From Tokyo, Japan.

Reflections on Travel

### Reflections on Travel

I’m currently in Tokyo and taking some time to reflect on the past 6 months. 

Life has been tough recently and although it has been only 24 hours since I arrived, it has nonetheless been a rejuvenating and beautiful time. It’s usually the start of something new that brings the greatest amount of growth. This experience has been no different. That said, I felt unusually compelled to write around the reasons for my rejuvenation because I love travel and what it means to be on the road. 

In this case, I get to be truly alone. Yet still in the company of others. I get time where I’m outside of my own cultural boundaries, where I can see new things, make new connections, and relate to what it means to be human through the lens of another culture.

It also allows time to be, now without expectation. This trip has been one of the first where I don’t need to achieve - to do, or to create. That’s very rewarding for someone who drives their whole life through the above. 

To see the world more gentle, to see another people, to eat and drink that which isn’t familiar (or perhaps is, but is not authentic in another context) is highly refreshing. Ability to observe almost goes back to a childlike quality.

It also gives an opportunity for reflection. In my case this has been extremely painful but much needed. The silence helps you speak to yourself. Don’t block it out with noise and activity. Don’t let action drive out thought. This is a note to myself, present and future. 

Travel is also an interesting time to reflect around meaning and purpose. I’m currently questioning the meaning of faith and the role of God in life (Benedict de Spinoza shares many of my thoughts here). I’m also questioning what’s next in my career and relationships, where both have changed rapidly in a short amount of time.

There’s a lot to explore here but I’m increasingly convinced to let go of what makes me think I’m doing the right thing, and let my intuition, or inner feeling, drive my direction. Macro and micro. You might think this is obvious but you might be surprised about how driven you are by the former. I know I am. 

I’m sure more thoughts will follow but ultimately through years spent away from home, I’ve learned that travel is all about you, yet it’s not at all about you. Living that distinction first hand is what makes it so great. 

And how we are becoming the commodies we create.

Product

A story about working through fear and what it taught me.

Desire, Risk & Carving Through the Sky


### Desire, Risk & Carving through the Sky

Skydiving is a mystical sport, sometimes seeming a little out of reach for most. Too crazy or too expensive. I couldn't do that. Maybe it’s one for the bucket list. When I talk to people about doing the sport, they either give these comments or they become childlike and ecstatic but when it comes to turning that excitement into their first jump, it’s usually cold feet.

Why reject yourself from one of most special experiences you could have in this life? It’s a chance to be a little more than human, captured in a 60 second fall towards the earth.

The answer is fear.

Since hitting some sort of relative awareness through my teens, I've always had an interesting relationship with fear. This was likely the main motivator when I signed up to to do a static line course (the original method to learn how to skydive, still performed by the army in the UK) with no previous experience or knowledge of the sport. It was a daydream turning itself into reality. I had so much desire to try something that I didn't feel fear.

Until the day. Surprisingly to me, when I showed up to the 'DZ' (the hangar where the plane takes off and where you usually land after the jump), skydiving simultaneously became both the worst and best thing I decided to do. In the face of uncertainty, the unbreakable excitement I had for the weeks before was replaced by an irreplaceable dread of actually doing what I said I was going to do. Worse, I convinced my hesitant best friend to join me in both learning, and jumping. So throughout the day I had to pretend my uncomprimising optimism hadn’t faltered.

It would be reminiscent to recall the day and its details, however, it essentially was a course that told us everything that could go wrong, how to fix it and also how to (in theory) deal with all the tasks of the jump, most of which were chronically under explained, since you had zero experience doing anything they told you.

Then the actual jump. Quietly hoping that it would be called off because of sunset or bad weather, it wasn’t. So we got ready. This is the point where you begin feeling like an underprepared astronaut, culminating in a walk out to a small Cessna plane in your lame jumpsuit and massive parachute. It's an alien experience from here on out. On the journey up a beautiful sunset was somewhat calming until the jump-master (leading instructor in this case) opened the door . Then you realise you have *never been in a airbourne plane with the door open*.

It's very noisy, and windy at this point. Being the tallest, and heaviest, of our group of optimistic imbociles, I was the last student to jump. There’s something quite strange about seeing the dread on the little pale face of your best friend, before he jumps straight into the ether. Not much time to think about it though as the instructor points to you to get ready. I remember quite clearly the mutter of ‘I can’t do it’ to Simon, the instructor, as I crawled across the Cessna. Hoping he would save me from the situation I found myself in. His response? ‘You can’, followed by a laugh. I supposed that was enough. 

