Pisgah National Forrest, North Carolina, USA. My favorite place I visited in 2024.
I borrowed this concept from Tom Whitwell as a way of cultivating a habit of curiosity. You can read his 2024 version here. I didnât make it to 52 things this year, but I stayed curious.
Transplant recipients can inherit memories from their donors â Adaobi Adibe
The March 2011 earthquake in Japan was so strong that it shortened the length of a day â Earth Sky via my friend Graham
Plants probably have memories. âOn one plant, the touch-me-not, feathery leaves normally fold and wilt when touched (a defense mechanism against being eaten), but when a team of scientists at the University of Western Australia and the University of Firenze in Italy conditioned the plant by jostling it throughout the day without harming it, it quickly learned to ignore the stimulus. Most remarkably, when the scientists left the plant alone for a month and then retested it, it remembered the experience.â â Scientific American via The Browser
US coal power plants killed at least 460,000 people over the past 20 years â Melissa Lott
A banana contains the same amount of radiation that a person would get from living next to a properly maintained nuclear power plant for one year â New York Times via Jim Pethokoukis
Smiling was once considered a sign of drunkenness â Upworthy
Lebron and Bronny James are the highest scoring father and son duo in NBA history without Bronny ever scoring a point â @georgemikan
There are more deaths from alcohol in the US each year than all illicit drugs combined â Charles Fain Lehman
France last used the guillotine to put someone to death in 1977 â The Rest Is History
The Barnum effect is when people give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their own personality that are in fact general enough to apply to a wide range of people â Simon Wilson
Predator-prey models have two stable equilibria: one where predator and prey are in approximate balance and the other where both are extinct â Paul Kedrosky
A correction from my 2023 things I learned: working moms today probably do not spend as much time with their children as stay at home moms did in 1960 â Lyman Stone
âSoccerâ as a word for the game of football came from the English, not Americans â Duolingo
Quantity precedes quality. Students graded on the quantity of the art they produce make higher quality art than students graded on the quality of art they produce â Perhaps apocryphal via Austin Kleon
JalapeĂąo peppers are getting less spicy over time âD Magazine via my friend Mark
Electrons within gold atoms are moving at 58% the speed of light â Will Kinney
Lake Superior is about the size of the state of Alabama â Wikipedia
The Milky Way builds between two and six sun-size stars a year â Quanta Magazine
The increase in driving due to 9/11 led to ~1600 more traffic deaths than otherwise wouldâve been expected â David Epstein
A correction to my 2022 list: Men whose wives are diagnosed with a terminal illness are not significantly more likely to get divorced â Retraction Watch
In 1990, 5% of Americans had a passport; today that number is 48% â Devon Zuegel
Fernet Branca uses 75% of the worldâs saffron â Eater
Making TB medicine sweet rather than bitter reduced a childâs risk of developing multi-drug resistant TB by over 50% â Bloomberg via News Minimalist
More than 50% of US couples now meet each online â Eric Klineberg
The Eiffel Towerâs lighting is protected by copyright â Tour Eiffel
If you think weâd have an interesting conversation about kelp, local news, our anything else, send me an email (jdilla.xyz@gmail.com). Iâd love to meet you!
Floâs tweet is my favorite scissor statement of 2024. I felt the sharp edge immediately. Iâve had a career in tech and I like to think of myself as ambitious⌠and yet when faced with the decision about where to live, we chose proximity to family over proximity to opportunity. At least I can comfort myself that I donât lack judgement.
where you live is the single most important career decision you'll make. You should make it with your eyes wide open
No matter what you think about living in the Bay Area, this is almost definitely true. But what if, either by choice or constraint, you find yourself outside a superstar city, but still want to have an ambitious career? What should you do then?
Here is my advice:
Attitude
Keep your ambitions high. Almost every project benefits from considering how to make it 10x more ambitious; even if you donât take that path, youâll benefit from the thought exercise.
One of the secrets of the Bay Area is the expectation that you can do something that changes the world. Merely inviting people to do great work increases the likelihood that they will do it, so make a practice of inviting yourself to do it.
Notice that impactful work can happen from anywhere. Consider that Nike, perhaps the worldâs most iconic fashion company, is headquartered in Oregon. Ben Thompson, maybe the most influential writer in tech, lives in Taipei. Mr. Beast might be the worldâs most popular entertainer and he lives in Eastern North Carolina. All of these are existence proof that geography isnât destiny. Great work is never the default path so donât waste your time worrying about what youâre missing out on.
Strategy
Choose your projects wisely. Some projects benefit more from network knowledge than others. As an example, there are going to be a whole set of business ideas that fall out of what people at frontier AI labs understand that will be tough if not impossible to access from outside those networks. Thatâs fine! There are many problems worth solving. When youâre choosing your work, assess the network tax youâre paying and steer towards ones where this is lower where you can. Keep the ambition high!
Every disadvantage has its advantage. Being outside the center gives you an outsiderâs perspective; use it. Extending the AI example, there are going to be applications of AI that wonât be visible to those inside the Bay Area bubble because they solve problems people inside the bubble donât see. Enjoy being outside the groupthink that leads to Uber for dog walkers.
