Week 6: Marathoning, Personal Brands, and Technology

Welcome to my newsletter, where I share weekly wisdom for the artistic. I’ve just revamped my website, so if you want to check out my essays/long-form writing, feel free to click the link here. Thanks for reading :).

Personal Updates

I recently wrote an essay about training for my first marathon, and yesterday morning, I officially became a marathoner. I finished with an official time of 3:41:29, an average pace of 8:28 min/mi. You can read more about my experience in the continuation of my marathon essay.

This past week, I had the pleasure of filming a podcast episode with Ryan Ward, who’s on a journey of filming a YouTube every single day for 365 days. He’s also on the journey of building a personal brand, so it was really cool to learn about how he’s been approaching this.

In this episode (here’s also the audio version), we talk about social media experimentation, content creation skills, social media, authenticity, balancing a 9-to-5 with side hustles, and much more. This is also episode 10 of the podcast, so feel free to let me know your feedback.

Learnings

1. On Marathons

This quote from Haruki Murakami (read his book just a few weeks ago, you can check it out here) captures exactly why I, and many others, run. There’s obviously a whole lot of health benefits that come from it, but for the most part, we want to feel alive. We want to reach the upper threshold of the human experience, and through running are we able to experience that.

Marathon running, I believe, requires a bit of delusion. The idea of painfully struggling through 26.2 miles isn’t something you’d typically think of doing on a random Sunday morning at 6:30 am. But for those who want to seek something more, experience something greater, start running. It’ll genuinely change your life for the better. It certainly did for me.

2: Don’t Put Yourself in a Box

Something Ryan and I discussed in our podcast episode was the difficulty of narrowing down a niche when building our personal brands. It takes an extreme lot of experimentation, and when you’re starting out, you have to try making content in different mediums and about different topics before you truly find something that you want to focus on.

This article by Jakob Greenfeld helped provide a lot of clarity on the idea of niching down versus experimentation. Here’s a quote:

The people who have a niche right now have spent months, years without a niche. Finding your niche isn’t something that’s forced; it naturally emerges as you produce more and more content.

3: The Anthology of Balaji

In my podcast episode with Noah Zender, he recommended that I check out Eric Jorgenson’s The Anthology of Balaji. I finally got around to reading it (btw The Almanack of Naval is really a good one), and I learned so much about technology’s role in the modern world. I’m still halfway through, but I thought I’d share some lessons I took away from the book.

This is a profound observation when contrasting between the 20th and 21st century. The 20th century was an age of centralization (centralized media, production, armies, etc.). Today, we’re living in an age of decentralization, especially with the invention of blockchain technology that allows for new financial and technological systems.

Think about the dwindling trust in media nowadays. More people are waking up to the fact that mainstream outlets like the NY Times and CNN are increasingly becoming untrustworthy, biased sources for accurate information. Instead, we’re seeing a radical shift toward the power of independent, individual sources for information. The creator economy is a fine reflection of this trend.

There’s so much to talk about here. I could make a whole essay out of it. But the lesson is clear: by studying the past, we can understand the future. Balaji argues that technological progress occurs in cycles → decentralization leads to centralization, centralization leads to decentralization, and so on.

Conclusion

With the advent of VR and simulations, I ask myself the question: What is it that’s so bleak with the real world that people would go to great lengths to create technology for simulated worlds?

In a sense, we’re all living in dual worlds - our physical one and our digital one. Video games are a great example: instead of stat-maxing our life in the real world, we stat-max our video game character in the digital world. Humans, what an interesting species. Here’s a quote to finish off this week:

Live a fruitful life,

Jeston