25 Years, 25 Lessons

Photo by Gabriel Tovar on Unsplash

A dear friend asked me to write this, and I thought I’d share it with all of you! At the close of my first quarter-century, here are 25 things I think I know about life.

1. The Mind Is A Tool — it is not who you are any more than the size of your waistline or the soreness in your arms or how fast you can run. The mind is to be sharpened, upgraded, and celebrated, but also used with intention. If you can’t put down a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail — the mind is not the right tool for all your problems, and if you can’t put it down then you’ll start seeing problems where none exist.
2. Keep Identity Small — the fewer aspects of yourself you need to maintain for self-cohesion, the better. Your skills, your mood/attitude, your taste in music or TV, your political takes — these don’t actually matter, but become baggage if you let them. If you’re going to build an identity around anything (and it really is optional), make it your values and some core commitments.
3. Choose How Much Other People Matter — you can’t tune out the haters but appreciate the fans. All you can do is decide how much the opinions of others will affect your emotions or self-image. My suggestion? As little as possible, and if anyone’s then those of close people. Note that this does not mean to ignore feedback; doing this actually allows you to appraise feedback lucidly.
4. Make Happiness Unconditional — the fewer things you need to be happy, the better. Any time you notice yourself saying “I need this to be happy”, question the thought. There’s enough actual scarcity in the world; don’t create more for yourself.
5. Intention Creates Meaning — things are important because we decide they are, then focus on them. Art, sports, socialization, work, business, politics, study, whatever you’re into — it becomes meaningful when you decide it is, and back that decision up with action.
6. Life Moves In Waves — resilient does not mean static. In fact, complex and overly static systems are brittle and prone to shattering! You’re not always going to be happy or sad, productive or lazy, content or angry, energetic or tired, clear sighted or muddy. Seeing the cycle over time lets you understand and anticipate patterns, and change the cycle in your favour; clutching at a state is the surest way to waste it.
7. You Can’t Make Old Friends — and little is more important than keeping them. The world sends us signals to prioritize all kinds of other meaningless shit — ignore it. If you want someone in your life, and they’re not opposed to the idea, make them a priority.
8. No Joy Without Integrity — I have rarely been happy when who I am externally doesn’t match my thoughts and actions, and I have rarely been unhappy when thoughts, words, and actions are in harmony. Everyone doesn’t have to know everything about you, but if you feel you are living dishonestly, something needs to change.
9. Timeless Over Timely, Great Over New — the times are rarely unprecedented. On both a personal and societal level, figure out what really works, understand it deeply, and stick with it — it’ll serve you far, far better than the latest trinket.
10. Choose Your Craft(s), Hack The Rest — the 80/20 principle should be applied liberally, but intentionally. Know what games you want to be great at, and sweat the details of those games. With everything else, ride the efficiency curve to “good enough” and don’t think about it any more than you have to.
11. Know What Not To Optimize — this is the stuff to be protected. Optimizing the rest of your life should be in service of making time, space, energy, and resources for these activities. Don’t optimize them too — do them exactly the way you want to.
12. People Are The Same — groups of people do very few surprising things, tend towards highly predictable behaviours, and have done so over the course of human history. Don’t rely on a group to be different unless you have a very good reason to.
13. Individuals Are Unique — never assume you know someone you haven’t taken the chance to actually know. Everyone has a different story to tell, everyone has something new to teach you, everyone loves to be listened to, and everyone is deserving of compassion and curiosity.
14. All The Time To Spend, None To Waste — 10 minutes spent with intention will feel longer and more meaningful than a week spent without it. Life is very long when it is used and savoured, and blindingly, depressingly short if taken for granted.
15. The Third Person View Is Clearest — you can’t see the forest when you’re in it. Get an external perspective of yourself, your circumstances, and the systems you’re part of as much as possible — writing, reading, and talking to trusted outsiders are three excellent starting points.
16. Make Good Things Automatic — we have a limited amount of willpower and decision making juice. If you want something to happen, set your life up to make it a default. If the plan is to try very hard to make it happen every day, it’s not a very good plan.
17. Contrarianism Is Unenlightened, Independent Thought Is Underrated — “because others think so” is a shit reason to believe anything. It’s completely ok not to believe anything about a topic, but if you’re going to have a stance, don’t get it wholesale from or in opposition to someone else. Know why you believe what you believe.
18. Giving And Accepting Love Are Skills — and for me, they have been both the hardest and most deeply fulfilling ones to develop. This starts with deep introspection and genuine vulnerability, and needs maintaining, but is so, so worth it.
19. Choose The Interesting Over The Conventional — it makes for a richer life with fewer regrets. I’ve never regretted pursuing genuine interest, but have often been very alienated and sad when playing a bureaucratic game I don’t believe in.
20. You Are Irrational — the question is what you do about it. It’s not enough to know that you’re irrational — overcoming that fact takes effort. Thinking clearly requires willpower, a lack of scarcity, and experience with the many glitches of your particular mind. It’s hard work, but extremely worthwhile.
21. Change Is Hard, Do It Anyways — it’s a very difficult skill. It’s messy, inconsistent, frustrating, humbling, and at times depressingly ephemeral. It’s also what allows you to choose how you live your life, and without it your life is chosen for you.
22. Joy Comes From Presence, So Cultivate It — this applies on many levels. Treasure the activities and people that make you forget about everything else, don’t pass up moments of stillness and tranquility, and fight against everything that encroaches on presence.
23. Write Your Own Invitations — no one will ask you to do the things you want to do. It’s very scary to start, and getting rejected for stuff you really care about hurts like hell, but none of that compares to the pain and self-loathing of denying yourself.
24. Models Lead You To Water — you have to lose them to drink it. Learning is a beautiful lifelong pursuit, and mental models are a necessary intermediate step to deep understanding. But all models, be they math or language or imagery or anything else, are just signs that point the way to truth — they’re very useful, but ultimately wrong and incomplete. Truly drinking in reality requires us to forget those signs and dive in.
25. The Familiar Feels Safe, Even When It Sucks — that’s what makes change so hard. This is not to say that familiar = bad, but that new will feel unfamiliar and unsafe even when you know the change is a good one. Returning to the familiar but terrible is the stuff abusive relationships, addictions, and self-sabotage are made of. Accept the fear of the new as irrational but real, and figure out ways to avoid regressing long enough to get to know the new you.

Thanks to Mohammed for getting me to write this and Tom Kreynin for getting me to post it