Wisdom of My Crowd - The Practice of Zen, Lojong and Stoics

Dec 20, 2023 · 34 min read · tweets zen ·

The following are tweets I curated over the years. I omitted the sources since I've internalized them so much they feel like my own BS. The title for each quoted tweet is indeed mine. I am grateful to all the original authors.

Kindful

Humility and courage

The great leaders in the Torah were reluctant to lead: Moses, Jeremiah, Samuel. Thinking you weren’t worthy of the job was part of the qualification for the job because it meant to understood the enormity of the responsibility and were prepared to confront your own limitations.

Be smart, and be humble

Life either makes us humble, grateful, and generous, or grandiose, entitled, and envious.

Which road we travel is up to us.

Stay Humble

At various stages of your life, you start thinking that this time, you have things figured out, then you are proved wrong once again.

Stay humble, or life will humble you.

No ego, no problems

Ego Is The Enemy. You’re not as good as you think. You don’t have it all figured out. Stay focused. Do better.

Be humble, and it's okay to be always wrong

Remember once upon a time when you realized everything you had been taught was wrong, and you had this incredible epiphany?

Well, what if I were to tell you everything you have learned since then is also wrong?

Be humble, no jealousy, and be/beat yourself

The more I improve in any craft, the more humbled I am by just how amazing some people are at it. Competing to be #1 seems ephemeral at best and futile at worst.

In the end, one must find contentment simply in becoming better than one's former self.

More humble as you age

At twenty, you think you have the whole world figured out, then with every passing year, you become more humble, you stop jumping to conclusions, you stop judging people you actually don't know.

Instead working on the biggest defilement of yourself

Anxiety means you have work to do on yourself

Anger means you have work to do with your situation in society

Loneliness means you have work to do with your relationships with yourself and with others

It takes a lot of work to become calm, clear-minded, content with who you are

Be kind to yourself

Self-forgiveness need not block self-improvement. You can resolve to do better without constantly berating yourself about the past. Growing pains are about becoming, not regretting.
To carry your past mistakes, future worries and current responsibilities all at once is too much. A little self-forgiveness and faith help a lot.

Yielding, Heart

A man does not yield when the mere universe has turned against him; he yields when his own heart has turned against him. We surrender, not when circumstances are miserable, but when we are miserable.

There is only one point

The faster you get rid of your pride, the faster you will get to the life you want.

The "right" path is full of mistakes, embarrassing moments, rejections.

Be ready to be mocked for a while, but don't worry, in the end, no one remembers how you got where you are.

Postive, no fault finding

Differences draw attention; It takes focus to see the similarities.

Kindness, not charm

Charm is a tatctic but kindness is a quality.

Authenticity

Manners are not artificial and rudeness is not authentic; Authenticity is the faithful outward expression of our desires as well as our impulses, and among our desires ought to be considerations of others.

Love, compassion and equanimity

Three imitators: attachement masqueraded as love; pity as compassion and indifference as equanimity. Our task is to distinguish and to be authentic in loving, feel genuine compassion and exibit true balance.

Be useful to others, no expectation

Life is hard for people who only work hard when they think it benefits them. The best things in life come to you in unexpected ways. Put a lot of value out there, be useful to others, don't expect anything in return, you will get exactly what you deserve.

Time to give back

when you are young, your life is mostly about you: Who you are going to be. Funding and exploring possibilities.

When you are 50, life — how to live — is mostly about those who live with and depend on you.

It is a remarkable shift. A beautiful one.

A moment of nostalgia too.

Pride and Lust

Pride makes a man a devil; but lust makes him a machine.

Ethics

No technology or tool can fix people that have profound ethics problems.

I should know. I have all the technology and tools of this society totally available to me...and I am still totally incorregible!

Half empty, not greed

A tribe full of centenarians attributes its longevity to a simple rule: leave the dinner table while still slightly hungry, feeling unfinished.

The principle is similar in writing & conversation. Resist the compulsion to say everything there is to say on the topic.

Virture

Virtue is what you do when nobody is looking. The rest is marketing.

Skillful

Moderation

Everything in moderation.

