What I Wrote in 2024
I published 36 essays, drafted more, and found my will.
This year, it became evident that doing and observing interesting things was necessary to write interesting essays.
My favorite essays, published and private, were written during ‘life experiments’ where I both did and observed.
'How I Stopped Producing Good Mathematics' was a diagnostic report written after I troubleshooted my struggles in some engineering classes. 'Lessons from Biking on Campus' wrote itself six weeks into my no-bus, only-bike commuting-code this past fall. 'Reflection as a Scouting Optimizer' was my attempt to outline and re-purpose the exact process through which I became decent at watching football. 'Go Slow. Be Honest. Pursue Epiphanies' was written during a 14-hour drive back home from New Orleans, where I had spent a week volunteering alongside mates from Engineers Without Borders.
Given the invasive nature of these experiments, I had no option but to write personally meaningful and interesting essays.
James Sommer makes a similar point, arguing that intending to write allows us find life more interesting:
You should write because when you know that you’re going to write, it changes the way you live.
That’s the promise: you will live more curiously if you write. You will become a scientist, if not of the natural world than of whatever world you care about. More of that world will pop alive. You will see more when you look at it.
When we reconcile Sommer’s revelation [write to make life interesting] and ours [make life interesting to write], the charge to become a good book to write a good book becomes somewhat palatable. If we live interesting lives, the stories we tell will be much more interesting.
With this basic understanding, here are some ways I intend to perform my writing adventures this year.
Run more experiments.
Meticulously document all experiments.
Share experiments with friends, trusted folks and collect feedback.
Publish technical essays in mathematics, engineering, and, really, whatever I learn in class.
Read with the intention to write or provide summaries – for friends who may benefit from a recommendation or myself.
Before I share a selection of my published essays from 2024, I want to investigate one common theme prominent in them.
Some weeks ago, I began to wonder what exactly it was that ran through my mind when I decided to smash the publish button. It had dawned on me that my motivations to write were very starkly different from my motivations to publish.
I considered and pitched several essays to my school paper, but could not bring myself to offer any draft for publication.
There were essays I wrote only to publish.
There were essays I wrote, allowed to sit for months, then suddenly decided 'oh yeah, I want the world to read this now.'
So, I wondered – Why do I publish the essays I publish? So far, I have managed two reasons:
1. Whenever I find myself repeatedly rambling about a certain issue, it's time to publish.
There’s a certain matter; I talk about this matter often; I incoherently talk about this matter often. So, sit down, gather my thoughts, research, write a less incoherent take, and hit publish to stress-test my findings.
2. Whenever I am taking on a particularly herculean experiment which might benefit from some public charge, it's time to publish.
I once told someone that I publish to psych myself into doing things. To raise the stake or accountability necessary to execute. To create some public burden to deliver. But most importantly, to culture the subconscious thought that allows me find connections in everything else the world has to offer.
A Selection of Essays from 2024
I think I’ve managed to curate a cool selection of words this year, but I can do better.
Most of my essays, including this one, were written in long, focused sprints across one or two days. If I managed to take a break, it often meant the essay wasn’t cooked enough to be written. The major themes of my essays were writing, disconnection and optimization.
I’ll now categorize and share snippets of my published essays using the following categories: Getting Good, Disconnection, Football (Scouting), Football (Frameworks).
Stay for the stray notes at the end!
Getting Good
How I Stopped Producing Good Mathematics
"When I first drafted this essay, I arrived at a different conclusion ... that, like my grandfather, I might have developed a fondness for seeing or helping people find and work through their own passions. There's evidence in my current work and interests that this is true – or at least close. However, I found the aforementioned – cheap motivation – to be much more potent, simpler, and revealing about my current struggles with producing good mathematics."
Lessons from Biking on Campus
"After suffering at the hands of my college’s transit system during my first year, I decided enough was enough. I had had enough of the delayed buses, the in-bus awkwardness, and the irregular timings that left me 30 minutes from home most evenings. Even if these were resolved, I particularly disliked not being able to carry momentum from my previous engagement into the next."
Reflection as a Scouting Optimizer
"One goal of reflection is to unravel epiphanies ('aha!' moments) and gain deeper insights from your experiences. Reflection involves discerning what you are currently experiencing or have experienced. This can be achieved through various methods, such as writing, pair-scouting (similar to pair-programming), and sharing your work online.
Reflecting on these experiences with the intent to obtain meaning allows you to recover any misplaced ideas and unravel epiphanies. You can identify patterns, make connections, and derive valuable insights that might otherwise go unnoticed."
Go Slow. Be Honest. Pursue Epiphanies.
"When we keep unraveling epiphanies, it is a sign that whatever conclusion we previously drew was incomplete or misconstrued. You, in fact, did not understand it – at least as well as you previously thought. We become like the toddler experimenting and being awed the simpler wonders of the world: that the kettle is hot and that a ball bounces and that the staircase catches us while going up, but not while coming down.
In this state, we are especially vulnerable and receptive to the world’s gifts."
Disconnection
Phones – a College Epidemic
"In college, students are patients and the phone our servitor. We have deferred all our trust to it. It walks us, dines with us, entertains us, wakes us up, sends notes on our behalf, spares us from exchanging artifacts, and is – itself – invincible to even the most uptight professor.
We have given up agency to the clouds and become feeble – and unable to wash ourselves without it singing in the background.
It has become the essential worker – needing to be shielded and to shield others from our demise. Our head stooped. Mind numbed. Eyes averted. Face concealed. The world is now safe from us."
Am I a writer or do I just happen to write?
