Becket U curates the best resources in Math, Physics, Computers, Microeconomics, Game Theory, and Persuasion. With this knowledge, you will understand how the world works.
Undiscovered #108: Shohei Ohtani's Secret Goal System, Karpathy Explains Importance of Film, Physics Lectures Anyone Can Follow
#108: Shohei Ohtani's Secret Goal System, Karpathy Explains Importance of Film, Physics Lectures Anyone Can FollowHi All! We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com. This week we will take a look at the Harada Method used by Shohei Ohtani, Andrej Karpathy talking about the importance of film, a website that visually teaches the dithering effect, and more. Let's dive in: Shohei Ohtani's Secret Method to SuccessShohei Ohtani is the best player in baseball and may go down as the greatest of all time. Arpan Gupta recently shared how Ohtani methodically prepared to accomplish his childhood goal of being the #1 draft pick in the highest level of Japanese professional baseball. It was a 64-cell roadmap based on a framework called the Harada Method. Here is how Arpan broke it down: You start by placing your main goal in the center of an 8x8 grid. For Ohtani, this was "be the #1 draft pick."
Next, you identify 8 critical supporting pillars needed to achieve that goal. These surround the main goal. Ohtani's 8 pillars were: 1. Body 2. Control 3. Sharpness 4. Speed 5. Pitch Variance 6. Personality 7. Karma/Luck 8. Mental Toughness You then break down each of those 8 pillars into 8 smaller, actionable tasks or daily routines. This fills out the entire 64-cell grid, turning a massive dream into a concrete, daily action plan. To improve his karma, he listed tangible actions like: 1. Showing Respect to Umpires 2. Picking up trash 3. Being positive 4. Being someone people want to support
The key to the system is daily execution and accountability. Once the 64-cell chart is complete, you turn the tasks and habits into a daily diary and a "Routine Check Sheet." It’s designed to transform abstract intentions into a measurable, daily practice. In the wake of the tweet, some individuals built apps to help you create your own 'Harada' chart. The two most impressive were harda.app and goalpillars.com. Karpathy on the Importance of FilmAkhmad Mamirov recently tweeted out "enjoy learning from @karpathy videos. As a cs student I feel guilty watching movies lately when there is a gold mine for free." Andrej Karpathy responded with something very interesting: a stance defending the importance of films. He went on to say: Movies are great though. Even if you set aside the pure artistic enjoyment (you shouldn’t). Movies are stories, and stories are powerful, primal, moving, motivating. They are prompts to you to consider dilemmas and scenarios, to build your world model and compass. My rec is to go to the golden age of story telling and movie making that imo ramped up in the 80s, was roaring in 90s, peaked early 00s, and declined since. One sourcing example: pick a random year there, look up Oscar winners, pick and watch. Enjoy and attend guilt free. He also said the following about streaming services: Don’t use Netflix there is very little quality there, it’s brain rot inducing. I use Prime Video and rent excellent movies/shows. I agree with you about the paradox of choice among other annoyances with “modern entertainment” - I am in the process of buying a dvd player and building a nice library. I don’t know that all people should do that I think I’m just old :D The most interesting discourse he said, however, was in regards to the usage of AI in filmmaking. One user expressed her concern and compared AI to the prevalence of CGI. Karpathy explained the nuance with great insight: I think it’s right that you’re grouping CGI with (current-capability etc) AI because they are both fundamentally technologies that trades wins in time/cost against increase in slop. A filmmaker suffers and usually gives into the temptation of gains in time/cost in a slight increase in slop. A crappy CGI gets you 90% of the way and then you stop. Increasingly, a video diffusion model might give something that looks mostly fine even cheaper. A quick ChatGPT writing help gives you decent enough suggestions to the writing or so on and then you stop. It’s a quick release valve that stops deeper work. The best filmmakers know intuitively to fear CGI, as they probably do and should fear AI. Chris Nolan being one prominent example. Another prominent example is watch the behind the scenes of making of the LoTR trilogy and the lengths they went to avoid CGI everywhere. Miniatures, doubles, optical illusions. Then watch the latest superhero movie. It’s really obvious which one represents the height of culture. I don’t know if movie studies pursue that as a goal anymore. Apparently not. Better to push out Avengers 12 asap so we can get 13 out by Q3. Beautifully Designed Visual WebsiteSam Rose shared a 'ridiculously well done' article that explains the concept of a dither. The page is part of a larger site called visualrambling.space created by Damar Berlari. Here he visually explores how neural networks operate, the k-pop wave, eight versions of Christopher Nolan movies ranked, and whether La La Land's ending is hopeful or despairing. The Dithering website takes about 10–15 minutes to read and shows how the technique recreates shading with limited colors placed strategically to preserve detail. Damar also introduces advanced ideas such as threshold map algorithms and error diffusion. Visual explainer websites like visualrambling.space play a vital role in making complex ideas accessible to a broad audience. Math Lectures Anyone Can FollowIn Naval's latest mini podcast, "Find the simplest thing that works", he summarizes his recommended area of studies and how it all comes down to physics: Once you study physics, you're studying how reality works. And if you have a great background in physics, you can pick up electrical engineering. You can pick up computer science. You can pick up material science. You can pick up statistics and probability. You can pick up mathematics because it's part of it - it's applied. The best people I've met in almost any field have a physics background...
The good news about physics is you can learn pretty basic physics. You don't have to go all the way deep into quarks and quantum physics and so on. You can go with basic balls rolling down a slope, and it's actually a good backgrounder."
This paired with Rota's tweet of "Send me your favorite math lectures that someone not in the field could follow" came with many serendipitous recommendations:
Reviewing Your Content PillarsThe internet's creative director Oren John shared two gems regarding his personal strategy for posting on social media:
In discussing Perplexity Comet, Oren says it has saved him countless hours of research and positioning. By scraping comments, he can instantly gauge what audiences like, dislike, or request more of, giving each new post a better chance of success. The tool can also analyze competitors’ pages to reveal recurring questions and pain points, sparking new content ideas. For social analytics, Oren tracks four main content pillars: marketing carousels, branding ideas, marketing playbooks, and product reviews. He monitors metrics such as views, reach, shares, saves, follows, skip rates, and watch time. Every 30 days, he manually logs each data point, a process that takes about a half hour. His biggest frustration with the system is that most platforms still don’t provide a “hook rate,” which he calls the most important metric of all. P.S Can you please respond to this email and bring it into your 'primary' inbox? You can say 'Hi!', tell us the last book you read recently, or what your favorite resource was from above. We appreciate any feedback you are able to provide here. What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Feel free to reach out to us on Instagram and give us a follow there, tag your friends on our posts, and please forward this newsletter along to anyone else who would enjoy it. Disclaimer: Becket U is an Amazon Associate and purchases through Amazon links may earn a small affiliate commission, but the price is the same for you. We only recommend books we love and think you would love, too. Always wishing you the best, J.B. |
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Becket U curates the best resources in Math, Physics, Computers, Microeconomics, Game Theory, and Persuasion. With this knowledge, you will understand how the world works.
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