Too much justice is tyranny.
Too much faith is blindness.
Too much honesty is cruelty.
Too much kindness is weakness.
Too much forgiveness enables evil.
Too much loyalty kills critical thought.
Too much tolerance enables intolerance.

Enjoy the struggles

In order to make progress we cannot exist in a state of constant contentment. Friction is how we grow.

But there is no greater goal in life than a settled mind.

The solution: be at peace knowing the instability of life brings us closer to truth.

Be calm at the right scale.

At Peace

You feel anxious when you think you are wasting your time.

You feel at peace when you do what you do best.

Having fun

You won't have fun doing something by trying to have fun. You'll have fun by being fully present and giving it your best.

Calm

Every high performer is fundamentally relaxed, and practices minimal use of effort to get a given result. Don't try harder: eliminate tensions.

Long game players: cultivating your skills

Investing in the right people is gonna be hard as long as you haven’t invested sufficiently in yourself

because it takes intelligence to see intelligence, talent to see talent

and you have to be a long-term thinker to recognize other long-term thinkers.

Stoic

Don’t be a tourist, experience other cultures

Don’t eat what you want, eat what you need

Don’t take yourself seriously, work seriously

Don’t worry, think

Don’t act like a victim, get stronger

Don’t mindlessly talk, talk purposefully

Don’t criticize others, improve yourself

Life long learning

"I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time."

— Charlie Munger

Know your flaws

Wisdom is about understanding your flaws in personality and playing a strategy that takes them into consideration (because they are really hard to change).

If you are dead, you can not do anything

You become wise not by knowing, but by doing with what you know.

Meaningful

Grace

My biggest takeaway from one year as a Catholic is the immense value of being in a state of grace.

You start to have a visceral sense of what you lose when you sin against the Holy Ghost. And the humility required to gain it back.

Sin becomes harder. Confession easier. Something is happening.

No Pride - get rid of yourself

The prideful atheist insists faith is a snuffing out of reason

My experience suggests this is decidedly not the case.

Faith does not snuff good things out, but sets them alight!

Faith enters you into a larger world, not a smaller one.

Pride prevents faith. I am smarter. I am wiser. Pride is deadly.

Cheerful

People who aren’t who they want to be, who couldn’t be with who they wanted to be, who worked hard but in the wrong direction, tend to become anxious, irritated, judgmental, and with a very cynical view of the world.

People who kept getting what they wanted, because they built up their talent stack with intelligence, people who have plenty of meaningful relationships and who feel loved, because they connected long-term on shared values like family, self-improvement, accountability for where they are in life, tend to be nice, cheerful, helpful to others, and with a very optimistic worldview.

The way you behave with others tells everything about your level of success and confidence.

What do you want ?

living in a place where they feel respected and accepted
a home that offers stability and safety
a loving family and loyal friends who care
enough money to not worry about food, rent, medical emergencies
enough free time to be able to keep learning and investing in themselves
a meaningful purpose that allows them to wake up every morning with drive and optimism
a calm and clear mind, that can come up with creative solutions to difficult problems
a healthy and strong body, that gives them enough confidence to face the challenges of life
feeling needed, and being rewarded by society for some unique set of talents
leaving some sort of legacy behind, to know, on their deathbed, that there was meaning to the whole journey

Happy marriage

Foundations of a happy marriage:

you have the same clear vision of how you will grow old together
you understand that there will be ups and downs, you are most supportive during their downs
in the long run, you understand it's more about not being stupid than being particularly smart
you are both humble, you learn from older people to avoid the mistakes that everybody thinks they are too smart to repeat
you respect each other's differences, you don't seek to change the other, you seek to grow individually, and because you had the same vision, you end up growing together
you leave your ego aside, stop trying to win petty arguments, understand that you are a team that should have better to do with their time together
you understand that hurtful words mostly underline your own insecurities
you treat each other's family with respect, if you think the difference of values is insurmountable, be smart, save each other time, don't get together in the first place
you are both financially responsible and transparent about how you plan to spend your money, you don't seek to impress them with any "hidden" investments
the years pass, you never get bored of each other's presence, because you always had time alone from each other when you could improve who you were as a person
your respective friends are also happy in their relationship, you avoid those who spend their time complaining about their wrong choice of partner
you both eat well, exercise well, sleep well, because you understand that it's really difficult to be a great spouse if you are physically and mentally unwell
you both understand that getting angry isn't going to help you solve your problems, you communicate with respect without being constantly snarky and cynical
you understand that your feelings evolve as you evolve, that you might no longer feel the same way after twenty years, that doesn't mean you stopped loving each other, you simply reached a different, more meaningful stage
you understand that the unexpected can happen anytime, and that's how you actually appreciate your time together even more

