Just start: Persistence-hunting for clicks
Hey team,
Do you remember Born To Run? It’s the book that supercharged the minimalist footwear industry, and introduced the world to the Tarahumara tribe. It taught me that pigs don’t have a nuchal ligament (the thing that stops your head from wobbling as you run), and convinced me to run a marathon in minimalist trainers. Maybe the most important takeaway from it, though, is that we humans are the best in the animal kingdom at one (physical) thing: we can’t outsprint, outfight or out-bite any animal even close to our size, but for sheer endurance, we’re almost impossible to beat.
This is something I try to remember, because almost nothing worthwhile gets done at a sprint. You can do Brazilian jiu-jitsu every day for 30 days, but you’ll end up very sore and you still won’t be very good at jiu-jitsu. You can sprint through writing a book, just about, but it probably won’t be very good. You can’t sprint through growing a YouTube channel at all: even if you made forty videos in two weeks, you’d need to course-correct once your audience started watching them (or not) and you’d probably end up doing more work re-editing them than you’d have done anyway.
In a video on his creative process, former NASA engineer and YouTube creator (10-million subscribers!) Mark Rober talks about jogging along at a comfortable pace that he can maintain forever, rather than trying to do things at a sprint and getting burned out. Obviously, not every creative person who trundles along for half a decade will create a mega-hit, but they’ll create a lot of whatever they’re creating, and they’re unlikely to hit a wall.
In terms of biology, we’re some of the best endurance athletes on the planet. So when you’re thinking creatively, it might be better to settle in for the long haul.
Have a great weekend!
Joel x
PS Side note: did you know that we’re also incredible at throwing? Chimps are much stronger than us, but a combination of flexible shoulder joints and long arms make us much more effective at flinging things over long distances. I’d read a book called Born To Throw.
Stuff I’ve done
📝 Article - Why Is Mark Zuckerberg Doing BJJ? (The Times, paywalled)
This week I got my first opportunity to write for the Sunday Times, trying to explain why tech-bros love Brazilian jiu-jitsu for its combination of videogame-style dopamine hits and dynamic problem-solving. Spoiler: I wrote about a thousand words too many in the first draft.
🎥 Video - Fighting Games Will Change Your Life
Oh are we talking about how videogames are like fighting? Then you might like this, a slightly more personal video than usual (it has a pic of my old dog!), where I explain how Street Fighter and Samurai Showdown set me on the path to having some amateur MMA fights and getting my black belt in BJJ.
Stuff I like
📝 Article - Chat GPT is a blurry JPG of the web by Ted Chiang
This whole piece on the limitations of AI is old in AI terms now (it came out a couple of months ago) but still an interesting read, and it’s especially worth it for this part:
“If you’re a writer, you will write a lot of unoriginal work before you write something original. And the time and effort expended on that unoriginal work isn’t wasted; on the contrary, I would suggest that it is precisely what enables you to eventually create something original. The hours spent choosing the right word and rearranging sentences to better follow one another are what teach you how meaning is conveyed by prose. Having students write essays isn’t merely a way to test their grasp of the material; it gives them experience in articulating their thoughts. If students never have to write essays that we have all read before, they will never gain the skills needed to write something that we have never read.”
🎶 Hype Music - Sweet Gene Vincent by Ian Dury and the Blockheads
I played this for my five-year-old recently, and he (correctly) ripped his shirt off and went absolutely HAM, because it’s amazing: starting with a genuinely touching piano-tickled eulogy, and then tearing into fiery 50s rock attack that’s impossible not to stomp a foot to. Listen to it right now. RIGHT NOW.
🎙️Podcast - Lex Fridman interviews Simone Giertz
I’ve been a fan of both Simone and Lex for a while now, and this conversation between the two is great: Simone’s insightful, funny, and extremely smart, and tackles the stresses of being a female creator in a field some men get weird about head on. She also turns the meta-interview back on Lex a few times, and it’s delightful.
🪶 Quote of the week
After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle.
From Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White