Principles
Balance
Have balance in thoughts. Fine to be sad but don’t let it affect your judgement.
Generally nothing is as good or as bad as it seems. Time changes things and respect that.
You will have good days and bad days. It’s important to keep discipline and keep making progress in an organized, even if it’s baby steps.
If you are arguing, you are losing. Great talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7Sd8A6_fYU&ab_channel=CppCon. As a side note: this tells you that experience translates to wisdom, and wisdom matters.
Why
For whatever you are doing, always know the big picture and WHY – which can be subjective. WHAT maps to WHY. And HOW maps to WHAT. Start with WHY, then WHAT, then HOW. Not the other way around.
Routines
Practice doing and forming routines which you can then optimize slowly. Otherwise you will be in analysis paralysis.
Failure
Learn from failure. And fail fast. Slow failure is the worst.
Next best thing (to success) that can happen to you is that you fail fast. Failing slowly, or worst, not knowing that you’re failing is bad.
Least resistance
For important stuff, form a path of least resistance.
Follow Matt’s advice:
“Distilled into empirically-wrought principles, my high-level advice is:
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Reduce transaction costs to engaging in productive behavior.
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Erect transaction costs to engaging in counter-productive behavior.
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Minimize opportunity cost. Do what you’re best at doing, and partner with specialists when you need to do something else. [This is the hardest principle for engineers to accept. We feel that if we can do something, we should.] In short, mold your life so that the path of least resistance is the path of maximum productivity.
People are surprised when I tell them I’m lazy.
I don’t try to change the fact that I’m lazy: I exploit it.
I try to make sure that the laziest thing I can do at any moment is what I should be doing.”
Invest in yourself
Invest in your health, wellness, productivity. Prioritize yourself. Help yourself so you can help your loved ones.
Iterate
Mental health
Reserve time for 10-15 min meditation every day.
Train yourself in small and big moments to be: slow and composed, high confidence. Remember skills are necessary but not sufficient, the other necessary part is mindset. In fact learning new skills, taking failure, iterating and keeping a positive mindset while making directional movement is also a mindset.
Exercise
http://matt.might.net/articles/hacking-strength/ http://matt.might.net/articles/least-resistance-weight-loss/
Listen
Listen, understand, ask, clarify. Then respond. Try to help.
Think
Think for yourself. Don’t be sheep.
Listen, verify yourself for imp things, don’t blindly trust, form your own opinions.
Empathy and compassion
Be kind to others. Understand that everyone is a human, and so everyone makes mistakes.
Compassion = empathy + action.
Be kind to others and yourself.
Don’t assume any one individual knows everything. Understand that everyone makes mistakes. Welcome them when they happen and try to avoid them in the future.
Trust
Trust is consistency over time. It does not happen over night. You have to earn it.
Introspect
You will have one offs. Spend some (not much) time introspecting what went wrong and use it as a learning for next time. Don’t over think or take yourself/things too seriously. Take things easy and try to enjoy how far you have come, where you came from, and the small things in life.
Do
Say and do, not only say.
Worrying
When worried or stressed, ask yourself if this thing will bother you in a few days or weeks? If no, stop worrying too much. Enjoy the present.
Prepare
Hope for the best – prepare for the worst.
Multi tasking
Do small cycles of multi tasking a day – not more. In general, don’t do two things at a time. At a given time, do one thing and one thing well.
Future
It’s impossible to predict the future. Try to plan if needed but don’t bet on it.
You can only connect the dots backwards.
Planning sweet spot
Planning is important. But don’t overplay and not do. This will cause analysis paralysis. If you think something is not important, note it down and consciously stop it. Start doing the important things. Forming a routine and doing will help kick start that. Once that happens, measure what’s going well against your criteria, and slowly optimize.
Hungry
Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Experts
Follow a small set of experts for learning. Get the fundamentals right and form your own opinions and mental models. Don’t worship experts. They’re humans so they will make mistakes.
End game
Always know your end game. Examples:
- Family first. Be ready to take bold steps to help them. Example: moving cities because your parents need you there. Of course, this varies a lot depending on every individual’s case. Not everyone can afford to do that. But if you can, and if your end game is family first, then take these steps if there are no viable long term alternatives.
- Invested for short term gains. Exit early when you get profits rather than waiting too long.
- Project not getting aligned despite multiple efforts. Maybe time to reduce the scope or drop the project.
Compound
read: https://www.ellevest.com/magazine/investing/compounding-returns
Doesn’t only apply to money. Other examples:
- you may take some time to learn a codebase. but with progress every day, you get exponentially better.
- bad eating habits when done frequently compound to the point where it takes significant effort to go back
Learn the power of compounding. Use it in your favor. And fear it when it’s against you.
Fun
Generally if you’re trying and not having fun, it’s not worth it – time to leave.
Clarity
Knowing wha you want to do and why is important. Be crystal clear with it and laser focus on it. Plan for what to do and what not to do - use tools ti automate. If you are not clear, you make movement and confuse it with direction but remember laser focused directional movement is important for your success and it comes with knowing why/what (how may vary, that is ok), having a plan, and then focusing and executing on plan while quickly iterating on failures and failing fast if necessary.
Advice
teach yourself programming in ten years - link
when you are depressed, make something - link
Honey pots
http://matt.might.net/articles/
http://matt.might.net/articles/productivity-tips-hints-hacks-tricks-for-grad-students-academics/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo&ab_channel=CarnegieMellonUniversity