Fire & Motion 43
Fleeting Quote
When asked if he felt pressure from fans’ expectations, Kobe Bryant responded, “Their expectations will never be higher than my own. Never, never, never.”
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Your actions speak so loudly, I cannot hear what you are saying.
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The most prepared person in the room usually says the least.
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The most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. And the worst thing is, they're not even fun.
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更悠長更遙遠更自在Out-of-League
🏅 The Reflections that Came to Me on Christmas Day
🏅 2025
🏅 The Shape of The Essay Field
Reading
[...] was the extent to which human happiness is a relative versus absolute phenomenon: what we care about is not how much we have, but how we compare. That, by extension, is what drives the technological paradox I noted above: more capabilities, more broadly distributed, has tremendously enriched the world on an absolute basis; the end result, however, has been the dramatic expansion of our comparison set, making us feel more immiserated than ever. This, writ large, is what Patel and Trammell seem to be worried about: sure, everyone may have all of their material needs met, but that won’t be good enough if the price of that abundance is the knowledge that someone else has more. This might not be rational, but it certainly is human!
As I've written this essay, I’ve returned again and again to terms like platform, ecosystem, leverage and network effect. These terms get used a lot in tech, but they have pretty vague meanings. Google Cloud, Apple's App Store, Amazon Marketplace, and even TikTok are all ‘platforms’ but they're all very different.
Maybe the word I'm really looking for is power. When I was at university, a long time ago now, my medieval history professor, Roger Lovatt, told me that power is the ability to make people do something that they don't want to do, and that's really the question here. Does OpenAI have the ability to get consumers, developers and enterprises to use its systems more than anybody else, regardless of what the system itself actually does?
AI-enabled or AI-centric software is simply moving up the stack of what a product is. Software did not create online banks. Banking always required software. Software that faced a consumer, banking or traveling or shopping or reading or viewing, just became an essential part of the bank, travel, etc stack. Sometimes this created new from-scratch companies and sometimes it created new companies inside old ones. Industries were restructured as assets moved around. However big and complex you think a legacy business is today, it will be vastly larger and more complex tomorrow, and it will do vastly more.
Domain experience will be wildly more important than it is today because every domain will become vastly more sophisticated than it is now. This is not just because service providers and builders have better tools, but because customers do as well. [...] Yes, some supporting jobs in domains went away, but they were not just replaced with even more skills, they were replaced with many more people. More people work in more banking locations today, per capita, than ever before. There’s more expertise required in every domain, even with three decades of automation.
📄 A Reflection on SEO & AI Search in 2025
The reality is that the total “search pie” is growing. People are searching more than ever across all platforms. It’s not a zero-sum game where AI’s gain is Google’s loss. In fact, Similar Web data from 2025 shows that 95.3% of ChatGPT users still visit Google. Google is also successfully “absorbing” AI search into its own platform using AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Web Guide. Users aren’t necessarily leaving Google in droves for ChatGPT; but they are just getting ChatGPT-style answers inside Google. [...] The smartest move right now isn’t to choose AEO/GEO over SEO, but to double down on a user-focused approach that serves both: abiding by Google’s policies and guidelines for SEO success, while ensuring your content is clear, authoritative, and well-formatted for AI search discovery.
Always demand a deadline because it weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. A deadline prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.
You need teachers, parents, customers, fans, and friends because they will see who you are becoming before you will.
Having customers and fans.Don't aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.
If you are not embarrassed by your past self, you have probably not grown up yet.
If your sense of responsibility is not expanding as you grow, you are not really growing.
When making plans, you must allow yourself to get lost in order to find the thing you didn't know you were looking for.
Your ideal partner is not someone you never disagree with but someone you are glad to disagree with.
The purpose of listening is not to reply, but to hear what is not being said.
Proactively hearing others and towards curiousity.For lofty goals, measure your progress from where you started rather than where you need to finish.
When introduced to someone, make eye contact and count to four or say to yourself, "I see you." You'll both remember each other.
The general strategy for real estate is to buy the worst property on the best street.
Three things you need: the ability to not give up something till it works, the ability to give up something that does not work, and the trust in other people to help you distinguish between the two.
The most obvious way to take advantage of superlinear returns for performance is by doing exceptionally good work. At the far end of the curve, incremental effort is a bargain. All the more so because there's less competition at the far end — and not just for the obvious reason that it's hard to do something exceptionally well, but also because people find the prospect so intimidating that few even try. Which means it's not just a bargain to do exceptional work, but a bargain even to try to.
There's another more subtle lesson in the list of fields with superlinear returns: not to equate work with a job. For most of the 20th century the two were identical for nearly everyone, and as a result we've inherited a custom that equates productivity with having a job. Even now to most people the phrase "your work" means their job. But to a writer or artist or scientist it means whatever they're currently studying or creating. For someone like that, their work is something they carry with them from job to job, if they have jobs at all. It may be done for an employer, but it's part of their portfolio.
Portfolio.While breadth comes from reading and talking and seeing, depth comes from doing. The way to really learn about some domain is to have to solve problems in it. Though this could take the form of writing, I suspect that to be a good essayist you also have to do, or have done, some other kind of work. That may not be true for most other fields, but essay writing is different. You could spend half your time working on something else and be net ahead, so long as it was hard.
Ultimately the quality of an essay is a function of the ideas discovered in it, and the way you get them is by casting a wide net for questions and then being very exacting with the answers.
