How to create, design, and measure life

Image by Alexis Guaba

Right from the time we are born, we are taught to live life sensibly, within well defined structures that have already been created for us. Concepts of success and failure are defined within these structures. While these structures are useful, questioning and reorganizing these structures enables people to create an environment that allows them to feel fulfilled. For me, fulfillment comes through creating optimal value for society in a way that I care about. What “optimal value” and “society” mean are both determined by my individual views. This framework helps me discover what definition of these terms leaves me the most fulfilled.

When I first took the Thiel Fellowship, I gave up structure and embraced chaos. This was liberating yet scary. My life changed from constantly scrambling to meet all my test and project deadlines at UC Berkeley to having no externally-imposed deadlines that I really had to meet. The change felt drastic.

From being overwhelmed by work with no time to think, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the silence with plenty of time to think and no clear work. While unstructured thinking time was initially liberating, it eventually became confusing since it was unclear what I should have been doing at any given point of time. To me, it felt like I could flip a coin and act arbitrarily. I could pack my schedule with meetings, I could sleep all day, or I could (finally) read all the books I’d been meaning to read.

Realizing the importance of self created structures

This lead to a paradox of choice. The more time I spent thinking about all the things I could do, the number of options available to me compounded, making the process of deciding even harder. This gave me the illusion that I could do everything I had ever wanted and yet, when I did try to do everything, I ended up doing nothing.

This was a powerful turning point in my life. I realized that I DID need to create structures in order to succeed. I started to realize the distinction between chaos and liberty. Chaos provided me an unrestricted ability to do anything, while liberty gave me the ability do what I needed in order to meet my goals. As Will Durant, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian, philosopher, and author illustrates, “In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order”. I realized that I didn’t want chaos, instead I wanted sufficient structures to provide me stability around everyday activities so that I could use the unstructured time productively. For example, creating routines around my eating, sleeping, exercise schedules sucked out time spent on making trivial decisions and provided me more mental energy that I could channel into creative research. My work is quite non repetitive and requires constantly making decisions and having a routine in other parts of my life helps me deal with the constant uncertainty and variance in the professional aspect of my life. Finding the right balance between unstructured and structured time helped me be creative while still ensuring I was making progress. I found that forcing functions were extremely helpful in ensuring I was always making progress. A common forcing function that I used with self learning was if I wanted to learn about a new topic, I would sign up to give a talk about the topic at a meetup or to an audience. This ensured I sufficiently mastered the topic in a timely manner. While forcing functions were helpful, I realized back to back calendar entries infringed on my ability to think and be creative. Instead, I found that having 2–3 clear goals that I want to achieve in a day was sufficient structuring that enabled me to be both creative and produce output.

What does success mean?

Before I talk about the framework that I use to find that perfect balance i.e. self-created structures that enable me to have liberty, it is essential to first understand what success even means.

To me, there is no objective definition of success. And yet, success or value creation isn’t subjective to just an individual either. I don’t think value has a completely objective or subjective meaning; rather it is relative, emergent property from our interactions with each other and the world around us. Defining success required an understanding of what was important to me, and what was important to the communities and people that I cared about. Thus, it became increasingly important to be aware of both myself and the desires of the section of society that I cared about.

For me, I feel most fulfilled when I am creating “value” for society. As the first step in the process to feeling fulfilled, I find it important to have an understanding of what success means. While it is possible to have a basket of multiple small mutually independent successes (I don’t believe there is one way to live life), I personally find it optimal to have an overarching thesis on the kind of value I want to create. I find that in periods of uncertainty, this overarching thesis maintains a direction and prevents me from ever feeling completely lost.

Why is it important to understand the definition of success?

Each of us have about 80,000 hours in our careers. Thus in order to optimize value creation, it is important to optimize both magnitude of work and direction of the work. Hard work in the wrong direction, or just hard work without direction doesn’t lead to value creation. Optimizing value creation is like vector physics; every vector has a direction, in addition to movement. While understanding myself requires some time and reflection and is a constant process, this time investment is hugely valuable in ensuring I am always moving in the right direction.

A common trap that I’ve fallen into is when I don’t create sufficient routines for myself, I spend hours everyday deciding what to eat, what to wear, what to do when I feel bored and such. Sequences of small decisions can cause mental fatigue since each of these decisions requires effort and feels like work. This is an example of work done without magnitude or direction. Having to make decisions about several small situations which are unrelated (not in the same direction) uses up small magnitudes of energy per instance. The overall result of adding up the energy expended on making each small decision is a substantial amount which makes me feel like I did work which didn’t amount to anything substantial.

Another common trap that I’ve fallen into in the past when I’ve thought about “hard work being the key to success” is mindless repetition of an activity. Repetitive practice without awareness is insufficient to see drastic improvement at any activity.

