One of the perks of my job running a knowledge platform is that I get to spend a lot of my time reading, which happens to be my favorite thing to do, and get paid for it. It is a privileged position.
Of course, being an operator-writer means you still need to build and run an operation, which is not easy. The challenges are there. However, it also puts me in a vantage point where I can see both worlds with context and clarity.
As such, I consume a ton of reading materials every week. I thought, how about I put down some of my takeaways from these readings in writing every week. This post is the outcome of that thought. Indeed, thought precedes action.
This week's takeaways are based on some of my favorite recent online readings on the loosely connected theme of solving difficult problems.
Let’s go.
Being able to articulate what you want in business and in life is exceedingly effective for achieving your goals. One of my favorite blog posts is this piece: Becoming a magician. The author writes about a kind goal-setting exercise where she put down the kind of life she wants in writing and, after a while, found out that almost everything she imagined in that exercise came true.
This is a common discussion topic in certain circles on the internet. Tim Ferriss talks about a similar exercise, something he says he borrowed from designer and writer Debbie Millman, called ten-year planning.
The exercise roughly goes like this. You sit down with a piece of paper and write down what you want your life to look like in ten years. Once done, you put the plan down somewhere and observe your imagination to manifest slowly.
I still have to read more on this to get a sense of what it is all about, but the common theory in the circle is that if you can imagine it, it will happen sooner or later, likely within your timeline.
The problem is that often it is hard to be articulate about what we want in life. It is even more so if it is five or ten years down the line.
We usually operate from a vague sense of what we want.
In this article, the author partly wants to say that part of the reason we fail to achieve what we want in life is that we actually don’t know in meaningful detail what we want.
If we can have a clear picture of our dreams and wants, we should be able to pursue them meaningfully and achieve them as a result.
To that end, the most useful section of the article comes at the end for me.
The author writes:
“So, in short, a helpful strategy for becoming a magician: Surround yourself with people who look like magicians to you.”
I can completely relate to this sentiment. This is not only about the fact that we eventually become like the people we spend time with. In this context, it is also about exposure.
Spending time with people who are currently living the life you want to live or doing the thing you want to do is an extremely effective way to give yourself exposure to imagine your own life. You finally can see what you have always been thinking about.
The author puts it beautifully in the next sentence:
“Then imagine yourself as one, older and wiser, in great detail. Imagine yourself as the person you would be afraid to say you want to be out loud to others (because it seems so ridiculously impossible right now). Write it down in great clarity and detail, then forget it. And let the part of your subconscious mind that still remembers lead you to becoming the things you want, and maybe, years later, check if it did.”
Once you have seen something, you can use it to imagine a better version or a different version of it. And if you can imagine it, the chances are you can make it happen as well.
You can achieve almost any difficult goal if you learn to apply sustained effort. And part of that is learning to be patient with discomfort and failures.
One of the perks and pains of entrepreneurship is that you are constantly dealing with ill-structured problems with no easy solution. On top of it, many of these problems don’t go away easily. They take a long time and a lot of sustained effort to solve.
To that end, learning to apply sustained effort when facing a complex challenge is a highly useful founder and operator skill.
In this old and wonderful article Why Can’t You Just Deal with It?, Joshua Rothman provides a useful approach for tackling pesky problems. He writes:
“Recently, like a typical forty-five-year-old man, I was in the gym, trying to best my personal record in the deadlift. Matt, a trainer I see every few weeks, had suggested that I put far more weight on the bar than usual, and when I tried to move it, it didn’t even budge. “Just keep working,” he said. “Use sustained effort. Keep going and it will lift.” I braced myself, gripped the bar, and pushed against the ground with my legs for two seconds, then three, then four, without result—until suddenly, as if by magic, the bar came off the ground, and the lift was complete. Ever since, I’ve thought of sustained effort as a particular way of dealing with a problem. I don’t know what was happening while I was trying to lift the bar but couldn’t; perhaps it took time to get through what’s sometimes called the “sticking point” of the lift, the position at which it’s most difficult. Many problems require long periods of sustained and seemingly fruitless effort. A painter may have to waste a lot of canvas before she starts making the paintings she wants; similarly, someone may have to hold a lot of repetitive conversations with medical specialists before he learns what he needs to know. Maybe, when we say that we’re not dealing with it, what we really mean is that we’re not used to failing for so long. Actually, we are dealing with it—but slowly.”
