List of Advice

Some life advice I have for myself, and for people like me. Read each section chronologically.

During College

1. Anytime you notice a pattern of compound interest, take deep interest. With that said, get into the habit of reading, altruistically helping others, exercising 15m a day, sleeping for 7 hours minimum, and writing on the internet.
2. Altruistically help others.
3. 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 studying.
4. Find ways to increase your luck potential (or “surface area”). Take risks. Help others. Talk with professionals. Travel for conferences. Do hackathons. Write online. Don’t just study and confine your luck potential to a recruiter taking interest in your 4.0.
5. 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.
6. As problems in the world grow in complexity, generality is just as important as speciality. 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. Don’t tunnel vision.
7. Track hours on independent deep work. Three to four hours puts you at the top percentile usually.
8. 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).
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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…
13. Be direct about what you want. Ask. Ask for funding. Ask for help. Ask for critique. Ask people to be your mentors. Just ask.
14. Doing things with friends (3+) always makes it easier. Try making anything you do with friends. Go to the gym with your friends. Study together. Build cool stuff together.
15. 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 ambition, energy, curiosity, agency, self-control, independent, integrity, and being fun to hang out with.
16. Prefer a handful of truly close friends over many acquaintances.
17. Cut negative people out of your life.
18. 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.
19. Say no more. 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.
20. 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.
21. 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.
22. 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.
23. 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.

Productivity

Listed in order of importance. Collected over 6 years of trying to become more productive.

1. If you spend 6 years reading about productivity, you’re procrastinating. Don’t think. Just do. 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.
2. Sleep, eat properly, and exercise. Spending the time to optimize for this will compound your high-quality productive time. Otherwise, you will run on low-quality time (even if you think otherwise). Set a bedtime alarm.
3. Creating a deep-focus habit for yourself is the highest impact change you can make to increase productivity. You must be able to enforce uninterrupted time for yourself. No text, no emails, no YouTube, no phone, no talking. Do this first before following anything else.
4. It is better to spend time figuring out what you should spend time on, then spending time on meaningless things. “It doesn’t matter how fast you move if it’s in a worthless direction.” 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.
5. Work with others as much as possible. Share the load and force each other to success.
6. If you find yourself procrastinating a lot (everyone does), break down the hard work in front of you to simpler, atomic tasks.
7. Write down (physically or digitally) what you need to do. You will forget. Doesn’t matter what system you follow (to-do, kanban, calendar, etc).
8. If you want to learn better, learn how to learn. Here’s a good starting reading: The 20 rules of formulating knowledge
9. You should also focus on cultivating luck: make it easy for people to find you online (writing, podcasts, etc), connect people with other people, practice speaking and being charismatic, work on opposite things at the same time, avoid boring people, follow-up on people, ask for help, and know enough about enough so you can talk to anybody.
10. See my note on Productive. TLDR: spend time being not productive. Talk with (optimistic) people, explore your hobbies, etc. Talking with “energy-radiators” is underrated because they provide energy and motivation for you to work on stuff too.
11. Say no to most opportunities (especially if they require lengthly applications, like clubs or a majority of fellowships). It’s always better to be open for a life-changing opportunity than to take all the smaller ones.