This document was inspired by Buster Benson's Codex Vitae. In his version, Benson laid out that his "document's purpose is to capture [his] beliefs about the universe, track how [his] thoughts change over time, and act an invitation to others to hold [him] accountable to [his] beliefs and commitments."
My version serves not only to accomplish those goals for myself but also to highlight the things I wish I knew earlier in life and record those things for the children I hope to one day have. Furthermore, this serves as a notebook to capture idea fragments that may benefit from public support, co-creation, or scrutiny.
Good thinking should be swift, precise, and terrifying, like a rail-gun obliterating other arguments.
While I'm not religious, I do think that understanding religion is important. Religion's importance to me stems from the reason that it exists. As a species, humans are different from other creatures because of the fact that we alone seek causes for things. We seek to explain the world around us; to date, we have found no other life form that does so. As Maria Konnikova of The New Yorker notes:
The human mind is incredibly averse to uncertainty and ambiguity; from an early age, we respond to uncertainty or lack of clarity by spontaneously generating plausible explanations... In 1972, the psychologist Jerome Kagan posited that uncertainty resolution was one of the foremost determinants of our behavior. When we can’t immediately gratify our desire to know, we become highly motivated to reach a concrete explanation... We want, in other words, to achieve “cognitive closure.”
Religion offers human beings an explanatory system for the natural phenomena that they would not otherwise be able to explain. It is for this reason that we see flood stories from civilizations across the planet: the Biblical account of “Noah’s Ark”, the Greek myth of Deucalion, the Hindu story of Manu and the fish and the Babylonian tale of Utnapishtim from the Epic of Gilgamesh, to name a few. Flood stories exist because of the nature of floods themselves. Ancient civilizations tended to center on rivers and could not expand too far beyond them due to the limits of irrigation technology; thus, the bounds of the "known world" were constrained. When the rivers flooded, it seemed like they would flood the whole world. Of course, while floods can bring life (as in Egypt), they can also be wildly destructive. Ancient peoples sought an explanation for this destruction.
Dr. Tania Lombrozo from Berkeley says that "people prefer explanations that provide a function or purpose, called 'teleological explanations.' If I ask, for instance, 'why does your cup have a handle?' a teleological explanations might be, 'The cup has a handle so that you can lift it without burning your fingers.'" Floods, teleologically explained, happen to smite people's wickedness and cause rebirth per various religions.
This brings me to my main point: religion is important to understand because people use it to describe the world. While you or I might not subscribe to those belief systems, understanding others' religions gives us a view into understanding them. My favorite theory of how one might reconcile various religions is recounted here by Jack Preston King.
Simply put:
All of Humanity is climbing the same Holy Mountain. It’s a big enough mountain that the landscape and the weather are different depending on which side you’re climbing. It’s so wide at the base that you have to have ascended quite a distance to even become aware you’re on a mountain with more than one side, that you’re climbing something other than a flat, vertical plane. At the top of the mountain is a Great Truth that is calling us all toward it.
The maps up the mountain are religions. They appear shockingly different due to the conditions different spiritual cartographers face. Different histories, cultures, and other factors all lead to different maps. Most importantly, though, is that each mapmaker's truth is true from the perspective of the map and path they're following.
While we’re on one side or another of the mountain, we’re stuck with a limited view, and we squabble over particulars. At the summit, that just won’t happen, for reasons that will make perfect sense when we get there, but not a moment before. It [The Holy Mount metaphor] suggests that perceived contradictions are only apparent, the result of drawing short-sighted conclusions before we’ve gathered all the relevant evidence. When the day comes that we do, in fact, “know it all” (instead of merely pretending to), we’ll all agree on everything.
A friend of mine recently (as of Apr. 2017) asked me why I want what many people consider an egregious amount of money (i.e. 8 figures in net worth). I didn't get around to answering her that particular day, but I would like to be clear about what the point of money is for me.
Money is not meant to be acquired as an end in itself. Money must be viewed as a resource, rather than a goal; one would be wise to keep that top of mind. If we try to acquire money just for the sake of a number on a bank account statement or pay stub, we subject ourselves to running on the hedonic treadmill. Simply put, this means that as we become accustomed to bigger numbers, we adapt to them and need more and more to get the same positive feelings. Thus, money becomes our drug.