Wealth

True wealth is a combination of health, money, time, love, and peace of mind. You are wealthy once you find the right balance for you.

Meaning of life: be happy for others

I don’t know if this is the meaning of life, but to me, it is damn close. As I meet more people in their sunset years, & I imagine myself there, I see that some have achieved a zen-like quality that I hope one day I'll have. Those are people who can be truly happy for others.

No veil. No bullshit. Bliss for those living outside your own skin. I don’t think everyone gets there, but I think many do.

You see, we are born lacking much of that ability. As children, we are self-centered. And that’s ok. As parents we even allow children to intoxicate in their own self-righteousness.

We know that it is futile to fight a child’s entitlement, so why not let the child indulge in their own feelings? We know what’s coming next.

As we grow our insignificance becomes palpable. Not because we are less important or influential, but because we begin to understand the size of the world.

Our life stops being ours. We become part of society. We begin to understand that we owe everything, absolutely everything to others, even though we have a minuscule ability to give back.

And life enters a competitive stage, a stage in which the pressure for survival pushes us to get what we can. To raise elbows. It can sometimes reignite those childhood feelings.

But the test cannot last forever. You need to figure it out before the sun goes down. And as the sun sets, life appears to ask you if you’ve learned to outgrow the jealousy inside you. If you managed to expel jealousy, self-importance, & entitlement from your body. If you learned to tame the feelings you usually deny. But they are there. Comparisons are unavoidable and can become toxic. Unless we find the ability to feel truly happy for others. Not to voice that happiness, or proclaim it, but to actually feel it.

And I’ve seen that feeling in some old people’s eyes. They don’t need to open their mouths or make any gestures. It is there. It is a spark. A glow in those who learned the lesson.

Not everyone gets there. Some still chase wealth and glory near the sunset.

So is life just a long lesson? A test to see if you can become free of your own feelings of jealousy and entitlement?

I don’t know if this is the meaning of life, but to me, it seems pretty close.

Finding meanings of life

You don’t need cheap entertainment, you need meaningful goals, you need to wake up every morning knowing that your life is getting better.

Getting better each day

Life never gets easier, you just get physically healthier, mentally stronger, financially freer, emotionally firmer, intellectually keener, purposefully bolder

Healthy life

A healthy lifestyle is simple: enough deep work to keep your mind calm, enough time with your family and friends to not forget where you come from, enough time reading to stay humble about how much you don't know, and enough exercise to enjoy the journey in the best conditions.

Yield and explore

Life is a dance between surrendering to who you are and becoming who you should be, and the art of wisdom is knowing which one to lean into in each moment.

Practice

I can't stress this enough

If your spiritual practice is not deepening your honesty, making you braver in relationship, bringing you closer to the beautiful mess of real human connection, it's not helping you

Chasing holiness, righteousness and bliss will keep you shallow

Max entropy

The joy in life is inthe random variations.

Unexpected outcomes. Surprises. Maximum entropy.

If you're maximizing optimization either through academia or some other linearized process you're squeezing the joy out of life.

The perfect life is the joy in the surprises of life.

Be yourself

The wrong person sees you as the worst parts of you, interpreted through their insecurities.

The right person sees you as the best parts of you, interpreted free from your insecurities.

To one, you're a lump of coal. To the other, a diamond.

