A list of timeless reminders about how l aim to be or just how life seems to work.

FOCUS ON FASTER ITERATION AND NOT ON ACCURACY

• It's important to do things fast. A week is 2% of the year. Time is the denominator.
• Motion creates information. You learn more per unit time because you make contact with reality more frequently.
• Optimize for being spectacularly right some of the time, and low-stakes wrong a lot of the time.
• The goal is not to avoid mistakes; the goal is to achieve uncorrelated levels of excellence in some dimension.
• The downsides are worth it.

GO TOUCH THE METAL

• Hard skills are super important.
• Get good with your tools. I mean, really good.
• Get rid of all the friction. Keep oiling your tools and don't let them rust.
• Don't get lost in the busy bandwagon of managerial or bureaucratic duties. Those create empty suits.

GET GOOD AT SMALL TALK

• Soft skills are even more important.
• Sapiens are emotional species. They cannot think objectively.
• Get good at telling stories. Get good at sales.
• Listen at least thrice more than you speak.
• Better to get your dopamine from improving your ideas than from having them validated
• If right things are said in a wrong way, they lose their righteousness.
• And yes! when deep into shit, keep your mouth shut.

INSPIRATION IS PERISHABLE. ACT ON IT.

• Start before you are ready
• Thousands have the same idea, which you think is original and exclusive to you.
• Thinking is easy, doing is hard! Only execution matters. Ship it!

LIFE ISN'T UNFAIR, IT IS DISPROPORTIONATELY UNFAIR.

• The path isn't linear. It is a Geometric Brownian motion with a drift. Make sure that the trend coefficient is always positive.
• There are people who are way more smarter and hardworking than you are, but are not sitting on the priviliges that you have. And vice verca.
• At the age of 25, it’s very tempting to conflate agency and determinism in scripts. You have a default state “I’m a smart guy, I have these resources at hand. The future looks full of possibilities." And then life will hit you hard on face.
• Efficient Market Hypothesis is a flawed heuristic.

WE ARE MONKEYS. WE COPY.

• You will always feel an overpowering urge to fit in and follow the herd. It's natural! It is the evolutionary make-up of your brain that you inherited from your primordial ancestors.
• The best thing you can do is that make sure that the herd around you is smarter and more aware than you are.

HAVE SELF BELIEF TO THE POINT OF DELUSION

• You can do more than you think.
• Always try to know to what extent you are operating in a condition of learned helplessness in institutionalized environments.
• You are tied down by your own invisible orthodoxy. The laws of physics are the only limit
• And do not get trapped at local maxima.

IT IS BETTER TO TRAVEL WELL THAN TO ARRIVE

• Life is happening, right now. There is no past. There is no future.
• Don't forget that you have limitless capability to respond.

RAISE THE CEILING, AND NEVER THE FLOOR

• And yes, most important! Ego is the enemy. It is self defeating and depression inducing.
• The higher you go, the harder it will get to contain your ego.
• Never forget, you are a mere mortal chimp with a plan and also without a tail.

I love ya!