In that case, what is the point of acquiring money? Why bother at all? To paraphrase the late Gianni Versace, "money buys freedom." For me, freedom falls into two buckets: (a) freedom from worry and (b) freedom from involuntary decision-making. Of course, those two might be sides of the same coin, but in any case, those two types of freedom are what I aspire to currently.
When I say freedom from worry, I mean that anxiety about affording my kids' college or my monthly bills or any number of other daily minutiae fades away. With enough money, the tedious concerns of daily life cease to exist; of course, money brings with it worry of its own (e.g. worry about losing your money or worry about the performance of your investments), but I currently find investing a scintillating activity and try to do so according to my appetite for risk. By limiting the amount I can lose, I limit the amount of worry I can experience.
When I talk about freedom from involuntary decision-making, I'm referring to not having my hand forced due to lack of money. This means not feeling forced to take loans with draconian terms or making decisions that weaken my position in order to shore up my financial position short-term. When people feel desperate, they tend to make bad choices and lose sight of the long game. However, if Warren Buffett can teach us anything, it's that patience and long-termism are powerful tools.
Tied to this is the idea of BATNA, which is the "best alternative to negotiated agreement." In simple terms, your BATNA is your next best option if whatever deal you're making falls through. With enough cash to both be content and free from worry, your BATNA is to simply walk away; as the principle of least interest says that the person who is least interested (i.e. can walk away) has the most power in any form of relationship.
Here are some miscellaneous things I believe about the world. Others may or may not agree with them.
Substance > Optics
All things break under their own weight when they become too big.
Here's a hit list of things I believe about business management. More simply, this is about how to make profit by building things people want and managing talent well, among other topics.
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The majority of the population cannot really articulate what it is they want. People's thinking and expectations are constrained by the past; you must show them a better future.
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This requires a single, overarching vision. Note that word choice: "vision," not "idea." Ideas are a dime a dozen. Anyone can have a "good idea." But vision comes from deep understanding of a problem. You don't have to be an expert. You just need to get really smart about a big problem in the world and find a novel, efficient, better way to solve it.
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In order to prevent dilution of vision, you need a benevolent dictator in charge. When decisions are made by committee or consensus, debates slow down forward progress and the vision that drives things forward is diluted by too many voices. Almost every successful startup ($1B+ exit) is therefore a cult of personality.
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Notably, this vein of management thinking should only be enacted if there is a hierarchy of power and influence. Among equal partners (e.g. law, investing, marriage), decisions should be made by consensus. If the partners lack (a) trust in each other and (b) conviction in their joint decisions, the partnership will likely fail longterm.
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Thus, a benevolent dictator sets vision, has veto power, and makes final decisions. However, this person must welcome team contributions and cooperation; otherwise, they will find themselves without teammates quite quickly. The dictator tells people what to do, never how to do it. To quote Shyam Sankar of Palantir, "Despite the necessity of joint ownership (or perhaps because of it), some things simply require a dictator to get done. This is especially true in product development, where not only does halving the team often double the pace of progress, but the fulfillment of a coherent vision usually requires one actual visionary."
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When deciding, it helps the team dynamic to allow people to indicate their viewpoint. If a minority of people disagree with the dictator, they should just disagree and commit with the dictator. If a majority disagree, the dictator should disagree and commit with the majority. Therefore, complete consensus isn’t required to move forward, just the team’s sense that the vision is maintained.
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The goal of the benevolent dictator is to protect the product vision, not his or her own ego. This means that a good leader will tell people what needs to be done when it needs to be done, but be flexible enough to listen and adapt to the concerns of their teammates. Ultimately, the best product leaders will use their influence and vision to act as force multipliers for their teams.
see Hubspot.
Time tracking doesn't matter. Idc how long you work, so long as you hit goals and ship quality product by deadlines or better. If you can do your job with great success in 30 minutes, awesome. You'll get promoted / keep getting promoted until you can't do your job in 30 min.
Meetings should never be more than 20 min. Human attention span is 20 minutes. Meetings should run with default of 30 second speaking time; use a chess clock to keep people on track. perhaps add 30 sec silent consideration after every 30 second speaking.
unlimited given certain parameters that I haven't thought of yet.
no decisions should be made due to emotion or opinion alone. Data rules everything around me. revisit "brilliant assholes" via utilitarian perspective.
You want a maker schedule, which you can attain via calendar anorexia
lorem ipsum dolor
I've worked as a consultant and one of my clients said that his firm preferred not to use contract workers. When I asked why, he responsed with a question: "Would you outsource the rearing of your child?"
