Some life advice I have for myself, and for people like me. Read each section chronologically. Written from the point of view of a student, for students!
- Anytime you notice a pattern of compound interest, take deep interest. Superlinear returns occur everywhere in the real-world. If your product is only half as good as your competitors, you don’t get half as many customers – you get none. If your basketball team is 10% worse, you lose the entire game, not 10% of the game. Prioritize compounding/superlinear returns. A growth rate of 1% is vastly different from a growth rate of 5%. A growth rate of 1% is 1.7x growth rate a year, while a growth rate of 5% is a 12.6x growth rate a year. Get into the habit of reading, altruistically helping others, exercising 15m a day, sleeping for 7 hours minimum, and writing on the internet.
- Emphasis on reading. It is one of the highest leverage activities you can do. One hour of reading can change the direction of your life.
- Altruistically help others. Don’t drag people down. Doing the right thing for a long time will pay off. If you just keep making enough positive EV bets for people, the laws of probability guarantee that you will win over time. It can be tempting to make short-term sacrifices, but having strong values and sticking to them will inevitably bring you long-term success. You can sacrifice your morals, but the shortcut is almost always never worth it.
- You cannot gain sleep back. Sleeping extra on the weekends to “make up” for the weekdays does nothing for the impact it has on your health. And having good sleep is one factor that has a superlinear return on your productivity. Thus, it is logical and advisable to prioritize sleep over grinding out another hour. Set a bedtime alarm.
- Find ways to increase your luck potential (or “surface area”). Take risks. Help others. Talk with professionals. Travel for conferences. Do hackathons. Write online. Connect people with other people. Practice being charismatic. Follow up on people. Don’t just study and confine your luck potential to a recruiter taking interest in your 4.0.
- Once you build up the surface area of your luck, it’s time to focus on capitalizing on that luck. Be competent, and competent usually means being serious about something. Go deep and be technical for whatever you are interested in. Aim to be the go-to guy for a thing (hackathons, physics, etc.) at your university if possible.
- As problems in the world grow in complexity, generality is just as important as specialty. Problems now exist in the realm of multiple fields instead of being isolated as they used to. Aim to be the best at a field (top 5% range). At that point, diminishing returns kick in, and focus on being good (top 20% range) at several other fields. Be good at a lot of things, but be really good at one thing.
- Track hours on independent deep work. Three to four hours puts you at the top percentile usually. You must be able to enforce and block long periods of uninterrupted time for yourself.
- When you look back, it is the hardest days that define you, not the easy or ordinary days. Do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. That could mean taking the hardest classes. But more usefully, it also means taking the easiest classes to do the hardest things you care about. If so, prioritize classes (and research labs) based on: good professors, interesting topic, and ease (for classes).
- College isn’t about learning. It’s about sending a signal. With that said, optimize for doing cool things out of classes – spend as minimal time to get ~3.8 GPA and spend the rest of your time in research or independent projects. Evaluate continuously if your research or project is actually helping you learn and get better.
- Doing cool stuff independently is a better signal to others than anything you may do at university (joining clubs, GPA, coursework). Skip classes if you have to. For most classes, it’s probably not the best use of your time anyways.
- Clubs are bullshit. Fuck them and your need for external validation. Work on your projects. If you really want to join one, join a club because you think it is fun, not because it will teach you something or help you “network”. Trying to “network” at “networking events” is fake and does not work. Real networks are built from genuine, non-networking intentions. AKA, make friends.
- At a point where you can comfortably feed yourself, money is not a constraint for doing cool stuff in university. It’s your friends, mentors, and ability to be creative. Friends will know people who can help or provide materials. Mentors do the same, but can also get you funding. Your ability to be creative is to persuade these unlikely individuals to help you do what you want. Hint: be friends with professors in highly-funded departments…
- Be direct about what you want. Ask. Ask for funding. Ask for help. Ask for critique. Ask people to be your mentors. Just ask.
