Preface to Résumé/Manifesto

Before you read my Résumé/Manifesto, I want to call your attention to a recent essay by Paul Graham, a successful computer programmer and writer, who first came to my attention a few years ago via Arts & Letters Daily. (Graham’s essay about essays has stayed with me ever since; it’s why I call my posts “essays”: “Essayer is the French verb meaning to try… An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.”)

His most recent piece, called News From the Front, discusses the value of education at elite schools. Graham and his partners run a seed stage investment firm called Y Combinator, and, in his own words, “One of the most surprising things [they've] learned is how little it matters where people went to college.”

Graham himself admits to “overestimating” people who graduated from elite schools. I’m guilty of the same mistake — though it isn’t necessarily a mistake. I don’t think anybody would claim that graduation from a top-tier school is meaningless — far from it. Graham, who has a PhD from Harvard, points out that such graduates are well suited for large companies, giving them high confidence, and demonstrating that “they’re good at doing what they’re asked.” I’d go a bit broader: they’re good at doing what’s expected.

As for me, I’m about average at doing what’s expected, but I excel at looking beyond and surpassing expectations, conventions, and assumptions. That might sound immodest, but I only say it because it’s the most effective way to explain my work from the past five+ years. If you still think I’m bragging, then I’ll refine my statement for the sake of contrast: I’m terrible at doing what I’m told, I don’t remember instructions (and I’m bad at followoing them when I do), I’m not interested in assigned goals, I’m easily distracted from given tasks, I’m clumsy, slow…

Having said that, I’ll reiterate that I’m at least average at doing what’s expected (which isn’t necessarily the same as doing what I’m told, and is probably more important), and I excel at surpassing expectations, or reformulating them to be more generative.

So, beginning in the summer of 2002, I took the responsibility upon myself to design a personal education that would cultivate my unconventional strengths. It had occurred to me that I was best at discovering, creating, and working things out for myself. In the course of trying to figure out what to do with my life, I realized that I was already doing what I was best at, what I loved, what “I can be best in the world at”: working through ambiguity and complexity to see emerging opportunities that had never existed before, and developing ways to capitalize on them.

I tend to get excited about ideas; when they occur to me I want to look into them deeper, uncovering links with other ideas, researching the background and sources, reflecting on the idea’s potential. Lot’s of people have ideas in the shower or whatever, but I seem to have a knack for having just the right idea at the right moment, so that a cascade of coincidences forms around it.

I know this might still sound like crackpot or pothead stuff, which is why I haven’t said much about it until now — after devoting a half-decade to making a discipline out of it. This is what my talk about investing in and managing ideas is about. I’ve invested a lot of time and energy to make my ideas articulate, consistent, precise, coherent, and relevant — doing research to find who might have already said the same things, considering the criticisms and arguments against them, and rooting out contradictions and false assumptions.

More importantly, I’ve made my project less about the ideas themselves, and more about the ability to generate and manage them. And then it became less about ability, and more about articulating the discipline and methods for communicating, replicating, and organizing these creative competencies — creating something concrete, something to really capitalize on.

So what does this have to do with Paul Graham’s essay, or my Résumé/Manifesto? Well, now that spent years developing a solid (yet open) ideological background, I’m finding that nobody is prepared to recognize it. Nobody knows how to look past expectations, to appreciate something new, to evaluate it for themselves, according to the work’s inherent qualities. People rely on recognizeable endorsements — like an affiliation with a top-tier university. Graham’s essay might help people understand my case, and my Résumé is my case.

While I excel at looking beyond expectations, conventions, and assumptions, I’m not quite so adept at helping others do the same; that’s what I’ve spent five years trying to learn how to do — largely so they (you?) can begin to appreciate for themselves what my work is about! I wrote this Résumé to account for the work I’d done, to help people see where I’m coming from — and where I’m going.

And I should add, I actually wrote it back in March of this year. I only showed it to a few people — with little effect — and I don’t expect it to have much of an effect now. Other people, more qualified and accomplished than me, have already said much the same thing, and it seems like every day I come across someone similar, who is trying to make something of the same kind of ideas. It’s become a veritable assortment of clichés.

But there’s no point in hiding it. I’m posting it now partly for its biographical value; and the more of my work I put out, the greater chance that some of it might resonate.

-go to Résumé/Manifesto

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