Decode

An inclusive place for truly ambitious individuals.

Ambition

By Sumit Srivastava on 22 December 2019

Decode was born as a place to hang out for lads who are ambitious, curious, or risk takers.

While it did become a tight-knit inclusive community of ambitious individuals, it does not cover even a fraction of the most ambitious people in the world.

I will go on to describe where I got my ambition from and how you can get into the brains of the most ambitious people on earth, mostly by reading what they write and hanging out where they hang out.

1. Why be ambitious? Your ambition essentially defines what you will do good at, what you'll master, what will interest you, and what will inspire you.

   Paul Graham, a major influence on my life and the founder of Y Combinator, writes great essays to read from. Here are two essays that I like:
   
   

   • Frighteningly Ambitious Goals
     

     How ambitious goals, once broken down carefully, seem completely achievable.

   
   
   • Cities And Ambition

     How people you observe, and the conversations and ideas you consume, even passively, shape your ambition.

   
   While startup ideas can be substituted with ambitious goals and cities can be substituted with internet communities, the gist of essay stays the same.

   A lot of ambitious people hang out at a lot of places on the internet. I am about to tell you where you can go to hang out with the ambitious people for the ambition you have, or for the things you want to master.

2. What should you do with your life? I suggest that you read the essay Directions and advice from Alexey Guzey. Here is the essay broken down in parts:
   
   
   • 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?
   • How to do anything you want?
3. Can we be ambitious and fast? Yes! Here is a list of examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together, compiled together by Patrick Collison, the founder of Stripe.

   List of ambitious things done rapidly.

   Here's my favourite one from this list:
   
   Apollo 8. On August 9 1968, NASA decided that Apollo 8 should go to the moon. It launched on December 21 1968, 134 days later.

4. Where to hang out online? That's a question that you yourself have to figure out.
   
   ✓ What works for me:
   
   
   • Surprisingly, I find arxiv.org pretty good to read research papers on. Not really a community, but that's where I have learnt almost all of what I have learnt from.
   
   
   • Hacker News is pretty good if you are into technology and software.
   
   
   • Reddit communities are pretty good. You will have to figure out what specifically suits the best for your domain. Just google: best subreddits for X, and replace X with whatever you are interested in.
   
   
   • Twitter is really good is you know how to curate a good feed and follow the right people of your domain. The best hack for this is to unfollow everyone who doesn't post what your domain is and follow only relevant people.
   
   ✗ What doesn't work for me:
   
   
   • Slack has lot's of really great communities but it's really cluttered, to the point that it almost seems like you are forced to be only involved in one community on Slack. That's how hard Slack has made it to switch the communities back to back.
   
   
   • Quora used to be good content when it was launched, but not now.
   
   
   • YouTube is tricky, the feed is so random that all efforts to curate a sensible feed go into vain. But it is awesome for learning since it has lot of good learning content. I have found a way around this erratic behaviour by going to the channels I like and learning directly from them without relying on the feed.