Hi everyone, Happy Monday!
I know I haven’t sent a newsletter for a while, so firstly I would like to apologise. The lockdown has made me unproductive and I have lost sense of days and time (I am sure a lot of you are feeling the same). I hope everyone is safe and staying at home.
With a lot of time in my hands, I have thought that I will write profiles more on people in tech, startups, founders and occasionally about people from different fields. Also, newsletters will start to get a little longer than before now.
With that being said, let me give a brief about today’s Titan, Tim Urban before I share 1 interesting story, 2 quotes to think about and 3 short lessons from him for you to read this week.
Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) is the author of the blog Wait But Why and has become one of the Internet’s most popular writers. According to Fast Company, Tim has “captured a level of reader engagement that even the new-media giants would be envious of.” Wait But Why receives more than 1.5 million unique visitors per month and has over 550,000 email subscribers.
His Ted Talk, Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator, has gotten more than 26 million views and is a great one to start with. Another popular post that you should check out is Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man.
1 STORY FOR YOU
Page 701
I have picked this story for this week because it feels like the right time amidst all the pandemic to think about how the future is going to be.
Tim Ferriss: I’d like to talk about the future for a second. And I want to read a quote here. I believe that you wrote or said this, so correct me if I’m wrong. “I always thought the future would be intense. But now, I think the future is going fully fucking crazy.” Okay. So, what are a few things that you’re excited about or see coming down the pike in the future? It doesn’t have to be one or two. It could be many.
Tim Urban: It is going to be crazy, and here’s why – this is going to be a long answer. So, 1,000 centuries of human history, 100,000 years. So, each two centuries is a page in a book.
Tim Ferriss: About 700 pages.
Tim Urban: So, 500 pages. Actually, whatever. They’re finding older, human mermaids, so, fine. So, 140,000 years, every page in this book that you’re holding is 200 years in human history. So, Page 1 through 650 of that book, hunter-gathers. If you’re an alien reading this book to understand what happened on this planet, you are bored. This is really boring. Page 650, 10,000 years ago, you have the agriculture revolution. Wait. So, suddenly, people are coming together and forming cities. They’re starting to actually form larger civilizations. They have a collective intelligence that’s starting to form. They can compare notes. They can kind of create the knowledge tower that is bigger than any one of them.
It’s very interesting stuff. So, that’s 50 pages ago. Then, it gets boring again for a while. Page 690 out of 700, the little tiny end of the book here, you have Jesus. You have 693, you have the advent of Islam. The Roman Empire happens two pages ago. It’s already done. In 697, you have Imperialism. For the first time, you have countries. There’s this new thing that happened in the last three pages. Page 698, you have the enlightenment, you have the renaissance. You have things like this. They discover that there’s galaxies, telescope. Page 699, you finally get to the beginning of the US and the beginning of the constitutional democracies.
Now, Page 700 happens, which is from about 200 years ago to today. So, the beginning of Page 700, the alien turns the page, the industrial revolution happens. Big deal, big change. And as he reads down the page, things start to go crazy. You start to have – in 699 pages this alien has read, this boring ass species have communicated through letters and talking.
He was excited about language 500 pages ago. Now, he’s bored. Smoke signals, firing a cannon ball in the air, stuff like that. Suddenly, on Page 700, we go to the space station. We have the moon. We have airplanes. We have cars just on Page 700. So, 699 pages, we only communicate through – we have this kind of simple transportation, communication. Now, we have Face Time. We have a telephone. We have the internet. Crazy. Less than a billion people for the first 699 pages. On Page 700 alone, we cross the one, two, three, four, five, six and seven billion person marks. So, the alien is reading.
And his wife comes in and is like hey, we’re going to have dinner. And he’s like shut up. This is the most riveting thing suddenly. He’s like what is about to happen to this species? This is crazy what just happened on this page. This is when we’re born. We’re born at the end of Page 700. This is why when someone says what do you think the future is going to be, I’m like Page 701. And he’s like what the hell is this guy talking about. Page 701, there’s no way it’s not going to be nuts.
The first three sentences of Page 701 will take us to 2025 when they predict that AI is going to, basically, infiltrate every single industry and part of our lives the way electricity did in a 10 year span in the 1880s. That’s the first three sentences. So, to me, I see revolutions. The first half of Page 701, the first quarter of Page 701, I see revolutions in VR, AR. I see revolutions in AI. I see revolutions in brain machine interfaces. We’re going to be able to think thoughts to each other. It’s way cooler for language, for the first time. I see revolutions in genetic stuff.
