Stubbornness and following your passion
Very Bigly Climate Game, London Dec 16th. Reflections on Life and Paul Graham Essays. Lord Mayor of London; being part of the parade. Sea Urchins.
Very Bigly Climate Game, London Dec 16th
Life: Paul Graham Essays
Writes and Write-Nots: on how valuable writing is
When to Do what you love: about the nuances between “follow your passion” vs not.
The Right Kind of Stubborn: about the difference between persistent and determined vs annoying and stubborn
London: City Guilds and the Lord Mayor of London; being part of the parade
Male/Female Sea Urchins
Come play our Very Bigly Climate Game, London Dec 16th hosted by me, David Finnigan and my 12 year old son, Oscar. FREE. Book here. It’s an informal test of an idea of what policy ideas could be given the different “climate tribes” (from techno-optimists to deniers) that we all play.
Step into an immersive climate mega-game where you and friends take on the roles of global leaders, decision-makers, and influencers. Over five rounds of play, you’ll navigate 100 years of critical choices, from carbon taxes to pandemics, guiding humanity through climate challenges, economic shifts, and social upheavals. Will you champion techno-optimism, defend a centrist stance, or push for radical degrowth? The future is in your hands!
I’ve been re-reading essays by Paul Graham. Paul is likely a billionaire from both founding his own start-up (Viaweb that sold to Yahoo) and then via venture capital (VC) where he founded the early stage VC firm,
Y Combinator (YC). YC is arguably the most famous and best seed state VC firm in the world. While Paul stepped down from day to day running of YC in 2014 he is still active in advising start-ups etc and extremely influential in tech start-up world.
For more general purposes, he writes essays which broadly help you to think about being human today. To me, they are practical applications of many of the tricky decisions and items today seen through the lens of a technologist and operator (who is also trained as a painter) who is also in touch with humanities and writing.
All of the essays (north of 200) are worth reading, and I have written before on my own reflections riffing off “Make Time Manager Time” on the nature of blocks of uninterrupted creative work and how organizations and managers get this wrong at their peril. I’ve also mentioned his How to Do Great Work (for ambitious people who want to push their field) and The Lesson to Unlearn (problems about teaching to the test).
I thought I would reflect on 3 essays Paul has written this year:
Writes and Write-Nots: on how valuable writing is, and will be more valuable in the age of AI
When to Do what you love: about the nuances between “follow your passion” vs not.
The Right Kind of Stubborn: about the difference between persistent and determined vs annoying and stubborn in successful people.
Graham starts in Stubborn:
Successful people tend to be persistent. New ideas often don't work at first, but they're not deterred. They keep trying and eventually find something that does.
Mere obstinacy, on the other hand, is a recipe for failure. Obstinate people are so annoying. They won't listen. They beat their heads against a wall and get nowhere.
But is there any real difference between these two cases? Are persistent and obstinate people actually behaving differently? Or are they doing the same thing, and we just label them later as persistent or obstinate depending on whether they turned out to be right or not?
If that's the only difference then there's nothing to be learned from the distinction. Telling someone to be persistent rather than obstinate would just be telling them to be right rather than wrong, and they already know that. Whereas if persistence and obstinacy are actually different kinds of behavior, it would be worthwhile to tease them apart.
There is a good kind of stubborn – which PG is calling persistence; and a bad kind, which PG calls stubbornness.
On Persistence, he identifies as important:
Energy and Imagination
Energy and imagination make a wonderful combination. Each gets the best out of the other. Energy creates demand for the ideas produced by imagination, which thus produces more, and imagination gives energy somewhere to go.
And then resilience, good judgment and a focus on some form of goal:
Merely having energy and imagination is quite rare. But to solve hard problems you need three more qualities: resilience, good judgement, and a focus on some kind of goal.
And comments on resilience:
Resilience means not having one's morale destroyed by setbacks. Setbacks are inevitable once problems reach a certain size, so if you can't bounce back from them, you can only do good work on a small scale. But resilience is not the same as obstinacy. Resilience means setbacks can't change your morale, not that they can't change your mind.