Some Paradoxes of Modern Life

The paradox of reading: The books you read will profoundly change you even though you’ll forget the vast majority of what you read.
The paradox of writing: Great writing looks effortless. But because the ideas are so clear, casual readers don't appreciate how much time it took to refine them.
The paradox of creativity: Your work is done when it looks so simple that the consumer thinks they could've done it, which means they won't appreciate how hard you worked.
The paradox of decision making: It’s better to choose, commit, and get started instead of waiting for the best possible option, so the correct decisions are actually suboptimal.
The paradox of originality: Many of history's greatest artists have found their voice by copying others. We discover who we are by imitating others and watching our uniqueness emerge over time.
The paradox of news: By telling us to care about everything, the news leads to apathy instead of action.
The Productivity Paradox: We keep inventing things that save us time, but it feels like we have less time than ever before.
The Paradox of Strategy: The same things that help you achieve outlier success also increase your chances of outlandish failure. For example, investing with leverage increases your chances of risk and reward.

Older and wiser

A lot of people become jaded, distrustful, grumpy as they get older. The sign of a successful life: you become more enthusiastic, sincere, light-hearted as you get older.

Navigating the real world

Superposition, not averging

My favorite Chesterton idea is that you don't need the middle path but a marriage of extremes. You need to be intensely invested yet totally relaxed at the same time. Hate the world enough to change it, love it enough to consider it worth changing. Not balance but insane juggling

Read, build, read, build

Don't read enough = you may re-invent the wheel

Read too much = you may feel paralyzed

The art of learning by reading more vs. creating new knowledge is a delicate balance -especially these days- because short term success is conflated w/ lasting impact and real progress.

Baysian, but with strong priors

When you have shallow knowledge and beliefs it's easy to change them every six months and act like this is a sign of your untrammeled honesty and skin in the game rather than your noob tier understanding of the world.

Are you angry ?

Anger, anxiety, envy, are what you accumulate internally when you don't make the daily efforts of becoming a better person and getting closer to your goals.

Just try and see what works

Being high in energy and relentlessly trying new things to see what works, is actually much more important than “being smart.”

Low time preference

Don't chase the goal, apply the mindset:

Fitness is consistent self-discipline
Talent is consistent self-investment
Mental peace is consistent self-care
Knowledge is consistent curiosity
Wealth is consistent risk-taking
Growth is consistent self-respect

Ironies

A Facebook employee who blocks FB for their kid.
An Ivy League professor who has their kid homeschooled / not attend university.
A VC who tells their friends to bootstrap and not take VC funding.

Converstation

The recipe of a great conversation: two relaxed, but ambitious minds, who share similar principles and values, who are both here to listen to each other, and not judge, and who have the strong desire to write a common, meaningful chapter together.

What does motivation come from ?

Feel like you belong
Feel like you can make progress
Feel like you have some control over your life and the pursuit (autonomy)

Intuition and computation

Intuition is not some special piece of knowledge, it is irreducible perception. Difficult to articulate because it is not about parts, but they all fit together.

Perspective

No matter how awesome you think something or someone is, always remember there's someone who's already had it and is totally sick of it.

Humor

Humorlessness is a sign of deep insecurity.

WFH

Fundamentally, the reason some managers dislike work-from-home is that they're unable to evaluate employee productivity other than by measuring hours spent in a chair in the office. If you can judge people's actual output accurately, unlimited WFH is simply a better policy.

Fuck you money and engineers

Every company needs 2-3 senior+ engineers who have fuck you money or just have 0 fear of getting fired.

Then when the architect or tech fellow or whoever unveil their new plan, those engineers unmute to say wtf is this, we're not moving everything into Lambda, are you high???

Tiny tiny tiny

As a physicist, what I've experienced is that there are these tiny bits of reality which we can model really well with equations. We celebrate their discoveries as heroic achievements because they are so rare. They're not the norm. Most of life is mystery.

Authenticity

Anxiety is when you are trying to become someone you are not
Growth is when you are actively trying to become who you could be
Success is when you look back and realize you went way beyond who you thought you could be

Parenting

Parenting is more about fixing yourself than raising your kids.
If you can’t relate to children you’ve lost too much.

Minority rules

A small band of deeply committed believers will spread a story better than a horde of the lightly committed. True for religion, reputation, brand, currency, politics...

