seemingly useless as that might be the acorn you need for the oak.
“While capitalism puts no checks on the well-being of our ecosystem”
Capitalism doesn’t make decisions, people do.
Why do businesses seem to care about climate change now? Because it became the politically correct thing to do. That’s maybe too harsh. But really capitalism has certain incentives and people respond to them unless there are things we collectively decide to do or to not to do like consideration for CO2 emissions.
Ironically enough, if you want to “solve” climate change, capitalism will be the system to do it, and not other system.