Random thoughts. In the style of The Bed of Procrustes, Poor Richard's Almanack and the Dao De Jing. All copied/derivative work, any allusion to original thought is a misinterpretation. This is for the people I love, the people who love me and for my future self. Some of it is advice, some of it is to understand how I think
The story wants to be told, to evolve, to be remembered
The story (meme, information, equation) is the identity, the leverage, the end all and be all
It's not what you say that's offensive, it's how you say it
You have to be rich or powerful or old enough to broadcast unfiltered thoughts out in the open
Read and write, don't just listen and talk
Good is what is aligned with my self interest and evil is not aligned with my self interest. What people call good and evil tells a lot about their self interest and values
You always give the advice that you wish you could follow yourself
The best product to sell is optimism for the future. The best promise is of justice.
You grow up when you get good at a game that a lot of people play. You become a leader when you create a new game that a lot of people want to play.
People that make you hate them are better than the people who make you hate yourself. One is selfish, the other is a parasite.
If I did anything bad or pathetic, it's the parasites who made me do it
You can speak to your younger self with git and an AI agent. So start writing your diary now
Some people when they get parasites and recognize it, socially isolate, some go and infect others
You should be able to dance into your old age, physically and mentally
No one else can change how you perceive and react to events, that's completely in your control
Read, don't review. Listen, don't judge. Understand, don't critique
Critiquing is the first step, not the final step or the only step
Finishing things is more satisfying than starting new things. Incomplete work increases cognitive load
It's unfortunate when someone who hates gatekeepers ends up becoming one themselves
It's maybe more useful to learn how to unlearn, than to learn how to learn
Separate the person from the brand, customers from shareholders
The way to win people's votes has always been to make them feel sorry for themselves and find someone else to blame for their problems. Unfortunately, it's also the way to handicap them for life
Individual playing a role are meant to be fungible, they exist to fulfill and create roles. Roles that are useful become eternal and are ideally automated
A hero (or a villian) is an entity of concentrated risk and is by definition fragile
Music is a special language. Unlike words and images or smells, your whole body listens to it and with the right music, resonates with it
What is the diagnostic self test for foolishness? for intelligence?
Truth is related to purpose, leverage to survival
All conflict is about definitions of words and gatekeeping/guarding those definitions
Truth/reality is quite simple, the problem is you accepting it
Policies should be binary. For a collective, clarity is more important than fairness
In order to conquer fear, you first have to define it, understand it
Positive sum games are finite. Zero sum games are infinite.
Hoarding optionality is bad for you, your ideas, your descendants, the world and increases pain and suffering for all. Check yourself when you tip over from optimism and curiosity to hoarding out of fear and anger
Memes die by becoming irrelevant and being forgotten. So, stop arguing about them if you want them gone
Information is the ultimate virus, reproducing itself at a ridiculous rate. We are all just carriers, not unlike malaria and mosquitoes. We incorporate the good information into our system and develop antibodies to fight off the bad information, this is how we develop mental srength
Don't say, I wish I can, say I wish to
The philosophy of the individual will always diverge from that of the collective. It's an imperative originating from biology, reality itself maybe, to experiment and survive. Philosophy of the collective arrived at through a governance model is just governance, maybe we can call it the soul of the collective.
When reading a book, ask yourself, are you trying to understand the content, the author or yourself
We are building tools and technology to understand reality. Did the universe build us (or reconfigure/evolving itself) to do the same?
It's easy to die for your mistakes, but harder to live with mistakes when someone you were responsible for died
What is tragedy? Is it just something that cannot be redeemed? If there is infinite redemption, will tragedy cease to exist?
Do you think about, wish well and take actions with good intentions for those you will never meet, physically or temporally. Is this morality? Is this aligned with your self interest?
Selling software services (or almost anything) is just like selling drugs. First you give some for free and get them hooked, then once they are addicted, it's margins all the way
Eyes up here. Don't look down on a story, see it eye to eye
Every story wants to change itself, evolve to become worthy of love (loving itself first, then love from others)
Be inspired by your heroes, Gods and take it to the next level, don't just worship and stop
Since we all inevitably end up dying, it is reasonable to frame our story as a tragedy from the start
Curation of things, friends, experiences is therapeutic, but it's also energy consuming and fragile. Instead curate your thoughts to think different
Don't just give advice, exemplify what you preach
Every accusation is partly a confession
Building the game is the best way to discover the rules of the game
We should all have a fiduciary duty towards the shareholders of the future, the children of the world
Lord of the flies is the perfect analogy of the world and societies we live in, bunch of children on an island called Earth, making stuff up and surviving in some good/bad/horrible/tragic ways
We all want to build a beautiful world for our children, family, friends and future generations. If you appeal to that part of a person, you can connect with anyone
Change your circles, burst your bubbles
Start with user experience and end with power management and you will always win. But remember, safety first!
