Mind Crunches #30: Lessons Life Has Taught Me
Life principles. Experiential patterns, definitely not advice!
It's never as good as it looks and it's never as bad as it seems.
If people don’t say NO to you, you definitely don’t ask the right questions.
Play sports. Try both team and individual ones. Most of the the things you will learn are lessons you can apply in life and business.
Everything is interconnected. There is one unified theory of knowledge. The alpha is on cross-pollinating ideas. Read Consilience.
Build an action oriented mindset. Bring something to reality first and then make it beautiful. A bad plan is better than no plan.
Work in a startup at one point of your life (if you can’t or don’t have the skills to build one yourself). It doesn’t have to be a tech startup.
Invert. Always invert. Doing a pre-mortem can save you from "bad situations” at least 80% of the time.
A conversation is technically a human prompting technique. Learn how to orchestrate a conversation. It’s an extremely underrated skill.
Be intellectually honest with yourself. As we grow up, it becomes naturally clear that many of the things we believed are wrong. Update your OS. Ask yourself: when was the last time I changed my mind about something?
Constantly changing your mind can lead to being intellectually wishy-washy. Develop some core beliefs that form your worldview and don’t change them.
Have kids. Among many other things, it’s best way to truly learn yourself.
You don’t have to be smart to be successful. You can be very good at most things in life if you just do the work and be diligent.
A super curated and diverse information diet is a competitive advantage. The Economist is still the fastest and cheapest way to get a good hold of all things around the world in a weekly basis. Apply your judgment.
Master steelmanning. It’s the best mental framework to be intellectually honest to yourself and win arguments.
Learn how to appreciate art but also don’t overthink it.
Subscribe to Replit Agent and launch an app. The only thing you need is an idea. Feel the magic of being a builder.
“The world is a museum of passion projects.” Still the best tweet ever written.
It’s extremely rare you will take a risk and you will regret it. Jump!
Download the Wikipedia app on your phone. Intellectual curiosity is an acquired taste. Yes, there are some people who are innately curious but you can develop your curiosity if you start by asking “why?” about pretty much anything in life. The more you learn about stuff, the more curious you get.
Always be high integrity, even when it costs you. The shortcuts aren’t worth it.
Life balance is subjective. There isn’t one recipe. Find yours.
Pick a sports club and support it till you die. Cry when they lose an important game and hug a stranger fellow fan next to you when they win a championship. Life is becoming more sterile. Humans are tribalistic. Enjoy the good part of it.
Develop a habit of writing. It can be anything and in any form. It can be on Apple Notes or on paper. You don’t need to publish it. (although publishing is a good trick to push yourself to discipline)
I cannot stress enough how important it is to not be afraid to ask “dumb questions”. I’d actually argue it’s a high IQ signal to ask “dumb questions”.
Interview your parents. Ideally record it on video. You will be surprised by how many things you didn’t know about their lives, how much more interesting their lives were compared to what you imagined, you will be able to pass along their experiences to your kids.
Information collection is a serious dopamine drug and can easily lead to inaction and midcurve takes. Find the sweet spot between info richness and action taking.
The IQ Bell Curve meme is one of the biggest truths in life.
Maximize for serendipity in life and business. The larger the surface of possibilities, the better.
Never trust people who are easily and frequently giving advice. Advice is heavily contextual and most of them suffer from survivorship bias.
Give back to the universe. Help your neighbor, volunteer to your local charity, reply to the cold email from a random student/intern.
Culture is upstream from everything. If you understand culture, you can connect dots between business, politics, human incentives. Watch movies, listen to music, read books, attend festivals.
Discipline equals freedom. Jocko Willink is right.
Travel somewhere abroad alone, at least once.
Believe in magic. “At some level, the universe responds to your intentions in a way that the laws of physics as we understand them don’t.” Some call it religion.
Be kind!
(photo by Thomas Gravanis)