Readers,
Every now and then, someone asks me for general advice. I’m still trying to figure things out, so I don’t feel best suited for the job. Yet I do take notes of advice from wiser, more accomplished individuals. Here’s some of what stuck with me, and I that try to live by.
Michele
Advice
It’s okay to not have an opinion. Everyone is talking about everything all at once. The compulsion of having to voice an opinion contributes to the noise. Shut up for long enough to let an expert be heard. Muster the courage to say ‘I don’t know’. You’ll be alright.
Don’t lie. Lying is cognitively more demanding than speaking the truth. It takes a lot of brain space to remember all the fake versions of reality you’ve sold around. Be consistent and truthful to yourself, even when it hurts.
Set aside time to think. Make sure you are not going to be distracted. Do it when your mind is fresh and agile. If you are a morning person, carve out time before lunch. Schedule time to think regularly, at least once a week. Try taking a walk while thinking through a problem.
No hurry, no pause. When you rush, time shrinks. When you’re relaxed, time expands. This is true even though it’s very hard for the mind to get. When you’re relaxed and doing something willingly, you’re participating in life. Participate as much as you can. That’s the whole point.
Read above your weight. Every 2-3 books, throw in an 800-pound gorilla. Push ahead into subjects you’re not familiar with and wrestle with them until you can. I got plenty of suggestions in this area, hit me up if you need recs. Perhaps you could start with ‘Regenesis’ by George Church.
It’s hell yeah, or no. When getting involved with something or someone, they must inspire you to say ‘Fuck yeah’. Similarly, figure out the branches of your existence that are not nurtured with conviction and enthusiasm. Prune them. Time is too valuable.
Go on solo retreats. Think of retreats as quarterly reviews. Check your progress against your goals, and tweak your plan accordingly. Pick a place outside the city, preferably in nature. Bring books, leave technology.
Learn to ‘fast’. Enduring suffering is a skill. It has to do with training expectations on the frequency and intensity of negative outcomes. Our brain is not wired to expect things to go south as often as they do. So when shit hits the fan, we feel caught off guard. Normalize that.
More distant, older friends. Don’t forge relationships based on proximity - same town or same workplace. Covid has made geographic location irrelevant. Also, roam around age groups. Hang out with and listen to people 20 (heck, 30!) years older than you.
Assume good intent. When you meet someone new, treat that person as a friend. Assume they will become a positive force in your life. Most people wait for others to prove their value. Give them the benefit of the doubt from the start. Occasionally you will be disappointed, and that’s okay. I’m still working on this.
Drink a lot of water. If you aren’t intentionally tracking how much you are drinking, you are likely dehydrated. Buy a 1L water bottle and try to drink 3 of those things most days. Ideally, shoot for 4. Scribble a checkmark on your notebook every time you finish one to keep yourself accountable.
Spend time with yourself. Loneliness has more to do with our perceptions than how much company we have. Some people would rather give themselves electric shocks than spend a few minutes with their thoughts. Get comfortable with your own company.
Develop second-order thinking. Almost everyone can anticipate the immediate results of their actions. Second-order thinking is thinking farther ahead and thinking holistically. It requires not only to consider actions and immediate consequences but the subsequent effects as well.
Exercise most days. Keep your body strong so your mind can be sane. Lift weights, stretch muscles, run distances. Force yourself to be active at least five days a week. Track your progress in a journal. Think about it as machine maintenance.
Engineer serendipity. Don’t keep the score. Don’t help others because you expect something in return. Instead, show up with kindness and generosity to everyone. Create a large enough number of valuable experiences for others. The game will take care of itself.
Turn off notifications. The average US smartphone user gets 46 push notifications every day. A truckload of crap is constantly shipped your way through Slack, Whatsapp, Gmail, and many more tools. Train your mind to be minimally reactive. Schedule slots to check communication channels.
Monitor your screen time. It’s way too easy to fall complacent and waste hours on social media, games, porn, or anything designed to release cheap dopamine. Resist the urge to mindlessly scroll, play or swipe. Own your time.
Study decision-making. Almost everything in life is about resource allocation. How you use your precious, scarce resources (time, money, energy) is arguably one of the highest leverage practices you can embed in your life. Iterate on your learnings.
Develop listening skills. No one has ever learned anything new from listening to the sound of their own voice. Pay attention to what people say, without overthinking your response to that. Allow others to express their views.
Don’t drink. Consider significantly reducing or quitting alcohol altogether. When you read about it, it’s the single most dangerous thing you introduce into your body. Its effects are glaringly destructive in both the short and the long run.
Consume books voraciously. Ideally, you want to read a book a week. List your top authors, research their writings and come up with a reading list. Block out time to read every day. I find early mornings to be particularly conducive to information digestion.
Don’t stop education after you graduate. To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. If you play life as a finite game, you train for the rules. If life is instead an infinite game, you focus on being educated to adapt to unknowns.
Eat right. Unless you are a professional athlete, there is simply no way you can eat whatever you want all the time. If you are older than 30, follow a meal plan. Stick to it at least 5 days a week. Cook your own food, and control your portion size. It’s harder than it looks.
Mornings are prime time. If you wake up early, great. If you don’t, train yourself to do it. Way fewer distractions, way less noise. It’s the best time to think, reflect and plan ahead. It’s also great for exercising and other things you might not want to risk procrastinating.
Learn to think for yourself. Nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself. By definition, a large fraction of what people around you believe is mistaken. So the more you listen to others, the higher the chance you’re wrong. Practice coming up with your own worldview.
