Some life advice I have for myself, and for people like me. Written from the point of view of a student, for students!
Note: the whole post will make sense if you read it chronologically.
Find Compounding Value Activities
Anytime you notice a pattern of compound interest, take note! Compounding growth is said to be the 8th wonder of the world, which should hint to you how important it is for you to find and leverage them. Doing so will unlock superlinear returns for everything you do in life.
And superlinear returns occur everywhere in the real-world.
If your service or 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. And depressingly, the world only remembers who came first. Being second is meaningless.
So what are some compounding activities? My list so far:
- Reading. It is one of the highest leverage activities you can do. One hour of reading can change the direction of your life. I personally try to read books for 30m (before I sleep) and 2-3 hours of blogs and cool essays I find online. See: Learning.
- Altruistically helping others. You can talk shit about your friends to their face, but never do so behind their back. Doing the right thing, for a long time, will pay off. Just keep making enough positive bets for people, and probability laws dictate that you will win over time. It’s tempting to make short-term sacrifices (like throwing your morals away), but the shortcut is almost always never worth it. Just do the right thing.
- Exercising, even if it is just 15m a day. Apparently, this is significantly better than doing no exercise.
- Sleeping for at least 7 hours. I did a lot of research on sleep in high school, and surprisingly I learned that there is no such thing as sleep debt. You cannot gain sleep back. Sleeping extra on the weekends to make up for the weekdays does nothing. Having good sleep is the one factor that affects virtually every other area of your life, so it’s logical and advisable to prioritize sleep over grinding out another hour. If you have trouble sleeping, just set a bedtime alarm.
- Writing on the internet. This is such an underrated compounding activity because it will increase your luck potential (or “surface area”).
Expand Your Luck Potential
Writing online is one way to expand your luck potential, but there are many other paths you cna take as well. Take risks. Do what you’re afraid of. Help others. Talk with professionals. Travel for conferences. Do hackathons. Connect people with other people. Practice being charismatic. Follow up on people. (See how do so in this blog: Interesting Stories.) I also like to know enough about everything so I can talk to anybody (my exceptions is religion and art…)
Don’t just study and confine your luck potential to a recruiter taking interest in your 4.0.
And once you build up the surface area of your luck, it’s time to focus on capitalizing on that luck. Be competent. Be serious about something. Go deep and be technical in that something. If you’re a student, my advice is to aim to be the go-to guy for that something in your university. Hackathons, physics, DJing, whatever.
Having just that one insanely deep and technical project on your resume will catch the attention of recruiters – as an example, search up Roy Lee and Interviewer Coder!
Be a Specialized Generalist
There’s a lot of debates on generalists vs specialists. I firmly believe in being a generalist (see my blog on Generalists). People say, if you spread your eggs in many baskets, you won’t be good at anything! My response is that people don’t have the same number of eggs.
Thus, my take is that people can be a specialized generalist.
As problems in the world grow in complexity, generality is more important than specialty. Problems now exist in the realm of multiple fields instead of being isolated as they used to.
For example, my work with Nanoneuro Systems requires knowledge in bioengineering, neuroscience, electrical engineering, computer science, and semiconductor theory and nanofabrication. If you weren’t familiar with most of these domains, you would’ve never thought about biological computing in the first place. Thus, a solution to a problem you may be trying to solve will remain locked – not because you didn’t have the skills to pursue it, but because you weren’t able to consider it as a possibility in the first place!
My advice is to aim to be the best at a field (top 5%). At that point, diminishing returns kick in, and focus on being good (top 10%) at several other fields. Be good at a lot of things, and be really good at one thing.
To learn effectively, track hours on independent deep work – long periods of uninterrupted, undistracted time for yourself to think (Focus is underrated). Three to four hours already puts you at the top percentile.
It’ll suck at first. You’re going to have to say no more. You’re going to have to minimize your commitments. If anything isn’t a fuck yeah, it’s a no. If getting rejected from something won’t make you feel terrible/dejected, it’s a no. Be open for a hard life-changing opportunity than to fill your time with the easier and smaller ones.
Because 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.
Question University and Other University Advice
From the above quote, you may think that you should take the hardest classes and push yourself in university. Sure, that could be it.
But more usefully, I suggest taking the easiest classes to do the hardest things you care about (which could be one specific class). If so, prioritize classes (and research labs) based on: good professors, interesting topic, and ease (for classes).
