An opinionated treatise on a life well-lived
A simple playbook for an uncertain life
I wrote the core of this piece in 2017 when I was mired in existential dread during my junior year at Princeton.
This is an amalgam of pieces of advice and principles that I've synthesized over high school, college, and the first few years of my career. This is very much an aspirational work too — it serves to remind me what my principles are, and why I should stick to them.
It’s a 25-page treatise on a variety of topics, not limited to:
How to deal with randomness
Trust the Process: process over goals
Life as a multi-armed bandit problem (decision-making)
Resolving cognitive dissonance
Seeking Truth
It’s still a generally accurate representation of how I think.
To my brother Kevin: This work is a synthesis of the axioms, values, and rules that I've developed within short essays through the years. I've grouped the pieces into a somewhat logical progression and thematic collection.
This is the knowledge that I wish I had ten years ago — I hope that this can be something that (at least partially) lights the way forward for you throughout your next set of adventures.
Part I: The Axioms
Randomness
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.
The quote above is often attributed to Albert Einstein.1 Whatever the attribution, this quote used to be one of my favorite quotes when I was little. To me, it verified what my parents, family, teachers, and role models were all telling me: Work hard, Nick, and you’ll be successful! That person over there didn’t work hard, and that’s why they’re in that situation! To my younger self, I interpreted the quote to mean that all outcomes could be reduced to a finite number of steps and an initial condition, which ultimately meant that people were the arbiters of their ultimate fate. Essentially, this quote confirmed my view of the world as a complex but purely-deterministic system, one in which the smartest among us could understand, dissect, and bend to our will.2
The truth is that there is a lot of randomness in the world, and chance plays a much larger part in our stories than we would care to admit. For those of us who are successful, it comes as a threat to our identities when we are confronted with the reality that luck plays a pivotal role in casting who we are today. We like to ascribe our successes to our own machinations.3
But I worked so hard to get to this point! Yes, you may have, but so did millions of others who didn’t get so lucky. I might be proud of some of my current accomplishments, but it always bears remembering the luck that has been on my side — the people who inspired me to explore different areas, the situations that I had access to, and more. Be it a loving and supportive family, being raised in a well-to-do neighborhood, never wanting for fundamental human rights we take for granted, these are all random, lucky draws that played a crucial role in allowing me to pursue and accomplish what I have today. Had I been missing any of these factors, I would most likely not be in the place that I am today.
My point with this rather long-winded exposition is that life is probabilistic, which should fundamentally affect how you approach it.
There’s a useful model to understand this, and that is poker. Poker is a valuable model to understand decision-making in a system with other agents lacking complete information. Poker is undoubtedly a vastly simplified version of life — there’s a clear way to “success” and set rules in the game that is not apparent in life — but the parallels between playing poker and “playing” life are remarkably clear.4
In poker, everyone is dealt cards. We don’t choose the cards that we’re given, and your initial starting hand could be drastically inferior to that of other people. It would be easy to fixate on the sad state of your hand and miss the opportunities in front of you. No starting hand is so terrible as to be completely hopeless, just as no initial lead is so great as to be insurmountable. It is the people who acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of their hands and consistently make calculated risks and decisions who will eventually emerge ahead.
Focus on what you can control — less is more
If life is probabilistic, how do you approach it? There are already enough complexities in life to deal with, and now I’m telling you that you have to deal with randomness?
In this case, less is more — focus on what you can control, and only on that. We have already established that life is an insanely complicated beast. From here, one option is to attempt to control every single aspect of your life, which sounds appealing at the onset. The only problem is that we are human, and there is only so much your brain can process before becoming overwhelmed. If you choose to obsess and micromanage each facet of your life, it might work for a little bit. However, it will finally dawn upon you that you have taken on more than you can handle, and then the first piece of the house of cards begins to burn. I don’t say this from atop a superior, holier-than-thou pedestal; I say this because this life conflagration has happened to me too.
Instead, focus on this idea: less, but better. This idea will appear time and time again, in many different guises, and I promise that I will not waste any opportunity to hammer this idea into your head. Life is a determinedly non-linear endeavor — certain things will always produce superior results to others, and we need to be cognizant of this. In this case, it means that if you can cultivate a mastery of a relatively small subset of behaviors, attitudes, and actions in your life, they will serve as the foundation for approaching life.
This is where Stoicism comes in. Stoicism is a philosophy founded in Athens in the 3rd century BCE by Zeno of Citium. It spread throughout the Hellenistic world: Diogenes, Seneca, Cato, and Marcus Aurelius were a few of the most prominent Stoics.
Philosophy is often maligned as the impractical intellectual’s pursuit — indeed, with its complicated, verbose terminology, it sometimes does seem like that on the surface. However, I like to think of philosophy as constructing a framework in which you begin to perceive, question, and interact with the world; in essence, philosophy provides a few key ideas that allow you to form your mental operating system. Stoicism has evolved through the centuries, but the foundational bedrock of the philosophy remains constant. There are so many things in the world out of our direct control, so we should focus on the only things we can control: ourselves and our responses. Don’t spend so much time obsessing about the world, but instead, seek to master yourself and your perspective.
The word “stoic” has come to take a different meaning, departing from its original historical roots (as many words naturally do). Today, “stoic” commonly refers to someone unmoved by emotion. However, the Stoics preached a markedly different existence in which they were very much allowed to feel emotion, but they crucially practiced to increase mastery and awareness of this emotion. Perspective — the lens through which humanity views life — is the primary determinant of how people experience life.5
Indeed, there is a plethora of scientific research on happiness that supports this idea. There is no marked increase in happiness before and after people win the lottery. After debilitating accidents, people still report similar levels of happiness compared to what they previously felt. Many people have found cataclysmic events to have been remarkable blessings to their lives, while others have been derailed by relatively small obstacles.
You’ve likely heard the quote, “With great power comes great responsibility.”6 The author Mark Manson proposes that we can invert the oft-quoted phrase into something of greater power: “With great responsibility comes great power.” As he writes:
The more we choose to accept responsibility in our lives, the more power we will exercise over our lives. Accepting responsibility for our problems is thus the first step to solving them.7
The ultimate tenet of Stoicism is this very idea proposed by author Ryan Holiday:
“Take obstacles in your life and turn them into your advantage, control what you can and accept what you can’t.”8
Own your world first, and the rest will follow.
Trust the Process
(2024 editor’s note: I adapted this section into my essay You are at the inflection point.)
