Writing Blogs: Another example for Paul Graham's Wealth Generating Theory

Paul Graham

Recently I have read Paul Graham's How to Make Wealth. From which I found Paul's theory really makes tons of sense. Briefly,

To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage.

For startup companies, because of the smallness it's relatively easy to measure individual's performance while this is almost impossible for gigantic institutions; number of users(copies of product) levered the wealth the company made, from selling one copy to a thousand that's a thousand times leverage, while from a million to two millions is merely twice, yet the latter goal is much harder to achieve.

It's said "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail to you." I tried to explain everything I can think of with the theory these days, and amazingly it always works! Applied to hedge fund industry I'm currently in: hedge fund manager's performance can be directly measured by his/her P&L in an almost violent way, and leverage here is AUM(asset under management). Similarly, number of read and subscriptions and number of post perfectly fit the pattern for the case of blog writing.

Nathan Marz

Unlike Paul Graham, Nathan Marz is much less popular, but like Paul, Nathan is great guy, and also maintains great blog. Nathan is the main contributor to Storm, a open-source distributed real-time computation system for "big data", distinguished users of Storm include Twitter, Groupon, Taobao, etc. Needless to say I know Nathan because of Storm, but here I want to make an AD for one of my friends, he ran a financial big data platform startup Bonafidey Analytics which also built up their infrastructure based on Storm. 

In Nathan's latest post Break into Silicon Valley with a Blog, he claimed:

A blog has one of the highest ROI's of anything you can do.

First of all, I want to make clear that I do NOT like silicon valley at all. I like NYC because there’s more to do on a Friday night than go to the Pizza Hut in Sunnyvale and you may even be able to find a date with a girl whose name is not Siri. Please don't give wrong.

However, I started to agree what Nathan said. And I will credit his latest post as my final motivation to launch this site. Writing itself is a cool thing, much cooler than those Brooklyn vegans refuse to offer their cats meat, especially when more and more people are losing the ability to write article that is over two hundreds words. Writing helps people consolidate their long-term memories, which is official term for 'learning'. The other thing I like writing is it's linear, and requires little bit of effort. I like linear stuff, say running and reading, not too fast thought. Rush screw things up. Publishing is another pleasant thing, human beings need audience, and that's the fragile part of genius. Blogging is the combination of writing and publishing, and possibly interaction with readers, if these three factors are NOT highly correlated, you can expect a nonnegligible aggregation.

Besides, blog can 

increase your luck surface area

Oh I'm a big believer of luck. Fundamentally I think to achieve something good you need to work hard, to achieve something extremely good, what you need is some extra luck.

Torch Planet

July 25th, 2013. Birth of my blog.

I did some research among three popular blog hosts: Wordpress, Blogger and Tumblr. You can pretty much tell my choice by reading this post. Wordpress sounds professional, but setting it up is little involved. I have Tumblr account(yeah it has been a while since I was a teenager). I still like the design of Tumblr, what stops me is the notorious searchability of Tumblr, the philosophy there is somewhat anti-blog, meaning people are NOT intended to let others see their post. The other reason of choosing Blogger(well it's more like my conspiracy) is that Blogger is powered by Google, so if you do a google search for some keywords, you would have a better chance to find my posts.

About the blog title: it simply means awesome in the local dialect of the town I grew up.

This blog would be bi-language: English and Chinese. The rule is writing technical stuff in English and personal random thoughts in Chinese. Because I assume if you are interested in technical posts, you must be able to read English; if you are interested in the stuff other than tech about me, you have a high probability of understanding 中文. At last, please forgive my poor English, if there is any grammar error and I'm sure it is please correct me.