I think it’s really important that I say I’m not a guru, an ultra successful person, or someone that has life all figured out. The reality is that I am a young adult that has just graduated university and this is my first time in the real world, untethered to any one schedule or organization. I don’t have a job, I work for myself, which means that I am the sole leader of my life.
This is not how to get rich quick, this is not even software specific (despite my extensive background in software); this is how you can succeed in life, in whichever way you quantify success. Maybe it’s money, maybe it’s fame, maybe it’s the freedom of time, or the ability to be with your family. Whatever it is, this is what I think is the fundamental blueprint to being successful in your life.
Why should you listen to me? You shouldn’t. Don’t. Do the research yourself, make mistakes, read lots of books, learn for yourself. What I am about to layout is not the end-all and be-all; I’ll still be modifying and adding thoughts to this list as time goes on, because that’s what time is there for. It’s there for you to gain experience, change your viewpoint on life, and modify your trajectory. You will note that one of the themes in the following points is to value your time, and if there is anything you take away from this, it should be that. Value each and every minute more than anything else in the world. It is never coming back.
Challenge what I tell you here, think critically about what I say. I probably am not right, how could I be? The goal here is not to lay it out as concrete statements, it’s to get you thinking and considering what I’m about to tell you.
These are not novel ideas and I didn’t come up with them. The following is the aggregation of a lot of reading, learning, a touch of life experience, and introspective thought. I am going to include a list of influences for much of my thoughts at the end.
Read and write, a lot
You have to read. You have to write. A lot. Communication is the way our species won the evolution game, and it’s exactly how you are going to win at life. The ability to communicate effectively comes from the ability to form sequences of words together that deliver some thought or idea to somebody that doesn’t share the same internal psyche as you. They are not you, they don’t have your background in life or industry, so you need to be able to conjure up a series of words to get them to the exact same point as you for them to fully understand your thought.
This is more difficult in practice than in theory, as with nearly everything in life. Putting pen to paper, or ASCII character to Notion doc, is a way of concretely translating your thought into something tangible. It is no longer an abstract thought flowing in the abyss that is your mind, with all of the background and consideration you have to back it up. It now has to stand on its own accord, open to scrutiny and criticism. Does it make sense? Does it convey what I am trying to get across? Those are questions that are going to immediately come to your mind when you begin to write out your thoughts and ideas. Let me tell you a secret: they won’t be right the first time. Probably not the second, third, or tenth time either. That’s why you have to re-read essays so many times to really extract the good parts and toss the bad. It is going to take you a lot of attempts to get it right, and that’s exactly why you need to practice. If you want to be better at communicating, you have to practice.
Practice does not just involve throwing words onto a page like an abstract artist may splatter paint onto a blank canvas haphazardly. Art has a free form of expression that unfortunately written words do not share. The truth is, if you want to write well, you need to expose yourself to great examples of writing. How do you do that? You read.
Reading does much more than just expose you to ways of forming sentences. It feeds you new ideas, gives you opportunities to learn, and let’s you experience life through the eyes and perspective of someone else. You have the ability to communicate, across time, with some of the greatest thinkers in history. You can perceive life as they did, and draw your own conclusions for what they experienced. With the ability to connect yourself to other realities you can never experience yourself, like life in the 1700s, you are able to expand the boundaries of your own mind and the thoughts it produces. You start to think outside of the box.
That out of the box thinking not only helps you approach your own life with varying perspectives, ultimately leading to different (and hopefully better) outcomes, but it also helps you communicate with others better. If all you ever knew was your own viewpoint on the world, how could you ever expect to connect with someone else? You have to force yourself to leave your own psyche and engage with someone else’s. The world isn’t made entirely out of people like you, and thank god for that.
Read and write. A lot.
Keep Learning
Life is a never ending game: you either learn a lot in the beginning and then decide that the next 60+ years of your life will be lead by the thoughts you formed at 17, or you never stop learning and adapt your trajectory to what you learn as you get older.
