Q&A: After gaining alien-level technical skills, how do you signal to others that you would make a positive contribution to their team?
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Yeah, thereβs more to it than just having alien-level technical skills.
I think you also need to acquire serious domain expertise, be able to talk about nontrivial projects you did, and cultivate relationships, and then you need to take actions to increase the chance of lucky encounters with the right people.
So, my answer is more piecemeal.
Nontrivial projects:
- See "what do you mean by sophisticated problem, not made trivial by foundational knowledge" here.
- See "create a personal website" here.
Domain expertise:
- Avoid failure modes 3 and 4 in particular here.
- Grind concrete examples/experiences in your domain of interest as described here. (This applies to all domains, not just math learning.)
Cultivating relationships:
- Don't be needy, be helpful.
- Don't try to show off, just make problems go away.
- See steps 3-5 here.
Take actions to increase the chance of lucky encounters with the right people:
- I talked about my own experience here, 1:13:45 - 1:24:45.
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