Introduction
To Me
The life philosophy I try to live by can be compressed to these quotes:
“[Do] whatever seems to you excitingly ambitious.” - Paul Graham
“If you do everything, you’ll win” - Lyndon Johnson
“Live in the future, then build what’s missing.” - Paul Graham
For me, the last quote is incredibly meaningful even outside of its context. Think of all the ways the world could be better in an ideal future — lower pollution, better education, warmer international relations — and move towards that future. As a person, build the future where you’re the healthiest, happiest, most fulfilled version of yourself.
See this for a more in-depth bio.
To This Blog
My goal for this blog from March 2024 onwards is to write blog posts that would’ve made me jump off my chair if I had read them six months ago. There won’t be a consistent schedule because I only want to post when I have that.
I’m working through a serious backlog of posts that I love and want to push into the world, but I can only dedicate about 3 hours on average to blogging every week (and most of these posts take forever). To sample some of those ideas in advance, see Soon Blog Posts.
The different tabs on the home page:
Garden: These are selected files from my notes that I’ve chosen to publish.
Long: These are (generally) longer and refined essays that are meant to craft a compelling argument or serve as an in-depth analysis of a subject. For these, I’ll do my best to hone my writing craft using some of the principles in Julian Shapiro’s wonderful handbook.
Books: Notes and summaries for some of the best books I’ve read. Some of them will be just a collection of notes while others will be more polished.
Context Dump: A brief autobiography and some notes on what my average days look like. This won’t be useful to most people, but it’s something I wish more personal websites had, so I thought it would be hypocritical not to put it on my own.
Information Diet: To a large extent, my ideas and mental models of the world are some amalgamation of these people. Everything else comes from my family and some of my closest friends (thank you A, E, J, and L for conversations that have completely changed the trajectory of my life).
I won’t be tagging anything written before January 2024. I originally started blogging to become a better writer and thought that the number of views I had was a good signal for my writing ability (and a good dopamine hit). Not so surprisingly, I began to optimize all of my posts around views at the expense of writing things that interested me. I’m not particularly proud of most of those posts, but you can see them in the archive if you’d like to read them. Those posts have been migrated from Medium, so there may be some weird formatting errors that I’ve missed.
More About Me
Find Me
first name + last name + 07@gmail.com
@vhaangogh on Discord
