trust the universe

homies!

its been a while since I last felt inspired to write.

its 7am in the morning. I've been up all night coz I couldn't sleep, so I distracted myself with jamming code as always, and reading the tao te ching. something is calming about being peacefully distracted in the cosmos. don't you think?

what if I told you —

recently, out of pure serendipity, I got the opportunity to build something for chakra labs. so here I was breaking my head and solving this problem for over 3 days. [I was trying to write a db loader for langchain to import data from chakra datasets to a duckdb instance to use natural language to talk to the db. hit my dms on twitter if you’re interested in implementing this on a db of your choice].

it was trial and error, and trial and error, a constant struggle. and then last night when I was almost asleep — the solution came to me. and I just had to stay up and implement it.

this reminded me of one of ol’ homie Hank’s quotes —

sometimes you just need to trust that the solution will come to you. this doesn’t mean you don’t try. you try, and you trust that you’ll solve that problem or catch that bug (pun intended).

shoutout to Frans for inspiring zen/acc. this might just turn into a movement.

1 zen story

this is about a hyper-ambitious student who seeks an excellent zen master who takes limited students.

student: master, how long will it take me to become your student?
master: 10 years
student: what if I work twice as hard, work day and night, travel the world, and do whatever it takes? how long will it take me then?
master: 20 years
student: ??? but master I’m working day and night and willing to do everything.
master: if you have one eye on the destination and one eye on the present moment, it will take you twice as long to do the work with one eye.

1 forgiveness experiment

… but 10K the newletter’s supposed to be 3 ideas. I know. fuck the rules. I’ll give you one more coz life is short.

try this.

pull out a piece of paper and write a forgiveness letter.

forgive yourself. forgive your mom. forgive your dad. forgive everyone. lay everything out on the paper until you’re satisfied. and then tear it up into tiny pieces. or if you have that pyromaniac in you, burn it (without burning down the house).

remember — you choose your thoughts or your thoughts choose you. thoughts are like pokemon. you get to choose gengar or pikachu. choose wisely.

1 fermi problem

what’s the financial runway you need just to try things — build a business or a podcast or any other way that keeps on going?

I’m assuming it takes at least a decade for an earning to become self-fulfilling.
let’s assume, if you figure it out for the first 5 years you will figure out how to fund the rest later. things change. opportunities arrive. yadda yadda.

the easiest way to do this is to reduce your burn rate.
let’s assume a healthy burn rate of $2000 per month in the west (probably a lot lower if you’re willing to move).
$2000 × 12 months x 5 years = $120 000.
on an engineers pay, it’s about 3 years of savings if you’re frugal in your early years, and about 5 years otherwise. are you willing to pay your future self 5 years of runway by being frugal 5 years as a young engineer?

that’s a bet I’d make any day.

keep being weird and trust the universe.

1 extra thing

these letters serve as a collection of lessons I want to carry with me as I do life.

if you found value in this letter, be sure to send it to a friend who might find it useful or tweet it.