Interesting Thoughts I have read or listened to..

27 Mar, 2023

A running list of interesting thoughts I have come across while reading and listening to various things over the internet:

new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time 
Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason 
The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing. 
I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand 
People are far more interesting in what they don't say about themselves 
You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others. 
Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it. 
The person you are the most afraid to contradict is yourself.
Personal epiphanies feel great, but they fade within weeks. Upon having an epiphany, make a plan and start actually changing behavior.
Sometimes unsolvable questions like “what is my purpose?” and “why should I exist?” lose their force upon lifestyle fixes. In other words, seeing friends regularly and getting enough sleep can go a long way to solving existentialism.
Think a little about why you enjoy what you enjoy. If you can explain what you love about Dune, you can now communicate not only with Dune fans, but with people who love those aspects in other books.
Sometimes things last a long time because they’re good (jambalaya). But that doesn’t mean that because something has lasted a long time that it is good (penile subincisions). Apply this to relationships, careers, and beliefs as appropriate.
Compliment people more. Many people have trouble thinking of themselves as smart, or pretty, or kind, unless told by someone else. You can help them out.
Don’t punish people for trying. You teach them to not try with you. Punishing includes whining that it took them so long, that they did it badly, or that others have done it better.
Don't punish people for admitting they were wrong, you make it harder for them to improve.
Liking and wanting things are different. There are things like junk food that you want beyond enjoyment. But you can also like things (like reading) without wanting them. If you remember enjoying something but don't feel a desire for it now, try pushing yourself.
When you lead, your real job is to create more leaders, not more followers.
Criticise in private, praise in public.
The biggest lie we tell ourselves is “I don’t need to write this down because I will remember it.”
Your growth as a conscious being is measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations you are willing to have.
Speak confidently as if you are right, but listen carefully as if you are wrong.
Three things you need: The ability to not give up something till it works, the ability to give up something that does not work, and the trust in other people to help you distinguish between the two.
You’ll get 10x better results by elevating good behavior rather than punishing bad behaviour, especially in children and animals.
A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.
What you do on your bad days matters more than what you do on your good days.
When you are stuck, explain your problem to others. Often simply laying out a problem will present a solution. Make “explaining the problem” part of your troubleshooting process.
Talk to people more. Read more long content and less tweets. Watch less TV. Spend less time on the Internet.
Build processes and systems for anything that you end up doing twice.
Something we all need to realise is that the things that we tell ourselves in our heads are generally to justify our own desire not to quit, as opposed to what other people will actually think of us
For a founder, being early is as good as being wrong
Refine your product positioning, sell solutions, not ideology.
how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives
If expectations grow faster than income you’ll never be happy with your money.
Very few choose ethics over engagement, money, etc
Most people don't know what they want unless they see in context 
Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person 
In your life, there are going to be constant demands for your time and attention. How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy 
Escape Local Maxima 
The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion 
You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. It’s that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase that I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: accept. 
Make your peace with the fact that saying ‘no’ often requires trading popularity for respect. 
Kids don’t do what you say. They do what they see. How you live your life is their example 
What you do is more important than how you do everything else, and doing something well does not make it important 
The worst financial decisions happen when people risk what they need in order to gain something they merely want. 
The most reasonable plan is planning on your plan not going according to plan. 
With the right incentives, people can be led to believe and defend almost anything. 
Something can be factually true but contextually nonsense. 
People like weekends because it’s when they have the most control over their time 
Most people are afraid of looking wrong 
Wealth is what you don’t see – money that hasn’t been spent, cars that haven’t been bought, jewellery that hasn’t been purchased. 
You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.
Spending time on things you can't control takes time away from things you can.
Most traditions are solutions to forgotten problems.
More choices often lead to less action. Do more by doing less.
You don't lack motivation, you lack a better reason.
Read to find new ideas, write to understand them, implement to learn from them.
Spending time on things that buy you time is always a good use of it.
Integrity is being the same person no matter the circumstance.