“Trust the Process” — this is the mantra that I have drummed into my head. “The Process” came into mainstream basketball culture from Sam Hinkie, former General Manager of the Philadelphia 76ers. “The Process” was the rallying cry of the then-floundering team: Sam Hinkie’s grand orchestration of tanking9 to gain a higher chance to acquire higher draft picks.
Armed with his degree from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and an apprenticeship under Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey, he engaged in the wheeling and dealing of players at a scale unsurpassed only by the repackaging and trading of financial instruments that precipitated the 2008 Great Financial Crisis. In some ways, this metaphor is apt for this situation because of the distress it caused, dooming Philly fans to competitive purgatory for many years — that is, until it paid off.
But before it paid off, Hinkie abruptly resigned.
In his 13-page magnum opus of a resignation letter, Hinkie outlined the full totality of his vision to the general public.10 He painted a picture of the current competitive landscape in the NBA, identified crucial variables that he believed resulted in success given this situation, and outlined a disciplined method to operate in this environment. Amidst a flurry of historical analogies, homages to various investors, and philosophical musings, Hinkie outlined a course of action that he believed sustained over the long-term would result in the highest probability of success. Sam Hinkie epitomizes having a process: deliberately identifying a system of efforts to maximize an objective and then buckling down and executing those actions.
This process-first mindset contrasts with the goal-oriented perspective. Many well-meaning people will still advise people to set long-term goals — figure out where you want to be in 25 years, and chase it!
Chase it and never quit; after all, winners never quit, and quitters never win. I believe that this is horrible advice.
I think about pursuing a career like climbing a mountain. Imagine that two people are starting their careers: Alice, who is purely goal-oriented, and Joe, who is process-oriented. Alice, being the hyper-ambitious, goal-driven person she is, decides that she aspires to be the CEO of a prestigious company (her mountain). She begins climbing towards the summit, arduously enduring all pain and brutalization through the climb, as she is entirely driven by the thought of reaching the top of the mountain. Thirty years later, Alice has reached the summit of the proverbial mountain — she has a comfortable, prestigious job — but she still feels empty.
Although she ascended to the peak, she never asked herself what she truly wanted in her life and instead chased a goal without respite. In the years she spent chasing this goal, the world had also changed dramatically — the company she now leads is an antiquated relic of the past, a far cry from the stature it occupied decades before. Standing at the top of the mountain and finally taking the chance to reflect for the first time in her career, Alice sees many mountain peaks that she had never seen before, ones that appeal to her much more. In a crushing realization, it dawns upon Alice: she had spent her entire life climbing the wrong mountain.
Joe had gone about this a different way. He asked himself what mattered to him and what he was interested in, and began climbing the mountain that most closely aligned with those. Joe walks deliberately, focusing on taking the path step-by-step and inhabiting the surroundings around him. He sees the top of the mountain but is not blinded to everything else around him through this time. At first, Joe spent some time climbing this mountain, but once he ascends higher up the mountain, he was able to see more. Joe then realizes that this was not the actual mountain he wanted to climb. He descends the mountain and begins ascending the new mountain the same way he did before: step by step, bit by bit.
The difference is that Joe had a process, while Alice did not. Alice might have been more driven and had more intellectual horsepower, but she was chasing a past that no longer existed.
Alice lived in a state of continuous failure; it wasn’t until thirty years later that she had finally “succeeded,” only to find out that this wasn’t what she wanted. Plus, in her feverish climb to the top, she had never taken any time to enjoy the hike — that possibility had never occurred to her.
And that’s precisely the point: a process succeeds since a well-disciplined process is much more robust against the randomness of the world. If you figure out what drives success in your field, distill these principles and values into a systematic process that resonates with you, and rigorously follow this, you have maximized your chances for success.11 With a process, you evaluate yourself based on adherence to your process, not on external metrics. If you have correctly identified your values and live according to them, you will ensure your fulfillment. Paradoxically, once you follow a process, it will also often take you far beyond any initial goal.
So many endeavors in different fields have channeled this idea of being process-driven. Nick Saban, one of the most successful college football coaches of all time, drills his players to follow a process: focus on the current play and execute it the best you can. All of the greatest investors in history, ranging from Warren Buffett to Jim Simons, have a defined investment philosophy and process that they adhere to.12 Jeff Bezos famously adheres to a regret minimization framework, a strategy that is reminiscent of the UCB algorithm used for multi-armed bandit problems in operations research.13 Scott Adams, the author and artist of the comic Dilbert, followed a simple framework of combining disparate skills to build the skills that vaulted him into prominence. William Faulkner had a famous remark whenever he was asked how he channeled inspiration to write:
I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately, I am inspired at nine o’clock every morning.
Of course, a process is not merely a one-time decision. A process is intentional. A process involves continual reflection and re-adjustment of your current direction. You must always know where your process is taking you, and it is your responsibility to chart your trajectory.14
Ultimately, I encourage you to craft a process. What drives you? What fulfills you? What do you obsess about? No one can help you answer these questions because only you can discover these answers that form your core principles and values. These values are the components that will constitute your process. Learn to measure yourself by how you follow your process.15 And with time, the rewards will come.
Don't plan your life
The first rule of life planning is that you shouldn’t plan your entire life. One of the most salient examples of this idea is one proposed by Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator.16 He writes:
A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job … How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way—including, unfortunately, not liking it. Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.
The nature of today’s world is that it is dynamic and ever-changing. Few plans created today will be relevant in two years, much less in ten or twenty, since the landscape is always changing. As you move through life, you will always gather more information and knowledge to inform your opinions and actions. I believe that society today has shifted towards unduly romanticizing grit and indomitable will. All else equal, having more resilience is generally better than having less of it, but proclaiming a long-term goal and doggedly sticking to it without re-assessing the landscape is a fool’s errand. This is a Sisyphean task, and while you are stubbornly rolling the large stone up the hill, you will be blind to the opportunities that pass you by.
The world is non-deterministic and messy, which is the exact opposite of what the education system trains and rewards us for. Upon finishing college, most graduates have only known the world of school. School is a very self-contained environment with a small ruleset. It was one in which it is elementary17 to figure out how “success” is measured — get the best grades, become the most popular, win the most awards, etc.18
However, your career after college is subject to the real world and all its non-deterministic glory. Any randomness that might have been in the school environment is magnified a hundred-fold, and there are a myriad of paths that you can choose to take. During school, you likely lived in an uphill linear world: the goal was right in front of you, nicely placed one step in front of you. Life is more complicated and has much more delayed gratification, which is very difficult for people to adjust to.
