Visakan Veerasamy
Singaporean writer and author of FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD; blogs at visakanv.com about ambition, writing and thinking in public.
Visakan Veerasamy did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Our reading
People often do too much out of an anxiety to do something, which makes it harder to do anything.
Their wordswe're often so anxious to Do Something that we Do Too Much, which then makes it harder for us to Do Anything, which makes us anxious...
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Their wordstrying to reduce reliance on a cope (cigarettes, screentime, etc) is very difficult. it gets much easier if you define an outcome that you'd like to inhabit, and focus on that.
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Their wordsit's very rare that you actually need to have a focus on reducing X in order to increase Y. i'd go so far as to say that people often overfixate on reducing X *at the expense of increasing Y*.
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Their wordsif you're starting a youtube channel or a blog or something, i believe you shouldn't put toooo much effort into your first post, because it'll rarely do as "well" as you might hope.
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Our reading
The problem with most people is not what they are doing wrong, but what they are not doing right.
Their wordsimho, generally speaking, the problem with most people isn't what they're doing wrong, but what they're not doing right
- 3 months earlier
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Their wordsit does seem that people who've never experienced any sort of real shock in their own lives, simply can't conceive of real shocks, no matter how much they read about it.
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Their wordsppl often assume order is stable, robust reductively, a lot of civilization is like this big factory floor, designed literally during the mechanical/industrial age. it provided great wonders like plumbing and sanitation and transportation and antibiotics etc, lots of great wonderful things about it, huge fun of those, but the big tradeoff is that many people get psychologically and emotionally mutilated to interface better with that factory.
- 11 months earlier
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Their wordsthe best you can do via text- even via hundreds of pages- is capture snapshots of intuition in action. but snapshots of intuition are no substitute for intuition!
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Their wordsyou can read a million words on a topic, study, analyze, etc, but it's no substitute for experience in the field, where someone with intuition can see where you're going and simply step right into the blindspot in your OODA loop and cut you off
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Their words"How to be appropriately self-critical" is another eg of a domain where even the best instruction will always be insufficient, BY DEFINITION.
- 4 weeks earlier
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Our reading
Their wordsThe thing I'm always trying to get people to see is that not all views or viewers are equal.
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Their words1 follow or view from the right person is worth 10,000 casual randos, maybe 100k.
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Their wordsalso, the flattening of metrics and the lurid quality of metric-gamers means that many people are inclined to assume that any person looking to "grow an audience" etc is metric-gaming.
- 6 days earlier
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Their wordsGreat ideas look like bad ideas, or are otherwise incomprehensible in the existing paradigm.
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Their wordsBig limiting factor that keeps people from having great ideas is the fear of looking stupid, incompetent, incomprehensible, insane, etc.
- 3 months earlier
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Their wordsvery often, the problem with advice is that all advice is constrained by the utterances in the advice.
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Their wordsI highly recommend that in your 20s, you try to keep your expenses as low as possible, because the freedom you get in your late 20s, maybe being able to take a year off to do whatever you like, that's really precious to me.
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Their wordsWhat I didn't realize was that if you go somewhere substantially different from where you are, you get to experience a different reality and that will make you question your own origins.
- 3 weeks earlier
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Our reading
The level of achievement in any endeavor is a reflection of how well one was able to focus on it.
Their wordsThe level of achievement that we have at anything is a reflection of how well we were able to focus on it.
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Our reading
Their wordsthe strong version is that public figures *create* publics, they *are* publics.
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Their wordsso be thoughtful about what you choose to notice, where you choose to direct your attention, and you can become a stronghold of joy.