This ties in with one of the benefits of reading a lot, which is the ability to learn about life. Whether those lessons about life are in regards to the physical world, the mental world, history, or what is to come next, there is plenty to learn. Everything compounds, and your ability to learn is no exception. Books you read on neuroscience, geology, the Great War, or computer science may not explicitly have an immediate impact on your life, but the information you retain from exposure to those lessons will implicitly drive future decisions.
Learning, of course, goes beyond reading. Life has a funny way of teaching those least willing to learn, whether they are actively looking for a lesson or not. It’s up to the individual to decide if they wish to take something away from it. Everyone experiences the triumphant rises and the dramatic falls of life; to quote Tony Fadell, “life would be a pretty boring rollercoaster without ups and downs”. These experiences are part of life, and we can either cheer on the way up and cower in fear on the way down, or identify the lessons we learn on the way up and down from the local maxima point and apply them to gradually keep the coaster moving upwards on the long enough time scale that is life.
When we are attempting to take a new path in life, whether that is in business, relationships, moving to a new country, or finding new friends, there will be issues along the way; obstacles in the road. Marcus Aurelias, the stoic emperor, has a simple thought for times like this: “the obstacle becomes the way”.
We should not view the obstacle as something blocking us from following the path we most want to take, instead, the obstacle becomes part of the path we are going to take. It is a new opportunity to learn, and we should treat it as such. The person that attempts a path and encounters an obstacle only to turn around is no better than the one that never tried the path in the first place. Learn from the obstacle and apply those lessons to life.
To put this entire point in a new and grimmer tone, the day you stop learning is the day you die. Benjamin Franklin has a quote, “most people die at 25 and aren’t buried until they are 75”; you can apply this to many aspects of life, but the one I think is most applicable is this shared consensus nowadays that as soon as you finish school you’re done learning. For some reason, what you’ve learning in the first 25 years of your life is all you need to know, there cannot possibly be anything else. That’s absolutely absurd.
You have to keep learning, you cannot stop. Make an effort to learn something new daily, and even beyond that, I would argue you should make a conscious effort to actively study new topics regularly. However, that’s for a following point.
Do the opposite of the masses
Remember that cliche saying your mom or dad used to ask you, “if all of your friends jump off a cliff would you do it too?”? It actually has really strong basis in reality, maybe even further than they ever would have expected.
You need to be critical and skeptical of everything you let into your mind. You need to silently ask yourself “is that true?” when consuming information from any person, media, or even book. Unfortunately the goal of many people, including the media, is to get you to pick “the correct side” of arguments, thoughts, and news, whether they know it or not. Sometimes it’s a very prominent bias, sometimes it’s a quiet bias that they don’t even realize they have. For an example, there is immediate incentive for mainstream media outlets to get you thinking like them; you will continue tuning in and watching the advertising they have running. Inversely, there is no immediate incentive for your mom or dad to have you thinking the same way as them (at least, not usually). However, both mainstream media and your parents will probably expect you to pick the “correct side”. This is not out of malice, people just have been conditioned to expect others in their same sphere of influence to share their thoughts and opinions, otherwise they’re one of the “other ones”.
The worst thing for you to do is to pick a side, and that’s exactly what the masses want you to do. You are left, you are right, you are for or against this thought, you agree or disagree with an idea. What about nuance? What about middle ground? Not everything in life has to be at the extremities of thought. Politics is the most obvious aspect of life where this comes up, but it’s far from the only one, and you may find yourself in some thought-bucket without even realizing it.
Now, it’s important to say that you absolutely should not blindly reject the masses for the sake of doing it. The nuance in this argument is that you need to make up your own mind and not base it on anyone else, period. Blindly rejecting the masses is essentially leading you down a path of exploitation by conspiracy theorists and grifters; you are no better than the very people you are rejecting to conform with.
You have to make up your own mind. You have to think critically about everything you hear and decide if it’s true or not, for yourself. The onus is on you for the evidence, not the person telling you. It’s perfectly okay to not have an opinion about things. Why in the world would you ever pretend to understand enough background on every topic to have an opinion on everything anyway? The people that do that are the exact people you should be actively critiquing internally, because they have likely picked a side.