Most people do not work hard nor do they want to. Many would get angry at me for saying something like this. They would rebut: "I work plenty hard! I work full-time (40 hours) a week. For that, I deserve to have some balance in my life." And this is fine, if you wish to be a normal person with normal outcomes. But 40 hours is not hard work.
Hard work is 60-80+ hours of work a week, including going in on weekends and holidays. Hard work is working 12+ hours a day every single day for two years, like my father did when he was starting out as a doctor. It's waking up at crazy hours of the night to make sure your experiments are running properly like my mother did when I was young. It's working 150 hours over 9 straight days and sleeping in the office like I did to make sure my team would deliver great work to our client. Hard work is suffering: you can only become exceptional if you're willing to pay your body and soul in the balance.
Few people think about these realities; fewer still embrace them. This presents opportunity. If you wish to be great, an easy way to get ahead is to outwork the competition. Better yet, you can work smart. If you're more efficient than the people around you, imagine how much you could get done while others struggle to keep up.
Working hard and working smart are not mutually exclusive. Some people advocate one or the other. This is fallacious. Instead, you should work more efficiently for longer. That's how gains compound. Little by little, decade by decade, you'll gain enough ground to be light years ahead of your peers.
Note: not all things are worth working so hard for. There are some things we are called to do. For my father, it was medicine and providing for a young family. For my mother, it was furthering cancer research. For me, it's been about developing a reputation of excellence (i.e. to have a Midas touch on work output). Actively hunt for your calling and the hours will slip by faster than you think.
In Victorian England, one pastime among friends and family was to jot down your “Confessions”— answers to semi-serious questions of taste and principle. I have taken the list of questions that Karl Marx answered in the spring of 1865, and have provided my own answers. While Marx did not indicate why he answered questions in any particular way, I have strived to provide some explanation of my choices. These are my confessions.
| Question | Answer | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| The quality you like best | Efficiency | My name means "efficient" in Sanskrit and I studied Operations Management in college. |
| Your chief characteristic | Quick-study | Speed-reading + memory = knowledge acquisition |
| Your favorite occupation | CEO | Aspirational... |
| The vice you hate most | Ignorance | In most cases, there's no excuse for not picking up a book or Googling. |
| The vice you excuse most | Arrogance | I've excused it in myself and so I do in others. It's something I personally need to work on. |
| Your idea of happiness | Complete freedom | see section on Money |
| Your idea of misery | Bureaucracy | Being told what to do, esp. in a slow and broken system, chafes. |
| Your aversion | Boring people | What sort of a person wants to be bored (or boring)? |
| Your hero | Deadpool | The wisecracks get me every time, also regenerates. |
| Your heroine | Jane Eyre | She had her shit together, for the most part. |
| The poet you like best | Lord Byron | "She Walks in Beauty" is a damn good poem. |
| The prose writer you like best | F. Scott Fitzgerald | He makes prose sound like poetry, layered with wit and insight. |
| Your favorite flower | Blue orchid | They are quite rare, tough to grow, and phenomenally pretty. |
| Your favorite dish | Butter Chicken | Feels very comforting to me |
| Your maxim | Success is knowing what to do and how to do it. | Seems like the simplest true advice I've heard. |
| Your motto | For now, "Hoya Saxa" | The informal motto of my alma mater meaning "What Rocks" |
| Your favorite color | Red | It's the color of my personality (see Color Code). |
| The character in history you most dislike | Joseph Stalin | Killed tens of millions in the process of building a society, distorted its theoretical underpinnings, and ultimately had it implode. There's something profoundly tragic about the callousness and wasted life there. |
"If you're not planting seeds for 5 to 10 years out, you have no company 5 to 10 years out."
-Jeff Holden, Chief Product Officer @ Uber (source)
Context: said at the Uber Elevate Summit (conference on flying cars) in April 2017.
"Disagree and commit."
-Jeff Bezos, CEO & Founder @ Amazon (source)
"Design is the rendering of intent."
-Jared Spool, Founding Principal @ User Interface Engineering (source)
"Coke v Pepsi. Pick the more mainstream option that more people can easily consume. Both will make money but bigger is always better."
-Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO @ Social Capital (source)
Context: when you need to decide between two similar investments (i.e. Bitcoin & Ethereum), pick the one that's ready for mass consumption (or pick both as a hedge).
