on Naming your Projects

As an aspiring polymath, you’ll soon run out of books and courses if you really wish to explore the intersection of multiple domains based on your current intellectual requirements.

That is a great problem to have and the solution is to transition into the mindset of chunking your learnings into projects rather than subjects.

I’ll recommend maintaining a sense of pragmatism (incentivize application of what you’re learning in the foreseeable future (with non-pedagogical intent)) and haste during your initial iterations. Perfection (The will to tend towards it, rather..) can follow once the prototype is principally sound.

You may expect to start and abandon a whole bunch of projects over the course of your life.

The one definitive thing that will help you maintain a sense of responsibility and mitigate the impending abstract dumping ground is to name your projects well.

I personally like to use references spanning across science fiction, mathematics, mythology, astronomy or whatever’s been my muse recently. The more cryptic the better.

Do not use a vanilla name, it gets boring very quickly.

Atleast during the incubation, choosing something that enlivens your intellect, has been a successful variable (not completely independent as, if I’m naming it, it must be confounding with my intent to follow through diligently) in dictating my will to work on it.

For instance, imagine creating an agentic AI that mentors humans in their journey towards learning to manipulate matter and energy in an immersive simulation, who would you rather choose:

• Morpheus, or ..
• Agent Smith?

I know which one I’m going for.

Post Script

A handy piece of advice: imagining being a supervillain helps cook up creative concoctions fairly rapidly.