This is an open letter of gratitude to some very cool people. For a handful of reasons, I really admire them and they have significantly influenced my dreams and core values.
My goal is both to give thanks and to introduce their incredible stories, providing a few of the many remarkable details.
Ron Jarzombek
Ron Jarzombek is easily one of the most creative and dedicated musicians I know of. He’s an elite, diabolical mad scientist and also a prolific inspirer and teacher.
One fun thing that separates Ron from other guitarists is his knack for scoring songs to film. The Animation of Entomology, for example, is entirely scored to horror films. It also manages to use bugs as the main agent of horror, rather than the standard, cliched gory metal stuff, and it’s a complete technical rollercoaster. There’s nothing else out there like it. The themes of Ron’s music are not thematically limited to horror either. I was lucky to discover The Cereal Mouse as a kid because someone made a Tap Tap Reloaded track for it. It’s scored to Charlotte’s Web and sounds nothing like the bug metal. It’s still oozing with nuanced technical wizardry, but more giddy and goofy than dark and creepy. It strikes an impossible balance of unpredictable yet perfectly coherent. Pretty much only Ron can write like that.
Beyond spellbinding guitar-playing and song-writing virtuosity, Ron produces a ton of free, publicly available educational content about his music and the processes behind it. He’s also written and released much of the tablature for his songs for free. You can find all of that on Ron’s website and YouTube channel.
Annie Rauwerda (Depths Of Wikipedia)
Depths Of Wikipedia (DoW) highlights noteworthy corners of Wikipedia and shares her findings on social media. Annie Rauwerda created DoW during Covid lockdown and it has since reached a large audience.
The significance of quirky fun facts is easy to understate. What they really do, and what Annie’s work on DoW has achieved spectacularly, is help reduce “unknown unknowns.” They enable introductions into new and unfamiliar topics of understanding that illuminate meaningful things which previously could not be identifed, let alone appreciated.
This flavor of exploratory education is invaluable in producing motivation. Having an upfront target topic limits how surprised, excited, or challenged you can be. But it’s also hard to do alone. The difficulty has historically been on teachers to figure out which missing concepts their students need and teach them. Kudos to teachers who take that challenge seriously. But, arguably, Annie’s work with DoW has affected many times more students than most teachers can.
To perform the research that answers the questions that various people didn’t know they had is a wonderful and essential calling. The delight I get from Depths of Wiki helped provoke the idea to make FITM.
Mark Minervini
“FinTwit” was a deceptive community, in my experience. A lot of users were inactive, unprofessional, or plainly mean (That was around 2019-2021—I had no idea how much worse Twitter could get). But a handful of knowledgeable, magnanimous voices made it, overall, an irreplaceable forest of investment wisdom. From my few years of keeping up with the online stock trading community, Mark Minervini stands out as a paragon of excellence and honor. Despite the distasteful attitudes sometimes found on that corner of the Internet, Mark returned week after week to encourage new and/or struggling traders with thoughtful and powerful words. Here’s a great example.
Mark’s trading journey is unique and inspiring. He learned about speculation in the 1980s as an independent, uneducated (dropped out of high school) rock drummer. He struggled for years while self-teaching, analyzing price quotes he recorded by hand from newspapers. (Bear in mind it was also common then for transaction commissions to cost a few hundred dollars each.) He endured for 6 years and crawled into profitability. In 1997 Mark became the US Investing Champion, and again in 2021. His Minervini Private Access program students also often lead in USIC competitions.
Outside of trading and mentoring, Mark is the author of several books about his work and his philosophies in life. I enjoyed and learned a lot from his book Trade Like a Stock Market Wizard. He also likes to jam out on the drums.
For someone like Mark, it’s probably tempting to relax and enjoy the life you’ve made. Still, he continues to cheer on fans, many anonymous, and drive them to give their best to trading and beyond. He seems truly delighted to see everyone else win, in their own way, so I love seeing him win too.
