Hello, everyone.

I didn’t update this newsletter in 2020, for one very simple reason: it was a hard year for all of us. I had a few wins - the biggest was that my novel the Salvage Crew, was published; the audiobook was narrated by Nathan Fillion of Firefly and Castle fame. And it subsequently became a Washington Post bestseller.

But crowing about this sort of thing in the middle of pandemic seemed . . . crass. Even when things began to clear, I wasn’t sure I had anything useful to say in email. A lot of my author friends tell me I should be marketing my books hardcore on email - but the truth is I’ve come to dislike these sorts of cold-call BUY MY BOOOK XXXOOOXXXO emails.

So I stuck to what I do on autopilot: I tweet (sometimes useful, mostly useless thoughts), I read, and I send my friends stuff I find interesting via WhatsApp.

One of my close friends pointed out quite recently that those random messages of mine were a useful source of learning for him. Because my interests are rather broad - from physics to AI to poetry and whatnot - I had sent him things outside his usual reading. It turned out my random ‘hey, this is interesting’ thoughts were of some value, after all.

So I decided to turn this old newsletter of mine into more of the same. Welcome to TILT, aka Things I Learned Today.

One of the poems I’ve always been obsessed with is Ulysses, by Alfred Lord Tennyson[1]. Ulysses, as we known, was the latinization of Odysseus, the Greek hero who wandered the earth for years, having misadventures on his way home. From his name we have the title of his journey: The Odyssey.

Tennyson’s Ulysses is an aged Odysseus, successful returning king, reflecting on his life.

I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

Odysseus has achieved all he set out to. By every possible measure of his world he is a success. More than that: he is a legend. And yet, Odysseus is restless:

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.

I’ve always read this poem as an extremely eloquent way of saying never stop learning. Ulysses/Odysseus is driven by his curiosity. His riches, his wealth and his power have cannot sate a more fundamental need - to learn, to grow.

And this gray spirit yearning in desire, he laments. To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

And at the end of the poem, he calls his friends together, gets back on the boat, and sets off in search of the new and the interesting.

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

This theme of seeking new information isn’t limited to the fictional Ulysses. One of the things that struck me was Paul Graham’s essay Fierce Nerds[3].

Graham’s essay extols fierce nerds - people who are deeply drawn to ideas and combine that with both confidence and the drive to explore those ideas. Being an Odysseus, so to speak. You can read his essay here.

But he also provides a cautionary lesson:

The bad news is that if it's not exercised, your fierceness will turn to bitterness, and you will become an intellectual playground bully: the grumpy sysadmin, the forum troll, the hater, the shooter down of new ideas.

How do we become better at both seeking and embracing new ideas? Because we are not Greek kings of old. Our problem is not that we are exposed to too little information, but too much[2]. To the point where interfacing with our daily flow of information is like being in a relentless river trying to bury us underneath a torrent of noise.

Graham has a few ideas. He’s one of the co-founders and the face of Y Combinator, the legendary Silicon Valley investment fund/network. Stripe, Airbnb, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox, Twitch, and Reddit - these are all Y Combinator companies.

Which means that PG must be able to professionally filter out interesting new ideas from noise; that’s literally his job. Which brings us to Crazy New Ideas[4], another one of his essays.

Graham points out that new ideas always look feeble when they first start out. That there is also a vested interest against those ideas in the social order around us. Having new ideas is a lonely business, he writes. Only those who've tried it know how lonely.

Having said that, he proposes an interesting heuristic: just look for a reasonable domain expert proposing something that sounds wrong.

Sounds odd? Read his essay here. We may not all be able to step out onto a Greek sea and call for heroes to join us on our next journey. But perhaps the experience of new ideas may give us, in small way, that arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades forever and ever as we move.

Best,
Yudha

PS: if you enjoyed reading this, please let me know. You can reply to this email and I’ll see it. We may not always talk about inspiration and ideas, but there’s so much more to talk about.

[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563219304364

[3] http://www.paulgraham.com/fn.html

[4] http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html