I really like the verbiage George Hotz uses when discussing this same point. “The meta” is what everyone else is doing, and it’s your job to “escape the meta by doing the opposite of everyone else”. Escape the meta and intelligently make up your own mind and decide on your own future. In fact, you should be escaping the meta of everything I am writing here and analyzing for yourself if what I’m writing is good or complete crap. The onus is on you, so be critical.
Your thoughts are what define you. so make sure they are thoughts you made up for yourself; or else you are no different than 90% of the population.
Set a strong foundation for yourself
The roller coaster of life is going to take you higher than you could have ever imagined and crash you harder and lower than you thought was ever possible. You shouldn’t shutter away from it, that’s the beauty of life; that is what it means to live. Your triumphant rises and dramatic falls should not, however, change your foundation. Setting a strong foundation means you can experience the turbulence of the life-coaster for everything it is without worrying about not being able to put food on the table or paying your rent. You need to put those strong concrete pillars into the ground that let you have fun up above while holding you rock-steady.
The foundation I allude to here is mostly about money, unfortunately. While I do think there are other valuable foundational pillars to life, I think this is the one most people struggle with, and it’s the one that can cause the most harm. It may seem contradictory to my other major points, namely “treat your time like gold, money comes and goes”, but I assure you it’s a necessary step in your success. You do not want to be scrambling to find money when situations are dire.
Your foundation has to set you up with a safety net that can cover your most basic needs, like food, rent, family expenses, and the unforeseen accidents that come with life. You know, the leaking roof? That fender bender? The money has to come from somewhere, and it’s really hard to come from anywhere if you’re riding the zero-line pretty tight.
Most people are not born with the luxury of a safety net, I wasn’t, which is why it has to be one of the first things you setup for yourself when you begin to make money. My belief, as of now, is that your foundation should consist of a few “safe holdings”:
- Immediate use. This should be where your rent, food, utilities, and other day-to-day expenses come from.
- Emergency savings. This should be where your “oh crap” backup money comes from.
- Experimental savings. This should be where you stash money to be used in businesses, projects, investments, or just buying that project car you want.
- Longterm savings. This should be where you are investing your money for the longterm, in whichever investment vehicle you deem most appropriate for your risk aversion.
I can’t tell you what percentage of your income should go into each category, and I certainly cannot tell you what investments you should be making. What I can tell you is that as a young adult you probably want to be putting as much money into experimental and longterm savings as you can, once immediate use and emergency savings are sufficiently filled. Try to spend less day-to-day until you have a nice war chest in experimental savings and egg nest in longterm savings. Your expenses will increase as you get older, so you really should be filling up these savings buckets as much as you can now when you have the chance to put more away.
Use the experimental savings for your projects, business ideas, risky investments, or whatever else you want to take a bet on. The larger this war chest is the better chance you have to being able to act on a project, business idea, or investment when the time comes.
As for anything related to investments or financials, you really have to look elsewhere. I do not have the answers and most other people don’t either (remember the onus is on you to be critical and make up your mind about everything you read and hear). Read a lot, study it to whichever degree gains you some sort of comfort, and understand that a lot of it is a gamble.
Treat your time like gold, money comes and goes
The most valuable resource you have in life is time. Period. You are never getting it back, you can’t slow it down, change it, or stop it. Treat time like gold because it is forever fleeting.
Money, on the other hand, comes and goes so freely. You are paid on a Thursday and then by Saturday a quarter of it’s been spent on bills and errands. By the next payday you have almost nothing remaining of that original money.
This is the nature of money, and once you realize that it’s nothing more than a tool, then you will finally understand that it’s a plentiful resource that you can tap into whenever you want. Time, however, is here in a moment and gone the next.
So how does this actually apply to life? Should I just stop caring about money and spend my time how I want? Kind of, yes. You should decide to spend time with family, take on new responsibilities, go hiking, work on projects, build businesses, not necessarily because of the money you could gain from them, but because that is exactly how you want to spend your time. I am going to touch on the idea of doing what you love in a future point, and it’s an important one, but it differs from my current point in the sense that I am not even preaching for you to do what you love here; I am simply saying you should never compromise your time for money. Nothing is worth more than your time, so even if you work at a job you love, you should probably say no to working overtime on a weekend when you wanted to spend the time mountain biking with friends. Unless it’s truly what you want to spend your time doing, of course.
