Just Start: How to be interested in things, part II

Sailing on a ship of fools

(Part one is here)

Have a kid.

That’s it, that’s the post.

Obviously I’m joking, but also I’m sort of not (also, if you have no plans to have a kid, this post is still for you, please stick with me for at least a couple of paragraphs).

Having a kid is hard, but it also makes a lot of things simpler, at least in my experience. Finding a purpose, for instance, is something I think a lot of people worry about — I definitely did — but when I had a kid, my purpose snapped into high-resolution clarity: I have to look after this tiny maniac to the absolute best of my ability.* Just to be super-clear, I’m not saying that you can’t have purpose without a child in your life: of course you can, lots of people do, but you have to seek it out or craft it for yourself, and in many ways that’s probably a lot harder. Having a kid, in that sense, is like playing on Easy mode.

Another way this Easy mode kicks in is finding things to be interested in. Kids are natural interest-havers: mine still hasn’t hit the age where he’s embarrassed by any gaps in his knowledge, and so he’s a constant font of questions about everything: seeds, weather, banking, jobs, crime, detectives, magic, engineering, the bombardment is relentless. At the same time, he’s very easy to interest in other things: as long as you can find an engaging way to do it, you can six-degrees-of-separation your way from something he’s asked about to something you actually want to talk about, I would say, about 90% of the time.

By way of an example, we’ve recently been playing Balatro together. Balatro is a poker-inspired deck-builder roguelike, which in English means that it’s a single-player card game where you earn, upgrade or remove cards as you go, starting out by scoring a couple of hundred points a hand, and eventually progressing to the point where you need to score 4.8e309 to ‘finish’ the game’s Endless Mode. Don’t know what 4.8e309 means? There’s a thing to be interested in: it’s 4.8×10^309, which is an incomprehensibly huge — bigger than a googol (which a surprising amount of kids will have heard of) but a lot smaller than a googolplex (see above). It's interpreted as Infinity in many programming languages, and in fact goes beyond the largest number that can be represented in double-precision floating point format, causing the score to overflow to nan (not a number). Don’t know what those things mean? Neither did I: those are also things to be interested in, and so on.

Balatro, in fact, gives you dozens of things to be interested in, mainly because of all the throwaway names it uses for its playing cards. Did you know, for instance, that in ancient Greek theatre, actors in tragic roles wore a boot called a buskin, while the actors with comedic roles wore only a thin-soled shoe called a sock? Or that the disease-resistant Cavendish banana cultivar makes up the vast majority of bananas consumed around the world, introduced after the Gros Michel variety was devastated by a fungal pandemic in the 1960s? To a kid, these aren’t just interesting facts: they teach you more about how the world works, like the fact that many cultures teach that joy and sorrow are inseparable, or that cloning our food sources makes them extremely vulnerable to disease.

Did you know the jester known as Chicot who served under King Henry III and later Henry IV of France was allowed to carry a rapier, and had a book written about him by Alexandre Dumas? That’s a fun fact that let me spend a school run chatting to the little man about the role of jesters in courtly life, the divine right of kings, and the ways in which science completely changed the course of the world.

And so my actual advice in this post (and something I’m trying to be better at myself) is to think more like a kid: find things that you’re a bit interested in and follow those things until you’re not interested any more. Sometimes you hit the bedrock of really understanding some brand new thing, and other times you just add to your store of knowledge about the world. If creativity is connection, then you’re unlikely to do anything really creative by reading, watching, or listening to the things someone else recommends. Kids are good at this. There’s a lot you can learn from them.

Have a great weekend!

Joel x

* I should probably say, since it took me by surprise, that this isn’t always going to happen the first instant you see your baby, as some people will tell me. For me, it’s been a sort of blossoming realisation that gets stronger every year.

Stuff I like

📖 Short Story - Butch Minds The Baby by Damon Runyon

I’m trying to get back into reading short stories — please put recommendations in the comments! — and this one’s a delightfully whimsical little slice of pulp. You can probably find it online.

📝 Article - The life and death of Hideo Kojima (GQ)

A really nice interview with Hideo Kojima (by Sam White, a chap I’ve worked with from time to time who does a lot of very good developer interviewers for GQ) creativity, inspiration, and the running-out-of-time feeling that kicks in as you get older. Definitely worth reading even if you don’t play games (which you should).

🎶 Hype Music - Gold Guns Girls by Metric

This is a sort of 90s battle anthem thing that kicked in when I was running earlier in the week, and I’ve listened to it about 20 times since. Incredibly hype.

Like this newsletter?

If you’re keen to support this newsletter and the other stuff I do, I’d love it if you became a paid subscriber: you don’t get anything extra (I don’t paywall anything), but it helps me write longer and more original posts, as well as feeding my family. I really do appreciate it.

Also, if you’ve got a book or an article you think I should read, or something you think I should watch or try, please send a suggestion my way.

And finally, if you haven’t already, please check out my YouTube channel, where I deep-dive into stuff like productivity, lifelong learning, piano and Brazilian jiu-jitsu.