So here I was, prime position. My head in the plane, and my legs hanging out of it. There's nothing quite like knowing there is 10,000ft of air beneath your feet, with nothing inbetween or stopping you from falling except the friction of your ass on the floor of the plane.

This is where your monkey mind starts to take over. Once you are alone at the door, the first thing to leave you is the theory that you thought you knew. Despite conceptualising the feat for months (on conceptualising what you can, through Youtube videos), doing the course on the day and saying you were ready. You wern't. Sure, theory provided a map, and prepared you somewhere in your brain. However, in reality it was all instinct. Looking right where the instructor pointed me to look, I think something akin to 'fuck it'. One, Two, Push.

That’s it. You can't go back. The virgin feeling of freefall is like, what I imagine, returning to the womb or being caught in a tornado would feel like. The moment in an awk dream in which you wake up from falling, except you don’t jolt yourself awake. After a few moments of sensory overload, before your brain can make sense of the situation, the parachute does its job, and one regains control - slowly figuring out how to fly a canopy then deciding upon a path towards landing. Another new and scary experience.

After managing to avoid the sheep with my feet gently touching the ground, the adrenaline continued to flow. I was hooked. So was my friend Patrick - at least for the 15 minutes he wanted to jump again (until the adrenaline ran out and he didn’t). So, as an impatient individual, I decided to do what a young university student should be doing - saving all of his money to blow on an even more expensive, accelerated skydiving course in a sunny skies of the Algarve, Portugal. This is where I really started to learn.

After putting down all my hard earned cash working in the Apple Store alongside my 80-hour study weeks for my architecture degree, I skipped my graduation with a bout of nonchalant, and flew to the Algarve. I realised soon after that the risk was not only in the task itself (which inherently is actually quite low risk due to, among other things, strict regulation) but in the possibility of a failing tests - the worst possible outcome in the mind of a conditioned twenty year old who spent the last three years of his life doing everything he could to over-achieve.

To explain simply, to become a skydiver you must get your license. To get your license, you are placed in a series of 8 tests or 'levels', that get progressively more difficult and test your ability to be stable in the air. I progressed swiftly though the first few but momentum soon ground to a halt and with the thought of failure, came failure. I jumped, but I was unable to fly. I kept pushing, repeating. To no avail. I ran out of time, money and perhaps most importantly, enthusiasm. I actually learned here that I didn't know how to fail or how to recover from set-backs.

After being sad for a while, I became infatuated. Not even with the idea of being a skydiver, but of overcoming a failure. It might have been the scariest thing I’ve ever done but jumping out of a plane wasn’t nearly as scary as giving up or failing, twice.

This infactuation, however, had to be balanced with my other desire to become a great architect. This brought me to Barcelona, to China to practice my profession. Once I accrued enough experience (and cash) it brought me through India, then LA. 

This required frugality. And creativity. To make money I taught economics to Chinese teenagers, and a presenter of infomercials on Chinese Amazon. I hope no one I know ever sees the videos. Once I arrived in LAX, I once slept in a bus station in the middle of Bakersfield in California, and when I tried to do it another night, got kicked out.

This taught me the nature of desire and risk. It was exhilerating.

The daydreams. The realisation of those daydreams. The love of the sport. The lucid nature of staying up late. The backpacking. The people met along the way.

I wanted it more than anything. I couldn't give up. I couldn't stop thinking about it. It couldn't help itself but come up in conversation with others. Talking about it with everyone. Writing it down. Then, when the moment came, making it happen (perhaps with a lot of suffering, perhaps not). This suffering is nothing in the later feeling of mastery, or at least achievement.

In hindsight, I could have waited until I was a little older with a little more cash. Yet there’s nothing like an adventure that is above your means, your experience, and your ability. One where you have to sacrifice, risk (both finance and mental alienation from failure) and become better, in order to succeed. I’m confident that without a obsessive-compulsion to achieve that which I dreamed, that I would not have had the journey I did. This pursuit is what gave me meaning in life, and the desire to push myself. 

I still believe that for any long term pursuit of meaningful reward, I believe it is better to get the rewards from risk earlier in life. As the earlier you earn these rewards, the longer you get to enjoy them, and the change they instill in you has more time to compound into something greater than the reward itself. To this day I still reap the rewards of overcoming fear. Everything that is slighly scary can be made less so through the perspective of what it takes to jump from a plane for the first time.