Let’s go back to the linear path analogy: If your school life was a linear path, life outside is subject to many more random perturbations. It can be viewed as a Brownian motion, a random walk with drift, a diffusion process, or any number of processes. There will be a series of sporadic shocks throughout your life that cause your path to deviate from the “ideal” straight path upwards that existed in the school world, but it is up to you to continue the process of moving forward and ever upwards.
Ultimately, the world changes too fast, and your forecasting power is too limited for you to plan your entire career. Instead, think about what interests you and pursue those interests wholeheartedly.19
Plan thoughtfully ahead for the next year or two at most, always keep a measure of your current trajectory so you can course-correct if necessary, and keep an eye out for new and exciting opportunities.
Don’t become blinded by any long-term goals — if you’re going to focus on something, focus on following your process.
The “real world” is infinitely more chaotic. But, in the real world, you also have the opportunity to choose what matters to you and to let that drive you ahead instead. Remember: “With great responsibility comes great power.”
PART II: The pillars of the process
So, I’ve talked a lot about following a disciplined process. What does a process look like? Let me share the pillars of my process, which have been largely synthesized from the combined thoughts and advice from a number of individuals I respect immensely, and then combined with my limited life experience.
Focus on developing skills and seizing opportunities
(2024 editor’s note: I adapted this section into my essay How to solve the game of life.)
So, there's a stochastic world in front of you — how do you start? One of the best strategies to answer this problem comes from the world of probability theory: the multi-armed bandit problem. The multi-armed bandit is as follows: imagine that you are a gambler choosing between a series of slot machines (known as "one-armed bandits," since they steal your money). Assume that each slot machine exhibits a different probability of payoff (or more formally, "distribution of payoffs"), and you want to maximize the amount of money you make. Naturally, you only have a finite amount of cash to play these games. What is your strategy?
There's an essential idea in machine learning, which is the exploration versus exploitation tradeoff. Assume that there are 100 slot machines and you have enough money to try 100 times. One extreme might be to select one machine and use all 100 attempts on that specific machine (pure exploitation). The other extreme would be to spread all attempts equally and use one attempt per machine (pure exploration). There are many strategies between these two extremes, but your dilemma largely stems from trying something you are familiar with versus trying something in the unknown. To figure out a slot machine's payoff probability, you have to pull it many times; the more times you try it, the better idea you have of the actual payoff probability (this is the intuition behind the law of large numbers). However, each pull you spend on the machine to learn more about its true payoff probability is an attempt you could have used on a different machine that you knew less about. This is the essence of the exploration versus exploitation tradeoff.
Life can be cast as a multi-armed bandit problem: you have a wealth of machines (different disciplines, activities, and experiences) to try and a limited budget (time, money, energy, etc.) Every decision you make can be thought of as pulling a lever on a machine, and the result of the decision is the payoff. I believe that this is a remarkably beautiful model for life, as it allows you to decompose life into a sequential decision-making process.
There's an exceedingly rich mathematical literature focused on these multi-armed bandit problems, and researchers have formulated numerous strategies to approach these problems. A straightforward example is the epsilon-greedy policy. In the epsilon-greedy policy, you explore with probability epsilon and exploit with probability (1-epsilon); in other words, occasionally randomly sample a slot machine, and in all other times, keep going to the slot machine that you think has the highest payout probability. For simple multi-armed bandit problems, this epsilon-greedy strategy and its variants work quite well, and we arrive at optimal (or near-optimal) strategies.
However, the reality is that life is a bit more wicked and complicated than the vanilla multi-armed bandit problem. There are often pre-requirements in life, like completing medical school before being allowed to be a practicing doctor; this is equivalent to the unavailability of specific machines until other machines have been sampled, which is not a restriction in the original multi-armed bandit problem.
Furthermore, the payoff distributions in life are non-stationary; that is, payoff probabilities are not fixed and change throughout time. Payoffs from pursuing the very same discipline will morph drastically as the world evolves. For example, if you were a computer programmer in the mid 20th century, your payoff distribution looks markedly different than that of a computer programmer today. If we want to be extremely precise, we don't care about maximizing the next payoff, but rather wish to maximize aggregate gain throughout our game's playing time. A job might have very low payoff probabilities initially, but after spending a few years in it, it could evolve to be extremely lucrative. If you were extraordinarily myopic and only tried to maximize the next possible payoff, your shortsightedness could cost you considerably; this is directly related to the concept of delayed gratification.
The good news is that life also has some nice attributes that make this optimization problem a bit easier: each pull in life is not independent. In the original multi-armed bandit formulation, each trial on a machine was independent. When you pulled a lever, each test only gave you information about that specific machine's payoff and nothing else. In life, when you try something, it gives you a wealth of information not only about that item but also about many other tangentially related things. Once you find out that you enjoy solving quantitative problems, the appeal of various other disciplines — mathematics, engineering, physics, etc. — increases. Or, if you realize that you experience palpable anxiety whenever you are forced to perform in front of large audiences, that also conveys valuable information about your possible inclinations toward public speaking, musical performance, stand-up comedy, and the like.
Therefore, since exploration in real life has this particular non-independence property, early in your career, there is extreme value in optimizing for learning and growth. If I were to describe my own strategy, it is remarkably like the epsilon-greedy strategy, except that I dynamically adjust the epsilon exploration parameter through different learning phases. In the broadest view of my progression of knowledge and development, my epsilon will on average decrease over time as I delve deeper. Yet, when I encounter a new idea that upends my current frameworks or perspectives (which will inevitably happen), I will dramatically increase my exploration rate to adjust and learn more. Most importantly, this strategy should ideally keep intellectual calcification and complacency at bay.
And if it doesn't, I'll just have to adjust my strategy.
Thinking about risk and reward
In the optimal decision-making process described previously, we carefully evaluate the opportunity cost of each decision. Essentially, we think about each course of action's expected payoff and choose an action from the set of possibilities. Implicitly, this means that we evaluate each decision's risk and return, which is then expressed as some expected payoff. I want to take a step back and think more deeply about how payoff is computed through the lens of risk and reward.20
The concept of risk and return is most often used in the context of financial portfolio theory. Professional investors must think about individual investments in aggregate. Each one of their investments contributes its own risk and return characteristics to the portfolio. Marc Andreessen has an elegant analogy of thinking of your career as a portfolio of jobs/roles/opportunities, each with its own unique risk and return profile.21 Investors measure return as an excess of the monetary value returned while measuring risk as the security's historical volatility. Similarly, when evaluating our own risk and reward to estimate expected payoffs, we need to think about our own definitions regarding risk and reward.