Do many things that you like to find the few things that you love.
Beliefs are more about belonging than they are about truth.
Be interesting to others by being interested in them. To be interesting, be interested.
The useless days will add up to something. The shitty jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.
What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
Never worry about being a small fish in a big pond. Being a big fish in a small pond sucks— you will hit the ceiling on what you can achieve quickly, and nobody will care. Optimize at all times for being in the most dynamic and exciting pond you can find.
Don’t create things to make money; make money so you can create things.  
Making money is often more fun than spending it, though I personally have never regretted money I’ve spent on friends, new experiences, saving time, travel, and causes I believe in. 
Keep your personal burn rate low. This alone will give you a lot of opportunities in life. 
Ask for what you want 
Go out of your way to help people. Few things in life are as satisfying. Be nice to strangers. Be nice even when it doesn’t matter. 
Do new things often. This seems to be really important. Not only does doing new things seem to slow down the perception of time, increase happiness, and keep life interesting, but it seems to prevent people from calcifying in the ways that they think. Aim to do something big, new, and risky every year in your personal and professional life.
Human mood and well-being are heavily influenced by simple things: Exercise, good sleep, light, being in nature. It’s cheap to experiment with these 
When you ask for favors, follow these three guidelines:  (1) Be specific and precise. (2) Tell the other person why you’re asking for their help. (3) After they’ve helped you, follow up with them thank them or provide an update. 
Avoid sophistication that diminishes your enjoyment. 
If your goal is to do more than make a quick buck, let your output be your signal—not your credentials. 
Finite games are played to win or lose. Infinite games are played to keep the game going. Seek out infinite games because they yield infinite rewards. 
If you listen to successful people talk about their methods, remember that all the people who used the same methods and failed did not make videos about it.  
You’re not lucky because more good things are actually happening; you’re lucky because you’re alert to them when they do. 
Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realise there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room. 
“I know it's hard to write. But it's harder not to. The only way you'll find out if you "have it in you" is to get to work and see if you do.”  
“Fear of being alone is not a good reason to stay”  
people don’t do what they say they believe, they do what’s convenient and then they repent 
Not everything that makes sense works, and not everything that works makes sense. 
You are not as good as your best success; you are not as bad as your worst failure. 
Impact of work on life is low compared to impact of life on work 
To be wealthy, accumulate all those things that money can’t buy.
Money can’t cover up terrible job.  
Push yourself to create more, there’s nothing cool about ideas and opinions without execution 
Ask for help more—for more things, more frequently, more openly 
When you’re overthinking = write. When you’re anxious = walk. When you’re tired = sleep. When you’re sad = move 
How you do anything is how you do everything 
If it costs you your peace, it’s too expensive
Building clarity in writing is more important than building clarity in speaking.  
Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal. 
You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what your plan to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history of economics or science or the arts. 
You don’t need a reason to leave. Wanting to leave is enough. Leaving doesn’t mean you’re incapable of real love or that you’ll never love anyone else again. It doesn’t mean you’re morally bankrupt or psychologically demented or a nymphomaniac. It means you wish to change the terms of one particular relationship. That’s all. Be brave enough to break your own heart. 
Everything’s been done before. The scenes change but the behaviors and outcomes don’t. 
We all are products of our background 
How you spend money can reveal an existential struggle of what you find valuable in life, who you want to spend time with, why you chose your career, and the kind of attention you want from other people. 
Spending money to make you happy is hard if you’re already happy.
The work that gets you to eight figures is often the work nobody else want to do.  
The gap between knowing what to do and actually getting people to do it can be enormous. 
The key is not to prioritise what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities. 
Sometimes what you don’t do is just as important as what you do 
Done is better than perfect  
You can do anything but not everything 
Once you have something, it means nothing to you. 
Everything good in life is just the gap between expectations and reality. 
The purpose of life is to experience things for which you will later experience nostalgia. The opposite of regret.
Aim to be fulfilled, not rich. 
