Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…The way I think about this sometimes is I want a good bargain on learning. I can become in the top 5% of whatever I defined as good at something, much, much easier. Perhaps it’s 20 times easier, a hundred times easier to get into the top 5% than it is to get into the top 0.1%. That’s almost impossibly hard to get into that. But if I’m content just being at the top 5%, I could be at the top 5% on five things at once. I can get really good at writing. I can get decent at driving a race car. I can become pretty good at programming, I can run a company, I can have a family. I can do a lot of things at the same time that gives me sort of that variety that almost was idealized. Karl Marx has this idea, oh, I’m going to fish in the morning and hammer in the evening and paint on the weekends, right? That there’s a sense for me at least, where his diagnosis of alienation was true, that just that tunnel vision, there’s just this one thing I’m just going to focus on that gives me a sense of alienation. I can’t stomach. When I’m really deep on programming. And sometimes I go deep for weeks, maybe even in a few cases months, I have to come up for air and I have to go do something else like, all right, that was programming for this year. I’ve done my part, and I’m going to go off riding or annoy people on the internet or drive some race cars to do something else, and then I can do the programming thing with full intensity again next year. Speaking of annoying people on the internet, you got to explain to me this drama. Okay, so what is this guy that said, “Imagine losing to Jira, but boasting they have a couple million dollars per year.” So this had to do with this almost now a meme decision to leave the cloud. DHH left the cloud. I think that’s literally a meme, but it’s also a fascinating decision. Can you talk through the full saga of DHH leaves the cloud, leaving AWS, saving money, and I guess the case this person is making now? Is that we wasted our time optimizing a business that could have been a hundred times bigger if we’d just gone for the moon.…

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