Juan David's Newsletter - August 21st, 2022
Quad Day 2022 and Why NPCs need to f*** clubs and do projects
Hello there,
It’s been an active week and a more active Sunday. During the week, I finished the draft proposal for the personal flying vehicle so things should speed up from here. And today, it was Quad Day!
Quad Day is this day when everyone at UIUC goes to the center of campus (The Quad) and they learn about, mostly, clubs. I say “mostly” because we went with the UIUC Talkshow, which isn’t a club. It’s cooler!
Usually, you need to ask for permission and so on. But that is BS so I just borrowed a table from a friend, found a random blue table cloth on the floor, borrowed the poster, printed flyers, and we sat up base. Our philosophy? “Ask for forgiveness, not permission.”
The yearbook photographer even took a picture of us. Not sure what he’ll do once he realizes we are not registered. Maybe they’ll include us, we’ll have to see this May.
And here we were. Our goal? Get 1,000 Subscribers! I know, I know. Crazy goal but otherwise I wouldn't have tried as hard. We start by talking and talking and talking to people, bringing them over, and just having fun.
You really have to believe in what you are doing because you are repeating yourself not once, not ten times, not twenty times but hundreds and hundreds of times. Every interaction is special and you need to have the same level of energy and excitement with every person. If you don’t love what you are doing, you will get tired and stop doing it. Therefore, it’s a great passion/motivation test.
Did we reach the goal? Noooooooo. Not even close haha. We got about 80 new subscribers and we got to 210 subscribers (subscribe, if you haven’t still).
We wanted to be at Quad Day and having a goal would be more fun so I thought a crazy goal would incentive us to talk to people and be more out there. The subscriber count is a bad goal because you want quality, not quantity. I’d rather have 10 subscribers who watch always than 10,000 thousand who watch rarely (or 100,000 who watch always). But still why not? Why not do something crazy that it’s more likely to fail?
But really even though we failed at our goal, we achieved things that we don’t even know yet. We achieved one important thing: awareness. Lots and lots of people know that we exist and we’ll be in their minds for future opportunities, connections, and reaching the objective of the show, which is to create a movement where we can start thinking and talking deeply about the world.
Because believe it or not, no one cares about the weather.
We stayed there for almost five hours and our voices started to hoarse but we kept going. A combination of explaining what we do at the UIUC Talkshow and a series of Live Interviews closed off a great Sunday and a start of the new school year.
But beyond these goals or what we did or how we did it, the most valuable aspect that I hope other people get is that when you’re being yourself, you allow others to be themselves too.
The UIUC Talkshow and other projects I will be doing throughout the semester are, hopefully, an start of a new movement where students do what they love, not join clubs.
In How to College: Advice, Mistakes, and Thoughts, I wrote:
Clubs are meetings and meetings, and not doing much. People join them because “looks good” on their resume, and it’s simply what they’re supposed to do. But you know what, fuck this mentality. These are the same people who think the future will be good or bad but don’t know how. These are the same people who think everything is random and is not worth working hard because everything is luck.
There have to be more options, not just clubs, frats, or nothing. Doing cool projects and interesting things must be #1 or at least an option in people’s minds.
It’s sad how many of these clubs on college campuses have applications, interviews, tests, and even high fees. For what purpose? To be like how everyone else is and to do what everyone else does. This is exactly how one loses control of their NPC level. If you forget you think for yourself, your NPC level will skyrocket.
Yesterday, a friend suggested writing a book about NPCs, starting with the meaningless of clubs, the stupidity of majors, and the calamity of college.
Like I’ve said before, we’re all NPCs. It’s really about to what extent one is.
I truly, truly believe that being more vocal, building projects in public, and being unapologetically yourself is how we can start … a cult, I mean a movement where people can find and think for themselves.
I’m in a college of 50,000 people. What can you do when you align the incentives of 100 of them? How about 1,000? How about 10,000? You can start massive companies, take control over what the university does, and you can work on literally any problem and pretty much solve it.
You can literally create one of the most important things in the history of the world like Wikipedia with 2,000 people. Imagine if we have 10,000 dedicated young college students, what kind of things can we create?
All jokes sides, cults or movements, or whatever you want to call them, are really effective ways to align the incentives of a collective group where you can achieve a common goal. Going to Mars/Elon Musk? Good example. Climate change activists? Good example. Any successful startup? Good example. Apple products? Good example.
This skill is massively important to learn because this is how anything important gets done.
So we’ll see how things go. I have a lot of things to learn and lots of experiments to make.
I’m excited for the new semester, to learn new things, build cool projects, meet new people, and have lots of fun this semester.
See you next week,
Juan David Campolargo