Inspirations

I'm obsessed with people who were obsessed.

I'm inspired by:

George Lucas, because he created stories that were so vividly real when I was growing up. With Industrial Light & Magic, he pioneered VFX and the use of computer graphics in films. He didn't fear assembling a ragtag group of amateur hobbyists to work on his revolutionary vision. Out of their needs, great tools were built along the way, like Adobe Photoshop.

Heinrich Schliemann - he had every reason to die early in the gutters of Fürstenberg. He had no health, no height, not a penny. He worked 14 hours a day, then slept in the cold, dusty attic. He saved money to pay a local Jew to teach him languages while learning trades.

Time-skipping here a bit, but he went to San Francisco, California, in the midst of the Gold Rush, and set up an exchange in Sacramento by April 1851, buying and selling gold from the prospectors. He then made a fortune in Saint Petersburg over decades by being a skilled trader, and became one of the wealthiest men in Tsarist Russia.

Yet, his heart was with classics, and soon after he went to Paris to study classics at the Sorbonne, then Greece, and eventually spent most of his time in Turkey, petitioning for an Ottoman firman to dig on the site of Hisarlik, where he suspected Troy to be located by Homer's words. His entire life, he was ridiculed by the community of historians, despite trying his best to appeal to them. He didn't have luck in love either.

He was obsessed with Homer, and in his mind, the heroes described in the writings were real and historical. How right he turned out to be... In his 50s, despite illness and heat, he excavated Troy and a palace of Mycenae. He was one of history's greatest contrarians.

I highly recommend reading both his autobiography and biography to see the duality of man from his inner view and the outside observer.

Steve Jobs. I've spent most of my high school physics classes reading his biography by the great Walter Isaacson. I am most inspired by his work at Apple in the early days, his reality distortion field when building Apple II, and the memoirs of the engineers who worked for him back then.

But to me personally, his greatest contribution was Pixar - Toy Story, history's first fully computer-made animated film, and later movies Pixar produced, which I watched dearly as a kid. It built my reality. These creations entered my mythos and forever stayed there. The heroes of Toy Story were as real for me as it gets. There is a philosophical argument to be made here about how real stories can become if given enough care.

And lastly, as I acknowledge how great men are usually gray, complex human beings, I am inspired by the work of Wernher von Braun. It's a weird thing to say as a Pole who knows very well his contribution to the Nazi concentration camp in Mittelbau-Dora and the factory at Mittelwerk, where 20,000 people were killed in slave labor to produce his V-2 rockets.

My take on him is that he was probably a product of his time, environment, and circumstances in Nazi Germany and World War II, while also having dimmed morals. I am not sure how the history of humanity will judge him.

But he was a visionary, beyond his time. He was the ultimate accelerationist, while having a conflicting vision of humanity reaching and colonizing outer worlds in the billions and being responsible for killing thousands.

It reminds me of a story portrayed in God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert, where to make humanity free forever, the God Emperor, aka Leto Atreides, first terrorizes and kills billions.

Wernher spearheaded humanity's Space Age and became a clear father of it. Once he was in the right environment, his inventions helped prevent the Cold War by letting America win it, probably saving hundreds of millions.

Maybe he just didn't care where his rockets landed. Up they shall go.

Who Else

There are many figures who were obsessed with their craft, who inspired, who faced unreal odds, and yet made their men survive. Scipio Africanus, who stopped the great Hannibal and helped Rome survive ages. Or the ability of Roman society to produce such men at such times. It reminds me of the modern USA.

Alexander Hamilton, whose persona I first really got to understand in 2025, when watching Hamilton in London at the Victoria Palace Theatre. After the play, I couldn't stop reading about him for three months.

He wrote the Federalist Papers like a madman, defining things like the federal unification of debt in the early American republic. Being born in 2000, in Europe, it's hard to understand how surreal the world where figures like the Founding Fathers could have existed and done so much at such a young age is.

I see this now in the culture of U.S. startups, but it's missing in my daily life. It inspires me daily to strive for greatness and not fear my young age.

Jared Isaacman, for his stellar (literally) leadership of NASA, nuclear propulsion work, and Artemis missions for a new generation of kids who will watch humanity step on the Moon again after 60 years of our absence from the lunar surface (and launching the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope ahead of schedule and under budget; it takes a great entrepreneur and leader to do so).

Timothée Chalamet for his work ethic, radical excellence, and radical competence.

Bryan Johnson, for thinking about what might be important to humanity 100 years from now. I'm always sad when I think about the amount of human thought produced daily by all the brains on our planet that is lost forever. Why is all this signal lost?

So Bryan thinks correctly that only thinking in ages can lead us to a deeper understanding of what is needed today. He is correct to do his tests on himself, becoming the most tested human ever. Wonderful use of capital and media to promote public health.

I had a chance to ask him a question from the audience in Singapore about sleep schedules while having young kids, and we all laughed. His response was to turn sleeping into a game where kids can score high for getting to bed early.

Best book on life asymmetry: Cixin Liu, Death's End.

And many others in the vast pantheon of souls of humankind. Bless you all. I am glad that humanity exists.

Every day I ask myself a question: what can I contribute?