What I Read This Week - 5.5.24
Weekly finds from across the internet.
Hey everyone,
Happy Cinco de Mayo Sunday! Hope you are able to enjoy today’s newsletter with your favorite Mexican beverage of choice this afternoon. It’s been a busy week out on the road for some AAA baseball in Albuquerque, so in the spirit of time let’s jump right into it.
In this edition of Weekly Reads:
What Michael Penix’s letter to NFL GMs tells us about a key but often dismissed athletic trait
How crypto helps put a price on ‘attention’
Why writers are like DJs when it comes to ideas
And more! As always, hope you enjoy - and please feel free to share any feedback in the comments below.
- CG
P.S. - As a reminder, you can find the master database of Weekly Read resources here.
Sports/High Performance
A Letter to NFL GMs - Michael Penix (~5 min)
If you can spare 5 minutes of your day after reading this newsletter, I would highly suggest you invest that time into reading this piece to GMs in advance of the NFL draft from Michael Penix Jr. (former Washington QB; 8th overall pick by the Falcons). If you are a sports fan, this will be one of the best things you see today.
While you should read it for yourself, there were a couple things that stuck out to me. First and foremost, I think The Player’s Tribune is one of the most powerful platforms in media. Why? Because it gives a voice to the currency of sport - the players. It’s one thing to read stories told by reporters watching from the sidelines, and something else entirely to hear them from the perspectives of the athletes living in the arena. There is a piercing level of authenticity that comes from hearing the best in the world share their stories in long form format - one I don’t think can be captured in any other way.
And secondly, specific to this piece from Penix, there is a key trait that jumps off the page to me, one I’ve seen in the best athletes I’ve been fortunate to interact with: confidence. The best seem to have an unwavering belief in the fact that they belong, an inner conviction that no matter what they face they can rise to meet the challenge.
I’ve come to view confidence as essential to high performance, because the expectations at the highest levels of sport are intensely demanding. They come from everywhere - both from those outside the building (fans, media) and those within it (coaches, front offices, the athletes themselves). It takes a certain level of self-belief to acknowledge the bar and rise to meet it. Without it, it becomes far too easy to succumb to the pressures each sport presents. So much so that in baseball we often joke that there is a necessary sixth tool for big leaguers: delusion.
If you’ve followed Penix throughout his NCAA career, you’ll have noticed the conviction he has in himself. From his perspective, it is what has allowed him to overcome trials throughout his life to ascend to the pantheon of his sport. From a gritty upbringing to 4 season ending injuries, he was presented with many opportunities to fold - but never did. Instead, he used each challenge to make himself stronger, writing:
Truth is, I’d be more worried if I had never been injured. We don’t all come back the same. I can’t speak for those that have never gone through anything. But I can speak on me. I’ve seen how deep my foundation is. I know the storms I’m prepared to weather. For most people that’d be the end of their story. But there’s more to my story, and I own every page of it.
So while there’s much we can take from his story, I think the most important is exactly what he closes the piece with: MRIs, X-Rays, film, and statistics all matter. But more often than not it is an EKG that will tell us everything we need to know about a player.
Health/Fitness
With Exercise, Results Matter More than ‘Time Served’ - Peter Attia (~3 min)
A short but impactful piece from Peter Attia that addresses a familiar question: how much time do we need to spend exercising?
Attia’s response is simple: however long it takes to get the thing we care about - results. I think this is especially helpful to keep in mind given the proliferation of fitness protocols on platforms such as X, many of which suggest an ‘exact’ number of reps or amount of time for a given exercise. While helpful as a starting point, we should be wary of anchoring specifically to any recommendations we find.
Instead, as Attia writes, we should be much more focused on assessing whether or not progress is being made:
If the goal for exercise is to improve health and extend lifespan, then the metrics that matter are those most closely related to health and lifespan – i.e., VO2 max and muscle strength. Exercise duration is another step removed from that aim and is only one of the various “inputs”.
So while the inputs are certainly helpful, don’t lose the forrest for the trees. Measure what matters - the outputs that come as a result. Only then can we adjust the inputs accordingly.
Storytelling
The Best Way to Grow on Social Media - Dan Koe (~11 min)
I read through Dan’s newsletter weekly and find his takes on entrepreneurship to be particularly insightful. And while social media growth is distinctly not the purposes of this newsletter, there was a specific analogy in this piece I found to be particularly intriguing: writers as DJs for ideas. As Dan writes:
Writers are DJs with ideas. DJs take songs and sounds from multiple sources to create something new. Writers take ideas from multiple sources and string them together into something of their own.
It reminded me of a principle I’ve noticed in regards to creativity and communication: there are very few new ideas, but many new ways of presenting old ones. I find this to be a helpful framework through which to think about creating new things, as too often we put up barriers in our mind by believing we need to produce something entirely new.
I think our experiences in the education system are partly to blame for this fallacy in logic. From the second we step into our first English classes in grade school, we are beaten over the heads with the importance of avoiding a dangerous villain: plagiarism. Certainly, copying the works of others verbatim and without attribution is bad form. But I don’t think we get taught an important analogous truth: that the essence of creation is humans building - and expanding - upon the work of others before them. As Sir Isaac Newton said in a 1675 article to his fellow scientist Robert Hooke, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
I find Dan’s analogy to be a helpful antidote to the creative roadblock from above. As writers and creators, we should think of ourselves as DJs looking to create our own ‘sound’. We do so by taking what we find from others and articulating them through our own worldviews, allowing old ideas to be shaped by our own experiences. In the process, we can reduce the activation energy needed for us to do the most important thing when it comes to creating: getting started.