Aaron Swartz
It’s shocking how many vital, ubiquitous features of the modern web tie back to Aaron Swartz’s vehement efforts. During his tragically short life, Aaron contributed to the authoring of RSS 1.0 in 2000 at age 14, helped to build and proliferate Creative Commons copyright license formats [1] in 2002, inspired and guided development of Markdown language in 2002, and helped to lauch Reddit.com in 2005 (rewriting the codebase using web.py, which he created and open-sourced).
Aaron also bravely fought informational and political injustice. He became an early leader of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) in 2009, which funds uphill advocacy initiatives for fairer governance, and in 2010 he co-founded the Demand Progress organization which raises support for Internet transparency and freedom. Demand Progress played a critical role in averting passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), whose terms would have annihilated online free speech and the creative and communicative potential of sites like YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and others (and crippled web safety, useability, and growth prospects by breaking global DNS [2]).
Moved by extreme belief in the universal freedom to information which is unrestricted by greed, bias, or other short-sighted motives, Aaron attempted in 2010-11 to illegally collect numerous academic journals from JSTOR through MIT’s private network. He was charged with wire fraud and violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and faced up to 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, supervised release, and fines of up to $1 million [3]. Neither MIT nor JSTOR pursued prosection; charges came from the United States Attorney’s Office in Boston. Aaron’s vicious and controversial prosection preceded his suicide in 2013.
Rest in peace, Aaron. Your sacrifices have made countless lives much better.
[1]. on the significance of Creative Commons
[2]. https://circleid.com/pdf/PROTECT-IP-Technical-Whitepaper-Final.pdf
Justin Wong
Justin Wong is not an educator per se like most others here. But his achievements have taught fans the limitless potential of determination and mastery. He is a professional fighting game player who I came to know as an icon in the community of Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, my favorite video game.
In the early years of “Mahvel”, Justin was a regular finalist in tournaments. Despite being infamously unbeatable in the previous edition of the game series, Justin was often regarded as an underdog in Marvel 3. It’s quite an unfair game at times, and tactics to produce near-riskless victories were, even by its 2nd birthday in 2013, well-known. Many abused these strategies but Justin never (well, almost never) relented to join them.
(You may think, “that sounds like a bad game if it’s so unfair,” and you would be right. It has some other redeeming qualities which explain why I rate it a 9.9/10 overall.)
Justin played fair and generally relied on superior skill, making it harder for himself. Why? I believe it shows his stance (with which I agree) that the process of earning a victory is more important than the outcome of having one. Following from that creed, there is no point in grabbing low-hanging fruit.
Still, he often came out ahead. Not only that, he would often conjure some mystical force which allowed him to suddenly, in the most dire and hopeless moments, make the exact decisions and executions needed to maneuver an impossible event sequence and invent a win out of thin air. It has been dubbed the “Wong Factor.” Beholding the Wong Factor in Evolution 2013 and 2014 finals was like witnessing magic. I consider it a defining moment of my lifetime. The immaculate talent Justin displayed and the collective psychological inflection that the hoard of onlookers felt forever changed my notion of “impossible.”
Years later, I still replay Justin’s early-Mahvel-era matches. If he did that, what else might be possible that few believe in?
Incidentally, in the decade-plus and thousands of matches I have observed as a player and spectator, Justin Wong is the only player I have ever seen to attempt—let alone pull off—the same-side overhead mixup from the Evo 2013 clip linked above. It’s extremely risky—certain death if your adversary catches on. He did it twice as far as I know: once then against Flocker, and once more here in 2022 against Chris G, nearly 10 years later. Chris G is another Evo champion and multi-time finalist who is known for composure and defensive skill; Chris G blocks everything. The absurdness of attempting that mixup, twice, against these two titan-like players, including in the final rounds of the world’s largest tournament, waiting a decade in-between, and it actually succeeding both times, is just hilariously epic.
Tim Ferriss
Tim Ferriss does many things, but I am most grateful for his effort into The Tim Ferriss Show. Like Annie Rauwerda, Tim is one of the best at offering people fun ways to shed “unknown unknowns.” His podcasts are typically interviews/conversations and demonstrate considerable diversity in guest backgrounds. It has by far the highest-quality average episode of the podcasts I have tried.
