I was pretty miserable in my job last year. I had no idea what I was doing and everyone kept telling me “fake it ‘til you make it,” which I thought was the worst advice I had ever heard. Is the world really run by the winners of a contest of false confidence? Everyone’s radical certainty, their preposterous ambition, terrified me, and when you insist on remaining terrified and other people insist on remaining cheerful, you get pissed off. So I was terrified and I was pissed off and I wanted to quit, but I’ve quit a lot of things in 23 years mostly through the silent resignation of inaction, and I was sick of inaction, and sick of feeling like I hadn’t made the most of any of the previous years of my life.

So I stayed, and when I had to move to LA, I moved to LA. And when I had to get a thicker skin, I got a thicker skin. When they hung up, I called back. When they asked me a hard question, I gave a straight answer. When I felt stupid, I spoke up anyway. So I got bolder. And more confident, and more unreasonable, and maybe for some people therefore less likable, but I got more okay with that too. I read things I wouldn’t have read before, and I met new kinds of people, and I changed my mind about huge swaths of how I see the world. And to my unexaggerated surprise, I’ve been pretty happy.

I was recently accused of being too malleable. But I believe in letting yourself change for an extraordinary opportunity. I believe in letting yourself be changed by extraordinary people. Why else go to such trouble to find them and keep them in your life?

I know I talk about my job too much. I talk about bad dates at work meetings and work meetings on dates. Sorry — it’s just that I love my job, which is a huge surprise because the only other thing I’ve done is go to school and I was terrible at that.

I work at an investment firm called Anthos, which is Greek for “to grow”. My firm’s pretty young and I’m pretty young and we’ve both got a lot of growing to do. My colleagues and I sat down to write a set of value statements for our firm a couple weeks ago, which we called the Anthos Rules (if you’re curious, notable phrases include “when in doubt, reach out” and “fuck buzz”). When you’re young circumstances change fast, and change accelerates change even further, so we wanted to really articulate our beliefs, to which we will work to stay true.

And I thought, I had better do the same. Because not everything about me is malleable. Not everything is up for debate. I took this job because I wanted to see the cold hard gears, the real mechanisms by which fortunes are made and the status quo is changed. I think a lot of those rules are non-obvious and unrevealed, and unrevealed rules tend to go unexamined. I believe in making as explicit as possible the rules by which we do our work and live our lives.

For what it’s worth, here are a few of the Tiffany Rules:

When in doubt, say yes.

Honor your whims and believe in your instincts.

Do something every day that won’t compute.

God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

Admit you were wrong, freely and often. Delight in admitting that you were wrong, because it’s the only way to make progress.

Work hard. Work harder.

Adolescence is insisting we have a right to inflict our emotions onto others, and it’s time to put those childish things away. Never be spiteful.

Clean up your own shit. Own your shit.

Your first question should always be: what could I have done better? Be reluctant to assign blame to others.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to your courage.

Believe in the best possible version of everyone. Try to be as enthusiastic about their dreams as they are.

Facts don’t cede ground to feelings.

What they think about you is not who you are.

Never lie to yourself. Try not to lie to anyone else either. The more painful the truth the more important it is to be truthful.

There is no last word on a human heart.

Be twice as vulnerable as feels natural.

Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, then open up some more.

This time last year I was pretty positive I’d want to get an MBA. There’s this interview with a writer I love, Sheila Heti, where she explains her own decision not to go to graduate school (in her case, to get an MFA).

She talks about organizing your life around your book: “What kind of person does the book demand it be written by? Do you need to be married, single, traveling, asking questions of other people, alone in your room? You have to become that person.” Even if my methods of inquiry don’t always involve writing a book, this is how I want to live.

She also talks about how she found peers to learn from. She basically describes this abstract, self-invented, conversational kind of education, the kind I’m trying to obtain.

SHEILA: Oh god, not networking. I mean something closer to love. Like, who are the people who I art-love? That means admire and want to share my brain with and make part of my brain…There are a dozen? Maybe dozens? It’s like having boyfriends, except instead of things lasting six months or a year and then you break up, it lasts indefinitely… Instead of having sex, we have art.

Sheila Heti’s latest novel/work of non-fiction is called How Should A Person Be. Towards the end there’s this conversation between her and her best friend. Margaux’s been wounded by Sheila and Sheila’s been wounded by Sheila but it’s okay because they’re both just a few pages away from finding their way out, towards each other and towards these better versions of themselves.

MARGAUX

I was up until dawn almost, and then I knew it… The solution was not to speak less but to speak more… but what did I have to say? So I sat at my desk and began thinking of all the things I have, right?

What would be the best outcome, taking everything I have? So it really was about using the variables and the — what do you call them? — the invariables.

SHEILA

What do you mean, invariables?

MARGAUX

Well, it’s like in life — you have the variables and you have the invariables, and you want to use them all, but you work around the invariables.

I thought you were an invariable — and then you left without saying a word.

SHEILA

You think of me as an invariable?

MARGAUX

Yes.

SHEILA, TO HERSELF

Then, very deep inside, something began to vibrate. I was an invariable. An invariable. No word had ever sounded to me more like love.