shazow
@shazow.eth
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3532 Followers
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my career path (qc with yours):
1) self-employed dev, making websites for schools and profs
2) relief superintendent in my 30-floor condo building (glorified janitor)
3) lead on tineye.com (first real job after graduating, one of the largest AWS customers at the time, launched the initial product, eventually led a migration to an inhouse racks before leaving reducing costs by x10)
4) brief 23andme tenure (paid for my relocation to silicon valley)
5) founded imoveyou (YC S2010)
6) founded socialgrapple (acquihired by Google to work on Google+ Analytics)
7) founded briefmetrics (my SaaS era, google analytics in your email inbox every monday)
8) independent contractor, worked with many early stage startups (worked with docker, pinterest, keybase, infura, lots of big names when they were still tiny)
9) independent open source developer (maintaining lots of popular projects, like urllib3, ssh-chat, etc while also building ethereum infrastructure like vipnode, whatsabi, etc) 0 reply
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In a world where everything is easier and cheaper to do, the most valuable scarce resource is activation energy.
Activation energy is the catalyst that makes something go from 0 to 1. It's the difference between writing the day off doom scrolling, and getting up to make something or change something.
It comes in many forms. It can be amplified, but it can also be suppressed. Burnout is a loss of activation energy. Demoralizing criticism can dampen some people, while a supportive community can help foster it. Powerful tools amplify activation energy, we can do much more with very little.
We can think of agentic AI as leveraging our activation energy as a vast amplification tool.
This is one of the lenses I rely on the most: What can I do to increase my activation energy? How do I avoid losing it? What tools will help me amplify it?
Not just for myself, but for others too: Can I help increase other peoples' activation energy? I don't want to live in a world where people only talk about doing things, I want them to do things, succeed, and achieve feedback loops towards even more activation energy.
I've been sharing similar advice for a long time, but only recently realized it that was related to activation energy: "When in doubt, do things you are most motivated to do."
If choosing a specific programming language is motivating for you (maybe because it's new or cool), do that! Motivation is a form of activation energy that is precious and we must cultivate it where we can. By accumulating spare motivation, we can spend it on things we have to do but would rather not without succumbing to burnout too soon.
There are other forms, too: Capital (funding teams of people who are conditioned to do the activation), personal discipline and a clear vision (an immunity against burnout?), what else? There's lots of nuanced difference between these that I want to think through some more. 3 replies
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