Markets deal with facts. Governments deal with feelings. And families have to balance facts and feelings
The default state is decay and death. It takes a lot of effort to preserve or make something, a lot of failures to make something great
Location. Location. Location
If you want to make money, build factories, not products
Philosophy is the label given to one's justification of their way of life and rationalization of their belief system. And also to burn their opponents
I like what I like - one of the most simple and profound things my 6 year old said. It is true, there are no rules on what/who to like or not like. Accept yourself and accept others
Taxation is the best business model
Morality is fighting against our gene's desire for immortality (to not become Galactus)
Every generation should re-discover and re-frame all the rules, so they really understand them, why they are the way they are, so they can identify what makes sense to keep and what needs to be changed.
It is not just about celebrating and rewarding past work, it is about incentivizing future work too
People don't buy the art, they buy the artist
If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together
People don't remember what you said or what you did for them, but they will remember how you made them feel
Give actual proof, not social proof
There is a counterparty for everything. Good and bad. Buyer and seller. Hero and villian. Empire and rebels. Existence of one, automatically manifests the other and an ecosystem around them
Who am I depends on who are you
The number of transactions should also be a metric that's tracked as an indicator of a healthy economy, especially the median transactions by individuals and institutions. High rate of transactions indicate collaboration, will foster innovation and better communities and generate increasing revenue for governments to provide better services and infrastructure to it's citizens. It will also help identify individuals and institutions that are struggling and get them help
Try to not ask binary questions, instead ask multiple choice questions and let folks prioritize the order of choices, based on what is important to them
Instead of saying no, say yes if/when this happens. It puts the control and responsibility back in the hands of the requester. Works great with kids
At some point, the rebels will form the new empire and the cycle starts again. Because it is fundamentally impossible to satisfy the needs of 100% of the people 100% of the time
Everyone should try to have multiple careers, even if some are part time. Because similar to what they say about our creations, we initially shape our careers, then our careers shape our lives.
Why not both
Once a product category is mature, most people buy brands, not product features
Every time you talk about an emotion, you should start the sentence with I feel, so you don't project your emotions and opinions on others
All city lifestyles around the world trend 95% the same with some local culture uniqueness in food, architecture, etc. They all have the same tall buildings, transport infrastructure, international cuisines, party culture and law and order. The biggest difference is the climate.
Writing books, creating art, building statues, scratching your name on trees and rocks is all the same need for life to seek out immortality in some form
There is no destination, only milestones. So, what's your next milestone.
The universe does not have FOMO
No booleans, only enums
A justice for all movement, eventually becomes injustice for all, because the universe has no concept of justice or moral values
Life is not a race or a marathon, it's a relay. You have to work with others, take rest between turns and eventually pass the baton onto the next generation
Effort is appreciated, results are rewarded
Thinking about how to save more is a losing battle. Saving is important, but spend more time thinking about how to earn more
The world is not your oyster forever. At some point, you have to become the oyster to nourish the pearl of the next generation
Listen to advice, but don't blindly follow it. Evaluate them and do what works for you
Don't use death as a leverage to survive
Being at harmony with yourself is all well and good, but being at harmony/in sync with the world is where true happiness lies. Because no (hu)man is an island. The world will not go away if you pretend it does not exist. So, might as well open yourself up. It will hurt, you will hurt sometimes, but you will eventually find your place and find your harmony
We only learn about the people who profit from making themselves known or someone profits from making them known
Ice cream is probably the greatest food ever created, followed closely by biryani
The problem with thinking in terms of winners and losers is that you end up with every statement that comes out of your mouth becoming something that's silently prefixed with "I'm not a loser because"
The Don't give up motto should have Keep trying added to it
It's not the plane, it's the pilot
Technology creates the tools to survive. Art creates the will to survive. The people in the harshest places to survive on the planet make the most stunning technology and art
What makes your art better than my art. Depends on how you evaluate it. If you think in some democratic way, then the one that most people like is better. If you think the one that fetches the higest price, then that is the metric. If you think all art is equal, then it is equal. If you think art cannot be compared, then it's just different then. Ultimately, it is you and I who decides whose art is better. By art, of course, I mean life
You are the average of the people you spend the most time with, weighted by the time spent. Average physically, financially, emotionally, philosophically and many other characteristics of life. Look around and you can see your future. If you don't like it, change your circle
Practice who you want to become. Change does not happen all of a sudden. It happens imperceptibly slow, but it's compounding
It's easier to pretend you are angry at others, than admitting that you are angry at yourself, because you are afraid or unable to make decisions or both
Companies who do right by their customers and shareholders are the ones who win. So, clearly identify who they are and do what's best for them