I also learned that you can do anything if you are prepared to deal with the trade-offs. From China, to India to backpacking across Southern California and the connection with those along the way (an extreme oversimplification of one of the most transformative and exceptional years of my life). To win big, you must be prepared to fail hard. If it’s within your means - you are doing it wrong. Yet winning often means you will lose elsewhere. That's okay if you are aware.

Perhaps the only thing I would change, though, is that I went the full way with a friend by my side. There wasn’t many feelings like the drive home with my friend Patrick after our first jump. Perhaps it really is true that happiness is only real when shared.

Beliefs are the core of who we are. Here are some of my beliefs. Updated periodically.

Beliefs


### Beliefs

Beliefs are important.

Everything is driven by the force of evolution, the greatest force in the universe.

- As human beings (the most consious force of life that we are currently aware), our imperative is to shape the world to our liking, and any consequence of that is an outcome of evolution (not bad).
- Evolution communicates through iteration, and iteration leads to innovation (new things). Bad iterations (bad things) can’t be stopped. But good iterations (good things) overcome bad over time.
- Innovation is essentially optimisation leading to an outcome of more being done with less, and thus our time is currently best spent in raising the ceiling of human progress, not the floor.
- Raising the floor will eventually erase all objective poverty from the world, but never relative poverty. There will always be a heirarchy.
- Unfortunately, at least for now, the nature of happiness is largely driven by social comparison so

Human experience is not base reality, and as a result we can not come to absolute conclusions about truth.
- The human experience is only a particular interface that picks up a small portion of reality, therefore we cannot grasp reality through our own observation.
- The things we believe are often wrong (as proven by history), and we are not even close to asking the right questions.
- Our definitions of consiousness might tend towards a truth, but consiousness is only one interface for interacting with the universe.
- Science and religion are pointing to the same thing, despite seemingly being at odds.
- Out of all the interrogatives (what, which, when, where, who, whom, whose, why, whether and how), what and why are the two that are most important as they relate how we interpret meaning.
- 80% of meaning comes from 20% of these interrogatives!
- Science seeks to answer ‘what’, religion seeks to answer ‘why’.
- Therefore it is as important to be curious about why, as it is about what.

Life is a ponzi scheme & everything a scam
- A ponzi scheme is defined as an investment scheme that pays existing investors with new investors.
- Humans are constructed on the will to meaning (as per Victor Frankl), and meaning in life is dependent on the investment into creating new things (children, objects, ideas).
- So the only thing to do in the end is grow, enjoy that growth, and pass that growth onto others so that they can repeat the cycle in a higher plane of being.

The greatest period of architecture (by modern standards) was the Europe in the late 19th century.
- We were able to take millenia of architectural wisdom and apply it collectively. Since the introduction and development of Modernism, this is far from the case today.
- The consequences of this period of building were also extraordinarily democratic, in our ability to build equitably, with speed, for the most populated cities.
- We were able to take greatest advantage of venacular construction and materiality, in a way that was greatest for quality of life & relationship to the built environment.
- The average lifespan of a building today is 30 years, yet there are more homes in England today which were built before 1900, than any other era.
- Our goal should be to understand the principles that embodied this period and evolve them through contemporary technology.
- One of these principles is in the idea of Design Driven Development, where there is equal spread over the creative, technical and economic facets of the built environment. All in one package.
- Another one of these is in open-sourcing architectural patterns, so that no two buildings need to be designed independently.
- True sustainability is hollistic & most measures and ideals we have around sustainability are wrong.
- Sustainability is embodied. The thing in question is made from materials that contain a neutral or positive amount of carbon
- Sustainability is operational. The thing in question runs neutral or positive in its carbon consumption.
- Sustainability is ecological. The thing in question has a positive or neutral effect on ecology.
- Sustainability is social. The thing in question is loved, so it is maintained.
- Sustainability is economic. The thing in question adds, and continues to add wealth to society after its inception.

The goal of life is love, and love is freedom.
- Great individuals (in both life and work) should be empowered to exercise their judgement, and your goal should be to interact and grow alongside great individuals.
- This will bring on mistakes, but likely less mistakes than if judgement is controlled by one person.
- You can take all that misdirected micromanaging (worry) time, and put it into positively reinforcing activities.
 
- China is a massive blind spot in the West, and we’re going to pay for it.
- The future of work is both remote and asyncronous.
- As covered previously, evolution is the greatest force in the universe, and evolution tends towards optimisation.
  Remote work is a massive optimisation on work in general, both from a time (productivity) perspective as well as an economic and environmental perspective.
- For it’s downsides, we are in early days and it is only going to 10x in terms of experience (as it has the past 10).