Don’t day trade. Unless you are an investment professional, avoid day trading. There are pretty smart people out there clocking 100-hour workweeks and still getting it wrong enough times to make it scary. If you don’t have a hedge on stock picking, stay away from gambling.
Quality time matters. Analyze the most important relationships in your life. If you’re in your last 10% of the time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.
Invest for the very long term. Get smart about an industry, a vertical, or a company. Develop a point of view and buy for the purpose of holding. Avoid day trading. Plan your exit strategy. Trim the leaves of your portfolio regularly.
Take notes. Do that about almost everything. Relationships, readings, places you go. Organize them in a way that would be easy for you to access later. Review them periodically. Find a way to connect the dots across topics and throughout time. Also harder than it looks.
Write to think. You don’t need to have a blog or become an author. You can keep your writings for yourself if you don’t want exposure. Yet, writing is the single most powerful tool to sharpen your thoughts and crystalize your ideas. Give it a go.
Identify aspirational role-models. Find vivid examples of success in the domains you care about. If you want to become a great scientist, try to find ways to spend time with good (or, ideally, great) scientists in person. Watch YouTube videos of interviews. Follow some on Twitter.
Recognize good work. Take the time to give those who work with you a pat on the back. Most people are so focused on the next challenge that they fail to thank the people who support them. It motivates and inspires people and encourages them to perform at a higher level.
Find one decision that removes 100. A whole lot of decisions are really part of the same category of a single decision. Find that one decision that categorically and completely removes other decisions. Create space for seeing the bigger picture and finding gems.
Develop conflict skills. We are not designed to agree on everything, and it’s not going to happen. Get familiar with batching, develop a decision-making framework to pick your own battles. Most importantly, never ever flip out. Once unleashed, anger is a form of madness.
Meditate every day. Every smart, accomplished leader I know practices meditation regularly. It helps with clearing your mind, developing perspective, and becoming consistently more centered. Don’t expect to see immediate results. Stick to it, every single day.
Gift great books. List your top reads of all times. Buy several copies of them in bulk and store them. Great books are incredibly high-leverage purchases. Gift them to your closest friends when they come to visit you or save them to celebrate a special occasion, like their birthday.
Work with a great therapist. Take care of your mental health. See a great specialist every week. Pay top dollar for them. Take notes after every session. You don’t need to experience a mental breakdown in order to consider therapy. The whole point is actually avoiding that.
Get comfortable with who you are. Most people don’t become comfortable with who they are until they’re in their 40s. By that time they can underplay their achievements and become a nicer, more likable person. Before then, there’s a lot of ego inflation. Try to get there sooner than 40.
Get enough sleep. You operate best when you are well-rested. Go to bed early most nights. Use an eye mask and earplugs. Keep the room tech-free, and the temperature relatively is cold. If you are older than 30, shoot for 8 hours. This one is way harder than you think.
Don’t waste time on envy. Don’t look at where others are. Don’t measure yourself against your peers. If you want someone else’s attribute, you should be ready to swap their entire life with yours. I am still wrestling with this one.
Own equity. Understand the difference between labor and capital. You are not going to get rich by renting out your time. So don’t take jobs based on salary. You must own equity, a piece of a business, or an asset, in order to achieve financial freedom.
Don’t be always productive. Take a walk without headphones. Paint on a canvas. Play an instrument. Don’t feel the need to be constantly productive. ‘All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone’. Learn to stay still.
Screw brunch. Go on long walks. Hike in the woods. Take a surfing class. Orchestrate social gatherings around activities, instead of passive consumption. Engage yourself with the world.
Introduce physical challenges. Try to get your body to accomplish something new every year. It could be running a marathon, a hundred consecutive push-ups, or a long swim in open waters. This will add incredible value to the process of self-discovery.
Travel to San Francisco. Figure out a way to spend some time there and meet people who've moved there to pursue their dreams. Why San Francisco? It is the Schelling point for high-openness, smart, energetic, optimistic people. Global Weird HQ.
Work hard, or don’t. To the extent that you enjoy working hard, do. Subject to that constraint, it's not clear that the returns to effort ever diminish substantially. If you're lucky enough to enjoy it a lot, be grateful and take full advantage! Otherwise, no need to punish yourself.
Investigate others’ life-defining events. When meeting someone new, try to find out what formative experience occurred in their lives before they were twenty-five. Some important event in everyone’s youth has an influence on everything that occurs afterward.
Stay weird. If you went to a good school, there are a lot of forces that will push you towards following train tracks laid by others. Heuristic: do your friends at school think your path is a bit strange? If not, maybe it's too normal.
Invest in a dinner table. It’s the greatest piece of social technology you could ever own. Aside from that, buy more plants than furniture. Throw dinner parties. Keep the group size between 5 and 10. Eat great food, discuss interesting topics.
Be true to yourself. Nobody spends time thinking about you. They really do not. Because they mostly think about themselves already. So stop overthinking what others might say about your decisions, and be true to yourself.
Borsalino Test #12: Advice
Hi there,
Thank you so much for sharing this list! As someone in my thirties, I can't help but feel that this list is spot on. It truly hits the nail on the head in terms of what I've been thinking about and what I believe is essential to focus on.
One aspect that I believe is absolutely vital for me right now is to remind myself of the importance of tidying up and keeping things clean. It may seem like a simple task, but it can make a significant difference in our lives.