Manan's notes

Weekly update, Week 27

Hi friends,

Welcome to my July 11th dispatch! As a reminder, you can browse the archive of these newsletters at https://buttondown.email/manan.

What I thought about this week

I hiked Half Dome this past week and wrote about Why I like doing hard things.

What I read this week

I lost my Kindle this week (thankfully, I recovered it!), so I mostly read shorter pieces.

  • How to Create More & Consume Less. I normally wouldn't take notes on a clickbait-y productivity YouTube video like this, but creation is something I've been thinking a lot about recently (which is why I'm updating this blog more frequently!). This video had some helpful tips on how to start creating.

  • Mental Liquidity. A very short piece by Morgan Housel (a behavioral economist and one of my favorite writers). He talks about the dangers of holding strong opinions because they're the ones you are least likely to update in the face of contradicting information. Be careful what beliefs you let become part of your identity.

  • On Building With Friends. I want to make cool things that benefit the world with people I admire and respect, and this piece describes that fundamental desire very well. If you also read this piece and it resonates with you, let me know; we should build something together.

  • Introspect. It's very difficult to summarize this book, so in the author's own words:

INTROSPECT is an ebook by @visakanv about becoming who you are. Remixing Nietzsche, Emerson, Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell and more.

I'd describe it as the most flawed book that's almost certain to change your life. It did for me. It's messy, and the author is painstakingly aware of his own shortcomings as a writer. But his honesty is inspiring, and there are a TON of amazing nuggets in here about coming to terms with yourself, dismantling your inner "authoritarian-tyrant", and growing into someone who can love themselves and others. I admire Visakan a lot and would highly recommend all of his writing.

I'd highly recommend watching the whole thing. This video made me realize that the way I thought about mistakes when I played piano as a kid was completely wrong, and was probably the reason why I burned out of playing. It also made me realize being comfortable with the idea of mistakes, and being wrong, is a highly underrated skill that I'm not very good at (but would like to develop). I'll leave you with a couple of quotes from the video:

Practice the chromatic scale so your ear gets used to hearing the wrong notes. And when you make music with the wrong notes, they're not wrong anymore.

We always practice playing right. That's okay, but there's a problem with that. And the problem is, we're always going to mess up. For the rest of our lives, we're going to make mistakes. But we're never comfortable with it because we always practice right.

Other Cool links

  • https://www.whatbeatsrock.com/. No context needed. Just play and let me know how high you can get. I'm especially proud of "Mama's homecooked food" beats "Feynman's path integral".
  • https://theapache64.github.io/git-do-not-ignore/. This site is incredibly useful for the very niche scenario in which you need to .gitignore an entire folder EXCEPT for a few files in that folder. This is surprisingly hard to do out of the box, but the page above makes it very easy.
  • How does an air fryer work?
  • Did you know that the jingle used in the Modelo commercials comes from "The Ecstasy of Gold" theme from The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly?