Less Rigorous Thinking

Hello, 

I have been trying something new this week. In an effort to change up the flow of information into my head, I have been reading more blogs and less books. 

So far, I haven’t decided if I like the change, but I want to talk about why I made the decision. 

When a book is published, especially by a publisher, there are hours, days, months, and years that go into identifying the topic, refining the content, polishing the results, and then ultimately getting it out to the public. 

This doesn’t automatically mean that the content will be good or the book will be fantastic, but it does have a certain level of refinement to it. 

Blogs, however, can be something someone thought of and an hour later it is published on the internet for all to discover. 

So, why read more blogs? 

I am looking for content that I can more easily attach my own thinking and experience to. Obviously, books still have missing context or plotholes… it is just way more common in a blog post. 

The same thing is true for my weekly newsletters, I will occasionally get an email about different angles I didn’t consider or how what I said this week directly applies to what a reader is going through this week. 

The agility is both a bug and a feature for blogs. 

Let’s quickly go over what I read this week, what I thought, and move on our ways: 

1. The Only Part You Can’t Bootstrap

This article makes an argument for vibe coding. Specifically, it makes the argument that just because a piece of the process is faster than it used to be (the coding part), the part of the process that was always the most important is having a deep understanding of the problem that you are trying to solve. It is an argument that time in the market always prevails. 

2. Founder of Instagram of Cutting your way to the idea… 

This is essentially a three step process for how to build. They talk about how they incorrectly started at the solution they wanted to build and worked backwards, where you should start with the problem and work forward. The piece I would add here actually comes from the first article. You don’t just start at the problem, you start at problem understanding. When you understand the forces that create the problem, you can start to simulate different potential consequences of the problem and then work forward with those contexts in mind. This is a reason why multiple time founders are able to progress through the startup process quicker… They know how to find the understanding they need in order to move forward. 

3. The world rewards action, not perfect plans.
   

This article touches on the experience of anyone who has ventured into an unknown domain. How do you plan for something when you don’t know what will happen? Or what it takes to be successful? The answer in this article is experimentation. Define an assumption, test it with a MVP, identify your metrics, give it time, and make a change. The best a perfect plan can give you when you are operating in ambiguity is the confidence to start. The worst it can offer is you wait too long to start in hopes that it will come along. Find something you can do today, define criteria around what you want to learn, and start.

That’s the game. 

Conclusion: 

Blogs are nice because they are usually quick hits of information. They can inspire thoughts because of what they get right, they can inspire thoughts because of what they get wrong. In many ways they offer what the last blog article talks about: quick feedback loops. 

My goal for the next couple weeks is to curate lists like this and see if what I come up with is valuable and if I like writing like this. 

Hope you enjoy!

Kyle