Nothing Left to Say

Since childhood I had a feeling that there is nothing left for me to invent. After learning about Newton's laws, models of atoms and more physics, I often used to ask myself — how do I invent something new? Everything seems to be already invented. Some of my friends shared the same thought. It was very frustrating to comprehend and accept that I'm not able to come up with any original and new ideas or inventions of my own.

I feel the same when I want to write about something, at core I believe it's about ideas and not inventions anymore.

False Beginnings

In high school I wanted to have a blog that would provide me with some side income. It was just around when I found out about the deep web, and was jumping around out of excitement. I read dozens of articles on how to launch a blog for side income and wrote my first post on accessing the deep web. Content-wise it was good but it didn't go anywhere, lack of motivation and vision.

Few years later during my bachelor's, I wanted to write something and get noticed in the tech community, I really liked the idea to leverage that to get exposure. I had then, recently started dipping my toes into Linux and was deep into rabbit holes, so I wrote about my dilemma on what I should spend my time on. I just checked and it doesn't exist anymore on Hashnode. Lol, what better argument for having your own site. Fortunately, the Wayback Machine saves the day — you can still find it here.

Both times I tried to write, I wasn't able to sustain it. Probably because I didn't believe I had anything worth saying that someone else hadn't already said better.

Feeling Like A Fraud

I'm a perfectionist. That hurts when you want to just start something or sustain it.

I never believed I could do something creative. It didn't feel natural. It doesn't come naturally to me, that's what I used to tell myself. When people say they do art or write books, I couldn't comprehend it — how the fuck do you do something out of nothing that's original or even close? I have a moral roadblock stopping me from just restating work that already exists.

As time passed I started consuming more and more content. Curiosity drives me crazy. I realized that for every paid resource there's a better free resource, and lots of them. Take for example, Onur Mutlu's Lectures or Science of Well Being, best in class!! I can't convince myself to write about something without feeling like I'm scamming people. Best I thought I could do was to share my self-learning curriculums — roadmaps for learning subjects that fancy me; I organize them after reviewing an exhaustive amount of resources. I'm extremely thorough.

Maybe those would be interesting to people exploring the same topics, but writing anything else felt like fraud, how unique my ideas could be??

It's very hard to believe I wrote this much while saying that. Magic is in doing without thinking much.

A Few Nudges

It was during covid that I learned about the idea of creating luck for yourself while reading Naval Ravikant. All I knew it meant was cold emailing. I later wrote a few personal essays to friends but couldn't connect writing to anything larger.

A few months back I was figuring out what skills I want to invest in for high leverage in the long term. Writing surfaced to the top, it was already helping me think clearly. And I believe it's important to articulate and present your thoughts in a clear and concise way. In the back of my mind I always wanted to learn it but never did. Now that I've renewed my personal site, I found a bit of motivation — now it aligns with my current mindset and vision.

Then I learned interesting things about randomness while reading The Black Swan. Increasing your exposure to the world is one way of creating more luck and a personal site is a neat way to achieve that. I often journal, write learnings from books or explore things that fancy me and record it in Obsidian, so I thought why not make it public?

I've been intrigued by the act of writing since I started journaling in October 2022. I was excited to learn how to write well but couldn't put it into practice. This felt like a good opportunity to start and see how it goes.

I didn't know what to start writing about, but I had a thought that I wanted to write something. And over days, slowly, ideas kept coming. They were exciting daydreams where I'd start thinking about an idea, how it fits into an article, how cool it could look.

Finally I decided to write multiple pieces but start by addressing the most pressing issue — the one that makes me hesitant to write anything at all: Would I ever be able to write something original? Something of value? Or would it just be a repeated dump of already existing information?

The Mix

I think I had it backwards. Creativity is not about having ideas out of thin air, although it feels like it. It's about having enough experience of doing something that now it's possible for you to make connections across your body of experience which others haven't been able to make yet, sometimes it's highly interdisciplinary that a layman would think it's out of the world, but maybe to people already in the field or domain that might not sound that magical after all.

I might be wrong about the feeling I had for physics or writing. Newton himself mentioned in one of his letters that "if I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." That's very humbling and I feel the same.

The only thing that can be mine is the perspective through which I see things and try to see the invisible picture by connecting dots. Many would have read Taleb, some would go on writing about its application in finance and trading. I connected it to why I should have a personal website.

In this piece alone I'm weaving together Newton's laws, Tor networks, Naval Ravikant, Nassim Taleb, and a childhood feeling about physics. Nobody else has this specific combination because nobody else has lived this specific sequence and that's what makes it fun, there is joy in realizing that having a unique perspective or view of the world is better and more fulfilling than having a best one.

I've always felt like I'm just a collection of books I've read and people I've heard. But the collection is different for everyone. Nobody else read the same things in the same order and lived the same life around it. The mix gives rise to the uniqueness I've been yearning for.

You can't think your way to originality. You write, and it reveals itself in what you chose to include, what you connected, what you emphasized. It happens in the act. Not before it.

Which means the ideas and examples I share might not be my own. I too stand on the shoulders of giants and it's a privilege to be able to see further than they did. I'll do my best to cite where things came from — if you ever find a gap, write to me. Credit shall never be due.

What I Am Hoping For

I have very clear goals: to develop clear thinking and persuasive writing, increase my exposure to the world, and create greater luck surface area for surprising opportunities in life. And I want to practice a skill I've been doubling down on — bias for action. Starting things when I feel I'm not ready yet and shipping when I believe it's not perfect yet is the only way I see to move forward. This serves as a catalog too. I want to look back in a year and see how my writing and ideas have evolved.

Hope something here is worth your while.

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I don't believe I'll ever write something like Elizabeth Filips' How Do I Deal With My Emotions. I feel it's either too personal or adds no value because people already know everything.

Biggest delusional roadblock someone can have who wants to write.

Grow up, Jay.