Risk is defined as the probability of losing something of value.22 Most immediately think of "value" to be monetary, but I would encourage people to think about "value" in the context of personal values – health, social status, growth, financial wealth, etc. Like with risk, I would argue that return is not determined by the pure financial payoff. The metric that people actually seek to maximize is their satisfaction, which while likely includes some component of monetary gain, also includes a plethora of other personal factors.
In essence, we must study risk and return within the context of our personal values. People's values and perspectives are often so divergent, so it is up to you to understand yourself to construct an accurate measure of risk and reward that you can feed into your decision-making process.
(2022 editor’s note: A few of the ideas in this section appear in my essay Three definitions of risk (and why it matters).)
Think about levers
When you think about building a portfolio of skills and experiences, how do you prioritize things in a world with an endless amount of choices? One such filtering heuristic is narrowing things down by how much they interest and captivate you. I think that this is a wonderful thing to do, combined with an awareness of "leverage." The idea here is that certain things will produce asymmetric returns and heavily bias your probability of success upwards. These are items with an asymmetric risk and return profile, and there are also things with a capped downside risk and unlimited upside — essentially, things with optionality.
I will cover a few of the most important ideas regarding leverage here:
power law distributions
focus
compounding
the whole is greater than the sum
Power law distributions
Power law phenomena come in various names — Essentialism, the Pareto Principle, diminishing returns, fat tails, skewed distributions. The underlying idea is the same: decisions and actions in life do not have equal impact, and the distance between the best and average is further than you would think.
Some time ago, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto found that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people; similarly, he found that 80% of the peas grown in his garden were produced by 20% of the pea plants. The idea is that a few causes are responsible for a disproportionate amount of impact in any given environment, which is why the Pareto Principle is sometimes known as the “law of the vital few.” You’ll also hear the Pareto Principle referred to as the 80/20 Principle, but note that the ratio is often even more heavily skewed (85/15, 90/10, or even 95/5).
The common reason that the Pareto Principle is cited in reference to efficiency is that it explains how we can make incredible leaps and bounds in our learning within relatively short amounts of time. Josh Kaufman’s TED Talk titled “The first 20 hours — how to learn anything” encapsulates this idea of spurts of deliberate practice to achieve competency in anything. Watch it yourself, but he explains how he breaks down his skill-acquisition process into a conscious formula, accomplishing a tremendous amount of progress (in his case, ukulele-playing) in a short period. It truly demonstrates the power of the Pareto Principle, showing that small actions can have a disproportionate impact.
However, it’s essential to realize the implications of the Pareto Principle. A corollary of the Pareto Principle is a version of the Law of Diminishing Returns: every unit of progress is incrementally harder than the previous unit of progress.
We should note this alternative perspective of the Pareto Principle and realize if you truly want to shine in something, it will require a considerable time and effort investment. The Law of Diminishing Returns is best understood by using a Pokemon analogy. When you first start in your Pokemon journey, it requires relatively few experience points to level up your Pokemon. But as your Pokemon reach higher levels, it becomes increasingly harder to make them “level up.” Everyone knows that it is much harder to train your level 99 Swampert to level 100 than to raise a level 5 Torchic one level. In terms of experience point acquisition, it takes 700 times as many points to level up the Swampert as the Torchic.23
The Pareto Principle is a fundamental building block of efficiency because it reminds us that our time is limited. We must judiciously allocate our time and resources to the actual tasks that require this precious time.
How else should you apply the Pareto Principle to your life? The Pareto Principle can guide you in making significant progress in many areas, or it can also show you that you need to work extremely hard to join the top echelon of individual performance.
Focus
Focus is a force multiplier.
Newton’s Second Law (of Efficiency) states that: Work accomplished = intensity x duration. The “duration” aspect of work completed is clearly-defined and easy to understand. If we were to suppose that “work accomplished” was only a function of “duration,” it would mean that results are solely dependent on the amount of time spent.
The focus on the duration of work is a sentiment reflected by the “Ten Thousand Hour Rule” popularized by Geoff Colvin in his book Talent is Overrated and Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. The “Ten Thousand Hour Rule” basically argues that it requires a minimum of ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. While the science behind this claim is partially suspect, I agree that achievement requires a large amount of time and commitment. Still, it requires a critically important supplement, which leads to the “intensity” portion of the efficiency law.
“Intensity” encapsulates a bevy of different factors. There are various ways you can increase intensity — marshaling all your concentration into one task or perhaps training with better techniques. We often marvel at individuals who can accomplish vast amounts of work in minute partitions of time, whereas it might have taken us substantially more time. But it makes complete sense; if this person works for three hours at the highest intensity level, he accomplishes just as much as another does in ten hours with a lower intensity level. It’s simple and easily understandable, yet people still “multitask” and think they’re more productive.
But more crucially, we must remember that focus also means a relentless dedication to accomplishing the right tasks and only these. As Sam Altman of Y Combinator points out:24
Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn’t matter.
Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful.”25
The takeaway is that you can accomplish more through intense focus rather than duration. The old adage holds: “Work smarter, not harder.”26
Compounding
"Compounding is the eighth wonder of the world." This quote is often apocryphally attributed to Albert Einstein, but the misattribution should not detract from its simplicity and profoundness. Compounding is most commonly referenced in finance, in which you are paid interest on the principal and the accumulated interest. For the sake of this discussion, we will refer to compounding as small changes over a long period that eventually builds up to an unrecognizably enormous impact.
You might have heard this story before, but there is a famous legend about the origin of chess. Supposedly, when the inventor of the game showed it to the emperor of India, the emperor was so impressed by the new game that he promised any reward to the inventor.
The inventor replied, "I only wish for this. Give me one grain of rice for the first square of the chessboard, two grains for the next square, four for the next, eight for the next, and so on for all 64 squares, with each square having double the number of grains as the square before."
The emperor agreed, amazed that the man had asked for such a small reward — or so he thought. After a week, his treasurer came back and informed him that the reward would add up to an astronomical sum, far greater than all the rice that could conceivably be produced in many centuries!
While this example of compounding is negative (for the king, at least), the very nature of compounding is neither good nor bad — it is simply a mathematical truth that exists. Compounding can either make or break you, but our job is to make compounding work for you in all facets of life. Harnessing compounding requires you to save or work harder today to reap a much greater reward tomorrow. Compounding is implementing delayed gratification and requires you to take a long-term view of life.
