Potpourri: Discomfort and The Internet
Internships, Fun, and, Experiments
☀️ Happy Monday from Tuscaloosa, AL ☀️
Welcome to the twelfth Louis’ Learnings email!
Like last week, this week’s newsletter shares my five favorite mini-essays I wrote during the week. I discuss experimenting, how to make hard things easier, how awesome the internet is, what to do without an internship, and why you need to have more fun.
Enjoy!
Best Essays From Last Week
Low-Cost Experiments
We severely undervalue the low-cost experiment.
To our detriment, we assume things are permanent.
Binary. Yes or no. Black and white. Never or forever.
That's not always helpful.
I was a painfully annoying vegetarian for 6-years. Now, 80% of my calories come from steak and eggs. I still have the same friends. My family didn't abandon me. I made a U-Turn. I'm okay.
You don't have to decide your entire life all at once. Tasting. Test drives. These are the antidotes.
Gates and Zuckerberg never "dropped out of college."
They each took a leave of absence to run with projects with traction. Because they saw success, they never needed to re-enroll, but that wasn't decided upfront.
How should you test? What makes a good experiment?
Low cost doesn't mean zero cost. Set clear boundaries at the beginning.
Trying a new sport? 1 day at Jiu-Jitsu isn't a fair chance.
Give it a month, minimum.
World travel? You don't need to commit to 14-months as a Nomad.
Start smaller and then decide if you want to keep going.
Set a minimum goal, achieve it, and then re-evaluate.
Set clear success criteria. Give yourself permission to change course.
Democratizing Manifestation
The internet has democratized manifestation.
It has NEVER been easier (literally, never) to take an idea from your head and bring it into the real world.
Rapid-prototyping. Arduino. 3D Printers. Python. YouTube. Google.
This is just the beginning.
Any knowledge is accessible.
Any collaborator is accessible.
Any customer is accessible.
Instantly. Anything you could possibly need. Literally right now.
How we don't appreciate this on a daily basis blows my mind.
About 2 weeks in to running my podcast, I was watching college Jeopardy with my parents. I marveled as Nibir Sarma demolished everybody. I thought, "damn it would be cool to talk to him."
A few DMs and Zooms later, we published an episode with Nibir.
My idea became reality within a week.
This might be a trivia example but the implications aren't trivial.
Now, more than ever, anything is possible.
Mainstream society celebrates consumption.
That will get you nowhere.
Opportunities come to creators. To producers. Builders of stuff!
Stop waiting. You have the tools. Bring your ideas to life.
Measuring Discomfort
"Successful people get good at doing hard things."
I first encountered this idea on Cal Newport's podcast, and it stuck with me.
Whether it's waking up early, taking cold showers, or writing for a few extra hours, a great deal of success comes down to winning inflection points: moments where you either execute the plans you've made for yourself or give in to resistance and snooze your plans for an indefinite 'later'.
From having tried to build all of these habits, I'm no stranger to battling with the resistance. Because of that, I'm always in the hunt for helpful tactics to win these battles. Recently, an unexpected strategy came to me from cold-showers.
Bringing my stopwatch into the shower like an absolute lunatic, I'd smash the start button after dialing the water down from cozy to cold. After a sufficient session of panicked deep breaths, my body would adjust to the water.
Settled in, I would then check my stopwatch to see how much time had elapsed & how much remains. Day 1, 1 minute & 10 seconds. Day 2, 1 minute & 10 seconds. Day 3, 1 minute & 10 seconds. Day 4, 1 minute & 10 seconds.
Everyday, it took precisely 70 seconds to calm down and settle in. This was an empowering realization. All of a sudden, a 5-minute cold shower was reduced to only 70 seconds of discomfort followed by 4 minutes of normal showering.
After noticing the pattern in the shower, I started looking for it everywhere.
Anytime I wake up to an alarm, I slide out of bed angry and grumpy. How long does that last? To find out, l measured my morning moods for a week. Like the showers, my state improved after a remarkably predictable interval: 12 minutes.
Now, my first priority in the morning is to make those 12 minutes pass as easily as possible. Make coffee, put away dishes, brush my teeth. I just bumble around for 12-minutes confident that alertness is just around the corner.
From observing the boundaries of discomfort, I reduced the difficulty of building good habits. What I learned by accident, I'm now purposely applying in new areas.
How long does it take to find flow when writing? What about ignoring a craving? At what mile-marker does my heart-rate settle down?
By measuring discomfort, I've made doing hard things easier. Resistance becomes predictable and manageable. Pay close attention when you are doing hard things.