And, on goals:
If you're like me you began, as a kid, merely with the desire to do something great. In theory that should be the most powerful motivator of all, since it includes everything that could possibly be done. But in practice it's not much use, precisely because it includes too much. It doesn't tell you what to do at this moment.So in practice your energy and imagination and resilience and good judgement have to be directed toward some fairly specific goal. Not too specific, or you might miss a great discovery adjacent to what you're searching for, but not too general, or it won't work to motivate you.
I very much agree that good persistence is very valuable. It’s a quality worth looking for in start-up founders. It’s an important quality for investors.
It seems to me extremely useful to cultivate in life in general.
One quality I would like to parse out further is resilience.
So qualities adjacent to resilience I think are important are:
Grit, determination and stamina. And out of these, I wonder if stamina may be the most important.
Grit enables you to power through painful or uncomfortable events – such as exercising through muscle failure, or presenting while feeling pressured by a crowd.
Resilience means when the wind blows against you, you don’t break down; and the grit and determination part help you get back up, if you are blown down.
The idea of recovering from set backs or when things don’t go right. Resilience to me is more of an anti-fragile, not being impacted by outside forces as much.
But all of these qualities miss an element that stamina has. And that is to just keep going – and especially to keep going when things are boring or normal.
Grit come into play when you are already knocked over, or have to power through a pain point.
Resilience helps not being knocked back in the first place.
But what keeps you painting, rehearsing music, doing podcasts or writing blogs when there is nothing particular against you? And to keep doing it again and again. That is stamina.
PG touches on it with the idea of “energy” although I think energy often has a connation of a burst or supply. I think stamina fits as a sixth quality to have.
PG leaves unexamined whether one can cultivate persistence. I think you probably can. Cultivating stamina helps on having a goal but you need a way of cultivating habit, and repetition of the elements and processes you want to cultivate.
In Writes and Write-Nots, PG starts:
I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write.
One of the strangest things you learn if you're a writer is how many people have trouble writing. Doctors know how many people have a mole they're worried about; people who are good at setting up computers know how many people aren't; writers know how many people need help writing.
The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it's fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.
And PG argues:
You could pay someone to write for you, like JFK, or plagiarize, like MLK, but if you couldn't buy or steal words, you had to write them yourself. And as a result nearly everyone who was expected to write had to learn how.
Not anymore. AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work.
The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can't write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who can't write, there will just be good writers and people who can't write.
Is that so bad? Isn't it common for skills to disappear when technology makes them obsolete? There aren't many blacksmiths left, and it doesn't seem to be a problem.
Yes, it's bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing is thinking. In fact there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. You can't make this point better than
Leslie Lamport did:
If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.
So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too.
I am unsure if the strongest form of his argument – that the middle will disappear completely – will hold but increasingly I think the world will be divided.
I do not see AI creating extra-ordinary theatre works. The best theatre is a type of thought, a type of argument with society and the audience, played through character and story.
Writing investment memos brings a clarity of thought that using AI does not. In this I think PG is correct.
My conclusion on this is – do use AI for facts and research and arguing and the like – I do this every day. But, it can not substitute thinking, and part of good thinking often comes with writing and so neglect writing at your peril.
PG starts:
There's some debate about whether it's a good idea to "follow your passion." In fact the question is impossible to answer with a simple yes or no. Sometimes you should and sometimes you shouldn't, but the border between should and shouldn't is very complicated. The only way to give a general answer is to trace it.
When people talk about this question, there's always an implicit "instead of." All other things being equal, why wouldn't you work on what interests you the most? So even raising the question implies that all other things aren't equal, and that you have to choose between working on what interests you the most and something else, like what pays the best.
And indeed if your main goal is to make money, you can't usually afford to work on what interests you the most. People pay you for doing what they want, not what you want. But there's an obvious exception: when you both want the same thing. For example, if you love football, and you're good enough at it, you can get paid a lot to play it…
I like how PG immediately elucidates that the answer can not be simple yes or no (and I agree), and implies easy algorithms will not help.
Now I have reached middle age and people perceive I am successful in at least two or three domains (arguably: podcasting, theatre and investing) I get asked variations on this question a lot, particularly from young people.