The Future (AI, Tech, etc.)
What Multicoin is Excited About in 2024 - Multicoin Capital (~12 min)
I find Multicoin Capital to be one of the more fascinating stories in the crypto space. Co-founded by Kyle Samani and Tushar Jain, Multicoin has had a remarkable journey of highs and lows. The firm rose to prominence on the back of early investments in technologies such as FTX and Solana, but was then crushed in the aftermath of the FTX blowup as Solana bottomed from highs of $260 all the way down to $8 in December of ‘22. They have since regained standing as their investments have recovered, serving as a great example in the space for both foresight and conviction.
In this piece, various members of the firm share the trends they are excited to follow into 2024 and beyond. And while I found the entire article to be insightful, there was a specific item that stuck out - what they call The Attention Theory of Value.
The crux of the argument is this: while traditional exchanges have established trading for ‘easy to price’ assets such as stocks and commodities, crypto enables price discovery for ‘hard to price’ assets that are oriented around attention. We’ve seen this in the past with markets centered around things such as sneakers and collectibles, but as Multicoin writes, crypto is serving as an amplifying force for such assets as a function of two key traits:
Permissionlessness: Anyone can issue an asset of any kind
Composability: Anyone can trade those assets on any venue
These are the mechanisms that underly the chaos you’ve no doubt witnessed with things such as meme coins and NFTs. The price discovery of these ‘hard to price assets’ is a function of the underlying technology itself. Markets like these have never before existed, and the result is a natural exploration phase that leads to the headline-making booms and busts.
The Attention Theory of Value hits at something I’ve long felt about crypto: it is as much as study of psychology as it is a study of technology and finance. Crypto enables a new speed through which assets can both be created and traded, and as a result we get to watch in real time how markets for previously un-priceable assets move. And while there is a great deal of noise created as a result, I think there are some fascinating things to be learned about how humans perceive the world and the value within it - if only we care enough to pay attention.
What Can Language Models Actually Do? - Dan Shipper (~9 min)
I’ve talked a lot here in past editions about how AI will shape our future as a species. Yet while this higher level discussion is important to get us thinking about the future implications of the technology, we are likely to miss the mark if we don’t first understand exactly what Large Language Models (LLMs) are, and therefore what they are capable - and not capable - of.
Dan from Every provides a great perspective here in a new series on how language models transform text in four unique ways: compression, expansion, translation, and remixing.
Starting with the idea of compression in this first piece, he highlights this as one of the primary roles of LLMs: taking large bodies of text and compressing them into useful formats. Where humans tend to struggle dealing with large amounts of information, LLMs are the exact opposite. What is our kryptonite happens to be their superpower. They are incredibly good at working from big to small, such that the more information with which they have to work the better they are. In more colloquial terms, they are exceptional at starting with a haystack and finding the needle.
Dan argues that this is a primary vector upon which LLMs and AI tools can be useful for humans. This is because when we think about human knowledge work specifically, we find that much of it is an experimentation in the art of compression. As he writes:
Once you start to look at things this way, you’ll see compression everywhere. Emails are often compressions of what people said in meetings. Poems are compressions of sensory experiences. Good decisions are compressions of the results of previous decisions. Basic programming is compressions of Stack Overflow answers.
By viewing LLMs as compressors, we can thus see a significant area of human function in which they can be useful for creative work.
The overarching theme is this: the more we understand the specific capabilities of AI tools, the more appropriately we can apply them to suit our needs and augment our productivity.
Personal Growth
101 Additional Advices - Kevin Kelly (9 min)
I found this to be a quality list of principles from Kevin Kelly, the well-respected technologist and founding executive editor of Wired magazine.
In general, I believe the best philosophy for dealing with advice is to borrow what you yourself find useful and discard the rest - especially in contexts like these where the advice giver has no knowledge of your specific life and experiences. As such, I’d highly suggest you read through this list yourself and pick out what resonates most deeply to you.
But in the meantime, these are the top 10 ideas from Kevin’s list that stuck out to me:
The best way to criticize something is to make it better.
Never hesitate to invest in yourself—to pay for a class, a course, a new skill. These modest expenditures pay outsized dividends.
You can become the world’s best in something primarily by caring more about it than anyone else.
Asking “what-if?” about your past is a waste of time; asking “what-if?” about your future is tremendously productive.
Every now and then throw a memorable party. The price will be steep, but long afterwards you will remember the party, whereas you won’t remember how much is in your checking account.
The surest way to be successful is to invent your own definition of success. Shoot your arrows first and then paint a bull’s eye around where they land. You’re the winner!
Don’t fear failure. Fear average.
For steady satisfaction, work on improving your worst days, rather than your best days.
You can not truly become yourself, by yourself. Becoming one-of-a-kind is not a solo job. Paradoxically you need everyone else in the world to help make you unique.
If you are more fortunate than others, build a longer table rather than a taller fence.