Keep sharpening
do your job, but don’t expect the results; 50/50; talking to robots; Just Kids
He's not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
I love that idiom. I’ve always found it funny. Nasty enough, but not ill-intended. It brings a smile.
It has a we’re all in this together vibe.
I don’t mind not being the sharpest knife – as long as I keep sharpening.
This CEO
Aravind Srinivas is the co-founder of Perplexity, straight out of Chennai, India (just like Google CEO Sundar Pichai).
Right in the middle of his podcast conversation with Rick Rubin, Aravind recited Bhagavad Gita Chapter 2, Verse 47, in Sanskrit.
Here’s the verse:
You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty.
Do your job, but don’t expect the results.
After two hours of listening to his vision and values, I think we're lucky if people like him control the AI industry.
Aravind is just 30, and so grounded it’s scary. The Force is strong with this one. Reminds me of Vitalik.
Perplexity is two years old, valued at $14B, and - with less than 200 employees - has become a serious threat to Google’s search dominance… to be continued.
This ratio
50/50
I spent as much on my sharpening stone as on my chef’s knife. No point owning the best blade if you can’t properly sharpen it.
Once I get the sharpening flow, I might reward myself with a buy-it-for-life knife. Open to suggestions.
I wish I had respected that ratio for my motorcycle. Instead of buying a brand new shiny one, I could have got a used one and allocated the savings towards plenty of track lessons.
Flow > Glow
Now I’m making up for lost time. This was me at Luddenham Raceway last weekend – first real track day.
This tool
Finally, a speech-to-text that works. I enjoy Wispr Flow big time.
The smart move? You can plug it into any app – Slack, Outlook, Google Docs, ChatGPT, etc – and start dictating with one button.
It doesn’t make mistakes. You can whisper, and it still understands. I just used it right now to finish this sentence. Bye-bye keyboard. Making technology more human, they say.
Use my referral and we each get one month free. Bisou.
Interlude
“Have you been to Japan?”
“So, the first day we arrived in Tokyo and…”
“That mix of tradition and modernity...”
“I went to this thrift store where…”
This memoir
I knew Patti Smith the rocker. I knew Robert Mapplethorpe the photographer. I could think of Because the Night and iconic black and white portraits. I had no clue how they got there, I didn’t even know their relationship.
Reading Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids - a great dive in the early 70s NYC - I discovered they started as bums. They met on the street. She was writing poetry, he was doing collages. She never planned to sing, he to shoot. They shared lice, and they were hungry. They were big-time NGMI.
Always fascinating how destiny unfolds. A million times, they could have failed. You could say New York made them, that they were lucky to meet the right people at the right time. The truth is they just believed. In each other, in their mission.
Faith and perseverance. And a bit of divine for sure.
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