Losing something hurts twice as much as the happiness gained from getting the same thing
Some people take more credit for their success and less responsibilty for their failure than they deserve, while some people take less credit for their success and more responsibility for their failures. You want to work for the latter type of people, they will have low expectations from others, be happier and continuously improve themselves
Instead of mocking others, reflect on your insecurities and disappointments, it will provide long term relief
Within a collective/organization, the primary game that's being played is the game of leverage. The one who gets the most wins
Money is fungible, but life is not (at least human life should not be? 🤷♂️)
Do not look at decisions in life as binary. It's not do you want it or not or is this going to be helpful or not. They are multiple choice, do you want this or one of these other things or is doing this going to be helpful or one of these other things? And the decision depends on the context of the situation, what is the time horizon to evaulate the decision, are you maximizing ROI or minimizing opportunity cost, regret? Taking these into account will help you make better decisions.
Fungibility builds resilience in the system. But applied to humans, it can lead to a feeling of purposelessness. So, we need to be deliberate about making sure everyone feels a sense of purpose in an organization. It can be inside the organization or time to have it outside the organization, ideally both. In our personal lives, we have friends, children, communities we are part of, pets, etc. In professional lives, it is the relationships with the people you work with and how the culture of the company helps foster and nurture them.
We have evolved System 1 for low energy, fast reactions for survival, a System 2 for high energy, slow reactions for high level thinking and self awareness/diagnostics. We also evolved a God in communities to create and sustain the will to survive. The concept exists in every civilization that has ever survived on this planet, so it definitely serves a critical purpose. God is the primordial will to life
Radiate/seek out/hire for optimism and curiosity. Skills benefit in the short term, culture for the long term
Memes, symbols, even truth is governed by the concepts of survival. If there is something new that improves the odds of survival, it becomes the new meme or truth or belief. If something reduces the odds of survival, even if it is the truth, it is going to be denied and eliminated from the consciousness
When listening to someone, remove yourself from the conversation to truly listen. Removing yourself means removing the influence of your current state of mind, your past experience, your insecurities, etc. This is a practice, that gets better, the more you do it
You have two homes, the primary one is your body and the secondary one is the physical shelter you live in. You should spend more time and money taking care of and decorating your primary home
Your physical health is determined by where you are born and what you eat. Your mental health is determined by who you move with, how you move and interact with the world
Fear, punishment will get you results in the short term, but they will not last. Love, respect and patience will get you results in the long term and they will be more permanent. So evaluate what your level of urgency and timelines and goals are and use the appropriate tool. Hint, the answer almost all the time is the latter, except in the very rare cases where it is an emergency.
The biggest contribution of any startup/company/agency is to increase the volume/rate of money movement in the economy. That increases tax revenue which in turn improves the life of the citizens of the company, state, nation, world. It is also a good evaluation criteria to predict the success of a company/agency.
Evangelism seems to be an emergent behavior in most faith based systems, where, after a point, to strengthen and sustain the faith, you need to convince others to adopt your system, lest some other faith will take over. This does not just apply to religions, it's for all institutions, political, social, economic systems or companies. The mind baselines pretty quickly and in order to continue to rationalize the faith in our values and belief systems, it needs continuous validation and the most effective way to grow the faith is by growing it's adoption and the best way to get results is by doing it collectively. This is a big source of conflict. Faith is something that's personal, has a lot of personal context and history associated with it. While trade and collective action is essential for this world to progress, accepting each other's faith and letting people have the choice to opt into other faiths on their own timelines is a good way to minimize conflict
Technology and Engineering is about making magic and dreams a reality
Innovation happens through cut-copy-paste. That is nature's way and no reason why it cannot work in your life and organization. Build the right abstractions, so it's easier to evolve your life and the products you build
You can do 80% of the work in 20% of the time and the remaining 20% takes 80% of the time. But you also need to realize that the initial 80% of the work only provides 20% of the value to your customers. The remaining 20% work is what unlocks 80% of the value
Customers don't use a product, they use an ecossytem of products. So, figure out if you are building a product in the ecosystem, the glue for the products in the ecosystem or the platform for the ecosystem itself
It should not be figure out your passion, it should be figure out your obsession. Then figure out how to productize it, manage it and stay balanced in life
Courage to seek/offer help is one of the most useful skills one can practice and learn
Technology is the herald for the death of the hero and the ecosystem of hero, villian and victim
Reverse the variables in your if..then statements. Sometimes, the effect is the reason for the cause
What is the point of truth if it cannot survive
Collectives survive because they are antifragile. Their antifragility increases with the experiments and failures/successes of their members. So, build or invest in platforms
Cities are basically forests, gentrified of all the wild animals. But then, what truly defines a 'wild' animal?