How you wish to spend your time is so personal and non-transferable that it can cause friction between people. Maybe you look selfish, stupid, or ignorant to others. And yes, maybe you do, but should you care? Probably not.
This also plays a big role in deciding what you want to do with your career life early on. Should you take that high-salary job that lacks lessons and doesn’t challenge you? Or should you sacrifice pay to learn new skills? If you’re asking me, and even Paul Graham, we would both say you should take the latter of the two. Paul considers the situation of having kids, given he is a father himself, and says that you should “stay upwind for as long as you can, then cash in the potential energy you've accumulated when you need to pay for kids”. Kids is not really on my radar yet, so I just utilize that first part, which he also translates to “work on things that maximize your future options”.
Decide not on what makes you more money, but decide on what you enjoy doing and what leads to the most future opportunities.
Your habits make you
Your life is the combination of each and every action you do, day-in and day-out. Most actions we do as humans are predefined habits we have created while on this journey we call life. If we want to ensure that our actions lead us to our desired outcome in life, whatever that may be, we should really start by creating better habits.
Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”, and it’s true. Think about times in your life when you were really sad, maybe for a perfectly valid reason; did you continue to sulk and relish in your sadness to finally get out of your despair? Or did you one day say, “enough is enough, I need to do something else to get my mind off of this”. I would wager you did the latter. This is a perfect example of a negative short-term habit of sulking in your sadness trending your contentedness with life downwards, until you finally take a stand and get yourself out of that pit.
With that simple example in mind, I hope you can see how habitual actions on a daily-basis have a massive influence on the trend of your life. This is where you should really start analyzing all your habits for what they are and ask truthfully, “is this helping me trend upwards in life? or is it pushing me down?”. Only you, with knowledge of your desired outcome in life, can answer that.
Some great habits that should be incorporated into your life are, of course, related to health, dieting, the pursuit of knowledge, and creativity. Add serious physical activity to your daily routine, eat clean and healthy meals, try to learn something new everyday, and allow yourself to have the proper time to be creative in a medium of your choosing. At the worst, if these somehow open no more doors of opportunity for you, then they will at least ensure you are healthy for far longer than the average person, have learnt a great deal of knowledge to apply during your now longer than average life, and have been creatively fulfilled. At the best, you have unlocked so many more doors you probably never even knew existed.
What do you have to lose?
Hold opposing realities in your mind
I read a great story of a military officer during World War 2 that was being held in a prisoner of war camp, along with many of his peers. It’s probably pointless for me to say that the camp conditions were beyond awful, and unfortunately he was stuck there for a few years until he was finally freed at the end of the war. Once the liberators came to rescue the prisoners, they noticed that he had outlived everyone else in his squadron that was held at the same camp, under the same conditions. They asked him how he managed to survive when every one of his peers perished; the answer he gave holds a valuable nugget of guidance we should apply to life.
He held two opposing realties in his mind at the same time. He was optimistic that he would be saved one day, but he was pessimistic enough to know that he had no real idea when it was going to happen. His squad mates, on the other hand, would echo hopeful phrases like, “the war will be over by Chirstmas, and we’ll be saved then”; Christmas came and went, and so did their belief that they would be saved. As each day passed after Christmas, they began to go into that dark place of our minds that we all have, the little voice that says “it’s pointless”, or “give up”. They gave up the will to live. Each and every time they hoped and anticipated a rescue from their current situation, they were let down, and gone was a small part of their life-force.
Holding two opposing realities allowed that military officer to have hope in the long-term that kept him eager to live, and the knowledge to know it’s not worth pretending he knew when it would all be over. He survived because he understood he had no control over certain aspects of his situation, so he didn’t place his spirit into them.
We often like to pretend we have control over many aspects of our life, but the truth is we don’t. The stoics talk a lot about this in regards to anxiety, and how the source for our perils of stress and worry stem mostly from concerning ourselves with aspects of life that we have no control over. It isn’t worth worrying about what we cannot change.
