Recap and taking a 2-month break after 40 Daily Balajisms
Recap and taking a 2-month break after 40 Daily Balajisms
It is a great challenge & collective activity with my old friend Duke Mtambo
Optimalism is a core concept of Balaji. It is a combination of an optimistic outlook and optimizing for an objective function. It’s the opposite of maximalism. Now I want to optimize my writing skills and delivery. And to improve my articles, I need to get back to studying, reading and listening.
I have written so far 40 articles about concepts of Balaji Srinivasan that I have collected over three years. Together with my old friend Duke Mtambo from Kenya we are discussing these articles in his Daily Balajisms podcast series at Mtambo’s Desk podcast.
We have recorded 26 episodes so far, and so we have 14 to go within this first batch of 40 Daily Balajisms. Eventually we might get up to 120, or 365 articles and videos, let’s see. I will take a short break as me and my wife are expecting our second daughter and the due date is around a corner.
I engaged in this writing challenge of Daily Balajisms during my paternity leave to improve my writing cadence and learn to write shorter articles. It was great to write on a daily basis and quite exiting to see if I manage to post a new article until midnight each day and produce an AI generated illustration picture with Playground AI.
With Duke we are investing in better microphones to improve the sound quality. I want to also improve my speaking skills. I also signed up for a writing cohort for 1729 writers and will write longer pieces related to Balaji’s ideas.
I am looking forward to read and listen to resources connected to Balaji’s ideas and build a clearer overall picture and collect ideas and mental models.
Balaji is a person with the highest output of new good ideas, says Marc Andreesen. There will be a v2 of The Network State book this year. Eric Jorgenson will publish his Balaji Anthology in Q1 this year. And I am happy when I discover a new or forgotten podcast episode with Balaji somewhere on the internet.
Lastly, the point of philosophy and writing is to improve the world, not just describe it – so building-highly aligned communities and learning, burning (calories) and earning are all valuable goals to optimize around.
With Duke, we have experimented with the Solana protocol and learnt a few things, like creating DAOs, that we want to expand on and align with the gradualist bottom-up vision of building startup societies and network unions/archipelagos/states.
(Our original idea with Wezesha DAO was to connect web3 with vocational education and so-called training/practice companies or student startups that we have experience with from our days at Sote Hub. But we need to improve our skills, strategy and create also a startup society to enable web3 apprentices).
Another great challenge that I want to try to complete this year is 100 days of code on Replit.
I hope to resume writing Daily Balajisms in about two months, and complete the 100-120 Daily Balajisms this year. If successful, I want to turn this content into a book – with concepts divided into Bold Balajisms, Based Balajisms and Bespoke Balajisms. Or so is the idea for now.
Thank you, dear readers, that you are a part of this journey and I wish you all the best. Please keep in touch on twitter and consider listening or watching Daily Balajisms podcast series with me and Duke Mtambo.