You don't have to learn programming, though. If you're wondering what counts as technology, it includes practically everything you could describe using the words "make" or "build." So welding would count, or making clothes, or making videos. Whatever you're most interested in. The critical distinction is whether you're producing or just consuming. Are you writing computer games, or just playing them? That's the cutoff.
The reason the persistent and the obstinate seem similar is that they're both hard to stop. But they're hard to stop in different senses. The persistent are like boats whose engines can't be throttled back. The obstinate are like boats whose rudders can't be turned.
When you look at the internal structure of persistence, it doesn't resemble obstinacy at all. It's so much more complex. Five distinct qualities — energy, imagination, resilience, good judgement, and focus on a goal — combine to produce a phenomenon that seems a bit like obstinacy in the sense that it causes you not to give up. But the way you don't give up is completely different. Instead of merely resisting change, you're driven toward a goal by energy and resilience, through paths discovered by imagination and optimized by judgement. You'll give way on any point low down in the decision tree, if its expected value drops sufficiently, both energy and resilience keep pushing you toward whatever you chose higher up.
So if you want to understand wokeness, the question to ask is not why people behave this way. Every society has prigs. The question to ask is why our prigs are priggish about these ideas, at this moment. And to answer that we have to ask when and where wokeness began.
If we're not sure what to do about any particular manifestation of wokeness, imagine we were dealing with some other religion, like Christianity. Should we have people within organizations whose jobs are to enforce woke orthodoxy? No, because we wouldn't have people whose jobs were to enforce Christian orthodoxy. Should we censor writers or scientists whose work contradicts woke doctrines? No, because we wouldn't do this to people whose work contradicted Christian teachings. Should job candidates be required to write DEI statements? Of course not; imagine an employer requiring proof of one's religious beliefs. Should students and employees have to participate in woke indoctrination sessions in which they're required to answer questions about their beliefs to ensure compliance? No, because we wouldn't dream of catechizing people in this way about their religion.
If you're excited about some kind of work that's not considered prestigious and you can explain what everyone else is overlooking about it, then this is not merely a kind of work that's ok to do, but one to seek out.
There are only two ways to combine branding and good design. You can do it when the space of possibilities is enormously large, as it is in painting for example. Leonardo could paint as well as he possibly could and yet also paint in a style that was distinctively his. If there had been a million painters as good as Bellini and Leonardo this would have been harder to do, but since there were more like ten they didn't bump up against one another much. The other situation when branding and good design can be combined is when the space of possibilities is comparatively unexplored. If you're the first to arrive in some new territory, you can both find the right answer and claim it as uniquely yours. At least at first; if you've really found the right answer, everyone else's designs will inevitably converge on yours, and your brand advantage will erode over time.
Quality doesn't stop mattering when a product switches to something people buy for its brand. But the way it matters changes shape. It becomes a threshold. It no longer has to be so great that it sells the product; brand sells the product; but it does have to be good enough to maintain the brand's reputation. The brand must not break character.
The way to find golden ages is not to go looking for them. The way to find them — the way almost all their participants have found them historically — is by following interesting problems. If you're smart and ambitious and honest with yourself, there's no better guide than your taste in problems. Go where interesting problems are, and you'll probably find that other smart and ambitious people have turned up there too. And later they'll look back on what you did together and call it a golden age.
Watching
📹 The Ridiculous Engineering Of The World's Most Important Machine
📹 Re-𝙇𝙄𝙑𝙀 Winter Olympics! Ice Dance / Free Dance - Figure Skating
📹 Why Taiwan Is Richer Than Japan and Korea
📹 Hassabis on an AI Shift Bigger Than Industrial Age
📹 Something Strange Happens When You Trust Quantum Mechanics
🎥 驀然回首
🎥 山河故人
🎥 Amélie
Outside Interest
📝 A letter from Jan 28, 2025
2025 年初的你也終於（稍稍）感到消解的時間感了。口袋多了幾張機票，橫躺之間的日、週，乃至於月都兀自成了一段，一段日日提醒自己要 push hard 的短跑。許多過往的口號不定時 pop up 在腦海中：不可忘記更高的自我要求、you can always quit tomorrow、2025 必定會是重要的一年。說到底是要行動，因為寫信當下的你依然還沒有開始。剔除了冠冕堂皇的口號與 mindset，其實 2025 列下的目標不多項，但每一個都求一個 kickstart，也都需要長期的抗戰！未來信件寫到最後，經常是腦中沒有太多思考，只因心瞭再多的條列都比不上一次紮實的行動。
其實 2025 年初的這封信通篇都好喜歡、讀起來也好順，當初不知道是在怎樣的狀態寫出來的（笑。也都是如此吧，對於「行動」的關注時常是 future letter 的主題，但仍需要一再地被提醒、一再地修正。各個面向中的 anomalies 與不合常理 / 怪異 / 不舒適之處，通常就是破口所在，直面它、思考它、提出問題、設計改善方案、徹底執行吧！每一次微小的轉身，到了後來，必定會成為無比重要的基石。📝 A letter from Feb 22, 2025
擁有的東西無意間越來越少了，也越來越喜歡將東西用盡、丟棄，彷彿行囊夠輕了，才有辦法動身。也許是這樣的想法，讓你覺得今年已經輕到可以做任何事。還是會羨慕別人，但隨即能想起即將到來的旅程、提醒不忘預訂再下一趟：他人的故事正精彩，而你也會富足你的經驗。
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