This note is the third letter in the 104-days-of-summer-vacation series. You can also follow the full twitter thread here.

Dearest Reader,

I hope you’re feeling confident. Whoever you may be, I believe that you are amazing, and I’m sincerely rooting for support, positivity and love to come your way today. I say this because I’ve been thinking about the reality distortion fields that many founders, visionaries and even professors sometimes seem to exude.

In The Art of doing Science and Engineering, Richard Hamming talks about the importance of having a vision for the world. It even came with a neat mathematical proof, that a random walk on a line after N steps has an expected distance from the origin proportional to the square root of N, while a directed walk in either direction has expected distance proportional to N. You can read the proof here: random-walks-are-sqrtn

This makes sense, in the vast space of possible actions in the world, only a North Star can help make consistent decisions. Licklider had human-computer interaction, Steve Jobs had accessible personal computing, Elon Musk has humans on Mars. And almost all of these technologists, operate in a mind-meld with their visions as if they’re living in a world where those visions are already real.

Live in the future and build what’s missing - Paul Graham

The slightly delusional optimism required to stake your entire life on a single North Star, seems to be derived from the effect of this mind meld. It’s interesting to also note how strong these mind melds can be, to the extent where they can influence people around them to also act with a similar brand of optimism.

Today, I realized a second effect of Richard Hamming’s mathematical model. When comparing two functions with complexity $O(\sqrt{N})$ and $O(N)$, while they remain in relative proximity at the start, they quickly diverge for large N.

In other words, the longer you spend locked in one specific vision, the more your trajectory deviates and becomes increasingly specific to that vision, as compared to a random walk or a more “societally standard direction”.

When any person with a vision experiences doubt, the optimistic reality distortion field tends to cancel it out, but as more and more time passes there’s also the added effect of larger sunken cost. As the 2 paths diverge, the person with the vision has more to lose and is actually less likely to give up.

And if any doubt manages to catch on, things can get very bad very quickly depending on how many diverging steps were taken. I’m talking about burnout, depression, and all the other miserable things that happen with the end of a reality distortion bubble.

Which leads me to two conclusions. 

1. I want to have a vision, I want to be moving towards something meaningful.
2. I want to minimize the number of steps taken before I know undeniably that a vision is meaningful.

In other words, reality distortion fields need escape hatches, or bounded conditions which trigger their collapse to maintain the sanity of the person with the vision. 

Off the top of my mind, it looks like the LEAN startup model tries to do this, validate, validate always validate assumptions. And if you don’t meet certain conditions, have a hard cutoff which collapses the vision and realigns it. 

I’m just wondering if the same methodology works for more moonshot like ideas? How do you define exit conditions from a reality distortion bubble that’s pointed at 20 years in the future? How about 50 years?

Lots of questions here haha, I’m afraid I don’t have an answer at the moment. So, for today, unfortunately I’ll have to leave you with just these questions, my dear reader. See you tomorrow :)

~ Shan