"At the start of my gap year, I had deemed my portfolio too meagre to compete with those who adorned the label. I was in my first gig. I hadn’t started college yet. My only publications were in self-launched blogs. I was spontaneous, writing typically in response to crisis, rarely habitually. So I dubbed myself a ‘budding writer.’ I plastered the label across all my social pages – almost saying, ‘Please forgive me if you don’t find my writing sufficient.’ A pitiful disclaimer."
On friends
With pain, I don’t know his…
What it despairs,
How to feed it,
When to, What to.
I am helpless to its motion,
Unable to play the other part of the dance.
I am and become prey to the cruelty of the forsaken one.
I remain alone.
Dissolving my year-long 'writer's block'
"It’s been 11 months since I last posted on Substack.
Across that time, I’ve started, stopped, and archived ~20 draft posts, renamed this publication, launched two new publications, deleted two of those, joined my school paper, blanked and been unable to curate any meaningful piece, started a football blog, published six articles across its first 10 days then plateaued since, and deferred publishing one investigative report I completed 9 months ago."
Football (Frameworks)
What Can Scouts Learn from Crawling Plants?
"...I have spent the past few weeks musing about the distinction between a tendency, a preference, and an appearance when scouting. In other words, what does it (or should it) mean when I say a player 'tends to' vs 'likes to' vs 'appears to.'
I finally have an analogy to share, and it involves crawling plants."
What Should We Expect from Head Coaches?
"Talent ID isn't just about being spot-on in one's assessments — it's about trust and appreciation. The meteoric rise of phenoms like Lionel Messi isn't solely because someone was 'right' about their promise – but because someone recognized and valued their unique abilities. This appreciation, rather than mere validation, is what nurtures superstars. Athletes who achieve greatness are often those whose talents are not only acknowledged but also treasured within an ideal environment."
Reverse-Engineering: How Players and Teams Poke Football's Margins
"Somewhere, perhaps in a nondescript building, the future of football is being conceptualised. The brightest footballing minds in top academies are not just studying the present; they’re reverse engineering it. They are predicting, planning, and preparing for tomorrow's meta."
Precision Play: Features of a Great Sho(o)t(er)
"Football is a low-scoring sport. Players receive few – maybe none – great shooting opportunities each game. Hence, they receive even fewer – maybe none – chances in their ideal spot.
Players who manage to log significant tallies across a campaign have many ideal spots, many ways of getting into their ideal spot, and/or many ways of deceiving the opposition goalie in their ideal spot.
It's just permutations."
Non-Trivial Scouting Cues
"At any point in the calendar year, coaches wield the most information about their players on the pitch. They train with them every week. They receive feedback from the medical team, the video team, the other coaching staff, the players themselves, the opposition analysts, and the club's executives.
Everyone else, even some of these aforementioned parties, has just press conference, club statements, and the 90 minutes we see some players on the pitch. However tempting it might be to draw irretrievable conclusions, remember that you are under-equipped."
Football (Scouting)
Archiving as a Scouting Tool
"The entire premise of identifying talent and projecting potential is grounded in principles of archiving. Scouts take in new information – a player in a specific environment – and retrieve historical or heuristic references to map their prospects. This process is typically facilitated by a multi-modal archive: physical notes, memory (however infallible it might be), intuition, and references."
Avoiding the Description Trap when Scouting
"Effective analysis should unravel and simplify, not complicate.
Effective scouting should yield predictions or prescribe solutions, not just describe.
Public analysis, however, tends to elevate description to the level of insight, occasionally veering into fiction. I can be guilty of this myself."
Why Focusing on Strengths Leads to Better Scouting Outcomes
"Teams sports are inherently synergistic. Collective effort often surpasses the sum of individual contributions, allowing us to compensate individual weaknesses through the strengths of others. This dynamic means that a player's unique strengths can significantly enhance overall team performance, even if they have areas needing improvement. A scouting process that prioritizes strength identification and benchmarking returns higher potential recruits."
Projections: Manchester United's Amad Diallo
"Role Adaptability: Possesses the ability to operate effectively across the front line or from midfield in a facilitator role. His skill in providing rhythm and connecting pre-box play makes him an ideal support for more dynamic attackers.
Tactical Flexibility: Peaks as a 'poker starter', offering any manager tactical flexibility (see Manchester City's Bernardo Silva). His ability to adapt and simulate different possession and offensive dynamics is a strength."
Projections: Mali U-17's Sékou Koné
"It’s easy to call a player good. Anyone can do that. In fact, depending on your definition of good one might argue that every professional player is good. It is not easy to tell in which environment or when a player's goodness will manifest. This is where the coaches, scouts, and recruitment specialists earn their buck. Sékou Koné has joined Manchester United. 9 months ago, I saw a few tapes on him, made a snap-judgment, and shared it on my account. This essay will discuss how I arrived at the take, imply why time-locked projections are valuable, and expose faults in my process."
Important notes I couldn’t fit in:
Here's an experiment I am currently undertaking: Every evening since turning 21 in late November, I have free-written a letter to myself using futureme.org. Each letter is set to be delivered exactly one year from the day it was written. By this time next year, I'll wake up everyday to a new letter from past-Joel. I am only a month into this, but it has already been a mind-bending experience. If you would like some more details about why I began this experiment, shoot me a message, and I'll be happy to chat.
I haven’t implemented a system for receiving feedback on essays before I publish. I understand why this is important, though, so I intend to find writing-accomplices this year.
I got my first paid subscriber a couple months ago. I’ll admit, my first thought was to cancel the subscription and process a refund. Grateful.
I want to write more memoir-style essays. The truth is, until recently, my affairs weren’t rich enough to reliably write non-fiction that weren’t tied to football. This is no longer the case, and I’m grateful: I am taking more risks, doing more experiments, and finding love in all things.
capedcorners.substack.com is now also capedcorners.com
Happy new year Joel! Here's to a year of taking more risks and finding love in all of our actions.