Your grandkids are going to be like, so, you just had a baby and hoped it was a good baby? It’s going to seem crazy. It’s going to seem so primitive. And you can just go on and on and on with things. How about this one? What are the major leaps for life? You can count on one hand for all of life. Simple cell to complex cell, a big one. Complex cell to multi-cell, big one. We have animals now. Ocean to land, a big one. I would say the fourth that fits on this same list is going from one planet to multi planets as a civilization. That’s happening in the next decade with space. No one is talking about it yet, but they will be.
2 QUOTES FROM HIM
“One is micro happiness: are your Tuesdays good? Are you generally having a good Tuesday? Then there’s macro happiness, (where you say) “I will dig into current life for 20 years, I love it” Or are you like I was for nine years after college, which was like I’m doing this now but I really want or I should be doing.”
“Humans are smart enough that they know how insignificant they are. We are the only species on Earth that can conceive of either our own insignificance or our own death. Indeed, I am a microscopic particle here for only a brief moment who knows that I am a microscopic particle here for only a brief moment. A person is a speck of nothing who materializes for a split second, realizes where it stands in the scheme of time and space, understands that it will soon disappear back into nothingness for eternity, says “Wait, what the hell?”, and then disappears into nothingness for eternity.”
3 LEARNINGS FOR YOU
You need to prove to yourself that you can do it.
You need to show yourself you can do it, not tell yourself. Things will change when you show yourself that they can. Until then, you won’t believe it, and nothing will change. Think of yourself like a basketball player on a cold streak. For basketball players, it’s all about confidence, and an ice cold shooter can tell himself 1000 times, “I’m a great shooter, I’m going to hit this next one,” but it’s not until he physically hits a shot that his confidence goes up and his touch comes back.
Get to know your Authentic Voice
This doesn’t sound that hard, but it is. It takes some serious reflection to sift through the webs of other people’s thoughts and opinions and figure out who the real you actually is. You spend time with a lot of people—which of them do you actually like the most? How do you spend your leisure time, and do you truly enjoy all parts of it? Is there anything you regularly spend money on that you don’t feel that comfortable with? How does your gut really feel about your job and relationship status? What’s your true political opinion? Do you even care? Do you pretend to care about things you don’t just to have an opinion? Do you secretly have an opinion on a political or moral issue you don’t ever voice because people you know will be outraged?
There are cliché phrases for this process—"soul-searching" or "finding yourself" —but that’s exactly what needs to happen. Maybe you can reflect on this from whatever chair you’re sitting in right now or from some other part of your normal life—or maybe you need to go somewhere far away, by yourself, and step out of your life in order to effectively examine it. Either way, you’ve got to figure out what actually matters to you and start being proud of whoever your Authentic Voice is.
Your time is precious
Sometimes life seems really short, and other times it seems impossibly long.
Given that fact, the only appropriate word to describe your weeks is precious. There are trillions upon trillions of weeks in eternity, and those are your tiny handful. Going with the “precious” theme, let’s imagine that each of your weeks is a small gem, like a 2mm, .05 carat diamond.
If you multiply the volume of a .05 carat diamond by the number of weeks in 90 years (4,680), it adds up to just under a tablespoon.
Looking at this spoon of diamonds, there’s one very clear question to ask: “Are you making the most of your weeks?”
In thinking about my own weeks and how I tend to use them, I decided that there are two good ways to use a diamond:
1) Enjoying the diamond
2) Building something to make your future diamonds or the diamonds of others more enjoyable
If a diamond is enjoyable but by enjoying it you’re screwing your future diamonds, that’s not so good. Likewise, if you’re using diamond after diamond to build something for your future, but it’s not making you happy and seems like a long-term thing with no end in sight, that’s not great either.
From now on - I will try and attach more reading links for everyone if they want to read more on the person and what they say -
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-life.html
https://tim.blog/2017/11/30/managing-procrastination-predicting-the-future-and-finding-happiness/
https://www.robertglazer.com/elevate-podcast/tim-urban-on-asking-why-and-appreciating-life/
That’s it from me, until next Monday! Be safe and stay indoors :)
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