If we focus on small improvements over long durations, you will see incredible results. Imagine that you were interested in becoming a better practitioner of some arbitrary discipline within the next year. Let's say that you wanted to become twice as good (however you decide to measure that) in that time frame — that sounds like a pretty tricky proposition.
What if I told you, instead of promising to improve two-fold over the year, you would agree to target getting 10% better each month? All of a sudden, improvement becomes a much more tractable problem.
Ok, let's set the bar even lower: improve by 1% each day. Trivial, you say!
Some of you already know what I'm about to show here. It turns out that within the three scenarios, you get the largest overall progress with the 1% daily improvement, then the 10% monthly improvement, and then finally the two-fold improvement.
Here's the math:
improving two-fold over a year: 1 * 2 = 2
improving 10% each month over a year: 1.10^12 = 3.138
improving 1% each day over a year: 1.01^365 = 37.783
Like we alluded to before, humans are predisposed to think of everything in a linear, uniformly progressive schema. The exponential growth of compounding simply doesn't come as intuitively to us, which is why it is often overlooked.
Compounding is one of the core principles underpinning why you should follow a process. As demonstrated by our thought experiment, if we focus on sustained incremental improvement, after a long period of implementation and dedication, we often find ourselves with outsized results that our previous selves could not have fathomed.
Ultimately, if you wish to maximize compounding power, all else being equal, a longer horizon results in greater rewards.
The easiest way to extend the period of compounding is to start earlier. Use your youth and relative lack of obligations and commitments to grow your learning and knowledge.27
In the aggregate, young people have more physical energy, more time, and fewer responsibilities than their older peers — so use it! You will forgo specific opportunities by doing this, but the future rewards will (hopefully) make up for it.
As Jim Rohn stated:
We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.
The whole is greater than the sum
Elon Musk is neither the best programmer, the best mechanical engineer, nor the best physicist, but he has deep expertise in each vertical and can use this to impress his vision upon the world. Abraham Lincoln espoused humility, judgment, oratory ability, and exemplary character to become one of the best statesmen in American history. LeBron James combines his skill in so many different basketball attributes to become the transcendent player he is today (sorry, I just had to insert a LeBron reference). The list goes on, but you find that the most successful individuals in their fields have ascended to their dominance through a blended mastery of a myriad of fields and disciplines.
In the long run, society tends to reward what is rare and valuable. There are two ways of accomplishing this: become the best at one narrow subfield through brute specialization, or forge a unique blend of competence across numerous subjects. Becoming the leading expert in a field is extremely difficult, and it is closer to a zero-sum game. Pure specialization leaves you more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the world and is much less robust to change. Ultimately, I find pure specialization to be overrated, and I find it much more personally compelling to explore various fields — the world has so much to offer!
Instead, I seek to construct a set of complementary skills. Becoming very good at a myriad of things is a much more tractable problem and allows you to learn from other disciplines faster. You will continuously find recurring themes in life, and there are principles that bind together disparate fields. Again, there are different names for this — universal themes, mental models, etc. — but the spirit is ultimately the same. Leveraging the Pareto Principle, if you can figure out the essential and what to learn, and then take it one step further by connecting all these things, you will emerge with something far more significant than its original constituents.
It is undoubtedly intimidating to have to learn so many assorted things. But have you ever wondered how some people seem to soak up information? The secret is that they have accumulated a critical mass of knowledge, which allows them to create enough knowledge anchor points to seamlessly integrate the new information into their existing knowledge framework (another example of compounding!). Of course, the challenging part is developing that initial mass of knowledge.
I’ve often written about how all knowledge is connected. Too often, subjects in schools are taught as if they were isolated, self-contained bodies of knowledge. That is so very false. And there is nothing better to prove this phenomenon than the Wikipedia Game.
I was first introduced to the Wikipedia Game at Chinese school when I was in sixth grade. The game’s goal is to navigate from one Wikipedia page to another page, using only the hyperlinks on the pages. Whoever uses the fewest links is the winner of the game. For example, if you wanted to navigate from “Ming Dynasty” to “Mao Zedong,” you could proceed like this: “Ming Dynasty” → “Forbidden City” → “Chinese Civil War” → “Mao Zedong.” Of course, there is probably a faster and more efficient way of doing this, but discovering the quickest path is the fun of the game.
While a very dynamic and exciting game, the core takeaway is that all fields of knowledge are connected. If you deconstructed and graphically represented all Wikipedia pages as nodes in a graph, you’d likely be left with a very aesthetic web of knowledge. This interconnectedness explains how those people can amass encyclopedic amounts of knowledge in their heads — as you spend more time learning, it just becomes easier to retain the information!
This sort of broad learning is the ultimate test in delayed gratification. Sure, many of the things you learn may not appear to be immediately useful. As Thomas Kuhn observed, paradigm shifts take time and require the gradual accumulation of insights and experiences, sharpened with discussion, debate, and experimentation.
People often denigrate the generalist: “Jack of all trades, master of none.” However, people seldom remember the entirety of the saying:
Jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.
On balance ("work-life balance")
What do you think of when I say “work-life balance?” Most likely, you imagine a day when you have a few hours to work, some time to work on new projects, some time to spend with friends, some time to relax and enjoy, and maybe some time to do some thinking and reflection.
I have a different conception of balance: balance in the aggregate on a longer-term basis. People often equate “balance” with a daily balance, but I think it’s better to think of balance in the weekly time horizon. If I tried to pursue all my interests and equally distribute them into each day, my daily schedule would be a disaster. Instead, I take a longer-horizon view of my interests and typically schedule more intense and less frequent sessions. Instead of talking with my friends for a minute each day, I would rather spend longer, uninterrupted blocks with each person. Instead of skimming my math textbooks each day, I choose to schedule intense study sessions each week.
The natural state of the universe is entropy, and things (e.g., skills) will decay if you do not maintain them. A problem arises if you have many interests and try to improve everything simultaneously — there simply isn’t enough energy to do so. You might be able to keep all your projects at the same level of accomplishment (or maybe even improve a bit), but you’ll also likely drive yourself insane. If given a set of objectives, it is superior to throw yourself deeper into a few things and pursue them, make a lot of progress, then switch off to the remaining items, make a lot of progress, and repeat. Of course, there are still things that benefit from more regular exposure (e.g., sleep, fitness, eating, reviewing flashcards, etc.), but this approach is more effective for most other endeavors.
