Greatness and Comparison
Hey everyone,
If you’ve been following along with the newsletter, you know I’ve been reading D.T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace lately.
This week, I came across a quote in the book that I thought was instructive. Wallace had a long-running correspondence with the author Don DeLillo, and often wrote DeLillo for advice and mentorship.
At one point after writing Infinite Jest, Wallace was struggling with his writing and feeling the pressure of having to live up to the huge hit. He writes to DeLillo:
Do you have difficulties with procrastination/avoidance/lack of discipline? If so, how do you overcome them? I ask because I’m frustrated not just with the slowness of my work but with the erratic pace I work at. And I ask you only because you seem at least on this end of the books, to be so steady—books every couple or so years for over two decades and you don’t seem to have an outside job or teaching gig or anything that might relieve (what I find to be) the strain of daily self-starting and self-discipline and daily temptations to dick around and abandon the discipline.
My big takeaway from this quote was encouragement. Even David Foster Wallace, widely considered one of the best writers of his generation, struggled with motivation, discipline, consistency and comparison.
To focus for a moment on comparison: it’s easy for anyone to look at colleagues or heroes and think that it (whatever it is) must be so easy for them. In tech, people talk all the time about impostor syndrome, but discussing feelings of inferiority is trite because the feelings are so pervasive. So, take heart—even your heroes struggle to do the work and to feel adequate. I’m taking it as a reminder to not be so hard on myself, and I hope you do too.
Pete’s Picks ✅
Podcast: I’ve been enjoying The Colin and Samir Podcast. I’ve mentioned these two in the past—they’re entrepreneurs and filmmakers from L.A.—and it’s been fun for me to get an inside look at their thoughts and process. I think their discussions are instructive for most kinds of work, but especially creative endeavors.
Article: My wife was telling me she heard people made a killing in the stock market by buying stock in Zoom Technologies (ZOOM), which happens to not be Zoom Video Communications (ZM), the company behind the conferencing app we’re all using. I found this article from about a year ago—apparently this phenomenon also happened when Zoom went public.
Video: If you missed it, NASA had live streams of the new space mission. This video shows the capsule dock at the ISS at about 2:15.
This Week’s Video 📹
How to Not Lose Money in the Stock Market (inspired by the May 17 newsletter)
Cheers,
Peter