Lex Fridman Podcast #309: John Carmack
Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren’t sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.
You can’t learn everything, but you have to convince yourself that you can learn anything. [And learn deeply].
Be prepared for opportunities to present themselves.
The most staggering thing about Python is how slow it can get. You can easily eliminate all the progress the hardware has made over the decades.
Deploy your curiosity to make things useful and valuable to you even though they don’t immediately appear that way.
It’s been my experience that people that don’t focus on the here and now (right in front of them) tend to be less effective…It’s the magic of gradient descent: People just don’t believe that just looking locally gets you to all of these spectacular things.
The first quote reminds me about the design principle, “biased towards action”. By all means, come up with ideas, but don’t be overwhelmed or paralyzed by a problem or situation. Take it in manageable bites and try things. You can’t predict everything; do the experiment and see what works. Get real world data and make course corrections. It can also be like simulated annealing; the only way to find something optimal is by trying different things, not standing still or doing the same thing.