Similarly, I think it is equally important to hold two opposing realities in your mind for your life; the optimistic view of exactly where you are going to be when you’re on top of the world, and the pessimistic view of your current situation and how it is preventing you from achieving your goal. Only when you can identify your missteps in the current time can the path to your optimistic future become more vivid. We all make the wrong moves once in a while, but the key is to recognize them and course-correct before you waste too much time trekking down a path that leads you astray from your main path. You can only do this by knowing exactly where you need to be and analyzing each and every step you take critically to make sure it is bringing you to your destination.
Do what you love
They say if you love what you do you never work a day in your life, and it’s true. Often times, however, it’s hard for us to identify what we actually love to do and even harder to actually be able to do it. I’m sure many of us have dreams of being painters, musicians, comedians, great scientists, Nobel laureates; some of which are easier to make a career out of than others. It’s your job to find what you love and then find a way to give it to the world. Sounds complicated, but it doesn’t have to be.
Start by identifying what you love to do; take as much time as you need to do this. Believe it or not, humans were not made to know exactly what they want out of life by the time they need to apply to post-secondary school at 17/18 years old. You have to put yourself out of your comfort zone, try new things, experiment, and gain new experiences as much as you possibly can. This could take a month, a year, or a decade. Everyone is different, but you need to make a conscious and consistent effort to discover what you love to do. Once you found what you love, it’s time to give it to the world.
Here is where you need to be creative. You need to understand what you love to do and find ways to manifest that into something that can build you a career. This is going to involve you having to combine multiple paths into one to build a unique offering that will allow you to establish yourself. An example would be someone that likes to invent: they could learn to code and build inventive solutions to problems in that area. Micro SaaS companies are a perfect example of this, where every month you come up with a solution to a problem, push it to market, and see if anyone bites. Same can be said of an inventor in the artistic space; they could offer their passion in the form of an artistic coordinator or consultant for art galleries, thinking of new and inventive ways of presenting art in impactful ways. There were these fantastic exhibits showing Van Gogh in an immersive way that allowed you to “walk” in the paintings and experience them in a medium that far transcended looking at the painting on a wall in an art gallery. That is a creative way to do what you love and be inventive while also tying it into a marketable product that builds your career. Just as easily, if you love the pursuit of knowledge and science, but don’t care to become an entrepreneur, you can work hard and align your skills to be employed by a lab conducting research that you find fascinating. Some of the greatest scientists came out of Bell Labs, Los Alamos Labs, Google Labs, university labs, among many others. The opportunities are there, you just have to go grab them.
You have to be creative, but if you think long and hard enough you will come up with a way to do what you love and make a career out of it.
Set your environment for success
One of the most important decisions you will have to make early on in your life is where you are going to live. This decision will ultimately decide the kinds of people you are around, the friends you keep, and will greatly influence the direction you take yourself in life. If you move somewhere completely new like New York City, you are much more likely to meet new friends working in finance, the arts, fashion, or marketing. Similarly, if you move to San Francisco, you are far more likely to make friends with people that are in tech. Same can be said of Boston and research. The impact these friends will have on you will greatly influence the trajectory of your life, and that’s why it’s absolutely crucial to pick a location, as well as friends, carefully. An important quote to hear, especially when you’re younger: “Show me your friends and I'll show you your future”. Friends will be a derivative of the area you reside.
That was the macro; let’s talk micro now. No matter what you work on, whether it be art, code, writing, or robotics, you are going to have a workspace. That workspace is going to be the birthplace of some of your most impactful ideas and thoughts that will either make or break your career. You need to set your environment around you for success. Now, I am not telling you to keep your desk super clean and organized—I am actually typing this from a table covered in notebooks, sticky notes, a calculator, and a few pens—but I am telling you to find what works for you and consistently put yourself in that environment. Maybe it’s a clean and organized desk, or maybe it’s a desk clearly in use and well-loved; just find what works for you and consistently find yourself there.
