Some principles I follow

January 15, 2023

  • You need to work hard in life to get anything
    • Hard work never goes to waste
  • Caring deeply about things is cool
  • Play for the front of the jersey
  • Be truth seeking (strong views, weakly held)
  • Believing in yourself is step zero. You need to believe in yourself before you can do anything
  • Locally, the process is more important than the outcome (ie the journey more important than the destination). So hard work matters locally
    • Globally, you get no extra points for working hard. What matters at the end of the day is how the world turns out.

    • "When all is said and done, and Nature passes her final judgement, you will not be measured by the number of moments in which you worked as hard as you could. You will not be judged by someone rooting around in your mind to see whether or not you were good. You will not be awarded extra points for the persuasiveness of the reasons that there was nothing more you could have done. You will be measured only by what actually happens, as will we all." - Nate Soares

  • Understand as much as you can before you act

    • "If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe." - Abraham Lincoln

  • It's important to think, reflect, and be self-aware, but also important to act

    • "If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?" - Paul Kalanithi

  • Simple living, high thinking
  • Comparing yourself to others doesn't work
    • If you compare yourself to someone worse than you, you'll feel good. If you compare yourself to someone better than you, you'll feel bad.
    • So it's a hack, because you can feel anything.
    • Instead, you want to compare yourself to your past self and what you want to be in the future.
  • Whiteboarding is one of the best thinking tools
  • The way the world is right now is because people made it so. You can change it, mold it, shape it. You can make it better. Steve Jobs explains it well
  • You can get good at anything today by using the Internet
  • Extreme conflicting viewpoints are often simultaneously true, ie Dialectical Wisdom