The rationale here is that 1) students don’t know what classes/research/fields they enjoy as they haven’t been exposed to much and 2) people generally quit their managers and team, not their job. Thus, you should index heavily on the people you’ll be with. Working with people you enjoy will also have a meaningful impact on your health.
The biggest thing I learned at Penn is that college isn’t about learning. It’s about sending a signal.
If you believe that, then optimize for doing cool things out of classes. Doing cool stuff independently is a huge signal to others (it shows high agency) than anything else you can do at university. Anyone can join some bullshit club. Anyone can get a 3.9 or 4.0 GPA with effort. But few can build a rocket in their dorm, or become the only undergraduate in the world to build a biological semiconductor.
Spend as little time to get ~3.6 GPA (no one will care about your grades unless they are absolutely shit) and spend the rest of your time in research or independent projects. Blog. Make videos. Program random things. Learn through that. Skip classes if you have to.
I mentioned clubs earlier.
My hot take is that 99% of university clubs are bullshit. Fuck them and your need for external validation, your need to be associated with a “prestigious” finance club. Work on yourself and your interests. 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.
But Maxx, building a rocket in your dorm costs thousands of dollars! I don’t have the money to –
Wrong.
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. Being friends with professors in highly-funded departments will do wonders.
All you need to do is be direct about what you want. Ask. Ask for funding. Ask for help. Ask for critique. Ask people to be your mentors. Just ask.
After all that, you may reach a point where university is hindering what you are doing on the side. You may consider a gap year.
My take is that 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. (See this post by someone else: when should one gap year or quit their job?)
Friendship
Being high agency and doing your own cool things is admittedly difficult. I find that doing anything with friends (3+) will make it easier. In fact, work with others as much as possible in anything you do. Share the load and force each other to success. Go to the gym with your friends. Study together. Build cool stuff together.
Your friends are also more influential than you think.
Being around optimistic, ambitious, intelligent, and kind peers is like intellectual rocket fuel. I’m not trying to be a dipshit, but once you’re exposed to people like that will change your worldview.
Really do 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. It helps if your field of interest is growing in popularity. Smart people like to stick together, and smart people like to cluster together where hard problems exist.
But most importantly, filter based on their integrity, energy, and agency. Energy may be confusing, but there are some people who, after you talk to them, you just feel more energized and ready to conquer anything. They’re rare but they exist.
On the other end of the spectrum, consciously and actively 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.
Think For Yourself
To apply all of my advice will require you to think for yourself.
What do you want to do with your life, disregarding what others tell you? What would you do in isolation from the pressures of the world, especially from money and prestige? Fields like law, consulting, investment banking, software engineering, or medicine is dangerously tempting to students, who haven’t thought much about what they really like.
What should you spend time on? Don’t spend time on meaningless things. Life is short, so focus on working on things that are hard, but important.
People tell me that I can never go wrong pursuing the things that you love… and I’m starting to think that’s true. When in doubt, follow your curiosity. If you don’t know what you like, then go deep on multiple things to get a sense for what kinds of things you enjoy doing (aka be a specialized generalist). This probably won’t change over the course of your life. What’s the shape like?
Better Productivity
If you couldn’t tell from my posts on Apps and Learning, I’m an absolute productivity nut. My biggest advice from trying out every single system possible is simply, don’t.
Don’t waste your time finding “systems,” “software,” or “tricks” for increasing productivity, as they made precisely zero difference in my life (and will make no difference in your life too).
After years of experimenting, I’ve settled into a simple philosophy of do what comes naturally to me and stick with it. My philosophy is now simplicity and flexibility. Complex tools and tracking apps are overwhelming and distracting, so the simpler they are, the better.
Other smaller productivity-enhancing tips:
- Collect questions and save them onto notes and read the questions periodically. This’ll help you pick up on information you randomly come across.
- Prefer async work unless the task is complex. “Could we start async over email?”
- Stop reading the news, especially politics. If something is that important, you’re likely to hear about it from your friends and family. Instead, curate optimistic content and people you admire.
- Time spend doing nothing is valuable. Go for a walk without your phone. Go walk outside. (See Productive.)
Be Social
🚧 Under construction… 🚧
- Come to dinners and events with stories prepared. Also host your own dinners!
- Keep a list of favorite quotes to use.