7.26.25 - Attention Is All You Need
Letter to Sofia and Arham from Paris
Bonjour Ami,
The older I get, the more I believe that everything meaningful in life is gated by a single bottleneck. A million dreams can keep you awake, but one constraint holds the key. Find it, and everything begins to move.
A bad life crisis ends in resignation. “I’ve worked too hard. It’s time to give it up. A good one sends you to Europe, not to escape, but to observe. To study how they live with beauty, leisure, and quiet dignity. Not that I’m in a crisis… I just have a wedding to attend and some remote-work embedded into my job.
Things are beautiful here. The buildings proclaim, “Greatness stood here.” Yet it’s not just focused on the past – as it’s not fully decayed, like so much of Rome. People also sit by the river, on top of bridges, under the tunnels with ivy growing off the side, and they kiss. Romance is built into the city.
But then I remember that even the most romantic places hide their dissonance. Paris dazzles on the surface, but beauty can mask the fractures underneath (Larry David suggests looking at a man’s wife to see if he has integrity). I think about the infidelity rate, and I remind myself that looks deceive. And yet, surface beauty still matters. Deep beauty is rare, self-fulfilling, and it transforms. But Paris makes a strong case that even shallow beauty, done right, can nourish the soul. I’m sure both kinds of beauty matter more than I admit.
Max lives in a truly quiet area. There are few cars and few tourists despite being minutes away from the Eiffel Tower. I noticed there are also no AC boxes blowing in the background. As we’ve discussed, surely this causes more deaths for old people, but the tradeoff is they probably sleep better and suffer less sound pollution. Andrej Karpathy might call this an improvement for the soul. On the other hand, the French tend to drink on a daily basis. I’m not sure if alcohol disrupts sleep more than noise. Maybe it balances out.
Every city lives by rules (spoken or unspoken). Tourists, often in negligence, float above them. But if you live there, the city starts to shape you. Paris invites an elegant essence. The people truly embody it. That elegance seeps into the gait of those who walk here. Into their taste, their sense of purpose, their freedoms.
New York has its own code: hustle. The city wakes before 6 a.m. Effort is measured in hours. Skyscrapers rise because ambition needs altitude and peaks. Paris, however, limits its buildings’ height. The constraint breeds its essence. In New York, delis and pizzerias are honest and world-class but ~rough. Here, even a corner boulangerie patisserie feels like an extension of the city’s aesthetic will.
You can feel what Parisians collectively attend to. How a croissant flakes, how linens hangs off the shoulder, how light fills a room.. In Paris, it’s seduced by form, texture, detail. The architecture spills into the street. Restaurants stretch onto cobblestones, people talk, watch, and linger. And what they watch is beautiful. The people. The buildings. Each other. A city in love with its reflection… but not in the way of selfies. They’re simply content in their beauty.
Cities are shaped by what people choose to see. And what they choose to ignore. Path dependence is real and culture has gravity. The place pulls you into its shape. Stronger cultural forces always overwrite weaker ones. Could a Parisian ever be at home in West Philly?
—
There is no freedom free’er than having the conviction to follow your dreams. Bison ranch wasn’t the end game. The end game is here and now. The end game is the 6 inches between our ears. Bison ranch is perhaps just a nicer environment to play.
Borrowing this from online: “male “healing” is actually about feeling power, agency, and capability.” Talking about feelings is pleasant, but true healing is found in depth. This belief is not from a theoretical, but a lived experience.
Ask a man what made him/her feel most accomplished in the past year, and you’ll uncover his priorities and his worldview.
On this trip, I’ve asked myself: why do I value ‘depth’ and ‘taste’ to such an extreme? It’s because of a feeling I get. How best to explain it…?
Well, how bland is a life without ‘taste’? For someone who’s developed it, I’d imagine painfully so.
A man loses his nose, and with it, flavor collapses into the flatness of five senses: salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. He drinks a Leffe beer and misses the faint whisper of vanilla. He eats but misses the experience.
(As a child, my sinuses were often congested, leaving me with a dulled sense of smell. By extension, I’m sure a muted palate as well. I still enjoyed the food, but not for its intricate flavors and aromas. My appreciation was driven more by sheer hunger after long days of physical activity.)
He dates, but doesn’t know what being deeply cared for feels like. He plays games, but never feels the thrill of real competition. It gets worse: he can’t even distinguish between extremes… He meets a 10x founder/engineer and can’t spot greatness. He stumbles into an incredible early-stage company but can’t read the signals. Can’t parse the SaaS metrics. Can’t smell opportunity. So he checks every thought through the filters of his more talented peers. Because he can’t trust his own instincts. It’s a feeling far scarier than lack of knowledge. Beneath it all was a strange cocktail of curiosity, guilt, and inferiority. For so long, I’ve been haunted by the question of taste.
This pernicious ‘feeling’ invaded many corners of my life. I felt it horribly in English class, when on my first read through I had glanced over the beauty in prose, intentional narrative perspective, and the author’s inner mind that Professor Egan would so passionately explain. It was only slightly softened by the ugly comfort of judgment that, unlike our classmates, at least I’m not majoring in English and still don’t get it on the second pass through.
The truth was that I didn’t believe I could quickly see what others could.
I felt it in my career most of all. Early on, I didn’t believe I could distinguish the categories or people that made a truly great Insight investment. While my closest friend raced ahead and realized he didn’t enjoy the rules of this game at Insight nor the company of its players, I was still reading the rulebook! Even in Thailand, where I trained in Muay Thai for the explicit purpose of being gritty, I couldn’t see the opening thread in the fight.
What is true freedom? Is it standing at the Sharpe Ratio? Sleeping lightly and waking joyfully? A buddhist presence? A connection with the “>”?
I wonder how much of what I’ve missed in life came down to something as simple as attention. Not intelligence. Not luck. Just the ability to notice and see what’s good and what’s meaningful. Taste without attention is impossible. Perspective without presence is shallow. The boatloads of dollars come to those with both good taste and lots of perspective. In most cases, simply surviving matters – returns from time in the game triumphs over most else.
But now that I’m finally starting to believe that I can be somebody, I want to play at the frontier.
—
I’m leaving for the wedding on Monday morning. Today, Maxime and I scoured thrift shops looking for a blazer and shoes to match the white pants I bought in Las Vegas. We searched for hours and hours in the dusty closets and tiny basements of the Vintage Parisian scene. There was no AC, very often no fans, and lots of mid-day heat. A half-day later, we found what we were looking for: a wonderful beige linen blazer that was light for the summer and versatile for travels. Depending on how you wear it, it passes for Americana or European summer. Shoutout to Maxime for waiting and weighing in on every option (a patient friend moment of epic proportions).
At a nearby shop, I picked up a pair of Italian suede summer shoes. Even at 50% off, they were a hefty price to pay. I’d seen them the day before on my way to see Amit at a park and spent 30 minutes going back and forth before deciding to pass. But my mood changed today. I weighed it differently. I considered how bad my outfits looked with the ONs. I thought about wearing these back in the States. About how showing up underdressed to someone’s wedding just feels disrespectful.
In both the personal and the professional, value accrues from how long + how closely we’re willing to look.
Maybe the bottleneck isn’t in the choices themselves (cities, clothes, ideas) but in the attention we give them. This year, I’ve started paying closer attention… to what I value, what I overlook, and what I quietly fear in myself. The growth’s been slow, but real. Taste starts with attention. Taste begins with attention. And attention, I think, is where all beautiful things begin. Maybe even freedom.
A plus,
Sourish