Collected since 2.25.25
- Almost everything is a skill issue (more than we like to think).
- Make habits as easily accessible as possible. Reduce friction wherever and whenever possible. Conversely, if you want to stop a bad habit, put as much friction as possible between you and the habit. This can include mental and physical friction.
- If you want to be extraordinary, most of the standard life milestones that guide others shouldn't apply to you. "A good way to become higher agency is to act like probabilities based on the average person don't apply to you."
- Extraordinary results require extraordinary efforts (most of the time).
- You don't have to have an opinion on things.
- Failures and mistakes should be reframed as both practice and a gathering of new information, resulting in a form of constant iteration.
- Both child soldiers and child prodigies exist and it's naïve to believe everyone else falls naturally in between those two extremes.
- Long term satisfaction is always worth the sacrifice of short term pleasure.
- Everything is impermanent.
- Almost no very successful person moves super slow.
- There will never be *the* thing or *the* idea or *the* material possession that grants you ultimate satisfaction. It's all unsatisfactory.
- The better you are at delayed gratification, the happier you will be.
- A lot of people don't really pass the Turing test.
- We are biological animals wired for survival attempting to navigate a highly complex, modernized world.
- Overcorrection in people, tribes, and systems is a very common failure mode that should be recognized and avoided.
- There is free alpha everywhere and most people do not do anything about it due to locally optimal mindsets and states.
- If you don't record it, it doesn't exist. The most effective method of recording is writing it down.
- If you're trying to make any progress about anything in your life, RECORD YOUR JOURNEY. Recording your development and being able to reflect back on where you used to be is one the most motivating feelings.
- There is no speed limit, but keep it within your sustainable zone of control.
- Anti-fragility is extremely valuable and rare.
- Most people are bad at identifying why they are successful or have succeeded.
- You can and should increase your potential for luck.
- Relatedly, making more contact with reality is correlated with more success. This is probably due to increasing your surface area of luck and escaping local minimas and moving to global maximas.
- True confidence is trained trust built within a container of self-love.
- Focus your time, energy, and attention on what you want to see more of.
- Your life is shaped by what you choose to focus on, so you must actively control and invest your attention like your most valuable resource.
- Make good and hard decisions before you turn ~25 while your brain is still plastic to secure your best future brain.
- Learn what you like and and why, then apply those principles to everything such as books, film, clothes, travel, social settings, etc. Knowing yourself and being able to put yourself in the best position possible for your personality and taste is a powerful feeling.
- "Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing." - Steve Jobs
- Doing as much as you can every day is a form of life extension. Building wealth is also a form of life extension. Both of these things go together sometimes and other times clash.
- We're all just temporarily abled.
- Reality is very very complicated and absolutes are always wrong.
- A deontological model of habits can be harmful.
- Get attached to processes rather than outcomes. Outcomes are fake, processes are not.
- The dumber the disagreements, the better the world actually is. To expand, as societies solve major problems and life generally improves, people tend to lower their threshold for what constitutes a problem, shifting their anxieties to increasingly minor issues despite overall progress.
- Our actions around other people are based on what our model is of what their model is of us.
- Repetition builds intuition.
- Goodhart's law runs the world.
- Aesthetics are the differentiator but not enough.
- In most contexts, it takes a lot less friction to destroy and tear down vs to build and create. Protect your habits and creations.
- "People tend to self sort into subcultures that best excuse their weaknesses." Make sure you're not unconsciously doing this.
- There are some skills you can learn that will affect all (or most) facets of life in big ways. These are permanent skills.
- Deliberate practice is as important for skill building as going to failure is as important for building muscle. (requirement!!)
- You're not pursuing your goals strategically and it's hurting you.
- Good sensemaking is a moral imperative.
- Context determines value. The same object can be worthless or valuable depending on its framing, presentation, aesthetics, and the story attached to it. Think piece of trash in garbage vs in museum.
- Tacit knowledge is just a bunch of tiny experiments and iterations done over a long time horizon.
- Progress = action multiplied by input quality. If you practice your thing everyday but going off garbage input, your action will be garbage (think weightlifting without going to failure).
- "Garbage in, garbage out; we're all basically LLMs so find good data to train on."
- "With ambition, you tend to get one step below what you aim for. So unless you try to be the best, you won't even be good."
- Every act of discipline is an expression of self-love. Every act of impulsiveness is an expression of self-abandonment. What you think of as discipline is just compassion for your future self.
- Never ever suppress emotions. Feel them fully and express them healthily. Emotional triggers are a goldmine for growth.
- We've already figured out how to reduce/remove suffering from subjective experience. Suffering = discomfort x resistance.
- Run towards the resistance.
- Systems and consistency > motivation or big one-time goals. Prioritize daily habits and processes.
- There will be months where nothing happens and days where everything happens. The point of the months is to ensure you catch the days where everything happens. This is skills meeting opportunity.
- There is a first-mover advantage in emerging domains. Think early founders building DoorDash (mobile apps, gig economy, etc) or Isaac Newton discovering the laws of physics. Take advantage of this where you can.
- Systems thinking is everything (but not perfect).
- "Invert, always invert"
- Typically, 80% of results come from 20% of efforts. Identify and double down on your highest-leverage activities.
- Simplicity begets action. Keep it simple stupid.
- "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
- Well read ≠ well thought. Input ≠ processing.
- When you avoid an emotion, you invite that emotion into your life in exactly the way that you avoid it. All of your unconscious and reactive patterns have, at their root, an emotion or emotions that you’re trying to avoid.
- The map is not the territory but maps are all we can run on so develop good maps.
- "If you’re trying to do something and there’s a type of guy who does that thing all waking hours for fun effortlessly and you aren’t that type of guy it’s going to be hard. Really hard to fight the type of guy you are." Alignment > discipline.
- Study the fundamentals, do the tacit and specific knowledge.