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
-Mark Twain, American author and humorist (source)
"There is only one god, and His name is Death. And there is only one thing we say to Death: not today."
-Syrio Forel, Game of Thrones character (source)
"Normalcy is not an objective state, waiting to be discovered. It is a social construction of society... This ability to normalize just about anything is simultaneously one of our species’ greatest strengths and one of its greatest weaknesses... Giving positions of power to people based on favoritism, or nepotism, or on how easily they can be controlled from above is a dangerous norm for our democracy... Consider that your very presence in such a system provides consent. Consent is the fuel any Administration needs to continue to normalize what it is doing."
-Noah Kunin, former Infrastructure Director @ 18F (source)
Context: explaining why one's continued presence within a system that normalizes bad behavior provides consent for said behavior, with regard to the Trump presidency.
"Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. The trouble is, it's not true. You feel this when you start to design things."
-Paul Graham, Co-founder @ Y Combinator (source)
"It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it."
-Paul Graham, Co-founder @ Y Combinator (source)
"Religion never just builds a pantheon of gods. It always builds the gods as the response to a threat structure, which is going to be a monster story of some kind."
-Stephen Asma, Professor of Philosophy @ Columbia College Chicago (source)
"Shelley drew on a mythology of technology that goes back to the 6th century B.C. when the figure Prometheus stole fire from the gods and bestowed it to mankind. The “fire bringer,” is often associated with Lucifer, (literally meaning “light bearer”), who pilfered light from the heavens and brought it down to Earth. The “fall of man” implies an age when mortals are illuminated with knowledge."
-Jim Kozubek, Author of Modern Prometheus (source)
"On the scale of unbearable suffering to unfettered joy, most people vacillate within a range they would describe as 'basically OK,' and they assume life will always be that way."
-Andy Raskin, Strategy Consultant (source)
"Infinite verification is impossible but basic verification is not. A few calculations or internet searches can give us some idea whether to trust, or verify more."
-Mike Dariano, Blogger @ The Waiter's Pad (source)
"Velocity is a vector-dependent concept. Moving in two directions that are not 100% aligned creates drag."
-Shane Parrish, Blogger @ Farnam Street (source)
"The great leader, the genius in leadership, is the man who can do the average thing when everybody else is going crazy."
-Dwight Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States (source)
"Once you’ve truly controlled your own fate, for better or for worse, you’ll never let anyone else tell you what to do. A taste of freedom can make you unemployable."
-Naval Ravikant, CEO @ AngelList (source)
"Very few people have consistent values on questions like these. That’s because nobody naturally has principles. People take the unprincipled mishmash of their real opinions, extract principles out of it, and follow those principles. But the average person only does this very weakly, to the point of having principles like “it’s bad when you lie to me, so maybe lying is wrong in general” – and even moral philosophers do it less than a hundred percent and apply their principles inconsistently."
-Scott Alexander, Blogger @ SlateStar Codex (source)
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Anger, frustration, and other negative emotions have an optimal window in which they actually help you get shit done. Too little and you're not motivated; too much and you're paralyzed. When you find yourself in the sweet spot, exert your negative energy to get results (see sublimation).
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Experience only matters insofar as you have the basic skills to get the job done. The ability to learn quickly is far more important and helps you level up faster (Hunter Walk describes this as "betting on people prematurely").
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If you want to figure out what a person or group of people truly values, compare what they say to what they do. People tend to say lots of things, many of which they don't actually mean. Therefore, examining their actions is the only way to parse out their motives, beliefs, and values (see revealed preferences).
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Nobody knows what they're doing. And as you get older, you become more aware of just how little you know. That's ok: you don't need to know everything about everything. You just need to know a lot about a little and a little about a lot.
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When you decide what you want to do, don't optimize for "what you love," which is the garbage advice most people will give you. Optimize for three things: (a) something that fascinates you, (b) something that will change the world in the future (right now, May 2017, that's bioengineering, blockchain, and AI/ML), and (c) something you're good at. If you can do those things, you'll get satisfaction from being curious, making advances in your field, and accruing personal acheievement.
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Not everything in life is winner-take-all or zero-sum, but it's best to go after it like it is. You have to compete at a high enough level to take advantage of the best opportunities. Compete so hard that you're not just in a different league, but playing a different game. Only that leads you to have monopoly power.
