Posts
Possessions
3. Things you use for a significant fraction of your life
(bed: 1/3rd, office-chair: 1/4th) are worth investing in.
4. “Where is the good knife?” If you’re looking for your
good X, you have bad Xs. Throw those out.
Productivity
17. Done is better than
perfect.
Body
22. Exercise is the most important lifestyle intervention
you can do. Even the bare minimum (15 minutes a week) has a huge impact. Start
small.
25. History remembers those who got to market first. Getting your creation into the world is more important
than getting it perfect.
28. You can improve your
communication skills with practice much more effectively than you can improve
your intelligence with practice. If you’re not that smart but can
communicate ideas clearly, you have a great advantage over everybody who can’t
communicate clearly.
32. Make accomplishing things as easy as possible. Find
the easiest way to start exercising. Find the easiest way to start writing. People make things harder than they have to be and get
frustrated when they can’t succeed. Try not to.
33. Cultivate a reputation for being dependable. Good
reputations are valuable because they’re rare (easily destroyed and hard to
rebuild). You don’t have to brew the most amazing
coffee if your customers know the coffee will always be hot.
34.
How you spend every day is how you spend your life.
Rationality
35. Noticing biases in others
is easy, noticing biases in yourself is hard. However, it has much higher
pay-off.
39. If something surprises
you again and again, stop being surprised.
Self
44. There is no interpersonal
situation that can’t be improved by knowing more about your desires, goals, and
structure. ‘Know thyself!’
45. If you’re under 90, try
things.
46. Things that aren’t your
fault can still be your responsibility.
47. Defining yourself by your
suffering is an effective way to keep suffering forever (ex. incels, trauma).
48. Keep your identity small.
“I’m not the kind of person who does things like that” is not an explanation,
it’s a trap. It prevents nerds from working out and men from dancing.
49. Don’t confuse ‘doing a
thing because I like it’ with ‘doing a thing because I want to be seen as the
sort of person who does such things’
50. Remember that you are
dying.
55. Personal epiphanies feel
great, but they fade within weeks. Upon having an epiphany, make a plan and
start actually changing behavior.
56. 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.
Hazards
59. Those who generate
anxiety in you and promise that they have the solution are grifters. See:
politicians, marketers, new masculinity gurus, etc. Avoid these.
62. “If they’ll do it with
you, they’ll do it to you” and “those who live by the sword die by the sword”
mean the same thing. Viciousness you excuse in yourself, friends, or teammates
will one day return to you, and then you won’t have an excuse.
Others
67. It’s possible to get
people to do things that make you like them more but respect them less. Avoid
this, it destroys relationships.
68. 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.
70. Bored people are boring.
71. A norm of eating with your family without watching
something will lead to better conversations. If
this idea fills you with dread, consider getting a new family.
Relationships
73. In relationships look for somebody you can enjoy just
hanging out near. Long-term relationships are mostly spent just chilling.
74. 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.
77. If you haven’t figured things out sexually, remember that there isn’t a deadline. If somebody is making you feel like there is, consider the possibility that they aren’t your pal.
78. If you have trouble talking during dates, try saying
whatever comes into your head. At worst you’ll ruin some dates (which weren’t
going well anyways), at best you’ll have some great conversations. Alcohol can
help.
79. When dating, de-emphasizing your quirks will lead to
90% of people thinking you’re kind of alright. Emphasizing your quirks will
lead to 10% of people thinking you’re fascinating and fun. Those are the people
interested in dating you. Aim for them.
81. People can be the wrong fit for you without being
bad. Being a person is complicated and hard.
Compassion
82. Call your parents when you think of them, tell your
friends when you love them.
83. 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.
84. If somebody is undergoing group criticism, the tribal
part in you will want to join in the fun of righteously destroying somebody.
Resist this, you’ll only add ugliness to the world. And anyway, they’ve already
learned the lesson they’re going to learn and it probably isn’t the lesson you
want.
85. Cultivate compassion for those less intelligent than
you. Many people, through no fault of their own, can’t handle forms, scammers,
or complex situations. Be kind to them because the world is not.
86. Cultivate patience for
difficult people. Communication is extremely complicated and involves getting
both tone and complex ideas across. Many people can barely do either. Don’t
punish them.
87. 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.
88. Remember that many people suffer invisibly, and some
of the worst suffering shame. Not everybody can make their pain legible.
89. Don't punish people for admitting they were wrong,
you make it harder for them to improve.
90. In general, you will look for excuses to not be kind
to people. Resist these.
Joy
91. 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.
92. You have vanishingly little political influence and
every thought you spend on politics will probably come to nothing. Consider
building things instead or at least going for a walk.
93. Sturgeon’s law states
that 90% of everything is crap. If you dislike poetry, or fine art, or
anything, it’s possible you’ve only ever seen the crap. Go looking!
94. You don’t have to love your job. Jobs can be many
things, but they’re also a way to make money. Many people live fine lives in
okay jobs by using the money they make things they care about.
95. Some types of sophistication won’t make you enjoy the
object more, they’ll make you enjoy it less. For example, wine snobs don’t
enjoy wine twice as much as you, they’re more keenly aware of how most wine
isn’t good enough. Avoid sophistication that
diminishes your enjoyment.
100. Bad things happen dramatically (a pandemic). Good
things happen gradually (malaria deaths dropping annually) and don’t feel like
‘news’. Endeavour to keep track of the good things to avoid an inaccurate and
dismal view of the world.
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