We are the stories we tell others, and most of all ourselves 
send cold emails. assume that everyone is a friend. 
read, don’t listen to books. 
people protect themselves by projecting their fears on others 
we become the people whose opinion we care about 
we become the people we spend the most time (physically and mentally) with 
intelligence != genius 
feeling stupid now is better than feeling stupid in 10 years 
luck favors the prepared 
ask for help. especially when you’re scared of asking for help 
seek people who don’t get angry at you for saying what you think, being yourself, and doing what you believe is right 
the richest people lose the most money, the most connected people get rejected the most, the most successful people fail the most 
go do something that can fail 
you radically underestimate both a) how much you know that other people do not and b) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it. 
I often look at people's achievements and think: I wish I'd done that.  More rarely, I see the work that went into those achievements and think: I wish I were doing that.   Chase the latter. 
Being happy for others is a super-power 
Stop Scrolling. Start Reading  
Don’t Self Reject  
It’s similar to the idea that everyone suffers two deaths: Once when they die, and another when their name is spoken for the last time. 
You find what you like by trying it, not by thinking about it. 
Your life choices aren’t just about what you want to do; they’re about who you want to be. 
Regrets are resolutions. When you know what you wish you had done, you shouldn't pass up the next chance to do it. 
Aim for usability, not for perfection. 
Make serendipity your recommendation engine, not an algorithm written by engineers in a back room on the other side of the world. If all the art you "choose from" is from a predetermined list, you're neutering your sense of agency and the potential of art to take us way beyond who we currently are.  
Take more pictures and videos. Blurry ones, candid ones, deranged-smile-and-scrunched-up-eyes ones. In the last year, you've gone back and smiled at these ones more than anything else on your camera roll. And while you're at it, resist the pull of social validation — don't post them anywhere. 
Expand and examine your understanding of self-care. It rarely ever is wine and a face mask after a long night. It is: snotty cries in bed following a revealing therapy session, a comfortable silence while you borrow the warmth of your partner, a day of arduous cleaning after a period of sadness, an hour with yourself and your favourite book, a sharp mental slap to shake you out of a downward spiral.  
Focus not on what makes you famous, but what makes you interesting. Engage all the senses you have available. Read, think, taste, listen, talk, feel. Cultivate a rich inner life.  
At many junctures in life, you'll find that your ambition outstrips your talent and skill by a laughable amount. Whatever you do, don't make a U-turn or take a diversion solely for that reason. Take it as yet another display of your taste, and then put in the work.  
The best measure of wealth is what you have minus what you want. (By this measure, some billionaires are broke.) 
Expectations are like a debt that must be repaid before you get any joy out of what you’re doing. 
you start where you are. Not where you wish you were. Not where you hope you are. Not where you think you should be. But right where you are 
When in doubt, optimize for interestingness 
The gap between knowing what you want and going after it is where fear thrives. You don't need enough courage for the entire journey. You only need courage for the next step. 
Finish something. Anything. Stop researching, planning, and preparing to do the work and just do the work. It doesn’t matter how good or how bad it is. You don’t need to set the world on fire with your first try. You just need to prove to yourself that you have what it takes to produce something. 
getting better at your craft is 100x more effective than networking. 
A laptop operates the same whether it is on a desk in an office or in a Starbucks. But human brains are incredibly sensitive to context. 
Produce more consume less. / Have original thoughts vs just take in media 23/24 hours / how do you know which thoughts are your own  
It’s funny how spending money makes you feel like you have money. 
Modern freedom is having the ability to disconnect 
In my experience, burnout has nothing to do with working hard and everything to do with feeling no control or impact. 
Don’t rush, but don’t wait. 
The economy is just smart people paying beautiful people to promote stuff to insecure people. - ShaanVP 
If you don’t like the outputs, change the inputs. (On consumption) 
Mark Andreeson on Ricks podcast - the internet leads to village thinking at a global scale - narrow minded and always watching and very judgmental. This is compared to city thinking which is very open minded and accepting 
If you look at the people in your circle and you don’t feel inspired you don’t have a circle you have a cage. 
