about me: https://ellispinsky.com/
* Three pieces of (mundane, well-known) advice: build stuff, write, and network. These support each other.
* Your profile is very interesting: philosophy & CS, languages, etc. Write about these things, what can the CS crowd learn from a philosopher and vice versa? Write a blog post with your thoughts on each of the ethics challenges (there are 100) in The Ping That Wants to Be Eaten (https://www.amazon.com/Pig-That-Wants-Eaten-Experiments/dp/0...)
* Do weird stuff! Randomly pick two departments in your university’s directory and think about an idea that combines them, eg Classics and Biology or Entomology and Math. This is where really interesting stuff comes from. Or you’ll end up with ridiculous ideas, great for a blog post.
* Fire up Eventbrite (or some similar) and go to local events if interest. Better yet, reach out to organizers to speak at events, they’re always looking for people. You never know who you’re going to meet.
* Allocate some alone time in nature
* Obvious, but: Create value for people and give away for free. This can range from a 2 sentence summary of an interesting concept and a quote (who were the Cynics) posted on LinkedIn to a small tool (my current needs: a Mac native tool that takes detects slide changes on Zoom/Teams meeting, takes screenshots and creates a lot out of them; a super simple web tool to edit images to put on tshirts).
* Cold emails are hard.
* rentr homepage is underwhelming there are a few typos, you should comments from people who use it (probably no one at the moment), these sort of N^2 ideas almost always run into bootstrapping problems, unless you can have a community, eg a large building, use it.
Hope that helps.
An entrepreneurs most valuable, “learned skill” is selling.
Budget your time against learning how to sell.
Mike Weinberg’s book is a great place to start. Chapter 14, “planning and executing the attack” is brilliant. > https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/15863998
Friendly Challenge: assuming those initial cold outreach targets are still solid; try to connect with them again.
It's also one of the rare times in your early career where you can actually work on what you want. Real work will be a lot less fun.
This reminds me of people who say they want to be writers, but aren't, and will never be. These people don't enjoy suffering the craft of writing. They just want to enjoy the status of being a writer.
Similarly, you don't want to be a polymath. Actual polymaths never said "I want to be a polymath". That's just vanity. Polymath is a vague status marker. Do you want to pursue art and engineering and math and architecture and beauty and truth and etc.? Then pursue those things, don't pursue the state of being a polymath. It sounds pretentious.
But don’t work too hard. Don’t forget to take care of yourself. No one else will do that for you.
Try to meet up with interesting people and see what they have to say. Go to some meetups and conferences.
For the summer: If you can’t find a paid gig, do a project of your own, that you can finish before next semester. Or just take some time off if you can.
Godspeed!