It is hard to learn about and explore the entire diaspora of life and the universe in a lifetime. It's a good place to start by accepting that, making peace with it, explore the parts that resonate with you and be ok with leaving out the ones that don't
Science is universal, philosophy and psychology is personal
Science is something you can discuss and reach an agreement on. Philosophy is something you can choose to listen to, but do what works for you and let others do what works for them. If you have a conflict, well...you can resolve it, duel it out or wait till some one dies
Innovation happens through cut, copy, paste. Don't believe me, just ask nature
Books and movies, comics and cartoons. When reading, you can imagine the characters, their voices and the environment, but not the music. The music in the movies creates the atmosphere, sets the mood and takes the experience to a whole another level
Keep breathing, keep reading
Love is something you feel, no one can give it to you. Sympathy is something that someone can give you out of kindness. Know the difference
You can either fight over scarce things or work together and make them abundant for everyone
In a conversation, periodically check in with yourself, how much of this is about you and how much is it about the other person (people) and how much it is about discussing the subject at hand objectively
If you can understand yourself, you can remove yourself and listen objectively in conversations
The question is not, if you have free will, it is, can you predict the future
Your mind and body evolution is caused by stress. If you reduce the stress, evolution slows down. It's not good or bad, it could mean a higher quality of life for individuals, whatever what means for each personal individual. But if you want to grow, seek out stress
Focus on increasing customer value, shareholder value will automatically follow
The exercise of writing is helpful to manage scope and prioritize, both at work and in life
The solution to the dark forest problem is a permanent sun (with cameras everywhere and a permanent record of the public world to make everyone play nice)
You want the pie to always grow, because when it shrinks, we start to talk about population control, ecosystem balance, morality, etc which ends in catastrophe
Anecdotal evidence, metaphors and analogies are hypotheses, don't accept them as proof
Sometimes we seek learning with a goal of curiosity and exploration. Sometimes we seek to learn with a goal to validate our thoughts and emotions
Your words speak what you wish to be. Your financial transactions speak the truth about who you are, your values, your responsibilities, your independence (or dependence), etc
Live in the world, don't isolate. Be dependent on your fellow humans, life, nations and let them trust and depend on you. Isolation is death, we can only go far together. Balance independence with community to be antifragile
The story of leverage is the root of all suffering, not desire. Maybe they mean the same thing, definitions 🙄
There is a counterparty to everything. Life is the counterparty to death
The difference between mania and genius, intelligence and foolishness is success (survival)
The quest for immortality, the desire to be remembered has caused more suffering than any religion, parasite, etc to humanity
The more important symbols that each individual should try to define are zero and infinity, not God and uni(multi)verse
A good purpose is infinite
Love, fear is something you feel in your body, not your mind
The problem is we don't have the words(symbols) to say how we really feel or express ourselves completely or understand what others are saying completely. In that way, we are no different from children. We cry, scream or break things
Look for feedback in actions, not words. Words communicate wishes and hopes, actions communicate reality
It's never either-or, but it's a bit of this and bit of that. The weights of each vary for different people, but it's never 100% this and 0% that, it's 80% this and 10% that and 10% something else or 50% this, 25% that, 24% something else and 1% of this other thing based on the individual.