One tricky aspect is that people need to be honest on how much money they would like or need. People need to be honest to themselves on several dimensions of wants. Beyond that, I find many young people do not have a great sense of the options before them.
PG’s advice here therefore resonated:
First, the problem:
there's something like a midwit peak for making money. If you don't need to make much, you can work on whatever you're most interested in; if you want to become moderately rich, you can't usually afford to; but if you want to become super rich, and you're young and good at technology, working on what you're most interested in becomes a good idea again.
What if you're not sure what you want? What if you're attracted to the idea of making money and more attracted to some kinds of work than others, but neither attraction predominates? How do you break ties?
The key here is to understand that such ties are only apparent. When you have trouble choosing between following your interests and making money, it's never because you have complete knowledge of yourself and of the types of work you're choosing between, and the options are perfectly balanced.
When you can't decide which path to take, it's almost always due to ignorance. In fact you're usually suffering from three kinds of ignorance simultaneously: you don't know what makes you happy, what the various kinds of work are really like, or how well you could do them.
And then some solution ideas:
What do you do in the face of uncertainty? Get more certainty. And probably the best way to do that is to try working on things you're interested in. That will get you more information about how interested you are in them, how good you are at them, and how much scope they offer for ambition.
Don't wait. Don't wait till the end of college to figure out what to work on. Don't even wait for internships during college. You don't necessarily need a job doing x in order to work on x; often you can just start doing it in some form yourself. And since figuring out what to work on is a problem that could take years to solve, the sooner you start, the better.
One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at who your colleagues will be. You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people?
Indeed, the difference in character between different kinds of work is magnified by the fact that everyone else is facing the same decisions as you. If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you'll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you're genuinely interested in, you'll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring.
The other thing you do in the face of uncertainty is to make choices that are uncertainty-proof.
I will re-emphasise. Try things out. For certain office work that means internship type things, but it doesn’t have to be. You need to explore seriously the doing of the job/role you are interested in.
The other element is this uncertainty-proof idea.
PG: the less sure you are about what to do, the more important it is to choose options that give you more options in the future. I call this "staying upwind." If you're unsure whether to major in math or economics, for example, choose math; math is upwind of economics in the sense that it will be easier to switch later from math to economics than from economics to math.
I would expand this idea and suggest that you want to choose something which continues to grow your options or luck surface area – or, to use an investor term – to retain or increase your optionality.
I don’t think it means you definitely need to make an upwind choice, as I think optionality can be wider than that – but certainly making choices which keep more options open, and switching options easier are worth doing in the face of uncertainty.
Our family was part of the Lord Mayor’s Show recently, joining the City Parent Carer Forum’s float - an old Routemaster bus.
The Lord Mayor of London is a historic figure with roots tracing back to the early medieval period, representing the City of London’s distinct status within the United Kingdom. Unlike the Mayor of London, who oversees the entire Greater London area, the Lord Mayor’s role is confined to the City of London, a small but influential area that is the historic and financial center of the city.
Here’s an overview of its history and current role:
Historical Background
The origins of the Lord Mayor of London date back to at least 1189, when the city gained certain self-governing privileges that were solidified under King Richard I. In 1215, King John granted the City of London a royal charter allowing it to elect its own mayor, establishing a precedent of autonomy for the City, which had been a hub of commerce and trade for centuries.
Since the 13th century, the Lord Mayor’s position has symbolized the City’s wealth, independence, and influence. The officeholder was originally a wealthy merchant or landowner, often deeply involved in the City’s governance and trade guilds, and was viewed as a representative of the powerful livery companies—trade associations that controlled various sectors of London’s economy.
Present Day: Today, the Lord Mayor of London serves primarily as an ambassador for the City’s financial and business sectors, working to promote the City of London as a global financial hub and to represent the interests of its residents.
The Lord Mayor’s Show
One of the most famous traditions associated with the role is the Lord Mayor’s Show, a parade that symbolizes the mayor's journey to swear loyalty to the Crown. This colorful procession dates back over 800 years and is celebrated annually with pageantry and elaborate floats that represent the City’s historic livery companies, modern businesses, and community organizations.