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What you'll realize at some point in life is that there are far fewer smart people than you thought there were. And note that a degree doesn't really correlate to intelligence in any meaningful way, most of those people are actually sheep with no unique thoughts. You'll notice that those with huge amounts of intellectual firepower can talk to an expert in a field with no prior knowledge and rapidly pick up terms of art and esoteric concepts. They'll walk away after a few hours able to have intelligent conversations about the subject and ask smart questions at the depth of tertiary consequences (perhaps 10+ steps down the decision / consequence tree). They can also take bits of knowledge from across fields and shape them into a coherent, compelling argument. Ultimately, the truly smart people will terrify you without even trying to, because those people are practically aliens compared to even folks of above-average intelligence. That's a good thing to aspire to, even if we cannot reach such great heights.
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You should almost never read books in which the author tries to predict the future. Such books, in most cases, are inevitably wrong. What you'll realize in time is that nobody knows what they're doing; thus most predictions fail and the rest are lucky. Don't place bets with prognosticators (I was one for a time).
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Companies will generally pay employees 5-10% of the economic value they create for the firm. This is the only way companies remain profitable.
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The things that ultimately teach you the most are the things that test you the most. By putting yourself in situations that are extremely taxing, you'll learn a lot faster than those around you. (h/t: Eliezer Yudkovsky)
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Diversity is better as a salad than a soup. A perfectly well-mixed soup becomes entirely homogenous. Organic clustering and mixing leads to larger-scale structures that extend the range of possibilities. (h/t: Joe Norman)
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Food is emotion, experience, and love in tangible form. There's a reason why the image of the grandmother toiling in the kitchen all day is so ingrained in our cultural memory. Perhaps that will change with more gender equality, but I suspect that the best food will always be a homemade meal crafted lovingly by an old person. There's just something about the care, decades of life, and craft coming together all at once. When you experience a meal, homemade or otherwise, that makes you cry, go thank the person who made it; they've enriched your life greatly.
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Behavior is a response to implicit prediction. This means that people almost instantaneously form expectations about what they believe will happen and then behave in response to mental model.
When I was 15, I wanted a job at McDonald's. My dad said to me, “If you want a job so bad , I will pay you $6 an hour. I will pay you $6 an hour every hour you stand looking at the wall.” I asked him “For real?” Then, being young, I asked “Is there a limit to how many hours I can stand?” “No,” he said, “every day, all day.” My younger brother was jealous and said, “What about me?” My dad said, “You too!” So we both faced the wall in the dining room and he only had 2 rules: we must pay attention to the wall and not lean on it. My younger 12-year-old brother lasted less than a half hour and I lasted 2 and half hours; standing was okay, but focusing on the wall was near torture. Having no goals, being homeless, not trying to exceed your own abilities in any way is simply choosing a way of life that leads to the wall, which then leads to drugs and alcohol to cope. (source: Quora)
My favorite time in NYC is 5am. That semi-quiet moment, motion is occurring but at three-quarters speed, the streets and cars providing most but not all of the light. Volume is there - it always is - but it is hushed. Stores opening. People just getting home. At 5am, all that exists are the details. There is something about this middle ground. (source: Andy Weissman)
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Most electrical sockets are inefficiently designed; they should be horizontally oriented. Hence, it's up to you to change your behavior to be more efficient when using them. If you intend to leave something plugged in for a long time (e.g. weeks, months, years, forever), plug it into the bottom-most plug. That way, you don't have to contort your arm to plug in items that will require less duration on the plug. In simple terms: things that rarely get unplugged go in the bottom-most plug; then work your way up the outlets by the expected duration of plug usage.
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If you watch YouTube videos at higher than 2x speed, enter
document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = Xin your console where X is a variable (i.e. if X is 3, the video plays at 3x speed). The rate at which you acquire knowledge matters. If you can encode just a bit more data into your brain on a daily basis than other people, it'll compound over time. And then decades from now, you won't be a little smarter but vastly so. -
An awesome bedtime routine for 4-year olds-- what me and my son call "the ones" (source: Patrick O'Shaughnessy)
- 1 book
- 1 story
- 1 "thankful" (these are either hilarious or profound)
- 1 minute lying down
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If your boss doesn't do weekly 1-on-1s with you, grab her or him each week and do an unscheduled one. (source: Jason Lemkin).
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For the vast majority of YouTube (all?) videos, you can skip the first 30% and still get the bulk of the main content. This is called the Wadsworth Constant.
