If you’re interested in programming, you may well have seen this quote before:
“Everyone in this country should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you to think.” — Steve Jobs
You probably also wondered what does it mean, exactly, to think like a programmer? And how do you do it??
Essentially, it’s all about a more effective way for problem solving.
In this post, my goal is to teach you that way.
By the end of it, you’ll know exactly what steps to take to be a better problem-solver.
Why is this important?
Problem solving is the meta-skill.
We all have problems…
I’ve read every Paul Graham essay (and summarized them in these 3 posts).
This is why I had a list of “all” the books he mentioned (or so I thought) and added it to Most Recommended Books. Surely people would love it!
And nowhere, I thought, would they love it more than in the house pg built, Hacker News.
Alas… As soon as I posted, reality hit me in the face.
Soon after releasing “Every book Elon Musk mentioned on Twitter,” I saw this request:
drig2510, this one’s for you.
It might be a year late, but it took me months to go through all of Naval’s 21,000+ tweets!
Fair warning: Naval has a reading habit that, as a professional wordsmith, I am required to describe as “voracious.”
… In other words, this list has 144 books!
So sit back, pack a lunch, and enjoy this trip down the reading list of one of the most interesting minds in Silicon Valley 🙂
Those of us who’ve followed Naval for a while, rejoice!
Yesterday, he appeared on Joe Rogan’s mega-popular show, the Joe Rogan Experience.
There were many great lessons, and other people have already summarized them.
So I won’t do that.
Instead, I’ll briefly talk about the part that stuck with me the most. Which was Naval’s argument against Universal Basic Income (UBI).
Why?
Do you know that feeling you get when your intuition tells you something is wrong, but you can’t clearly express why?
This is how I felt about UBI. I knew it sounded great and Andrew Yang is awesome…
This is part 2 of my history of Silicon Valley series. If you haven’t read part 1, you can find it here.
Begin Part 2
William Shockley and Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
After earning degrees in engineering from Caltech and MIT, the British inventor, William Shockley, and his two partners (John Bardeen and Walter Brattain) were working in New York at Bell Labs.
They were looking for an alternative to vacuum tubes for conducting electrons.
Can you guess what the alternative was? Silicon!
However, his partners made the discovery (which they named Transistor) while Shockley was out of the office… So they filed a patent immediately and didn’t include Shockley.
…
Interestingly, I’ve found most successful founders have a deep appetite for history:
- In the book “Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire”, biographers James Wallace and Kim Erickson said Gates would “consume a number of biographies — Franklin Roosevelt’s and Napoleon’s, among others — to understand, he said, how the great figures of history thought.”
- In her book “The Billionaire and the Mechanic”, Julian Guthrie writes “Larry [Ellison] was a voracious reader who spent a great deal of time studying science and technology, but his favorite subject was history. …
“Out of every one hundred men [on the battlefield], ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior…” — Heraclitus
Yes, both photos show the same person! His name is David Goggins.
On the left we see a younger David weighing roughly 300lbs. He grew up with severe allergies, sickle cell trait, and a congenital heart disease that left him with a hole (the size of a poker chip!) in his heart.
On top of…
When seriously studying Python, what do you build?
A twitter scraper of course!
Why?
I enjoy reading biographies. But I love autobiographies even more. Knowing how someone really thinks is fascinating.
But… what if they never wrote a book?
They probably tweet!
So, I dowloaded every tweet written by a few people I find interesting (Naval Ravikant, Dr Rhonda Patrick, Demis Hassabis, etc…)
Sidenote: Damn you Marc Andreessen for deleting all your tweets!!
One of these people was Elon.
What’s even cooler is I found every book he mentioned on Twitter.
So I gathered the full list and put it…
Hello dear,
This is it.
This is the final letter in Personal Finance Series! *gasp*
What a year… Right?
When we began, I told you that “if I do my job well, you’ll learn how to ‘live’ as an adult before the year is over.”
This is true. Anyone who’s read the series can answer these questions (and many more):
- What do I do with the money I earn?
- What are taxes and how do I pay them?
- How bad is my debt, really?
- How do I invest?
- 401 que?!
Hello dear,
Can you hear the trumpets of victory?? We made it!
You are currently reading the final letter in my “Make Money” series!
In fact, next week’s letter will be the final one in all of Personal Finance Series.
Whew… But let’s save that for later.
Today we’ll summarize everything we learned about making money.
Onward.
Why Make More Money?
It’s hard to write about making money without sounding like those annoying spam emails.
But I had to try.
Why? Because it’s an incredibly important topic.
I already talked about why making more money should be the focus of anyone who can’t save…
Richard Reis
"I write this not for the many, but for you; each of us is enough of an audience for the other." - Epicurus https://www.richardreis.me/