From wiki: The Great Twelve City Livery Companies — the Mercers, Grocers, Drapers, Fishmongers, Goldsmiths, Merchant Taylors*, Skinners*, Haberdashers, Salters, Ironmongers, Vintners and Clothworkers — participate as of right and the other livery companies by invitation
Other participants include bands and members of "privileged regiments" of the City of London such as the Honourable Artillery Company and The Royal Fusiliers. Privileged regiments have the right to march through the City with bayonets fixed, colours flying, and drums beating. (See above for the bomb disposal team)
The many other participants lend a unique flavour to the occasion which include organisations that the Lord Mayor wishes to support or has belonged to, such as charities, old schools and business associations before becoming Lord Mayor.
We were invited via a parent-child charity specialising in disability and special education in the city.
It’s worth noting that the City Guilds remain a blend of old and new. Old guilds include:
The Worshipful Company of Fletchers: Fletchers were originally the makers of arrows, a highly specialized trade that naturally declined with the advent of firearms. While archery is now a niche interest, the guild remains and contributes to ceremonial archery events.
The Worshipful Company of Innholders: Responsible for the hospitality industry, this guild represents innkeepers and has roots in medieval inns and taverns. While the guild’s focus on the hospitality sector is still relevant, the old inns of yore conjure up interesting imagery.
The Worshipful Company of Basketmakers: Dedicated to the art of basket weaving, this guild covers a range of items from wicker furniture to traditional baskets. Basket-making might not be a profession you'd think of today, but the craft remains celebrated.
The Worshipful Company of Fan Makers: Originally responsible for making hand-held fans, this guild managed a once-booming industry when fans were essential accessories in high society. As fans became less fashionable, the guild's purpose shifted to supporting modern engineering applications related to airflow.
The Worshipful Company of Pattenmakers: Pattens were wooden-soled overshoes designed to keep feet out of the mud, a crucial accessory before the invention of modern pavement. The Pattenmakers now focus on charitable efforts, particularly for people needing specialized orthopedic footwear.
The Worshipful Company of Horners: Originally involved in crafting items from horn (like cups and combs), this guild has transformed over time to embrace the plastics industry, as many traditional horn-based products are now made from plastic. (We spotted the Horners on parade, see picture above.)
And new guilds include:
The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists: Granted livery status in 1992, this company represents the information technology sector, including professionals from software development, cybersecurity, and digital innovation.
The Worshipful Company of Management Consultants: Established in 2004, it brings together professionals from the management consulting industry, focusing on best practices and ethical standards.
The Worshipful Company of Educators: Formed in 2001, this company unites individuals involved in education and training, promoting excellence across all educational sectors.
The Worshipful Company of Arts Scholars: Granted livery status in 2014, it includes professionals such as art historians, dealers, and conservators, emphasizing the study and preservation of art and artifacts.
The Worshipful Company of Security Professionals: Established in 2008, it represents individuals in the security industry, including cybersecurity experts, physical security professionals, and risk managers.
And the parade itself is a symbol of this old and new colliding while ensuring visibility for its participants - particularly important for the City Parent Carer Forum and the families we were representing.
Everyone seemed pretty happy, and the festive spirit means I quite enjoyed being part of the parade. I even understood why the “royal wave” comes about because your hand gets pretty tired of constant normal waving!
I love the flavour of sea urchins. The taste is complex and pretty unique.
The taste recalls the sea. Salty and briny but with the sea weed, algae notes of marine. It tends towards notes of iron rather than fish, but is unmistakably of the sea.
The texture is creamy and buttery, with a tiny amount of small egg bubble texture. This gives the texture a richness and a custard-type mouthfeel.
When fresh, the sea urchin has little to no bitterness, although still with the sea flavour. Instead there is a sweetness and strong umami sense like a deep mushroom or soy sauce.
I recent had some uni which is imported from Iceland. These ones has a hint of mineral and nut tones as well.
I wanted to see if I could tell the difference between male and female sea urchins. I think the male was this darker orange one here, and had slightly stronger brine and metal tang. The lighter yellow being more female roe was slightly more buttery, with no metal tang at all. But if anyone eats a lot or knows, let me know.
Thanks for reading! If in London do come on Dec 16.