A compilation of very valuable lessons that I’ve learned throughout my life—a bunch of useless bullshit that hopefully helps someone! If anything catches your eye, feel free to reach out :)
Inspired by Sam Altman's How to Be Successful →
Take some, apply it, and if it works for you, work it into your worldview/daily thought process.
Life is about minimizing regret. Life is about picturing yourself on your deathbed and thinking... was that shit tight or no? Life is about thinking, in 5/10/50 years from now, will I regret this or will I regret not doing this. Life is about minimizing the possibility of regret when looking back upon it. This is a great mental razor and really serves as my compass to make sure that the life I live the fullest possible life: one that I'd be proud of on my deathbed.
You are the average of the 5 people you spend most of your time with. Humans are a function of their inputs, just like any traditional computer. You become an average of the 5 people (or in the digital age, online personalities or books) you surround yourself with. Only surround yourself with the highest quality ones, or you risk being mediocre. If they don't make you better or inspire you, they don't belong in your life. You don't have an infinite social circle or life, only make do with the best.
You can curate your proximate personalities with books, podcasts, videos, real life friends, mentors, relationships, etc. If you want to be great, your 5 closest personalities must be great. Be very very conscious and careful when choosing who your 5 are.
Develop a rich information diet.
I got this from Jessica Li. You get good at life by knowing things and then doing things. Develop your consumption habits to mainly consume rich and quality information. If your youtube suggestions are mainly memes, maybe make a new one that's less memey. Make one where you follow high quality sources of information so that the act of constantly consuming high quality information is almost automatic.
But never stop improving. i.e. move from YouTube tech videos → TechCrunch articles → textbooks → field expert's video → cutting edge research i.e. TED talks → Gary Vee → Freakonomics → Tim Ferriss
Be conscious of how much rich experience a source of information has and how effectively it can impart that upon you. Youtube videos can be more helpful than books :)
Intentionally do things that make you uncomfortable. This is an important skill because uncomfortable opportunities tend to be the most rewarding experiences in life.
When you are faced with a reality that you reactively flinch from or second guess, these are the times you grow and learn the MOST. People are not willing to do the uncomfortable, so you will have less competition here. Extreme progress and growth is found in reaching through to discomfort. Conversely, progress and growth are limited and diminished if you only reach for the comfortable risks. Routinely forcing discomfort makes sure that when you face your life's hardest, most worthwhile challenges, you'll have the muscle built up to take it on the chin.
This Tim Ferriss podcast elaborates on this better than I can.
Learn about Daoism and Stoicism. Learn to be happy + egoless. Being happy is a learned skill. It's a skill everyone can learn. And only a happy life is worth living. Being happy makes you a better friend, lover, and member of this human experience. It took me years, but I learned how to be extremely rational, intensely happy and grateful with the help of these two frameworks. They protect you from negative emotions and deep emotional stress. I'd attribute all my success and lack of negative emotions to this. Not only is it near impossible to make me sad, I'm still really fucking happy. And that's the beauty with these, you can choose what to be sad or intensely happy about. Really. I've learned that I can't convince people of this, but check them out. Maybe read The Tao of Pooh.
Always seek fundamental causes, reason from first principles. Reasoning from the ground up allows for branches of knowledge to share common stumps (roots) of knowledge that are robust and best aligned with objective truth. When you build a cohesive, well reinforced view of reality, you will be correct much more often. You gain the super power to see when convention, popular opinion, status quo or even your overthinking no longer (or never have) made sense.
We fall victim to a lot of these things in the name of convenience. If you're always conscious of this fact, you will avoid being wrong and avoid wasteful mental labor, stress, effort, or careers optimizing for the wrong things or in the wrong ways. Challenge all assumptions. In the beginning it's active and annoying work. But with time, you build a worldview, thought process, and domains of robust knowledge that allow you to reason about the world and be right oftern, learn new things quickly (as analogy is much easier to apply to solid fundamentals) and accomplish anything.
A good exercise that leads to this is just practicing asking why/how 3 levels deep to everything. i.e. "I'm hungry" → Why am I hungry? → Why does Ghrelin exist? → Why would that sustenance mechanism of human biology be useful in this modern age of abundance? i.e. "What should I do this gap year?" → Why am I taking a gap year? → Why do I do anything? (What's important to me?) → How do I achieve what's important to me (goals)?
From Elon's AMA: "One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to."