There are, however, a few environments that can absolutely and objectively hinder your success. Working somewhere that is open to chatter, interruptions, or otherwise promotes conversing will pull you right out of any meaningful train of thought you had and prevent you from getting into a flow state. Sitting in the kitchen of your home as your family is running around, or sitting with a bunch of friends at a busy coffee shop will tend to not render great results. Try to put yourself in quiet and secluded areas to do your deep work. Similarly, an environment with constant background noise, like a TV, will greatly impact your ability to get in the zone with your work. You either need controlled background noise, like select music, or complete silence. Usually a mix of both. If you think you can multitask any meaningful work while an episode of The Office is on Netflix, you are sorely mistaken.
Design your environment all around you, including location, friends, and workspace, to be exactly what you need to succeed. Doing this will not guarantee success, but it is a requirement of success.
Be brutally honest, with a velvet glove
Napoleon said to always, “place your iron hand in a velvet glove”. In the context of ruling a kingdom, this means to be stern yet forgiving, strong and all powerful with a touch of grace. This leads your subjects to respect you far more than if you were solely stern and unforgiving, strong and all powerful and unrelenting. Your subjects would quickly grow upset and overthrow your rule.
The same can be said of your mind. Imagine that your conscious, the voice in your head that is reading this now and which makes all of your decisions, is the ruler of the kingdom that is your mind. It is the ruler’s duty to keep the kingdom in check while also remaining on the good side of their subjects. The subjects are your subconscious thoughts and ideas. If you are over bearing on the kingdom, the subjects will revolt against you and remove you as ruler over them. This is exactly why it is so important to be stern and disciplined with yourself, but never too hard on yourself. You can expect better, be disappointed, and work to make your wrong right, but you cannot have hatred towards yourself. You can understand you did something wrong, you want to do better, and then course correct for that.
Far too many people fall into mental health issues during their journey of life because they are overly hard on themselves for decisions they made and regret. While it can absolutely suck to have made a bad decision, it is wrong to regret it, and even worse to punish your mental wellbeing because of it. You probably learned a lot with that decision whether you know it or not, and ultimately, the decision was made and that time came and went. Don’t look backwards with longing or regret, look forwards with nostalgia for the future; for all that you are going to change and accomplish.
Look at those moments with an iron fist, understand what you did wrong and how you need to improve, then place your iron fist in a velvet glove and push forward without self-punishment.
Measure what you wish to change
One of the most important things you learn from building a business is that you absolutely need to measure anything and everything that can have some influence on the direction your business goes. This makes pivoting or diverging from your current trajectory far easier to do since you will have measured data points to use as ground truths. The same can be said if you want to gain or lose weight; you need to keep track of your calories and measure what your consuming to make appropriate changes. All of this remains true for other aspects of life; if you need to pivot or modify your longterm goal slightly, it’s much easier to do so with well documented datapoints from your life that indicate the trend you want to steer towards or away from.
Journaling daily can be a fantastic way to keep track of thoughts, progress towards a goal, emotions towards an issue at hand, or any number of other datapoints. Doing this consistently, reviewing them, and discussing with yourself what exactly is going on in your life is a great way to identify areas of improvement. Holding weekly meetings is a great option too; create an agenda the night before, sleep on it, and set aside 30 minutes the next day to be alone with your thoughts and brutally honest with your agenda points. Write everything down, and write it all for yourself. No need to connect with other people, this is between you and your mind.
It’s time to excel.
Now that you have read all that, it’s time to critically analyze everything I said, make up your own mind, and apply what you think best accelerates your life towards what you wish to achieve.
I wish you nothing but the best on your journey, good luck.
Influences
- Psycho Cybernetics, Maxwell Maltz
- Can’t Hurt Me, David Goggins
- Never Finished, David Goggins
- Build, Tony Fadell
- Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill
- Rich Dad Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki
- The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
- Zero to One, Peter Thiel
- The Republic, Plato
- The Violin Maker, John Marchese
- The War of Art, Steven Pressfield
- The Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman (and the stoics, of course)
- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, Eric Jorgenson and Naval Ravikant
- You and Your Research, Richard Hamming
- The Need to Read, Paul Graham
- Putting Ideas into Words, Paul Graham
- How to Think for Yourself, Paul Graham
- How to Lose Time and Money, Paul Graham
- What You’ll Wish You’d Known, Paul Graham
- ...and probably many more I cannot remember.