Often, starting might just be the hardest part.
Permissionless Experience
For many students, COVID has made it more difficult to find internships.
Many worry that this is going to trap them in the Catch-22 of hiring: to get hired somewhere, you need to have relevant experience, and to get relevant experience, you need to get hired somewhere... or do you?
As difficult as this situation may seem, it could be a blessing for a student with the right mindset.
Why? The needs of a given business don't always correspond to projects with the greatest degree of learning. On the other hand, self-designed projects can be custom-tailored to teach exactly what you hope to learn.
Inspired by Jack Butcher's idea of the Permissionless Apprentice, I encourage students to consider what I call Permissionless Experience.
Gate-keepers be damned. If you can't find an internship it is not game over. It's game on. The only permission you need to learn and grow is your own.
Ask yourself the following questions. What skills were you hoping to learn from an internship? What relationships were you hoping to make?
Is an internship necessary to achieve those same goals? Not quite.
The internet has made it easier than ever to build compelling self-designed learning projects and to connect with anyone via Zoom and DMs.
Consider trying any of the following Permissionless Experiences 👇👇👇
Design your own 'internship' by learning a skill and completing projects.
Create and publish content about your passions, hobbies, or industry.
Volunteer your time somewhere and build your 'life-resume.'
Take free online courses (and take them seriously).
Pitch yourself as an intern to relevant companies.
Consider opportunities outside of your major.
Don't give up hope if you don't get hired. Take ownership of your education.
If you found this helpful, I seriously recommend these two books: Ultralearning by Scott Young and The Third Door by Alex Banayan.
Productivity and Fun
The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes.
Most productivity advice is wildly ignorant of this natural phenomenon.
You are bombarded with tactics and widgets: pomodoro timers, complex planning systems, nootropics, to-do lists, and focus music.
While these are useful, and I actually recommend most of them, they are trivial in the big picture. They are the 80% of causes that earn only 20% of the results.
The truly impactful variables come from the context of your life outside of work. Circumstance exhibits a much greater impact on your productivity than whatever systems and tools you try to incorporate.
You hopefully know the importance of sleep, diet, and exercise, so I won't bore you with repeating those. Loving what you do also makes a huge difference, but what really matters is excitement.
Are there things outside of work that excite you? How often? Are there things that excite you outside of work on a daily basis?
As a countermeasure to letting work bleed into the evening, I've tried imposing a hard stop to my workday. I set the intention of finishing everything by 5pm but pretty much always end up working past 5pm.
Why? I didn't have anything compelling planned for after 5. I'd cook dinner, call a friend on the phone, and maybe read a book? I 'like' all of that, but it's not nearly a strong enough pull to work harder all day.
To stop working at 5, you need to really look forward to what you are going to do after 5. Otherwise, why be productive? Why finish early?
Being quarantined and locked-down has stripped a lot of excitement from daily life. Concerts, social venues, group fitness, and travel are either closed completely or are lacking the vibe they used to create.
It's up to you to find new forms of fun and new ways to interject excitement into daily life. Your productivity depends on it.
Content Updates
LK Podcast #52 with Dickie Bush: Dickie Bush comes on to discuss how and why he started his writing community, Ship 30 for 30. We also dive into the benefits of writing online, personal development, playing center on Princeton's football team, investing, and Dickie's future goals for Tampa, FL. (Watch on YouTube)
LK Podcast #51 with John Sherwin: John Sherwin joins us to discuss Co-Founding Hydrant, a high-growth vc backed startup at "the intersection of water and wellness." John discusses the science of hydration and the business of delivering it to the world from raising money, marketing, and getting investors.
Coming Soon!
(This week) Our interview with Geoff Woods, host of The ONE Thing Podcast
(Soon) Our interview with Tal Gur, from The Art of Fully Living
2 Quick Clicks
(1) Reading Online 💻: Khe Hy’s Blog
Really great content about prioritization and leverage.
(2) Reading Offline 🗞: The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan
Another source of really great content about prioritization and leverage.
That’s All For This Week!
What did you think of the essays? What have you been up to?
I’d love to hear from you.
Cheers,
Louis Shulman
Help Me Out! Share Louis’ Learnings
If you know someone who would enjoy these emails, share it with them here!
Video of the Week
I did my first ever press-handstand without a wall. It’s ugly, but I’m proud of it!
Soon enough, I’ll be making these look easy!
Subscribe
If this was forwarded to you, subscribe here!
Such a good one! So inspirational! Thanks for sharing this week :)