Issue 11: 500 Days of Summer
Issue 11: 500 Days of Summer
the next Lex Friedman, problems to build a startup on, a WTF notebook
Hello people! Welcome to Issue #11 of the 10pm publication!
We are really excited to talk to you, so leave a comment if you find anything interesting or any topic that resonates with you!
This week, Ben is in HK traveling so this newsletter will be mostly based on my taste and curated content. Enjoy!
Life Updates
Continued building and shipping YT University.
I am engrossed in this idea and really think this can take off. Let’s see how it goes! Happy to share if anyone wants to give some early feedback.
Also did a lot of slides and prep work for my first tech talk next week with Snowflake! Both excited and nervous for this.
— Wei
Learnings from being in your 20s
A really good read to absorb some advice from people who had lived their 20s.
There is so much good advice there that I think a summary just doesn’t cut it.
You have to read this writing by
to understand.
Dwarkesh Patel - The Next Lex Friedman
I came across
on YouTube as it was on my Recommended page.After watching one of his podcasts, I must say I really appreciated the amount of study and prep work he put into each of his interviews.
He’s the definition of curiosity and perseverance.
Is Passion Getting Monetized
I picked my job from passion which then stemmed into a career path.
Reading this made me think about “How can we shrink the footprint of paid employment in our lives?”
How can we really make work only 1/3 of life and live the rest as what we want it to be?
The passion principle is a cultural schema that elevates self-expression and fulfillment as the central factor in good career decision-making.
It entails the prioritization of personally fulfilling work—sometimes even at the expense of job security or a decent salary.
Artist’s Depiction of Us from 1899
At a Crossroad in Life? Read this
This article dives into topics like these.
What to work on?
How to actually work on the problem you like?
Cold emails and Twitter
Where to find funding to work on any of these problems?
General Advice
For example, 1 takeaway I got was Don’t End the Week with Nothing. Or more specifically, Don’t End the Day with Nothing.
I’ll close with my usual advice to peers: reading this email was valuable (knock on wood). Watching Jason’s video is valuable. Rolling up your sleeves and actually shipping something is much, much more valuable. If you take no other advice from me ever, ship something. You’ll learn more shipping a failure than you’ll learn from reading about a thousand successes. And you stand an excellent chance of shipping a success – people greatly overestimate how difficult this is.
Just don’t end the week with nothing.
World’s Hardest Problem
A list of potential startup ideas here. These are difficult problems but if you are interested in taking on any, I am happy to jump on a discussion to just ideate it out!
An example from the AI section.
Post-Mortem of a Co-Founder Breakup
Give this a read and you will understand the complex intricacies of getting a strong partner to build and ship together.
For me, at least, having the same mindset and goal has to be the bare minimum for people to work together. If not, then why bother working together?
Have at least a problem in mind to solve, or at least a slightly narrower area you want to explore.
You should be at least have enough conviction about what you're working on to want to talk about it all the time.
Having stuff look good matters, having stuff sound good matters.
Build in public.
Be very deliberate and careful about how you conduct user interviews and make sure you go in with certain hypotheses that you want to validate.
Find a cofounder with complementary skills and personalities. Just because you're good friends and both hardworking, smart, people doesn't mean that you would necessarily be good cofounders.
Prompting Guide
A pretty good (although long) site for you to learn LLM prompting.
I dabbled with this since I was improving my prompt to OpenAI to summarize a video transcription.
Man, it was hard. Talking with a ‘Robot’ is hard. So this helped me with some structure.
So many cool articles by Reboot / Kernal
A critical analysis of technological progress and regress while still charting a path forward.
Well, that’s a good summary of what they are doing.
Reading their newsletter and publication made me realize that there are just so many more intelligent people around us and it’s so interesting to understand the way they think about a particular subject.
Not just on the good side of Tech, but evaluating them on the bad side as well.
Light Show but Make it 10x
Minimalist at It’s Peak
Get a WTF Notebook
I am definitely going to use this when I start my new job later on.
This sets up your reputation as someone who can identify and then solve problems early on - a critical skill for anyone to have.
There's no faster way to totally sink my credibility, as a new team member, by making a huge fuss over something that's not a problem, or that the team doesn't see as a problem, or that there's already an effort to fix, or that there's a really simple way to fix that I just didn't see at first. There are always so many problems on a team, so many things that could be better, that I'm only ever going to solve a handful of them. Working on problems in the order I noticed them is rarely the most effective order. So the WTF Notebook gives me a place to park the impulse to fix it now, damn it! until I have more context for deciding what to work on first.
Instead, for two weeks, I just write things down.
What I’m Watching
One Day
One of the best romance series I watched in 2024.
It was beautifully made with the storyline just on point.
It felt very authentic yet thought-provoking.
Just so so phenomenal (but heartbreaking).
500 Days of Summer
Such a throwback canon movie.
This shows what Love is in reality. People have different interpretations of love and conflict of opinions is something expected.
“If you go in darkness because Summer is gone, it’s okay, because Autumn is here” Watch the movie and you will understand.
He develops a mildly delusional obsession over a girl onto whom he projects all these fantasies. He thinks she’ll give his life meaning because he doesn’t care about much else going on in his life. A lot of boys and girls think their lives will have meaning if they find a partner who wants nothing else in life but them. That’s not healthy. That’s falling in love with the idea of a person, not the actual person.
What I’m Listening
A playlist as I was daynightdreaming at 3 am in the morning. It surprisingly has some good music in there.
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