It works because there are always specific inflection points in the progression of learning. Once you reach these inflection points, your degeneration/forgetting rate is much slower than if you hadn’t progressed to this point, allowing you to forestall any learning retention slippage. If you try and work on everything at once (i.e., daily balance), you’ll be fighting a much harder uphill battle. Therefore, by adhering to the long-term balance idea, you maximize your progress over many topics over the long term.
Finally, it is well worth considering a different mental conception of “balance.” Think of balance as a verb, not a noun. Balance is not some point of finality that once you reach, you can stop putting in effort. Balancing is a process that you must follow to slow down the universe’s tendency to entropy. Balance is an act, not a state.
Perfect is the enemy of good
My previous decision-making framework was to create a mental decision tree. It worked decently well in middle and high school (which again, features a much smaller rule and possibility set). My strategy was literally to map out the three most likely possibilities and then propagate the next three most likely possibilities from these nodes, and so on. As you can imagine, having something that grows at the exponential rate of 3^n is not sustainable and incurs a substantial mental strain. If you account for the fact that the world grows in complexity and possibility as you grow older, the ability to keep this mental decision tree became impossible. I suffered from decision paralysis, and my sub-optimal reaction and reflection speed crippled my ability to move. I kept trying to have a solid plan, but it was a stochastic world that continued to elude my capture. After all, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.
This experience taught me something: perfect is the enemy of good. More often than not, the search for perfection paralyzes us and prevents us from making any progress at all. I am not arguing against striving for the greatest you can achieve. But I believe by focusing on delivering good work and iterating, you will create something far more significant than if you had initially set out for perfection.
If you set out to create something that is 100% perfect, the task will be too difficult and you will give up before achieving anything meaningful. But, if you aim for something that is good enough (e.g., 95% perfect), it becomes a tractable objective that you can continue to iterate upon. Life is a constrained optimization game: you have finite resources. You must be intentional with your approach to work and creation. Perfection is not attainable from the onset but is something that we approach through time.
History has proven that the body of your work is not measured by its average quality but rather by its peaks. Many famous and “successful” people (scientists, authors, politicians, investors, and more) have experienced monumental failures, yet these are not what they are remembered for.
Let’s try a little experiment. I’ll describe a series of characters, and you can try to guess who they are:
1) This person was ousted from the company that he co-founded, mainly in part for being impetuous and temperamental. He was infamous for demanding impossible standards of perfection of his workers and had an explosive and unrestrained temper.
2) As Britain’s lord of the admiralty, he made a series of disastrous decisions during World War I, leading a failed campaign that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. He was subsequently dismissed from his position, removed from the War Council, and humiliated.
3) She began working on her first novel while she was recently divorced, destitute, jobless, and had to care for a newborn child. After she finished her book, all twelve of the major publishing houses rejected it.
4) This man dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year to pursue an entrepreneurial venture. However, he’s not Mark Zuckerberg: this man left school to create Traf-O-Data, a company aimed at designing systems to read raw data from roadway traffic counters. The company reported a total net loss of $3,494 before shutting down.
Today, we remember these characters quite differently. Steve Jobs is recognized as a visionary figure who combined technology and design in an unprecedented fashion, founding not only Apple but also Pixar Studios. The Right Honourable Sir Winston Churchill led Britain to victory in WWII, serving as a beacon of light when all hope seemed lost. J.K. Rowling is the author of the best-selling book series in history and has impacted innumerable people worldwide with her writing. After Traf-O-Data, Bill Gates founded Microsoft and helped usher in the age of personal computing; his ultimate legacy may be more driven by his philanthropy and humanitarian work across the globe.
You are allowed to fail, but whether or not it is temporary is only up to you. Don’t let your obsession with perfection obstruct your ability to do good work. Follow the process of continually doing good work, and you will be pleasantly surprised at what ensues.
Good work compounds, and sometimes your heralded magnum opus isn’t “discovered” until after you’ve already produced a few subsequent works.
All else being equal, quantity engenders quality. If you follow a reflection process, constant iteration will allow you to hammer out the mistakes and learn faster. There’s a famous story on this topic involving a ceramics teacher and his students:
The teacher announced on the first day of class that he was dividing the students into two groups. One group would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, while the other would be graded on its quality. For the first group, if they created fifty pounds of pots, they received an “A,” forty pounds of pots received a “B,” and so on. The second group, which was graded on quality, only needed to produce one perfect pot to get an “A.”
At the end of the term, something interesting happened: the best pots actually came from the group graded for quantity. That “quantity” group had dove into making pots and iterating on their mistakes. The “quality” group had spent the entirety of the time theorizing on the attributes of the perfect pot, and as a result, never created any good work.
But wait, you claim, what if people only engage in mindless practice? That’s rather useless, isn’t it? I agree that deliberate practice28 is better than “regular” practice, but even “regular” practice with reflection and some sort of feedback loop will result in huge gains. The problem is that most people spend their time jumping from method to method. They are continually searching for the best strategy, and once they find that, they promise that they’ll get started in earnest. Unfortunately, the “best method” doesn’t exist, and they would have been much better off picking a good method and practicing and putting in the work.
Spend some time exploring the world and figuring out what matters to you, but you should start after some time. You won’t feel ready, but the truth is that you’ll never feel ready. If, after some time, you still think it’s the wrong path, simply choose a different direction.
Like most things in life, it really is simple, but it is not easy.29
Just take the first step and go.
Preserve your health
It perplexes me that many otherwise intelligent people will casually neglect their physical health. What confounds me even further is that many of these people will also revel in the fact that they don’t prioritize their physical health, as though it signals a higher devotion to their other endeavors.
Physical health, mental health, and emotional health are the main backbones of our lives. They are tightly interwoven, with each feeding directly into the others. If you are missing one or more of these components, the rest of the foundation will crumble.
People often take good health for granted (myself included). It isn’t until our body begins to break down that we look back and realize our oversight. Health is one thing we don’t understand or appreciate until we don’t have it.
To imagine this, think back to the last time you had a debilitating injury. Now take that inconvenience, mental anguish, and pain and double it, since you’re likely underestimating it. And through the magic of compounding, imagine that the pain steadily increases in magnitude (yes, pain compounds too). Imagine that you have to live with that for the rest of your life. I wouldn’t wish this upon anyone.
You don’t have to become a professional athlete. Just treat your body with the same reverence that you would for your brain and soul. Strive to eat well, maintain your sleep, and incorporate exercise of your preference. Your body is the physical instrument in which you interact with the world — treat it as such and make it as healthy and robust as possible.
Part III: Other thoughts
Writing and idea generation
(2022 editor’s note: I adapted this section into my essay The unreasonable effectiveness of writing.)