Fox AND Hedgehog

Startups are (by necessity) filled with generalists; big companies are filled with specialists. People underestimate how effective a generalist can be at things which are done by specialists. People underestimate how deep specialties can run. These are simultaneously true.

Creative people: don't beat up yourself if you don't fit in

Creative people are the "black sheep" of humanity. They cause most of the trouble, but also all of the breakthroughs. They are often late starters: Van Gogh didn't make his first brushstroke until he was 27. They struggle to fit into the world, because they're creating a new one.

Reuse

When you’ve written the same code 3 times, write a function When you’ve given the same in-person advice 3 times, write a blog post

Writing tips

Writing will humble you by making you see how flimsy and imprecise your thinking is all day.
The pain of writing is actually the pain of improving your thinking.
Writing tip: Take half your commas, and replace them with periods.

Order and Chaos

Extremely flexible systems rob users of creative freedom.

It’s the mistake of thinking rigid axioms prevent one from inventive expression, when it’s the precise opposite.

One’s chaos must move against a backdrop of order to create meaning.

Reread

If your to-read list is in constant expansion, you are spending too much time browsing and too little time reading.

If your to-achieve list is in constant expansion, you are spending too much time observing and too little time doing.

Reward

You should expect your biggest accomplishments to materialize all at once, preceded by a very long period of opaque progress.

Play the stupid game, win the stupid prize

The quest for social status and popularity as an end in itself is fun as hell...for a while...but it ultimately wrecks even the brightest minds.

Private life

It's harder to learn from happy and successful people, because you don't constantly see them posting fake smiles on social media, or trying to sell you some product.

The kind of people you want to learn from, those who already have everything they want, are living private lives.

Curiosity

Knowledge gained through curiosity is way different than knowledge gained through obligation.

Do not stand in the way of a child's curiosity.

It is her greatest asset.

Parenting

One of the few pieces of parenting advice that I’m highly confident in and think generalizes widely across personalities, family cultures, ages:

If your child is concentrating on doing something, don’t interrupt. Don’t correct, don’t compliment, don’t join in. Leave them be.

Write, write, write

The smartest people I know have the most to say, but struggle to write because they’re afraid to look bad and so desperately want to impress people.

Don't delegate understanding

https://stephango.com/understand

Success

You don’t succeed professionally because you want to get rich, but because it’s so much more fun to work with competent people who are at the top of their discipline.

Do the stuff you like

Relax.

Find something that strikes your interest and pursue it.

Even if it turns out your idea doesn't work the way you pictured it, you'll have spent your time doing what you find interesting, as well as likely learning quite a few useful tools and tricks along the way.

Throw away and start over again

Your project starts off clean, planned and low in complexity.

Attempting to maintain this state as you build is only possible if you create unrealistic things nobody needs.

The information content of your creations isn't available until you've coaxed it from nature. And that only happens when you build bloated, unmaintainable objects that don't generalize to real-world utility.

Many people hang-on to their creations because they perceive its value in terms of the effort they already put in. But you're not after the tangible construct, you're after the best distillation.

A lot of the struggle in trying to produce nontrivial things that genuinely work is tied up in fighting against the tendency to keep what you made.

But when you have the constitution to start over, your mind only keeps what it remembers, and those pieces of recollection represent the distillation you're after.

One of the most formidable techniques you can use in life is starting over. It bakes-in a large set of the efforts you would otherwise try to implement manually, in the hopes of preserving what you made.

Evolution works because of its capacity to remove. What is kept is both automatic and correct.

You can either fight complexity or use complexity. Start over, and let nature show you what's worth keeping.

Sensitivity

I love sensitive people. By this I do not mean fragile, rather people with a mode of consciousness that is characterised by a certain receptivity, openness. They notice, they allow the world to speak to them, they hear & they are capable of true intimacy & closeness.

Sensitivity and Leaders

People who are the most rigid as adults were born very sensitive and had to shut it down to survive childhood. When they allow themselves to be sensitive again and learn to integrate it, they become incredible leaders. If they don't, it is all power struggles and feeling alone.