What makes the podcast so good? A fine blend of: unusual and thought-provoking subject matter, great questions (often the same or variations—because they work well), focused conversions with few detours, a willingness to congratulate and empower rivals (the opposite is a red flag indicating selfish ulterior motives) and, often, sincerity that you’ll find in few other shows.
Tim is the author of several great books and has recommended others (both directly or by bringing on a guest who recommends one) that I have loved. A few noteworthy examples are Vagabonding by Rolf Potts and Anything You Want by Derek Sivers. His works tend to focus on performance optimization and, compared to alternatives in that genre, are generous in humor and good spirit. He is transparent about personal struggles, endeavoring not to come off as an “unflappable juggernaut” (his own great phrasing). That authenticity amounts to some fun and compelling thought adventures. Tim’s skillful wording, both in writing (see aforementioned example) and in discussions with podcastees, is a treat, and his zest for life is highly contagious. I recommend trying his podcast or blog if you haven’t already.
Paul Graham
Paul Graham (PG)’s brilliant and prolific rhetoric has nudged me to both contemplate more thoroughly and write more in public (sometimes at once, as you can see). PG has written a lot online and his essays constitute a trove of clear, logical, and practical thinking. Some of my favorites are How to Write Usefully, How to Do What You Love, and Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. I don’t know of another author having both the technical knowledge and appetite for dissecting psychology and behavior that PG does.
For the invention of Hacker News, a precious gem of the Internet and one of my most frequented sites, PG deserves many thanks. He is also well known for founding and raising YCombinator. I don’t tend to glorify venture capital, but some companies and nonprofits that YC has backed are pretty cool, like Reddit, Stripe, and 80,000 Hours.
Despite all of the success, PG gives the impression of being humble, compassionate, and eager to see others get theirs. I salute his commitment to improving broad quality of life through startup advising, readying Hacker News to become the epicenter of chivalrous and well-researched discussion that it is, and openly sharing his thoughtful excerpts with the world.
Terry Crews
Terry Crews hardly needs an introduction. Why is he here? Terry is very open about his own war against toxic aggression. His early life didn’t invite peace of mind (abusive father, football player, lauded for toughness, etc.), but it’s incredible who he has become nonetheless. He is not just nonviolent, he is a worldwide icon of self-reflection, wisdom, and courage.
Admitting fault is difficult, especially at the level of core identity. For him to voluntarily sacrifice toughness, a key ingredient in his recipe for fame and success, to align with higher ideals and eventually discover a greater happiness, is a real show of character.
Terry, like many I admire, has had plenty of chances to sell out but never does. He could have found other partners after his affair was discovered, without moving on from the habit of infidelity. He could have easily continued to live violently, since it’s encouraged as a football star. He has been offered an easier but less honorable life many times but chooses instead to be a leader and example for others, particularly for men who battle the instinct to act overly tough.
Joyce Kaufman
Joyce Kaufman is my grandma, who is also the kindest and most selfless person I’ve ever known. She lives in Elma, NY in the same ramshackled farmhouse where she raised my dad and his 5 siblings. If I had to summarize her favorite things in approximate order, they would be 1) hugs, 2) making people laugh, and 3) telling you all about how much she loved my grandpa, Sol.
Joyce has always done her best to provide for those around her, regardless of lineage or any other differences. She fostered many kids and pets throughout her adult life, both temporarily and indefinitely. My aunt Jessica and uncle Dan are two such kids, and I’ve only known them as family because that’s how Joyce treats everyone.
Years before I was born, she and grandpa would invite teenagers over from Buffalo inner-city group homes during the summers to play outside. The kids led troubled lives—some had earned prison sentences for heinous transgressions—but Joyce and Sol didn’t care. They put that stuff aside and gave them the chance at those times to be good guests and have fun. And that’s what always happened.
My grandpa suffered greatly from dementia later in life, and looking after him became a huge challenge and full-time duty for Joyce. She refused to send him away to assisted living. She valued being together with loved ones, and the decade of stress leading up to his passing was worth that.
She was my very first idol, before I realized it. I love you, grandma.