This is a compilation of thoughts and beliefs (mental models, if you’re fancy) that I’ve accumulated over the years. Think of these as slightly more than Tweets, but not quite full blog posts.
I try to formalize these here for future reference, and to crystallize my thinking. Some ideas may still be a work in progress, change over time, and may lack full nuance. If you find something here you disagree with, or think I’m wrong, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Correct but not Useful, and vice versa
I used to evaluate all ideas for correctness. Was something provable, analytically and verifiably? I wanted to be Rationalist, and this was important to me.
However, at the altar of correctness, I noticed myselfmyself sacrificing utility. What if there was a mindset that you couldn’t prove or verify (or even was obviously incorrect), but if you adopted, magically made your life better? Wouldn’t you want that?
An easy example of this: if you believe you are fully responsible for how your life goes, this brings a lot of agency. You can make excuses and argue why something wasn’t your fault - but if you always just take responsibility, this enables a lot of growth.
Another example: if believe that God (or “The Universe”) is looking out for you and wants you to have a great life, this enables a lot of optimism, and your life will be better.
This is similar to the Rationalist vs Post-Rationalist philosophy — instead of fixating on correctness, figure out what your end goal is, and then contemplate if any given idea is useful for that goal.
“The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.” — Naval
People often have a reflexive negative reaction to this, because it sounds like I’m discarding truth, but I’m not. In many arenas, truth is all that matters, and so it is the most useful thing. But, not always.
Optionality is a Scam
Many great things in life come from commitment and compounding. Friendships, marriage, business, fitness, etc.
Maximizing optionality is bad and ends up hurting you a lot, there’s a very high opportunity cost that is hidden. It’s good to do early in life, but not as a continued strategy.
Similarly, the best things in life have the softest deadlines.
The Lazy Impulse to Restart Your Life
I recall once being very burnt out, disinterested in what I was working on, lying on the couch at around 10pm. I was watching a YouTube video about some guy riding a unicycle all over the world. In that moment, this seemed incredibly fascinating, and the sort of thing that would fix my life.
After a brief period of reflection, I realized how ridiculous this was, but I often notice variations of this sort of thinking in myself and others.
If you’ve worked very hard to build out a certain “life tree”, it’s rarely a good idea to throw it all away. This is obvious when I write it out like this, but often not how it feels in the moment.
- “I don’t like my friends, I should move to a new city.”
- “I don’t like my job, I should quit and start my own business”
- “I don’t like my life, I should move to a new country”
No! Find the small tweaks that you can make to your life to make it better.
Stillness and Fasting
There is a lot of value in stillness, and a nice parallel between mental stillness (meditation) and physical stillness (fasting).
Most of society is not oriented around stillness, and almost no one can make money off of stillness. It’s easy for the default to be action and consumption.
But, as a wealth of psychological and longevity research shows, regular stillness in all arenas is very valuable. I have often woken up in the morning, ready to jump into the obvious action items of the day. However, after some mental stillness (meditation, running, etc), I have a realization that totally deletes the obvious action items, and skips over them completely.
“A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library” — Frank Westheimer