I remember recently, someone told me ‘man, with everything that you’ve done, if you put together a nice CV, you could probably land whatever job you want.’ And I just looked at him. Because that would defeat the purpose of everything. The point of everything I’ve done is to not have to have a job.”— Benjamin Edgar 
Are you creating to build what looks like success to others or are you creating to build value? 
Are you rooting your decisions in your core principles or in a mix of second hand opinions you see on media feeds? Do you have core principles? 
Many people go around looking for a box to fit into. Why? 
Fun is a feeling, not an activity. 
Get it wrong the first time.  Then make it better. 
People and companies struggle when they try to become something they are not. 
If you’re trying to get healthy, drinking a glass of water and going for a walk will serve you much better than spending time researching obscure details about nutrition and exercise. Figure out a good-enough next step and execute it. This applies to practically everything 
joy is freedom from the shackles of narrow utilitarianism 
Boredom is a bug of the mind. Very specifically, a tired mind in a cluttered space with unclear purpose and unrealistic expectations. 
when life kicks your ass, try to accept it with as much grace as you can manage. life kicks everyone’s ass in the end 
how you conduct yourself in crises will define you much more than 95% of everything else you do, so it’s worth mentally rehearsing them. be the person that people can count on when shit hits the fan 
The fortress you build to protect yourself can become a prison if you’re not careful 
there are lots of good reasons to work out, but here’s my favorite: the moment you break a new Personal Best (fastest mile, heaviest lift), you can feel your limiting beliefs melt away.   You just did something today that you couldn’t do yesterday. What will you do tomorrow? 
It’s okay to no longer be interested in things that you were interested in before. You’re a different person now. Forgive old obligations that are no longer relevant. Forgive your future self for doing the same. Cultivate trust and good faith across your past & future selves 
it is important to have projects on the scale of an entire life rather than months or years 
Thousands of people will want to start a Substack or podcast. Something like 1% of them or less will stick with it consistently for 2+ years. If you commit to things for 10+ years, you develop what appear to be superpowers 
There is a common issue of over-optimizing the metrics in business, which can damage the whole system.  Doing the wrong thing efficiently is actually worse than doing the right thing badly. 
Big ambitions, low expectations, and high standards are a powerful combination for living your best life. 
If you're stuck, there's likely a good reason for it. There's also likely an additional good reason why you're avoiding the first reason. (It's typically some form of fear, which is trying to protect you. The ultimate fear is often a fear of death/loss, and/or social death. For many, the latter is often more frightful than the former.) 
Self-love isn't just bubble baths and spa days, it's about confronting the "monster"| within yourself that you have ostracised for being shameful, cringe, dangerous, gross, grotesque - and embracing that part of yourself. (Notice how common it is for people to feel that they "have" to ostracize a part of themselves in order to avoid being ostracized by others in turn. 
The inward journey towards confronting that "monster" requires reliving your worst experiences. This is painful and scary and you have to set aside time and space to do it. You can choose not to do it (most people put it off), but if so, then the confrontation will likely happen someday when most inconvenient, in ways that create a worse mess. I wish that wasn't true lol but it often is. 
let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life. 
The right way is the hard way 
Here’s something I’m very thankful I was told while I was still in my 20s: that the point of all this “hard work” is to recognize the person it makes you, not what it “gets” you 
If only we wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is difficult, since we think them happier than they are 
Being happy with what you have doesn’t prevent you from pursuing what you want. 
Avoid zero days. A zero-day is when you don’t do a single thing towards whatever dream or goal or want or whatever that you got going on. To avoid zero days I make sure I read at least half an hour every day if not more. 
If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing 
Stop worrying about how it looks and focus on how it feels 
Things that are most fulfilling are hard to start, easy to quit. Things that are least fulfilling are easy to start, hard to quit.   Every. Single. Time. 
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.