a polymath is not someone who knows a little about everything. it is someone who can learn anything
the advantage is not knowledge. it is adaptability.
polymath is about building the habits behind broad expertise:
• learn fast
• connect ideas
• switch domains
• build mental models
• practice deliberately
• stay curious
every new field gives you another way to solve problems.
• physics teaches constraints.
• biology teaches adaptation.
• computer science teaches abstraction.
• economics teaches incentives.
• design teaches human behavior.
innovation rarely comes from knowing one field better than everyone else.
it often comes from carrying ideas across fields that were never supposed to meet.
A man’s character is defined by the choices he makes when given the power to act." Uncle Ben didn't just teach Peter how to be a hero; he taught him how to be a man.
INSTEAD OF WATCHING AN HOUR OF NETFLIX TONIGHT.
This 1 hour Stanford lecture by Joel Peterson will teach you more about negotiation and getting what you want than most people learn in years.
Bookmark it and give it an hour, no matter what.
Stop being patient and start asking yourself:
How can I accomplish my 10 year plan in 6 months?
You’ll probably fail, but you’ll be far ahead of the person who accepted it would take 10 years.
- Elon Musk
STEVE JOBS GOT FIRED FROM APPLE.
Then he walked straight into MIT and dropped the most raw, unfiltered 60-minute business masterclass ever recorded.
Zero PR bullshit. Zero image to protect.
Just pure, brutal honesty from the man who built Apple once and was about to rebuild it even bigger.
Stop scrolling.
Watch this tonight instead of Netflix.
Bookmark it. Come back to it.
patterns I’ve noticed in great engineers:
• they think in systems, not events
• they reduce problems before trying to solve them
• they obsess over fundamentals more than tools
• they can explain complex things without sounding clever
• they build small, test early, break things on purpose
• they respect physics, constraints, and reality
• they document their thinking, not just results
• they care about edge cases because that’s where truth hides
• they borrow ideas across disciplines without ego
• they have taste, and they know when something feels wrong
• they value reliability over novelty
• they keep learning long after they’re “qualified”
none of this is flashy.
none of this trends well online.
but this is what quietly compounds
into real mastery over time.
be a nerd.
be a weirdo.
don’t care.
the world worships outcomes, not the process.
but the process; the obsession, the curiosity, the tinkering: that’s where all real breakthroughs come from
nerds build rockets
weirdos design worlds
normal people scroll
so yeah, go deep into your niche.
collect data, draw diagrams, read manuals, stay up all night debugging circuits.
you’ll look crazy; until it works.
I had a holy shit, the world is not the same anymore moment last night.
Put BigC, my @openclaw on a hetzner server and my mind is just blown.
We all know that AI is transformative but I don't think you really feel it until you step outside the prompt/response loop and step into the prompt/take real actions on my behalf/response loop.
- I got BigC to check on the deployment of a new railway project
- Builds for each of the services in the project failed
- BigC reviewed the logs
- Then reviewed the project on the server
- Identified the root cause (incorrect build commands on each service)
- Updated the configs of each in railway
- Redeployed
- Confirmed everything worked
- I then tested it
- Identified a design issue
- Got BigC to review, fix and submit a PR
- job done
oh and all this was done over voice when walking the fucking dog...
More to come as I try and make sense of this new world.
how to set up hermes agent step by step. built-in memory, 40+ tools, works on your phone, and what to think of hermes vs openclaw:
1. hermes is a personal AI agent that runs in your terminal. think of it like open claw but with built-in memory, 40+ tools out of the box, and 90% cheaper token costs. you install it with one command.
2. the 3 problems with open claw that hermes solves: no memory (you keep repeating yourself), constant gateway restarts, and zero visibility into what you're spending on tokens.
3. hermes remembers everything. every completed task gets saved to memory. it searches through past logs to find solutions. over time it literally gets smarter at your specific workflows.
4. connect it to open router. you see exact costs per model per task. free models rotate weekly. one founder went from $130 every five days on open claw to $10 on hermes. same output.
5. it comes preloaded with skills. apple notes, imessage, find my, browser, web search, image generation, cron jobs. no hunting for plugins.
6. connect it to obsidian so it reads your entire vault. connect it to gstack for your dev environment. create custom skills for your specific workflows.
7. the biggest money saver: have it write code once for recurring tasks. then it runs without burning tokens every time. stop paying an LLM to do the same scrape or report daily.
8. run it on android via telegram. name your agents. talk to them like coworkers. in this episode imran shows you how to set this up.
9. you can run it bare metal, in docker, or serverless on modal. pick your risk level.
i begged @imranye to come on @startupideaspod and walk through the full installation live. he made it impossibly clear.
if you've heard of Hermes Agent and want the clearest explanation of how to get set up like a pro
let me know what you want me to cover on the next ep
this is the best personal agent setup video on the internet right now.
watch
Stanford computer science professor just revealed how to master Markov Decision Processes.
83-minutes. free. By Stanford.
here's what they cover:
• search problems vs. stochastic environments
• policy evaluation & q-value recurrence math
• value iteration loop engineering
• convergence limits under a cyclic graphs
Bookmark & watch today. Then read the article below.