ADHD

https://twitter.com/DoctorPerin

So if you were made to feel like your ADHD is a character flaw remember we get strengths from how our brains are wired. We are creative, high energy, likely to have senses of humor, intuitive, enthusiastic, and our hyper focus allows for deep knowledge and expertise in many areas

ADHD is an asset for me

Easily bored. Driven by the flames of passion. Can’t make myself do stuff I don’t want to do. Lose focus in a second for 99% of things, but can work like a mad man for the 1% that ignites my spirit.

ADHD is an asset for me.

American dreams

The OLD American dream:

Stressed out “important” office job.
Climbing the endless corporate ladder.
Luxury cars (only 71 more payments & you’ll own it!)
Huge house filled with stuff.

The NEW American dream:

Fit & healthy.
Content & grateful.
Home full of laughter, love & peace.
Lives below means & passive income.
Money buys freedom of time & location.

By the time you’re 18 you’ll have seen 100,000 commercials PROGRAMMING you what happiness looks like.

Unlearn.

Discover what it means for you & run full speed towards it!

CCP

The CCP is Marxist in the way that the Mafia is Catholic. It's more like the ancient Mandarin bureaucracy than the Soviets. China has never had a civil society in the Western sense: There is family and there is state, a private and public sphere--more like Sicily than Sweden.

Predicting the future

10 thoughts on predicting future trends:

If it's talking point on Reddit, you're probably early. If it's a talking point on Linkedin, you're definetly late.
If the media is building something up -- be ready for them to tear it down.
If you're over the age of 25, assume your initial reactions about new trends are wrong.
If you're mocked for doing something, it doesn't mean it's the future. But if nobody mocks you, it's not the future.
Mainstream topics of 6-12 months downstream of memes on Twitter, Reddit and 4chan. The Overton Window is guided by memes.
The future isn't evenly distributed -- you can get on a 5-hour flight and move 5 years ahead.
If you wait for the news to tell you, you'll probably be wrong or too late. Historians now recognize the Roman empire fell in 476 -- but it wasn't acknowledged by Roman society until generations later.
If multiple smart friends tell you about a new idea, don't wait to understand it before you put a small bet on it. If you wait for society to educate you, you'll be too late.
Avoid reading about new trends. Get your hands dirty with practical time. You'll spot things 6 months ahead of the journalists.
Don't rely on algorithms. Have specific accounts you visit manually. If they're predicting unpopular future trends, it's unlikely the algorithm will be rewarding the content.

Empericism vs theory

Empiricism is a comparatively weak approach to knowledge discovery. Physics itself emphasized understanding as the main goal. Only when the understanding started to lack behind prediction in the advent of QM the priorities were changes (see Beller: Quantum Dialogues)

Think like a farmer

do not shout at the crops

don’t blame the crops for not growing fast enough

choose the best plants for the soil

irrigate and fertilize

remember you will have good seasons and bad seasons - you can’t control the weather, only be prepared for it

Optimist

The life of a pessimist is easy but dreary. The life of an optimist is hard but exciting. Pessimism is easy because it costs nothing. Optimism is hard because it must be constantly reaffirmed. In the face of a hostile, cynical world, it takes effort to show that positivity has merit.

To be an optimist, adopt these assumptions:

The future can be great
People’s intentions are mostly good
Ideas are fragile and need nurturing

Every new idea is an unrealized dream. Dreams are delicate and easy to destroy. When an idea presents itself, try to imagine the best version of it — what would make this idea great?

Pessimism and optimism share a trait: both are self-fulfilling. Your intention influences the outcome. Call it karma or, simply, effort. I would rather inhabit a future that has the possibility of being great.

Only optimists can create a great future. Only optimists can imagine it. Only optimists will put in the effort to make it. If you want to create a great future, believe it can happen. Choose optimism.

Work on the missing elements

Technical competence, good political skills, and good ethics seldom overlap in the same individual.

Illusion of a child

As long as you keep a childlike attitude towards life, and never take yourself too seriously, your personal growth will never stop.