My central takeaway from the article, as I noted above, is that solving any problem requires sustained effort. If you can somehow master the skill of putting in sustained effort, you can almost always overcome most challenges.
But how do you develop the temperament and character required to become someone who puts sustained effort into every problem?
One skill I have found very useful in this regard is patience. This comes from lived experience. I have been trying to teach reading to my two-year-old. The first challenge I hit on my way is that she is hard to sit down with for a sustained period of time. Like almost all two-year-olds, she is always doing something. It is hard to make her sit down for a prolonged period of time. Some days, after some effort, I manage to find a small window where she kind of agrees to pay attention to what I have to say, and then the next minute she finds something more interesting and goes after it.
Most days, my usual response is giving up. After many such tries, one day I somehow stayed with her through multiple such failed attempts, and I managed to sit down with her for a meaningful length of time to give her at least some lessons. That event remained with me for a few days after that. I kept going back to it and realized that most of the time, if we stay with a problem for long enough, we can figure out a solution. The challenge is the stamina of patience that is required to do so.
In my mind, Rothman offers an interesting insight into developing the skill of sustained effort, which I feel somewhat validates my ideas as well. He writes:
“Dealing with difficult things requires getting to know them. It can be hard to really wrap yourself around a quirky and recalcitrant problem; it’s a little like hugging in winter, when people wear big coats and seem to have a lot in their pockets. You often have to contort yourself into an awkward embrace. And embracing something briefly won’t help you really deal with it; you have to stay there, settling in. You need nuance, persistence, flexibility, firmness, attention to detail—almost a love of the problem. You’ll have to become old friends before you can say goodbye.”
This is a beautiful way to look at it. The next time you struggle with a pesky challenge of business building, see if you can master the art of sustained effort.
At the end of the day, everything is about talent. Everyone is talking about the Chinese breakout AI company Moonshot after the launch of its K3 model. I briefly tested Kimi recently, and it felt very good. I'm a regular Claude user. FT published a fascinating profile on the founder, Yang Zhilin. The part that stood out for me is FT's take on what helped Zhilin to attract and retain top AI talent in a hyper-competitive AI talent market.
At the end of the day, solving hard problems and building ambitious organizations are all about attracting top talent. If you can attract and retain talent, the rest usually takes care of itself.
The following paragraph from the profile is quite instructive.
"Wang Tiezhen, an independent consultant and engineer, said Yang’s status as a “leading AI researcher” has enabled him to “build a team of talented engineers all working towards the same goal”. Before founding Moonshot, he was known for research extending models’ context windows, allowing chatbots to retain more information over long conversations.
China’s AI race has been a battle for talent, with deep-pocketed tech groups aggressively poaching from smaller start-ups.
Throughout this, Yang has kept one of China’s strongest research teams together. Many of Moonshot’s founding researchers studied alongside him either at Tsinghua University, where he graduated top of his computer science class, or at Carnegie Mellon University, where he completed his PhD. During his CMU years, Yang had stints at Google Brain and Meta.
That cohesion has distinguished Moonshot from Chinese AI groups including Alibaba and Baidu, which have seen prominent researchers depart amid disagreements over balancing frontier research with commercial demands.
Moonshot’s decision to pivot to open source reinforced that advantage. Researchers are attracted by the opportunity to publish papers and receive individual recognition. “Researchers want to be remembered for breakthroughs,” Wang said. “Open source gives them that.”