Be a big fish in a small pond. Most cities, towns, and regions, want to be more like superstar cities and are looking for companies or organizations of their own they can boost. You should be the one theyâre boosting! Tobi LĂźtke, founder of Shopify, has talked about how he was able to make Shopify into a regional talent magnet. Duolingo does this in Pittsburgh. Startups in the Bay Area have to compete with OpenAI, Google, and Meta for talent, but you can be the best possible choice in your own backyard.
Network building
Plan regular trips to the city most connected with your industry and work. Focus those trips on time spent with people as much as you can. Keep your laptop closed. Use your trip as an excuse to bring people together. Attending the right conference does this as well.
Join distributed networks. Some of these are selective (Emergent Ventures, Supra) and others are generally open (StartUp CPG). Use these as a way to meet people and make the opportunity to see them in person if you can.
Learn to build relationships remotely. Building rapport with people that you mostly know from online is different than how you would do it in person. Be more intentional about reaching out, checking in, making up inside jokes. Emojis and memes are your friend.
Set up virtual coffees. If you write a thoughtful note about a problem or topic your target is interested in and if you seem thoughtful and interesting, most people will be willing to set up a virtual meeting with you. The time demand on a virtual coffee is almost always less than an in person one.
Always be posting. Having an online presence will be more important for you than it will be for others. Practice this and use it as a magnet for your work.
There are lots of ways to do great work with focus, intentionality, and creativity. Donât let your location stop you.
Have anything I missed? Send me an email jdilla.xyz@gmail.com. Iâd love to hear it.
Smiling was once considered a sign of drunkeness. Upworthy.
â˘đ"A banana contains the same amount of radiation as a person would get from living next to a properly maintained nuclear power plant for one year"@NYTpic.twitter.com/pb4gF7m090
— James Pethokoukis âŠď¸â¤´ď¸ (@JimPethokoukis) November 17, 2024
Observations
A pro / con list means the answer is no.
every decision i've ever made that wasn't an instant "hell yes" has been a mistake. every pro/con list is an admission the thing isn't worth it. the path God has laid out for you is so obvious it feels like getting bludgeoned with an anvil. no analysis makes a bad decision good
Be able to pull yourself to c-minus at just about any task
Be able to identify which parts of a project need an A+
Be able to find the people who can do an A+ on those tasks
Be able to work with those people and help those people work with each other
If you try and tell people 5 interesting things about your product / company / cause, theyâll remember zero. If instead, you tell them just one, theyâll usually ask questions that lead them to the other things, and then theyâll remember all of them because it mattered to them at the moment they asked.
Modern social media rewards information abundance, so if you find yourself with a product / company / cause that has lots of benefits, tell each of those story one at time. People are more likely to remember it and it gives you more to post.
78 percent of Christmas hits were penned before 1990. From Canât Get Much Higher. Also: âAccording to a report by CNN, about 52% of adults said they celebrated Halloween in 2005. In 2012, that percentage had jumped to around 72%. Over a decade later, ~the New York Times related~ that that percentage has slowly crept up closer to 75%.â
Transplant recipients can inherit memories and preferences from their donors from Adaobi Adibe. More on this here and here.
Worth your time
Getting materials out of the lab by Ben Reinhardt in Works in Progress. Lots of this resonated for me in my work at Macro Oceans, even though our materials arenât novel in the same way that say carbon fiber was in the 1960s. Thereâs an interplay between unique functionality (what the material does), scale (your ability to produce consistently), and price at each step along the journey. The art is picking use cases where your unique functionality isnât blocked by your limited scale and high price.
I know from my own experience of studying martial arts in Japan that intense study brings rewards that are impossible to achieve by casual application. For a year I studied an hour a day three days a week and made minimal progress. For a further year I switched to an intensive course of five hours a day five days a week. The gains were dramatic and permanent, resulting in a black belt and an instructor certificate. Deep down I was pessimistic that I could actually learn a martial art. I thought you were either a ânaturalâ or nothing. Then I saw natural athletes fall behind when they didnât practice enough. This, shamefully, was a great morale booster.
"Social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture" and more from Katherine Dee.
The Marginal Revolution Podcast on Crime in the 1970s. They were somewhat pessimistic as the episode ended, but it made me much more optimistic about Americaâs future. The resilience of our society is really underrated.
AR binoculars that automatically identify birds anywhere in the world. Stupid great product idea.
Observations
Product market fit provides gravity for a business. Before you have it, moving in almost any direction might be a good idea. But after you have it, youâre either going to double down on whatâs possible or expand into the adjacent possible. All the moves are directly related to your current momentum.
âFor an increasing proportion of software itâs more helpful to think of it as content rather than softwareâ â Daniel Kuntz
âThe difference is that I just get to be really stubborn about making things as good as we all know they can be.... But the real big thing is: if youâre going to make something, it doesnât take any more energy â and rarely does it take more money â to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time. Not that much more. And a willingness to do so, a willingness to perservere until itâs really great.â - Steve Jobs
Sometimes caution is the riskier choice.
Politics is made up of both style and substance. I remember Tom Holland of the Rest Is History saying that Roman political parties didnât break down on policy lines the way that ours do but on style: a conservative style vs a progressive style.
