Advice for Life

• Do your best. Most people do things “good enough” …and if everything was done good enough, would anything be good enough? If you try your best, at everything, every time, then even if you don’t win, you will always get better and learn along the way. If you make it a habit to always do your best, you will find yourself succeeding more than not.

• Be your own compass; think independently. Derive ethical truth on your own. The crowd, authority figures, and memes (ideas with authority over people) can and often times are wrong. The best means of guidance is internal. Ask yourself, “How would I like it if that was done to me?” Then use that question in relation to harm/care and fairness/reciprocity to derive the right thing to do.

• Little gains matter. See the book “atomic habits” 1% gains compound. It’s better to slowly, incrementally improve than to try to make huge gains. Small gains compound and improve things exponentially over time.

• Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life. This applies to physical exercise, food habits, study habits, learning difficult things, acquiring new skills, and ethical choices*. There is a caveat with hard ethical choices… doing the right thing is not always externally validated, but it is always internally validated.

• Constantly build your mental tool box. Omni-competence is a worthy ideal. It’s impossible to know and understand everything, but the more things you know, the more you can do. Every word you learn is a new way of thinking. Every skill you acquire allows you to do something new. Every mental model you build or improve upon allows you to understand more about the world and move in a positive direction. Ideals are not obtainable but they are infinitely approachable. Omni-competence is not a destination, it’s a direction.

• Embrace the suck. If you find yourself in a bad situation (as you are bound to from time to time), don’t worry about how much it sucks, rather find the good in the situation and figure out how to embrace the suck.

• The serenity prayer. “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, the strength to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

• Be kind to others. To use two economic analogies… Kindness costs nothing. Kindness is a valuable currency that pays dividends. It seems odd to use these analogies because it’s best not to look at your kindness to others in terms of its advantages to you, simply being kind for kindness sake is best. Most people suffer in hidden ways and little acts of kindness can heal others in unique ways. Oddly, being kind can be hard, it can cost time and energy, and the benefits are not always obvious. Being aggressive can have more obvious and immediate results. That said, kindness builds bridges and bonds that are long lasting and powerful. It’s better to be the light than the darkness.

• Keep a list of your goals - a ToDo list for life. Start everyone. Don’t worry about how long they take, just make slow forward progress on them. They don’t all have to happen at once, and some may stay on the back burner for years, but the simple act of writing them down, and the harder act of taking some actions to move down the path, is typically enough to get you moving in the right direction. Remember, little gains compound.  NOTE: Your goals may change over time and that’s OK. Keep the important ones on the list, feel free to cross off the unimportant ones. Don’t give up on important ones because they are hard. The hard ones just take more time.