Grace

If you can't look over your own life and recognize decisions you made when young that could have gotten you killed -- but for the Grace of God -- then you understand nothing. Absolutely nothing.

A kid trying to have fun, what kids do, partying with friends, exposed to fentanyl, dies. No coming back, no chance to amend their life. Tragic.

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

Vibe check

You actually feel anxious when you don’t take any risk.

You enjoy who you are, but remain ambitious about who you could be.

You are doing less, but you are achieving more, because you narrowed down your focus on what you are actually good at.

You love being challenged intellectually. You feel grateful when smarter people ask you difficult questions.

You don’t worry about missing out: you know that great opportunities will come, because you have enough self-discipline to get better day after day.

You don’t feel lonely when you are alone, because you are focused on a mission that naturally attracts the right people into your life.

You actually enjoy time alone, you understand it’s a rare opportunity to invest in yourself and upgrade who you are.

You no longer get angry over small things that don’t matter, and you don’t waste your energy on things that won’t make your life better.

You are not worried because the future is uncertain, you are excited because it means new opportunities for bold people like you.

Curiosity

I’m convinced the secret to happiness is curiosity.

You can’t stay anxious or lonely for long when you approach everything and everyone from a place of curiosity.

Slowly and steadily

The biggest competitive advantage is to have time to read slowly, think deeply, learn widely, enough confidence to ignore the noise of society, enough patience to go through with your long-term vision.

Simplify, not optimize

Most people don’t want to constantly hustle and optimize every single dish, workout, conversation they have.

Most people just want:

to spend more time laughing casually with their family and friends
to be free from their mental health issues
to not feel like a mindless cog in a society where everyone is too busy to appreciate the simple things
to grow old without feeling useless unless they are rich or influential
to feel appreciated and useful in a local community and neighborhood
to live in a walkable area where they can feel at peace, and focus on their long-term goals
to have enough time to read books without feeling guilty about their productivity
to look back in a few decades, and be able to say with a smile of satisfaction, that they did a good job, that they had a good life

Emotions

Feeling anger, anxiety, or sadness is normal. Emotions are a healthy, unavoidable part of life.

However, wallowing in your emotions is a choice. Feel your emotions, recognize them, then move on.

Faith and confidence

Anxiety disappears once you stay away from sugar, alcohol, sleep deprivation, manipulative people, online outrage, and learn how to appreciate your daily: walk in the sun, laughters with family, workout with a local community, session of deep work, moments alone unstimulated.

Confident, but not cocky

Don't waste their time pleasing others.
Always keep their word.
Answer insults with smiles.
Say no to things they don't like.
Get their clothes tailored (They look nice).
Admit their mistakes with honesty.
Always be the first to reach for the check.
They are confident and take the lead.
Never fear taking big steps & pursuing their goals.
Avoid arguing for the sake of arguing.
Always speak the truth, even if it's hard to do.
Know how to fight and defend themselves.
Have total control over their emotions.
Don't get easily influenced by the opinions of others.
Take responsibility for their actions.
Don't watch Porn

Getting Things Done

How to do hard stuff ?

write down a 1 page doc with your key assumptions, the hypothesis/goal you want to test, and your plan to do it

now read it with a maximally critical eye…does it make sense? are there gaps? iterate until you can’t find any

now go execute like crazy

Focus what's present

Focusing on what matters requires continuous effort.

There is always something calling for your attention, pulling you away from what matters. It might be a grammar mistake begging to be corrected, an expectation put on you by someone else, or even the gas station across town that’s a few cents cheaper. Individually, none of these things really distract you much, but as days turn to weeks, they become an anchor.

It’s easy to overestimate the importance of winning the moment and underestimate how it can cost you the ultimate goal.

It’s a daily battle to focus on your ultimate goal, not the quick wins that lead to nowhere you want to go.

You have to choose and give up

Being interested in everything, and wanting to do everything, is how you often end up doing nothing at all. It's easy to never make any choice when you have plenty of options. You can't do everything if you want to do a few things in a great, impactful, meaningful way. Choose.

Get ball rolling

When facing an overwhelming task never think about finishing. Think about starting. Allow yourself to not finish but force yourself to start. Once you start you can’t stop.

