Dennis's Serendipity Digest - overcome learned helplessness

Hey,

I meant to write from Venice, but didn’t find the time. Instead I now write to you from my home office in Berlin at around 32 degrees Celsius, with Bach “Französische Suiten” chiming on my Sonos speaker, the Elgato key light shining at my face and my fingers typing into my 2023 MacBook Air.

Enjoy.

Photo of the Week

Two ideas

1. “Learned helplessness” is an idea I learned from a 2005 presentation by Jeff Bezos at the Stanford Graduate School of business. I am fascinated by innovation and how we changed things, this presentation gives a lot of cool examples to learn from. And whenever I come across something like this, that hints at how to contribute to that, I prick up my ears.
   
   Whenever we encounter a problem for long enough, we tend to adapt to it and see right through it. So we don’t notice any problem. And that’s what learned helplessness is all about.
   
   For inventors, they get annoyed by ordinary things that bother them. If you ask me, the first thing that comes to mind are customer service interactions with Lufthansa. But let’s look at a fun historic example that Jeff shares.
   
   The invention of the windshield wiper by Mary Anderson around 1913: Before car drivers would stop every mile or so when it rained. They would get out of the car, clean the window, get back in and continue driving for another mile until they stopped again to repeat the same process. Mary thought this was stupid and invented the windshield wiper. At the time she got criticized , because people thought that having a windshield wiper go back and forth in front of the driver is dangerous. Fortunately she persisted and within 10 years almost all cars had windshield wipers.
   
   Noticing details is a skill not just useful for writing but also for invention.

2. Prof Galloway: "Young people talk about wanting balance. Well then you don't want to be rich. You can have it all. You just can't have it all at once." sounds about right. For me it’s time to grind, it’s time to have some fun while grinding and it’s time to build.

Three cool links

1. “Schlep blindness” essay by Paul Graham from 2012 adds to the “learned helplessness” idea from Jeff Bezos. Key takeaway to identify interesting problems: Instead of asking "What problem should I solve" ask "what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?"

2. “The Real Story Behind Apple's 'Think Different' Campaign” written by advertising legend Rob Siltanen who flies to Cupertino to meet Steve Jobs in 1997, expecting to get the business handed over to him. But things went different once he meets Steve Jobs. Intense story about how to win business and how creative things come together.

3. “Eureka Labs” a new company started by Andrej Karpathy, the guy who built up the Tesla AI team and is one of my favourite AI educators.
   “We are Eureka Labs and we are building a new kind of school that is AI native.” The first course they work on is LLM101n (more details in the link above). Boy I am excited to take that course once it comes out.

Personal note

If you’ve got any thoughts, questions, or feedback, please drop me a line - I would love to chat.

Catch you next Sunday!

Best,
Dennis