My (More Than a) Kilobyte

Over the past few days, I’ve thought a lot about a prompt from a friend: “If you could beam a kilobyte of information straight into the minds of every person alive, what would it be?”

Here’s my (more than a kilobyte) answer. Looking at this list in hindsight is funny because I struggle with internalizing all of this advice myself. Always be aware of the law of equal and opposite advice.

• With many caveats, you can choose to be happier.

• Be finely attuned to what makes you excited, and optimize for that (within reasonable constraints). Do things that are excitingly ambitious.

  • “Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own. It may be within some bigger project, but you'll be driving your part of it.
    
    What should your projects be? Whatever seems to you excitingly ambitious. As you grow older and your taste in projects evolves, exciting and important will converge. At 7 it may seem excitingly ambitious to build huge things out of Lego, then at 14 to teach yourself calculus, till at 21 you're starting to explore unanswered questions in physics. But always preserve excitingness.
    
    There's a kind of excited curiosity that's both the engine and the rudder of great work. It will not only drive you, but if you let it have its way, will also show you what to work on.
    
    What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.” - Paul Graham, How to Do Great Work

  • If nothing’s exciting, keep throwing yourself at the world until things start to click. You won’t get anywhere by sitting at home and waiting for the right things to come to you.

• It’s a lot easier to change your identity than you might think. You can become someone who loves math. You can become good at programming. You can become the kind of person who reads research papers in their free time. Understanding this is genuinely transformative.

  • Doing great things (whatever that means for you) is hard, but the people who do great things aren’t as different from you as you probably think they are.

    • “It’s amazing how quickly you can be world-class at something, just because most people don’t try.” - (I heard a variation of this in a podcast episode, and I haven’t been able to figure out which one, but it’s a great quote.)

• Related to the bullet above: give yourself permission! Most people don’t actively stop themselves from doing whatever they think is important (founding companies/solving difficult problems/being a really good musician/whatever), but they also don’t actively give themselves permission to really try. In the end, they continue following whatever default path they’re on. I hereby actively give you permission to give yourself permission!

• You are way more “stupid” than you probably think you are (and so is everyone else).

  • Interesting sidenote: extend more grace to people holding other beliefs. Beliefs are so context-dependent that in a large number of counterfactual realities you probably hold the beliefs you hate most.

• Your ground state isn’t complete inaction and it shouldn’t be complete inaction. You'll take a lot of “happiness damage” and find it hard to do the things you want to do if that’s the framework you live your life by. Let your ground state be motion. Rest in motion.

  • I firmly believe that if you let yourself, you’ll be really surprised by the amount of things that can replace scrolling on social media (or whatever else your “ground state” is) and still give you at least the same amount of fulfillment, excitement, or whatever else you get out of your “ground state” while being more “productive” for your long-term goals.

• There is no speed limit, but you need to be wary about going too fast and sacrificing quality for speed. Resisting the urge to go fast and sacrifice quality is what I struggle with the most on this list.

• Be around awesome people (whatever that means to you) who can help you unlock new ways of seeing the world. Acquiring new ways of thinking about the world can massively alter the trajectory of your life. Almost everything else on this list comes by default if you’re around the right people.

  • Help others be around awesome people and/or be an awesome person for them.