Tinkering My Way Through Life

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I can't code, but I'm a hacker.

Hacking doesn't mean coding to me. It means tinkering, inventing, and iterating.

I've been a hacker since I was a kid.

At six years old, I built a contraption with pots and pans to catch paint drops from my easel. I called it The Paintcatcher 3000. In 5th grade, I remember bending a paper clip to steal a friend and now Cyber Patterns reader's stuff out of his desk. In 7th grade, it was learning how to use Photoshop to place my face onto Phillies players.

The stories continue. I always just thought I had a wild imagination. I never really thought of myself as a hacker until last year when I read Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters.

Graham is best known as the co-founder of startup accelerator Y Combinator. Most people don't realize that after getting a master's degree in computer science he went on to study painting. It turns out the two skills are much more alike than you'd think.

People seemed to really enjoy my post covering Rory Sutherland's book Alchemy, so I'm going to use a similar format here. Let's go through a few Graham quotes and reflect.

“I would have realized that there was a name for what I was doing: sketching. As far as I can tell, the way they taught me to program in college was all wrong. You should figure out programs as you’re writing them, just like painting.”

Programming, painting, writing. You figure them all out as you're doing them.

"It’s odd that people think of programming as precise and methodical," Graham continued. "Computers are precise and methodical. Hacking is something you do with a gleeful laugh."

When I have an idea for an essay, it's usually just a topic or a sentence. Today, it began with "Hacking and Tinkering" and then I sat down and started typing. Only then did I discover the format of this piece and the goal I wanted to achieve with it.

That's why I love writing so much. I figure it out as I go. I've always been an "I'll figure it out" kinda guy. All real questions I was asked by friends and loved ones:

• How are you as an English major gonna break into tech?

• How are you gonna make money with a newsletter?

• How are you gonna take care of a dog in NYC?

"I'll figure it out." 4 simple beautiful words that shut people up every time.

I didn't know the answers, but I believed I would figure them out. Eventually, I did. You don't have to be confident you know the answer. You just have to be confident you can figure it out in the long run.

If you go in with the mentality of "I don't know, but I'll figure it out" then you'll work and persevere until you figure it out. As Graham writes later on, "Relentlessness wins because, in the aggregate, unseen details become visible."

"The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know."

"Talking about an idea leads to more ideas," Graham continues "So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it's also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends."

I love the friends I can say literally anything to. Girls, business, politics, whatever.

As an entrepreneur and writer, imagination is the name of the game. If you have friends who shut down all your crazy ideas, you're hanging with the wrong crowd. As I said previously, some people can't see past their own noses.

I used to have friends like that. These people are so filled with their own preconceptions of you and the world that they'll unconsciously try to stop you from becoming the person you want to be. "Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot," Graham writes.

At this point, I keep most of my goals to myself — or with friends I know are dreamers and doers. That's why I love the startup/VC crowd. Anything is possible.

"The mark — or at least the prerogative — of strength is not to take oneself too seriously."

"To have a sense of humor is to be strong: to keep one’s sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to lose one’s sense of humor is to be wounded by them," writes Graham.

I couldn't agree more. When I was struggling with mental health battles, I lost my sense of humor completely. Now that I'm happy, I can laugh about my old struggles.

My friend Adam Mitrani is a brilliant comedian with a twisted sense of humor. "Say what you want about Hitler," he says, pausing for a moment. "No seriously, say anything, I hate the dude." He makes jokes about his dead brother and his fear of his bi ex-girlfriend cheating on him with a girl. To me, that's strength.

The Taleb quote above exemplifies why funny guys get the girl.

It's also why Jack Raines's LinkedIn posts went viral a couple weeks ago. LinkedIn is full of decently smart people writing platitudes trying to sound smarter than they are, but just sounding stupid. Jack Raines said fuck that, I'm gonna be funny and risk looking dumb.

Like I did with my referral program, I'm copying Jack and have gone unhinged on the most boring social network ever. Go follow me on LinkedIn for more dumb tech jokes.