The best book I've ever read

Hey y'all, Another great week here at Try Hard Studios! Turns out, doing the work does, in fact, decrease anxiety. Almost all of the Intro to Postgres videos are recorded. They are being edited. The website is being finalized. And we're going to launch very, very soon! I still feel that renewed sense of hope that things can go well, which has been missing for several months. I am almost done with The Intellectual Life. I have one chapter left! And I feel confident in saying that it is the best book that I have ever read. I mentioned Scott Adams' book, Reframe Your Brain, last week, and I finished that one earlier this week. I would continue to recommend it to you, having finished it now. The Database School podcast is on a much more regular schedule now! I'm having my amazing ops person, Kelsey, manage a lot of the actual production of it. I have an editor that takes the raw files and turns it into the final video product, which Kelsey takes and puts on YouTube and Transistor, does the show notes and everything. I'm trying to get better about doing the things that I am really good at and not doing the things that I'm really bad at but still need to be done. Kelsey is excellent about reminding me to do that and taking things off my plate. We're getting better and better systems in place every single day. --- ### Thoughts from the week Something I've been thinking about a lot this week is a principle, or theory, that I've actually been noodling on for several years, and that is the concept of Games of Luck versus Games of Skill. I tweeted two things this week that have gone viral. One was a picture of an industrial building talking about how men only want one thing, and that is an industrial building to turn into a studio. It's a play on a common meme that says "men only want one thing and it's disgusting." The other one that I tweeted was a play on a famous quote that says, "If you're the bank $100, that's your problem. If you're the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem." That's a famous quote by John Paul Getty. I added on the end, "If you owe the bank $100 billion, that's the government's problem," referencing OpenAI's recent talks about being backstopped by the federal government. I've tweeted a lot of things in my day. I don't know why these two went viral! I have no idea, but Twitter is mostly a Game of Luck, and I think all games can be classified on a spectrum of Game of Luck or Game of Skill. Some games are pure skill. I think chess is a pure skill game. Poker is somewhere maybe in the middle. It requires skill, but it also requires a lot of luck. I think posting on Twitter is mostly a luck game. There's some skill to it, but it is mostly luck. You can look at most things as being on the spectrum of luck to skill. The interesting part is that the strategies for Games of Luck are completely different from the strategies of Games of Skill. In a game of luck, if the cost to play is very low, you want to play as often as possible. The lottery is a game of luck. If it were free to play the lottery, the ideal strategy would be to play it as often as possible, because you might win! The cost to play the lottery is not free. You have to pay to play, and so that changes the calculus. The cost to tweet is basically free. In a Game of Luck, where the cost of entrance is low or free, the ideal strategy is to play as often as possible and hope that you get lucky. Contrast that with a game of skill. The ideal strategy is to focus on mastering the skill and putting all of your energy behind one effort. I think this is the root cause of why people online argue between doing 12 startups in 12 months or putting all of your focus, energy, and attention behind one startup. The people that think startups are just a Game of Luck correctly use the strategy of "do a bunch of things and try to get lucky." The people that think startups are a Game of Skill correctly think I should really focus on one thing and put all of my efforts and energy into this one thing. So the real question is not should you do 12 startups in 12 months or should you do one. The real question is do you believe that startups are a Game of Luck or a Game of Skill and to what extent is it a Game of Luck or a Game of Skill. I think the reality is it lies somewhere inside of the extremes of the spectrum. My opinion is it is more a Game of Skill than a Game of Luck, but it is not purely a Game of Skill. It does require some luck. If you have any thoughts on this (not necessarily the startup angle but the Game of Luck / Game of Skill idea,) please let me know. This is one that I am workshopping and I will eventually write about and I would love more examples or different perspectives to help me round out this idea. --- 🎬 **YouTube** **Building an S3 Competitor with Tigris CEO Ovais Tariq** I talk with Ovais Tariq, co-founder and CEO of Tigris Data and former Uber engineer who helped scale one of the world’s largest distributed systems. In this episode, we discuss Uber’s hyperscale infrastructure, what it takes to build an S3-compatible object store from scratch, and how distributed storage is evolving for the AI era.Check it out on [YouTube](https://youtu.be/c5tGw1Z13uI) or your favorite [podcast player](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/building-an-s3-competitor-with-tigris-ceo-ovais-tariq/id1752196733?i=1000735588246). --- ### Things I found this week *Just a heads up that each Twitter/X screenshot has a link to the original post if you want to go follow the account.* [](https://x.com/bearlyai/status/1986471831378010488) Two incredible examples of videos that were made in the old school analog way. I think there is going to be a place for AI effects in videos, but obviously right now people are leaning too hard into it. It's fun to see Apple getting back to their craft! We highlighted a commercial last week that felt very Apple, and this also feels very Apple. --- [](https://x.com/AlexKontorovich/status/1986413336213209110) I haven't seen this documentary, but I've added it to my list! I encourage you to watch this clip of him describing the discovery that he came across, and just the amount of emotion that he feels recounting it. This reminds me of stories of Einstein in Walter Isaacson's book, and how deeply moved he was by the beauty of the universe and mathematics. I highly recommend that book! --- [](https://x.com/usualoma/status/1986303023505895632) A fellow chalkboard friend, apparently! The thing that caught my eye on this was the tools that he has hanging over on the side of the board. And I have thought about creating some of those tools, just stuff to draw straight lines and angles and that sort of thing. It looks like his are backed with cork board to prevent scratching on the chalkboard, and I will probably be stealing this idea. --- [](https://x.com/jacob__titus/status/1986187122924048750) This is the quote tweet that renewed interest in my original tweet and it's easy to see why. It's an unbelievably stunning before and after transformation and frankly, exactly what I had in mind when I wrote the original tweet! I checked out his account. I'd never heard of this person before and he tweets good stuff and so I've started following him. --- [](https://x.com/scotthraines/status/1986106213277581508) I think the rise of casual gambling is going to be a disaster for our society, especially young people. It seems like a bleak road to nowhere. This guy is arguing that people are not actually looking for entertainment but looking for redemption, and that feels directionally correct to me. I think people are looking for a deep sense of connection and abiding and something that has substance, but everything that is being offered to them is paper thin. --- [](https://x.com/MeneerS_/status/1985646662614761769) Can you imagine the tweets that I would write from here! I'm only half joking. But more seriously, this does look like a beautiful place to create, to build, to write, to make of value. --- [](https://x.com/majamediaco/status/1985177589959594253) Every day is all there is. --- [](https://x.com/ElliottBlackwe3/status/1984958502448898271) I really don't want to come across as anti-AI! I think AI is an extremely powerful tool. I use it for coding all the time. I use it for research, for finding links to stuff that I didn't know existed. Even yesterday, I used it to help me find something, some specific type of binder that I wanted to buy. I just didn't want to look around, so I used AI to find that for me. It's awesome and I love it. I do not think it is good for creating things that require human experience. I don't want to read anything that is written by an AI. I don't want to watch any videos that are purely AI generated. I think the value of consuming that media is in part that it comes from the depth of the human that created it. --- If you’ve been enjoying the newsletter and think a friend may enjoy reading it each week too, please forward it to them! They can sign up to receive it weekly here: . That’s it for this week! I enjoy reading all of your replies, so if you see something interesting or just have a thought you want to share, please hit reply and let me know. Talk soon, Aaron {{ ENV.unsubscribe\_personal | default: visitor.unsubscribe\_url | hyperlink: "Click here to unsubscribe." }}