Smaller teams are better, so keep things as small as you can for as long as you can.
- Faster decisions, fewer meetings, more fun.
- Can grow faster as individuals as constantly stretched.
- No room for mediocre people (for the above reasons).
- With technology, a lot can be done with very little. This is increasingly the case. Entire products with millions of users have been built with teams that can be counted on one hand.
- You can have your cake and eat it, meaning you can achieve everything you want to.
- The only caveat is that you can’t have it all at once and the desire will take on a different form that you imagined it to.

Most human problems stem from issues in communication.
- There is always room for new products that iterate and evolve how we communicate, making it better, faster and cheaper to do so.
- In the past I have chosen not to speak, because I thought it was better to be quiet than misunderstood. Now I think the opposite.
- Being wrong is good, especially when there is a proposal (or it reveals a proposal) for a better way.


Things I have an hunch about, but am not yet sure:

- Augmented and Mixed Reality will be the dominant computing force for consumer tech within the next 5-10 years (not VR or personal computing), simply because it solves the majority of problems people have with current technology (it takes away from their ‘real’ life).
- Money is collective communication and a means to an end. All economics are laughable in time due to the creation of wealth by society. Therefore raw ideas are the true currency of humanity and truely timeless creation lies in the hands of art rather than industry.
- The New Testament eg. the teachings of Jesus are the closest thing to universal truth for how to behave as a human. The inclusion of the old testament and the Jewish ideas tied in by Paul are a flaw that bring fear and stunt humanity.
- BTC (PoW), ETH (and other PoS chains) & Fiat are mutually compatable. There is room for all of them and they will all be used en mass long before any of them are eliminated.
- BTC will become the worlds main reserve currency, creating a dynamic between the centralised control of nation states and the decentralised web. Post nation world order & post war society?
- COVID was an unintentional lab leak, that somehow proved that engineered biology can be paired with strong policy to attack other nations. Warfare of the future will be conducted in this way.
- Much of modern medicine that involves pharamacuticals is a complete scam, and much of the promised effects of treatment can be solved (or prevented) through lifestyle (diet, exercise & mental) changes. Including depression & cancer.


Books on my shelf that I would recommend to friends & family.

Bookshelf


80/20 Principle / Richard Koch
Star Principle / Richard Koch
The Nature of Order / Christopher Alexander
Lifespan - David Sinclair, PhD
Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The Status Game - Will Storr
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy - Richard Rumelt
How to Not Die Alone - Logan Ury
The Sovereign Individual - William Rees-Mogg
The Changing World Order - Ray Dalio
Principles - Ray Dalio
The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous
The Four Agreements - Don Miguel Ruiz
The Alchemist - Paolo Coelho
The Score Takes Care of Itself - Bill Walsh
Creative Selection - Ken Kocienda
Inside the Dream Palace - Sherill Tippins
How Innovation Works - Matt Ridley
Hooked - Nir Eyal
Founders At Work - Jessica Livingston
Hackers and Painters - Paul Graham
Endurance - Alfred Lansing
Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Awareness - Anthony De Mello
The Way to Love - Anthony De Mello 

Sapiens /
21 Lessons for the 21st Century 

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Company Building;
Creativity Inc - Ed Catmull
Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing / 

Biography;
- Chronicles I / Bob Dylan
- Surely you're Joking Mr Feynman / Richard P. Feynman
- The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

Architecture & Design;
- Order without Design / Alain Bertaud
- A Pattern Language / Christopher Alexander
- Invisible Cities / Italo Calvino
- Humanise / Thomas Heatherwick
-How Buildings Learn / Stuart Brand



Leading Product and Engineering as CPTO through a 10x in revenue and a $24M Series A led by Benchmark.

An all-in-one multiplayer workspace for remote teams.

Moot

Creating the category of Wearable Intelligence, specifically tailored towards for cultural application.

AIME

An anthropomorphized biomonitor for Inflammatory Bowel Disease via the Calprotectin protein in sweat.

GüT

Circles is a private place to share with friends & family. Mobile app launched on iOS and Android.

Circles

From furniture to city sized airport terminals, some snapshots from my early design career.

Making

James Stirrat-Ellis

A designer engineer founder living in San Francisco and London.
My two goals in life are to build and explore the extraordinary.

Experiences

Writings

Links

James Stirrat-Ellis

A designer engineer founder living in San Francisco and London. My two goals in life are to build and explore the extraordinary.

Experiences

Writings

Links

A designer engineer founder living in San Francisco and London.
My two goals in life are to build and explore the extraordinary.