While technically I could create anything in the world, narrowing down on what value I wanted to create was important in order to ensure I made some progress towards actually executing on it. Figuring out if I had found what impact I want to make or if I should keep searching for a better definition of value creation was a hard problem. I found it useful to think of the value that I wanted to create in terms of explore vs exploit tradeoffs. The optimal stopping theorem is a useful framework to ensure I had sufficiently explored before I started to exploit. I feel I have lived a life sufficiently rich in experiences for me to know which causes I care about currently. With time and other experiences, my goals will probably get more refined, but as of now, I see a general direction to proceed in. I also find that being passionate about something and going all out in it makes it easy to understand the whole world from that perspective. From there, curiosity can enables me to connect that one thing to everything else in the world.

Framework for coming up with an initial definition of success for myself:

Below are some questions that help me refine my own perspective of success:

What value do I want to have created in the world in my lifetime? How will this impact the lives of other people?

1. What are causes that I care about the most currently? (Eg. I personally care a lot about privacy and creating a future where we can’t track human beings. The fact that there exists social ranking and tracking systems in China is an extremely scary reality to me.)
2. Who are the people whose lives I want to impact the most?

What does meaning in life for me mean?

1. Personally?
2. Professionally?

Framework for executing on my initial definition of success:

Once I had a better understanding of the long term value I wanted to create, it was about executing on that. I use the following questions to break down how I can ensure I align my actions with my longer term goal.

What personal and professional growth do I want to have achieved in trying to create the value that I want 1 year from now?

1. How do these goals bring me closer to my longer term value creation goals?

How am I going to achieve these goals?

1. Choosing forcing functions / accountability metrics: What forcing functions / accountability metrics do I need to create for myself to reach my professional goals? (Eg. for me I find that having motivated co-Founders who I do weekly check ins with creates a strong accountability metric. )
2. Understanding impact of environment / culture / setting on flow state: What kind of environment / culture / setting helps me be productive? What factors contribute to me getting to flow state? (Eg. a room with sunlight and silence might be helpful factors) How can I create this environment for myself for long periods of time for 5–6 days a week?
3. Understanding factors which accelerate getting into flow state quickly: What are things that I can externally control / change to improve my chances of getting into a flow state every morning? What are factors that internally contribute to me going into flow state? (Eg. For me I find that a slightly stressful atmosphere helps me get into flow state. Anything more than slightly stressful puts me into stressed and can’t work mode. Anything less than that makes me complacent. I try to set goals and accountability checks to bring me into this mental frame.)
4. Understanding factors which break flow state: What disrupts my flow state? (Eg. I find emails, messages etc to be extremely distracting. I ensure I set a fixed time every day to batch and do these and when I am in flow state I remain in Do Not Disturb mode where only emergency contacts can reach me). How am I going to deal with these factors that break my flow state?
5. Maintaining motivation: What structure in my life will help me remain constantly motivated for the next x years to keep creating this value in the world? Good health, friendships and relationships are important factors for me.

What am I currently doing to set up these structures and forcing functions for myself?

1. What are the situations where my actions are aligned with my goals for the next year?
2. What are the situations where my actions are not aligned with these long term goals?
3. What actions am I going to take over the next month to align these actions to meet my goals?

Framework to keep iterating on the definition of success while executing on it:

While the initial definition of success is helpful to have, this definition isn’t a fixed target. In fact, the process of execution will bring up more information that might alter / refine the initial definition of success. In such cases, it is important to get good at iterating on the definition of success while executing on this definition.

I like to take some time out of my every day life to ensure I understand and refine my ideas of success. Below is a set of questions that helps me find and keep direction as I keep executing:

Am I completely honest with myself?

1. What are places I am disillusioning myself but not willing to accept it?
2. Why am I disillusioning myself?

What are my thought patterns like?

1. What thoughts do I have most regularly? Where do they stem from and what do they lead to? I have been trying the Vipassana style of meditation where I categorize my thoughts. This helps me understanding thinking patterns and loops. This also helps me separate out mood from action. Feelings and emotions exist, but I try to observe and accept them and function despite them. I also find that understanding thinking patterns helps me recognize that I am going into a bad mood and catch myself before the thoughts spiral downward. Morning Pages has also been a great way for me to surface and deal with thoughts and emotions that I would otherwise bottle down.

In conclusion, this is a framework that helps me to understand myself better. I believe that while this is a useful starting point, each individual is unique and self reflection is the best way to discover frameworks that work best. Processing life is just as important as experiencing many things. This is why the 10,000 hour rule (10,000 hours of practice makes one successful) doesn’t blindly apply. In order to maximize value creation, I find that introspection is just as important as acting and experiencing external stimulus. Introspection is crucial since it helps me figure out if I am any closer to the direction I want to move in, similar to a powerful inner compass.

Thank you to Alexis Gauba, Zubin Koticha, Logan Ford and Allyson Dias for their valuable feedback.