Hi, this is Grace. Each month, I talk about what I tried and stumbled upon as a creator. I share exciting findings and honest learning along the way.
My husband’s new book: Inside the Machine Learning Interviews
My husband’s book is finally out! You can order it on Amazon.
In the past decade, we have shared similar career paths: we went to the same graduate school, worked at the same fintech company in Manhattan, the same retail giant, and the beloved social network with a bluebird. We also co-founded a company together. I have admired his excellence since the beginning.
In the past 5 months, I have watched how much effort he has put into this book. Now I am extremely happy and proud for him to see it released, featured as the #1 New Release, and receiving rave feedback.
Even though I had published two books prior to his book release, he has his own way of writing, formatting, and marketing his book. As a bystander, I have learned a lot from him.
For example, despite having no presence on Twitter, he successfully launched the book on LinkedIn because he had a lot of connections in the AI/ML domain.
Another example is how he formatted the book. Despite my influence to use the MacOS app Pages (as seen in my article How to Publish Technical Books With Pages), he did not use it 🤷♀️. Instead, he bought an Office subscription and used Word. It turned out that the printed copy looks amazing using Microsoft Word.
As a creator, the biggest challenge is finding joy in the process. If you focus solely on the end goal, the results may often be disappointing.
He always says he wrote the book for himself and his colleagues. If each of them could get a free copy, he would meet his goals. As a result, he not only met his goals, but his post went viral on LinkedIn for weeks! Many of his former colleagues, including Senior Staff and Principal MLEs, sent personal messages expressing how useful and well-written the book is.
Twitter is great for breaking news as its news cycle lasts about 1 to 2 days. However, there is a significant decay in impressions after day 1. On the other hand, LinkedIn has a much longer cycle - weeks.
An Article Went Viral
Last week, I wrote the article Printing Money: The Absolute Privilege of U.S. Dollar in the context of the debt ceiling standoff in the US.
This is the piece that I always wanted to write, but it took me a while to structure my thoughts. I hope it summarizes my understanding of money and the US dollar.
After many months, this article became the second one that went viral on HackerNews.
The topic of money is always sensitive and controversial. Everyone seems to have their own understanding, just like how Morgan Housel said in his book Psychology of Money:
The economists found that people’s lifetime investment decisions are heavily anchored to the experiences those investors had in their own generation—especially experiences early in their adult life.
If you grew up when inflation was high, you invested less of your money in bonds later in life compared to those who grew up when inflation was low. If you happened to grow up when the stock market was strong, you invested more of your money in stocks later in life compared to those who grew up when stocks were weak.
The economists wrote: “Our findings suggest that individual investors’ willingness to bear risk depends on personal history.”
I had comments like how money deployed to the US is used to buy human labor. I believe it is a personal choice to keep resenting capitalism or to understand money and avoid situations where you are being taken advantage of. I also believe that optimism makes people happy.
Niche Website Update
After seeing many months-old niche websites take off like hockey sticks, I found that mine grew slowly. However, I am glad that it did not stall.
I have noticed that the position has been going up week by week, and clicks have been growing as well. The pace is modest, but it is still progress.
The growth in performance comes from one of the 32 articles, which was also the one that went viral on Reddit. Therefore, I am guessing that when evaluating the weight of links, Google also considers the performance of the link on social networks.
Although there are competing articles for that particular piece, engagements on Reddit may boost its position on the SERP.
The same thing happened with my Medium article, Printing Money. I was surprised that traffic came from Google on Day 1. Can articles index that fast? I am guessing that the link on HackerNews may have helped.
Writing A Novel
I am currently in the process of writing a novel. Over the past few years, I have made several attempts to write one. I wrote storylines and shared them with my close friends, but they did not like them 😅. So I abandoned those efforts.
Recently, I came up with a storyline that is fictional, but it incorporates many details from my true experiences. Therefore, I feel much more confident in articulating the thought processes of the protagonist.
I did try to write the novel outline with ChatGPT, but I did not like the end result. My conclusion is that the plot that AI can come up with is a mixed result of other people's work, and it may not appear creative.
I will share more on this novel project later as I go.
Traveling for the Entire Summer
I will be traveling in the next two months. As a matter of fact, I’m writing you this letter on the plane.
My kids are officially out of school. It is the first year we are able to take the entire summer off. It has been our dream to do it, and we finally got to do it. Sometimes it sounds too good to be true.
We will travel to a few countries, visit families, and understand this world better. I love how Ali Wong said in her book Dear Girls:
Studying in a developing/third-world country is way more intense and formative than studying in a first-world fancy country. It makes you so much more open-minded, adaptive, and confident. You become so much more real. When you have to shit on two little bricks into a hole the size of a tennis ball at an elementary school in the countryside, or sleep in a farmer’s yurt after not bathing for five days, you become a much more easygoing person. It teaches you to value experience over material things real fast. And living in a different part of the world can sometimes present the opportunity to take on a new personality.
Her way of seeing travel has already helped me, especially when my kids were grossed out upon seeing cockroaches in Hong Kong. I had to reassure them that cockroaches are common and they don't bite. 😅
(By the way, I just finished reading Ali Wong’s book. I could vividly imagine her voice while reading her words. It is so raw, so real, and so funny. I enjoyed reading it.)
That’s all for this issue! Thanks for reading. If you have any questions, I would love to hear from you. Just reply to this email.
God willing, until next time! ✌️