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Iāve mentioned an essay idea to several people in the past week and have received a lot of positive feedback about it. I call it the SLINGSHOT THEORY, loosely based on a sweet trick used by rocket scientists - using the gravity of a planetary body to add velocity to a spacecraft https://t.co/GIBM9fMcL3
So hereās the fundamental idea: Sometimes, if you want to get somewhere fast, the fastest way to get there isnāt to go there directly, but to first slingshot around something else. This can give you a dramatic increase in velocity that *seems* supernatural to everyone else https://t.co/g01lXtwHNU
Some egs. Bollywood is a famously nepotistic industry. If you want to break into it, youāll need a lot of connections, relationships, favors. Unless youāre Sunny Leone. Sunny slingshotted past millions of hopeful starlets via an orthogonal path https://t.co/bmxrdyYpZv
I am a big fan of Sunny Leone - not particularly of her early career or even her current work, but of how she has leveraged herself, as an *outsider*, into being beloved by hundreds of millions of people. A series of very intelligent decisions. Sheās a Gaga-esque media maestro https://t.co/IkEsGKUkfZ
Lady Gaga similarly slingshotted around Planet Weirdo to accelerate dramatically towards A Star Is Born. She would never have made it if she attempted a direct path, and she knew this. She strategized over a decade https://t.co/bjb07FfUnU
been procrastinating for years on an essay exploring how lady gaga chose to be weird as a positioning strategy in order to get the attention (for her hard-won talent) that would make her a star. she knew she couldn't get to where she is by playing it straight https://t.co/vver9z2q5m
As I go to bed tonight halfway across the planet from home, I find myself reflecting on how Iāve Slingshotted myself here, & onto the Following lists of ~10,000 people. Itās definitely been an unorthodox journey. People in the startup scene know me from my essay about Mean Girls https://t.co/2VaPMhByuF
Looking at @vgrās reflections on his own trajectory - I think it could be said that he slingshotted around Planet Office with The Gervais Principle https://t.co/c8oWM7lnWE
Hereās another wild thing - I now have Singaporeans in my DMs who are asking me āhow do I make friends with Silicon Valley peopleā 1. My visit to SF is itself slingshotting me back to my hometown with increased velocity 2. The answer is āslingshot around interesting thingsā
We can dig a little deeper into the metaphor: there are several ways in which a slingshot maneuver can go wrong 1. You miss the planet altogether and barrel off into deep space 2. You get sucked into the gravity of the planet, and either get stuck in orbit, or crash into it
The thing that strategic artists like Gaga, Sunny and Venkat (now thatās a podcast! š) do really well is to seek out something interesting that they can do, and then *leverage that into something else*. Importantly, they *donāt* chase incremental gains - they seek new games. https://t.co/GC75Ul63Bx
If you play a game for too long & youāre not mindful + intentional - you can get sucked in by its gravity. Sucked into the politicking, the positioning, the favor-counting, all that smarmy, tedious stuff. I felt it happening to me as a local blogger in 2013, so I cut & ran https://t.co/9uHPqWHcBq
I am very grateful to my younger self for having the guts to do that. I think lots of people get trapped by the experience of some sort of success, and then they cling onto it desperately, trying to preserve it. You canāt. You have to evolve and move on https://t.co/ZSGa1XcAzd
I āgot intoā political blogging because I was really mad about a flagrantly misleading bit of statistics in the national newspaper. I wrote in about it, and they completely neutered my criticism. So I got madder, and took to the Internet. The rage-mob gave sweet, sweet approval
You cultivate taste and then you seek out whatever you think is interesting https://t.co/zJi8WUze6S
one does not simply slingshot around Mars... jk, that's exactly what one does https://t.co/9BkohgLJAw
Itās definitely easier in some respects. A thing nobody explicitly told me, but I think is true: itās highly worth prioritising āforeignā experiences (eg getting your band to play out-of-state gigs) for the āproof-of-workā. Locals always overvalue this https://t.co/viFnbL4JqF https://t.co/ocra3rYyG4
Itās definitely easier in some respects. A thing nobody explicitly told me, but I think is true: itās highly worth prioritising āforeignā experiences (eg getting your band to play out-of-state gigs) for the āproof-of-workā. Locals always overvalue this https://t.co/viFnbL4JqF https://t.co/ocra3rYyG4