Hardship creates strong people, easy life creates weak people
Overthinking and perfection are highly overrated
Admire simplicity over complexity
Authenticity and chill are the best personality traits
Sense of purpose and sense of community are key to happiness
You have to be able to navigate ambiguity and apply your intelligence in non-obvious ways. Seeing incredibly academically smart people be so incredibly dumb in non-academic ways is one of life’s greatest mysteries to me.
People aren’t good at identifying what is “valuable”, we tend to overfit on what evokes emotion
There are many ways of saying the same thing, most people will just remember your vibe
True success and accomplishments are quiet and concentrated, no need to make noise along the way
Don’t hate the player, hate the game
Finite resources are the source of all conflict
Having high skill ceiling hobbies is healthy (chess, lifting, magic the gathering, StarCraft)
Body language is truly >50% of communication
Stay in school until you have things figured out if you can afford it (med, law, mba, phd)
Unless you have a big family or really interesting hobbies, retirement is somewhat of a scam
OMAD is the best diet, rowing+biking is the best natural full body workout
Chase is the best bank, Delta is the best US airline, Amex has the best credit cards
Plan your life based on the average case scenario and best case scenario. Not just the best case scenario
Trauma bonding and love bombing are bad but mild trauma bonding is how most people bond
Entitlement, victimization, and self-obsession are way too common these days
Sometimes, a whole field can’t be innovated (social media startup graveyard, reinforcement learning is dead)
Revealing romantic feelings is a one-way door with only 2 outcomes
A person’s living space says a lot about who they are
We all do things to benefit ourselves and society, but we shouldn’t glorify greed or selfishness
Social skills, financial literacy, personal care, and fitness are the most important topics to learn outside of school
Realism over idealism
IQ and EQ can pretty much summarize who someone is
Don’t trust someone who doesn’t have a todo list
Humble bragging (even someone else or future goals like OpenAI or Forbes30u30), idealism, being quirky for the sake of being quirky, and always complaining are way too common in tech culture
When it comes to friendships and relationships, the natural way is the best way. No need to overthink, listen to your gut
Markets are everywhere and it’s exhausting (jobs, dating, housing)
You can get decently good at anything with enough practice
Nature is timeless when it comes to interior design. Japanese architecture had amazing longevity
Life lesson learned from call of duty, the game is best enjoyed when not obsessing over your KD
For some reason, when people start a family and move to the suburbs, they tend to become the most boring people imaginable and enjoy talking about news, real estate and stocks
No matter how smart you are, there is only so much you can deduce from limited knowledge. There is no replacement for experience
Overly pedantic or bureacratic people at work are the worst
Life is filled with beautiful and highly intellectual things, being alive is a gift even if it doesn’t always feel like it
If you have FOMO, just know that things sometimes sound better than they actually were
Once you overuse the terms “growth”, “impact”, and “alignment” - you know you’ve officially become a corp slave. Maybe it’s time to take some PTO
Rising up too high on the management side of the corporate ladder especially in big tech doesn’t exactly signal good things about you
Do your best, try to detach from the outcome
Don’t be contrarian or conformist for the sake of it, exercise critical thought
Being likeable is very important in all aspects of life
Don’t do too much fake work and trick yourself into thinking you’re doing real work
Don’t focus on hype, tech has gone through so many hype cycles (robotics, AR/VR, self-driving cars, crypto, quantum, 3D printing, nanotech). The overall hype has only been real a few times (drones, AI, cloud, mobile, telehealth, fintech). There’s tons of problems to work on outside of hype
Food tastes better when you don’t know the exact ingredients and recipe. Things in general are better when there is still a little mystery and novelty