It is important to understand which resources are finite and which are infinite. Most resources are limited: time, focus, attention, energy, money, etc. However, one of the biggest realizations that I had was the idea that creativity is not a finite resource. Creativity can be most appropriately modeled as a positive feedback system — the more you practice it, the more it develops into more creativity, and so forth.
The way that this manifests in my process is most noticeable in my writing. Most people begin the writing process when they have a fully-fleshed idea. I no longer do this; instead, I write to create ideas.
When I'm stuck with a question, instead of disregarding it and returning it to the ether of discarded questions, I'll often begin regurgitating my stream of consciousness into my notebook (yes, it's with pen and paper). Within seconds, I'll find that my mind floats to previously unanticipated ideas, all spawned from that initial bit of curiosity. I'm not sure why it works, but it's almost like releasing a primordial force: once unfettered, the ideas keep flowing.
That's actually how this piece of writing emerged. I had a shadow of an idea, and this is what it has evolved into.
On conflicting advice
Something that I’ve been thinking deeply about recently is attempting to find an operating system or set of rules toward approaching life. For all my life, people have given me well-intentioned advice and principles on how to live my life. How should I approach problems? How should I deal with other people? How should I live my life? Yet so many of these answers contradicted each other, and I was left with a deluge of advice to sort through.
I’ve finally come up with a way to reconcile the literal cacophony of conflicting advice that has been bestowed upon me. Interestingly enough, I attribute it partially to my first generation status as a Chinese-American. Growing up as a child of immigrants, I was exposed to a wide variety of diametrically opposed ideas. My American peers espoused independence, while my Chinese peers paid homage to Confucian filial piety — it was expressiveness versus humility; effusive and compassionate communication against veiled, measured speech; independence to collectivism; and more.
To further confuse me, I saw that people who followed completely orthogonal schools of thought (American v. Chinese, in this case) were equally successful and happy. How could people in both regimes be simultaneously correct, while adhering to such fundamentally divergent values? I remember spending so much of my childhood and teenage years contemplating and holding so many simultaneously clashing ideas, trying desperately to resolve this cognitive dissonance.
We all search for the Holy Grail — the infallible strategy — but we are human, and thus not infallible. In holding all these clashing age-old ideas and still fighting with them, implicitly I was acknowledging a limitation of my human understanding. Coming to this realization is freeing, because it frees you of this burden to achieve perfection and instead focus on a process of improvement and exploration.
In the face of this realization of our limits, instead of searching for an invincible strategy, it's much more effective to practice an epistemic humility: belief in the fact that you don't know (and can't know) everything, but are always striving to improve your understanding and model of the world. You must constantly stress-test your beliefs and current intakes, and keep collecting different ideas and beliefs from disparate sources. I partially attribute the years of mental warfare in my childhood to developing my pain threshold for contemplating and holding so many of these simultaneously clashing ideas. This meant not marrying myself to an idea, but instead trying to consider all facets of an argument before attempting to come to any sort of conclusion.
There is an immense importance in evaluating the full spectrum of extremes in order to understand something better. This idea manifests itself in two completely different schools: the father of western philosophy, Aristotle and his Golden Mean, and the Chinese duality of yin and yang. Aristotle’s “golden mean” is a simple principle for moral behavior: moral behavior is the mean between two extremes: excess and deficiency. For example, an oft-cited example is generosity, which can be viewed to be the mean of profligacy and parsimony. You might also call it the “Goldilocks Theory” — not too hot, not too cold, but just right. In order to understand an idea, it behooves you to first understand both extremes, before arriving at the actual principle, which is often a combination of the two.
As Bruce Lee said:
Gentleness alone cannot forever dissolve away great force, nor can sheet brute force forever subdue one's problems. In order to survive, the harmonious interfusion of gentleness and firmness as a whole is necessary, sometimes one dominating and sometimes the other, in wave-like succession.30
Similarly, yin and yang describe how seemingly opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another. Perhaps most crucially, the black dot in the white — and the white in the black — indicate the opposing, dormant seed that lurks within all parts. It is this where the Taoist idea of “learning the hard from the soft” derives from, where we must contemplate all extremes to understand an idea. Without light, the notion of darkness is unintelligible.
Bruce Lee said it best: "Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own."
Life is an adventure, with so many different ideas, disciplines, perspectives, and opinions to sample. Your mental models will be an amalgamation of these things, and that means that there is a constant re-weighting of beliefs in your operating mosaic, dynamically adjusting your internal model of how the world works. Of course, along the way you will acquire conflicting ideas and themes, and they might each be correct in their own way — situationally, combinatorially, etc. Again, this means that you will be wrong sometimes, but that is what it is to be human. Plus, life is so much more interesting when you're not always right.
On Truth
One of the fundamental axioms of this philosophical treatise is a humility towards how much humanity can genuinely understand and predict. Humans are meaning-seeking creatures, continually trying to reconcile our existence with the universe and its plans. Therefore, this wouldn't be complete without my own interpretation of human existence (here goes nothing).
If there is a Truth (note the capital "T") that humans can perceive, the closest way we can arrive at it is to study where divergent disciplines independently arrive at similar conclusions. In this way, I view Truth as a singular equilibrium point in a vector field composed of different disciplines: no matter which initial conditions you start with, eventually you will arrive at the truth.
What does this mean practically? Suppose you see that people of different cultures and backgrounds (e.g., both geographical and intellectual cultures) independently come up with the same conclusion. In that case, there is a good chance that this idea is as close to truth as possible. Additionally, you can think of ideas existing not only in culture space but also in time space. If people from different periods and across different cultures come up with similar conclusions, then you should really pay attention to the idea.
This formulation is a natural extension of the idea of evolutionary fitness. In the end, I claim that if an idea or principle is robust enough to propagate and survive through such different conditions and cultures, then there is most likely something important there.
This idea is the sine qua non31 of my process: distilling the ideas, knowledge, and wisdom of people from as many disparate disciplines as possible (across different cultures and idea spaces throughout history) and studying it through the lens through which I interpret reality. This process is my very own synthesis of people's lives, perspectives, and experiences across time, forged through my own interpretation of reality.
On teaching and giving advice
I used to get frustrated when I would give advice, perspectives, or thoughts to people, and they wouldn't heed it at all. I now know better.