- Doing things with friends (3+) always makes it easier. Work with others as much as possible. Share the load and force each other to success. Try making anything you do with friends. Go to the gym with your friends. Study together. Build cool stuff together.
- Your friends are more influential than you think. Try to make ambitious and smart friends who do cool things. The best way to do so is to be smart and ambitious yourself, and do cool things. Being around optimistic, ambitious, intelligent, and kind peers is like intellectual rocket fuel. (Read the PayPal Mafia). Filter based on their trust, ambition, energy, curiosity, agency, self-control, independent, integrity, and being fun to hang out with. Never compromise on that.
- There are some people who, after you talk to them, you feel more energized and you want to conquer the world. They’re rare but they exist – find them.
- Prefer a handful of truly close friends over many acquaintances. Stay up late at night and talk. Build connections and don’t burn those bridges.
- Cut negative people out of your life. The negative effects of being around low energy people will far outweigh the positive effects of high energy people. How can you tell? After spending time with someone, do you feel energized or tired? Rate from 1-5. If it’s 1-2, fade away. It isn’t worth your time.
- Go out of the way to meet people who will become your: significant other, cofounder, people you admire, and friends for life. Don’t be afraid to reach out to professors and PhD students.
- Say no more. Focus is underrated. Distractions take your leverage and make you poor. Keep your personal burn rate low and minimize your commitments. If anything isn’t a fuck yeah, lean towards no. If getting rejected from something won’t make you feel terrible/dejected, it wasn’t important in the first place. Lean towards no. It’s always better to be open for a life-changing opportunity than to take all the smaller ones.
- Planned gap years are almost always beneficial. I have never met someone who regretted a gap year they planned, such as independently learning, traveling, or internships. Take them. Embrace the risk.
- Get started in stock investing (all you need to do is buy ETFs from your university job) and learn about basic financial literacy. May as well get started now, rather than later.
- Spend time thinking about what you want, and not what others tell you. What would you do in isolation from the pressures of the world? (Especially when money is combined with prestige, such as in law, consulting, investment banking, software engineering, or medicine. This is dangerously tempting to students, who haven’t thought much about what they really like. Do not choose credibility reason as a reason for working at a large tech company, or any company, for that matter.) Be like Bruce Wayne. Understand what you want to do with your life.
- When you’re trying to find internships, my only advice is to be so good they can’t ignore you. Here’s someone I know who wrote an awesome thread on this. Check him out and read his thoughts, he’s a guy who knows and does what he says.
- Know enough about everything so you can talk to anybody.
- Spend minimal time finding “systems,” “software,” or “tricks” for increasing productivity, as they made precisely zero difference in my life (and yours too). Do what comes naturally to you and stick with it.
- Figure out what you should spend time on. Don’t spend time on meaningless things. Life is short, so focus on working on things that are hard, but important. On another note, you can never go wrong pursuing the things that you love. When in doubt, follow your curiosity. It never lies, and it knows more than you do about what’s worth paying attention to.
- Go deep on multiple things to get a sense for what kinds of things you enjoy doing. This probably won’t change over the course of your life. What’s the shape like?
- Collect questions and save them onto notes and read the questions periodically.
- Consistency in anything is the key to improving and living a better life.
- Make money to buy freedom.
- People quit their managers and team, not their job. Index heavily on the team you would be working with. Working with people you enjoy and working in a team with autonomy can have a meaningful impact on your health – a large majority of people are unhappy and stressed solely because of their boss.
- Choose to live a happy life (personal satisfaction), a meaningful life (societal contribution), or a psychologically rich life (wisdom) every year.
- Be reliable and consistent with what you say and what you do.
- Block times for your todos instead of having a list.
- My philosophy on productivity has returned to simplicity and flexibility. Complex tools and tracking apps are overwhelming and distracting, so the simpler they are, the better.
- Prefer async work unless the task is complex. “Could we start async over email?”
- Incentives override how much someone likes you, how great they think you are, and how much they want to do the right thing.