Start with Distribution First time founders focus on product and consumer, second time founders focus on distribution and b2b. At the end of the day, the business that wins is the one that can generate more revenue and can spend more on advertising. Your competitor won because it 4xed revenue and hired your product person. Your competitors personal brand reached more people and convinced them to buy. This translates to finding people and dating as well. Harry Styles has way better options for friends and girlfriends than I do :(
Become the Broker Often times, when you can’t reach the people you need, just build the community they’d want to be in. If you can’t reach your real estate investors, be the marketplace that connects all real estate investors. If you can’t get into Harvard, just make a community with Harvard caliber people. If you can’t get around the world’s best tech investors and founders, just make HustleCon or start a newsletter or podcast surrounding them. If you can’t find enough independent and successful young startup founders, make Verci.
Naming comes from this post
Get good at asking the right questions. Elon said, the answer is usually the easy part. The hard part is asking the right questions. Questions are the only tool we have to inquire about this reality. It is our pickaxe to inspect the world we live in. It also happens to be the backbone of our cognition, we literally think in questions. Getting good at questions means getting good at thinking, the very essence of human experience. This importance is why I like Tim Ferriss' Podcast. He is really good at asking questions.
Use a note app profusely as a digital extension of your brain: it clears mental baggage, increases mental capacity. This is probably my most important productivity lesson. The brain is good for creative, constructive thought and really bad for memorization and menial maintenance (something digital brains/computers are really good at). Let the silicon work for you, clear your mind of todos, tasks, reminders, thoughts, learnings so that it can do what it really excels at. "Clearing your mind" in this sense does really open up bandwidth for your brain to do more interesting work. Brain computation is a limited resource.
What you work on matters more than how hard you work. 20% is actually doing the work, doing it is doing it and there’s no substitute to doing it. BUT its magnitudes more important exactly what you work on and why vs actually working. If you are not careful about this you join the rat race of prescribed and conventional options that don’t matter if you’re good at anyway. I call these small games. Don’t play small games. Ever.
Time will always be the fundamental asset/resource. Life is the never ending struggle to spend it most effectively. Everybody has the same 24 hours. Begin to think about everything in terms of either time cost or happiness/fulfillment gain. How you spend it dictates your life, happiness, achievement, or whatever else you care about. Get good at being hyper conscious of it and allocating it really well.
Have a very strong bias toward action. People tend to bias toward overthinking and inaction. What separates you from the successful people is maybe 5% intellect, talent, and utter utter luck, but most of the time it is the disparity in amounts of action. X person got famous because he got to work and created X Y Z opportunities for himself—because he put the work in, because he filmed 100 videos before you filmed one, because he shipped 10 versions before you finished designing your app, because they had the dumb confidence to do before you had your full conviction and over analysis. This is a very a common story. A genius thinks that only thinks about their brilliant idea for years and years, never allowing their genius to meet the opportunity half way by means of action.
The winners in business, life, etc. are the ones that think about something and do it now instead of the ones who plan their course well. Iteration speed and feedback cycle speed is the highest determinant of success and excellence. Iterating fast gets you more moments of exposure to how the world works, and what you need to do differently.
Do everything now. Never "I'll do it later". Get into the habit of doing things now. Have laundry? Just do it now. Think of a brilliant email to send? Fuck it, send it now. I've found the best strategy to adopt this is: You think of something you ought to do and you say fuck it, don't think about it and block out the outside, just do the action that starts the progression, don't let your brain think to hard about it, don't let the procrastination weigh in. Block it out. This is stupid, but what it looks like for me is this: I decide, hey I need to work on being a better programmer today. I then define a task in my head, say an online course. And before I can think ehhh or I'm too lazy, I just repeat those words/motive in my head. Online course, online course, and not even allow my mind to be distracted. I let up off this... mental short circuit after I'm already in the act of doing. At this point, it's just easier to keep going. The inertia sustains it. Or, I put my feet on the ground, stand up, and all of a sudden we're doing laundry. Don't give yourself a chance to decide otherwise. Just do. Or, fuck it, we're emailing 4 schools to start this non-profit, and shutting out our urge to write it down and do it later. If you shun this feeling long enough, brainlessly just start doing whatever it is, you'll eventually snap out of it and discover that you're already mid-act. Too late to procrastinate now.
^ I wrote this in 2018 but have since found a better person to explain these exact thoughts: Tiffany Matthe →