Take the first step, the step you don't want to take

my biggest speed constraint in development is deliberating over the best way to do something

I'm learning to just ignore the instinct to deliberate and freeze in analysis paralysis: go on gut feeling. If its wrong, that just means that I've learned something

Do try to force your focus

I meet many people trying to teach themselves to focus harder. I'm skeptical. When I'm routinely having trouble focusing, it's often a helpful sign I'm working on the wrong thing, or applying insufficient imagination, & need to shake things up.

Getting things done without willpower or discipline

When it comes to getting things done people either rely on willpower and/or discipline.

But neither willpower nor discipline are sustainable.

Willpower fails because it’s too sporadic; discipline because it’s too unnatural.

Requiring either willpower or discipline is a red flag, as they both signal one’s process is deeply flawed, demanding inordinate amounts of energy to complete tasks.

You must find the process that gets things out the door quickly, but ONLY when you move slowly.

Only at this intersection of rapid release and slow movement does tractability live.

Pay attention to when this happens in your work. Therein lies the actions worth repeating.

Work like an athelete

Forty hour workweeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes - train and sprint, then rest and reassess.

Practice like a standup comedian

In a past life I took stand-up comedy lessons and even performed a little. I learnt that for every joke in your set, there were 10 that didn’t land well when you tried them, 100 that you wrote down but weren’t funny enough to try, and 1,000 you thought of but didn’t write down.

Creative work

One of the hardest parts of doing creative work is simply explaining yourself.
The idea-hunting instinct doesn't have an on/off switch. It's a 24/7, all-consuming craft. It's bliss and torture, at once.
Working overtime is mandatory, but the pay is speculative.
Though epiphanies arrive in a kinetic flash, the seeds are sown over years of play and contemplation.

Cognitive demanding work

Two of the hardest things about cognitively demanding work are:

You can’t really make it go faster. There are tricks to getting unstuck but it usually proceeds very nonlinearly.
It often looks like it could have been done in a far shorter amount of time when it’s over.

Life long learning

In 10 years, the world will be very different from today.

Once upon a time, it was okay to learn sth in school & then apply it for the rest of your life.

Today, to keep up and thrive with the rapid pace of change, it's pivotal to keep reinventing yourself and to keep learning.

Enviornment & Habit

A lot of what we do is a simple response to our environment.

You eat the biscuit because it's there. If it isn’t there you’ll eat the apple instead.

Simply create an environment that is biscuit free and full of apples.

Pay attention to your environment.

on shortification of "learning"

There are a lot of videos on YouTube/TikTok etc. that give the appearance of education, but if you look closely they are really just entertainment. This is very convenient for everyone involved : the people watching enjoy thinking they are learning (but actually they are just having fun). The people creating this content also enjoy it because fun has a much larger audience, fame and revenue. But as far as learning goes, this is a trap. This content is an epsilon away from watching the Bachelorette. It's like snacking on those "Garden Veggie Straws", which feel like you're eating healthy vegetables until you look at the ingredients.

Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It's not that the quickie doesn't do anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn.

I find it helpful to explicitly declare your intent up front as a sharp, binary variable in your mind. If you are consuming content: are you trying to be entertained or are you trying to learn? And if you are creating content: are you trying to entertain or are you trying to teach? You'll go down a different path in each case. Attempts to seek the stuff in between actually clamp to zero.

So for those who actually want to learn. Unless you are trying to learn something narrow and specific, close those tabs with quick blog posts. Close those tabs of "Learn XYZ in 10 minutes". Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don't just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn.

And for those actually trying to educate, please consider writing/recording longform, designed for someone to get "sweaty", especially in today's era of quantity over quality. Give someone a real workout. This is what I aspire to in my own educational work too. My audience will decrease. The ones that remain might not even like it. But at least we'll learn something.

Making progress everyday

There is nothing more common than getting distracted for a few days that suddenly become a few months, and before you know it, several years passed and you didn’t get closer to any of your goals. If you don’t make daily progress, you are not serious about your long-term vision.

Terminal disease

you can get a tattoo removed, but a PhD is forever