Part of this formulation came from a lesson that I learned recently, specifically regarding convincing people. Winning an argument is not the same as convincing someone, which is an underrated idea. I used to think that if my argument had an indisputable, overwhelming logic, that was all it would take to bring my ideas to people and persuade them. While it might have seemed that some people were swayed, it was only an illusion. In reality, if I had succeeded in convincing someone of an idea, I had only a smaller influence. Convincing someone means showing them the path to a new perspective, but you can not force them to take the path. All you can do is to do your part to lay out the path to them in the way that you think will resonate with them the most; then, you must step back and watch as they either decide to take the path or advance elsewhere. They are the meaning-makers for their own story, their own life, and their own reality.32
This is what I think is one of the hardest struggles of being a parent.33 I am always intrigued by the difference of approach from parents to children versus grandparents to their grandchildren. Ultimately, I think it stems from a matter of perspective and experience.
Parents will see their children as reincarnations of themselves, the 2.0 version that is bigger, better, stronger, faster, but most crucially, younger. I speculate that once upon a time, grandparents saw their own children in this exact way. Yet, as time elapsed, the worries that they had for their children mostly evaporated as they witnessed their children grow up. They stood by the sides of their children and watched as their children succeeded and failed, rose and fell. But in the end, their children emerged as functioning adults, and the grandparents realized that there is only so much you can do to pave the path for your children, but you have to let them walk it themselves.
Armed with this realization, grandparents have a more laissez-faire approach to their grandchildren — their grandchildren are the future they have faith will endure and continue. Their own children (the parents) and grandchildren might not know it yet, but they have a lot to learn in this world. And the only way that they will learn these ideas is by experiencing them themselves.
That is why I think there is a lot of hidden value and wisdom in aphorisms and cliches.34 These ideas have survived through time and different cultures, and you often don't begin to truly contemplate their importance until you've experienced them. Whereas many of these statements might have initially seemed like glib platitudes of pseudo-wisdom, they take on new life and meaning after confronting and wrestling with these ideas.
There is a certain beauty in this struggle for understanding. I recently learned about a Japanese aesthetic called wabi-sabi. In a world that idolizes the relentless pursuit of perfection, wabi-sabi prizes authenticity. Its core ethos can be summarized as the following: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.
This spirit of wabi-sabi, finding beauty in transience and imperfection, applies not only to art but also to help bring light to our human existence and search for meaning. As you move on through life, you will continually be refining the meaning of these statements and the "truths" you encounter. Your experience imparts a deeper meaning to these ideas that were previously impossible to imagine. Previously, you were wrong, and as you experienced more and reflected upon it, you are still wrong, but you have become less wrong. We should forever strive to be less wrong.35
In the end, the only thing in life that I can claim to be 100% confident about is that you will always be wrong. You will always fall — the challenge is how you get back up.
"And why do we fall, Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up." — Batman Begins
The quote is also often attributed to Confucius, or any other number of intelligent sources.
I obviously watched too many movies when I was a kid.
And conversely, we also tend to downplay our own failures and attribute them to bad luck.
Recently, there have been a bunch of books about learning decision-making from poker, like Maria Konnikova’s The Biggest Bluff and Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets. Both are decent reads.
As the computer scientist Alan Kay noted, "A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points."
Apparently, that nugget of wisdom derives its origins from the first Spiderman trilogy. It’s probably the best thing to come from that specific movie trilogy, but that’s a discussion for another time.
Read The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F-ck!
In my opinion, the most digestible modern-day introductions to Stoic philosophy come from Ryan Holiday. I recommend starting with The Obstacle is the Way.
Tanking refers to strategically losing to take advantage of rules that benefit losing teams.
You can find his piece here: https://www.espn.com/pdf/2016/0406/nba_hinkie_redact.pdf
How you personally define success remains a more complicated question.
I know that some of you will disagree with me and say that Jim Simons isn’t an investor per se, but rather a quantitative trader who perfected statistical arbitrage. If that’s you, objection noted.
Stay tuned for more on multi-armed bandit problems...
Some people pretend to never care about results at all, and never put their full effort into anything. This is a distortion of the process-first philosophy, and in reality is more about ego protection than deliberate action.
Now, you might ask: is it even correct to make such a demarcation between goals versus a process? Can't a process of continual improvement be decomposed into a myriad of small goals? Can't you view Jerry Seinfeld's chain-method (a process) as a series of incremental daily goals? My answer is that it is largely a definition of construction and semantics. Most importantly, this apparent dichotomy between having a process and goals (what Scott Adams calls "systems versus goals thinking") is — like most things in life — not strictly binary (more on this later). However, the act of juxtaposing and contrasting the two gives you additional insight into each idea. So yes, while the duality can be argued to be artificial, thinking about each as an opposite can help enrich your understanding. This too, the process of learning through contrast, is a learnable process that can take you far.
Paul Graham is one of the clearest writers that I’ve encountered. Two of his best pieces: Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule and Do Things That Don’t Scale.
Pun intended.
While I said that "success" in school is relatively easy to determine, that does not mean it is easy to accomplish. School is hard.
Some people mistake following a process with picking a boring course of action. Your process should contain all the elements that excite you and deeply resonate with you.
“Risk and reward” is often used interchangeably with “risk and return.”
Most people conflate “risk” with “volatility,” especially in financial markets. Legendary investor Howard Marks’ definition of risk — as the probability of permanent loss — is a much better definition.
The Pareto principle holds true for all pursuits, not just Pokemon training.
One of the only counterexamples to this idea is found in successful investors. Traditionally, successful investors are generally quite slow-moving, but it should not be mistaken for indolence. Instead, great investors are extremely patient and wait for good opportunities to swiftly and aggressively strike.
But also, why not both?
Patrick Collison has a great piece on what else you should do when you’re young: https://patrickcollison.com/advice. Laura Deming has another great one too: https://ldeming.posthaven.com/advice-for-ambitious-teenagers.
Deliberate practice is purposeful and systematic practice with iterative feedback loops. You can read more about it in Anders Ericsson’s book, Peak.
“Simple, not easy” is one of the most impactful maxims I’ve discovered. Most worthwhile things in life are philosophically simple to understand, but extraordinarily difficult to stick to for a prolonged period of time.
Most people know Bruce Lee as one of the world’s greatest martial artists, but few people know how facile he was with philosophy.
I’ve always wanted to unironically use that word.
Meaning-maker is a term shared with me by a friend during my junior year in college. I particularly enjoy how it implies a sense of agency and control over one’s perceptions.
Disclaimer: I'm not a parent, so this is pure speculation on my part.
I particularly enjoyed reading La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, which was a collection of particularly piercing aphorisms about life and human nature.
I believe this is the founding origin of the excellent website Less Wrong.