Things that give you new information are useful. Things that numb you are not (maybe useful for a short period, but not long term)
The amount of technical debt you have is directly proportional to your market share. You cannot take a mathematician's approach to engineering when building in the industry, business is not academia. But remember, this is not an excuse for shoddy engineering, up skill yourself and go back and invest and improve your systems periodically, if you want the business to thrive long term
The goal of every individual, system is to increase optionality for themselves. You get leverage by reducing optionality for others and have them become dependent on you. Balancing this out is what most of the conflict in the world is all about, since we all have fears about different things and different interpretations of safety and fair
Tears, blood and sweat is how change happens
Having a dream is more important than attaining it
We all are looking to see more dimensions in the world. We are amazed at what an Einstein saw or what the penicillin guy experimented or what the gene guys were able to do or what the internet and computing inventors did and how useful that was to the world
The best thing you can do for your kids and family is to sow the seeds that help a lot of people around you and around the world, even if they don't directly help your kids or family. All the love I received as a kid was from people who loved my parents and grand parents and they saw me as a living keepsake from them and loved me as such. This is the best gift you can give to your kids. Be kind and pay it forward
A nice warm velvety blanket is more therapeutic than the best coffee or biryani
Most people stop at the memes part. It helps understand the world, but it has no real world consequence. The next steps to make change involve courage to take personal risk and most people are too scared to venture there
There is no nobility in being a tragic victim. Dying is easy, decay is easy, you just don't have to make any effort. At the same time, there is no nobility in being a violent parasite
Businesses have relationships with more roles and less individuals. People have relationships with more individuals and less roles. An individual is Anand, John, Alice. A role is engineer, plumber, gardener where you don't know/remember the name of the individual fulfilling that role.
Follow examples, not advice
Make it work, make it great, make it fast. And finally, make it last with good abstractions
God replaces Santa Claus when you grow up. But eventually everyone realizes it was their parents, their ancestors and everyone else's ancestors the whole time
Words are easy and cheap. Action, Money is hard and has value
Every parent builds a cage for their children, so they can grow up safely. As they grow up, they need to leave it unlocked and help build courage and strength for the child to venture out small distances and eventually not need the cage to be safe. But not all parents do this well, some parents don't want to let them out and in some cases some parents are stuck with children who are too scared to leave the cage
The goal of civilization was to work together to increase optionality for everyone
Stop analyzing others and develop the courage to analyze yourself. What other people say is about themselves and their philosophy, use it as information to understand yourself and understand more dimensions of the world
When setting policy, assume bad intent. When working together in a company, assume good intentions
Child and adult should be replaced with parasite and symbiote
Good design is loosely coupled, highly aligned
To really understand something, you need to watch someone do it and do it yourself, sure, but you also need to experience it from the other side, so you know what it feels like when someone does it well. For example, if you want to be a good salesman, buy a lot of things and see what the buying experience is like and what a good sales person can make you feel vs a bad one or buying without having one
You want to work in companies and be in countries that are aggressively spending towards a vision they have, not clinging to money and power and hedging against risks, that is not a place you want to be. You should hedge of course, but that can't be the majority focus. Survival is movement and adapting to change, stasis is death
The biggest problem that all people need help with is the blank page problem. How to take the dreams in their head and manifest them, but what's the first step to overcome inertia and get the momentum going. Of course, it's another problem to keep the momentum going in the face of road blocks
Fuck your opinions and ideas, show a well thought out action plan
We all choose aggregators to summarize the world for us. Who are your aggregators?
Before sending out a survey question of would you recommend this to friends and family, think about if you would buy this for your kid or mother or father or grandmother or grandfather, it will save a lot of time and effort
A lot of the world's problems will be solved if we stop judging people for what comes out of their mouth and judge them by their actions (or spending habits) instead
The others seems to be a constant in societies. The others can be another country, state, city, religion, caste, skin color, species, neighbor, family based on the context, it could be the natural order of things. The others serve the purpose to unify a group, with the second order effect being producing doctrines or constitutions or rules to live by within the societies and manifesting ego
The old wisdom is always lost in translation, when they mean sacrifice, it's not sacrificing animals, it is to sacrifice a part of your self, your identity, so you can detach a bit from maya and get closer to the truth of the universe.
Most of the human problems is about trying to make sense of randomness and the different stories we come up with and believe and want others to follow to validate them
Survival is the answer to a lot of why questions
If it's too complicated for you to explain something, do you think you can be trusted to make decisions on it
LLMs will be universal translators. Now anyone and anything can talk to everything else. Every person, animal, app, thing has a language and some verbal or non verbal cues, now they can be analyzed and understood and translated to something you can understand. Maybe you can understand yourself better as well through reflection
The odds are always against the hero and always in the favor of the villain
It's easy to know what you don't want, but hard to understand what you do want
Products that reduce people getting laid will not survive long term. It's a good heuristic to evaluate if a product will be around in the future
Fewer things of higher quality is what you want
When buying something, think about how much effort will it be to sell it or how long before you may have to trash it
When I'm powerful, uberman morality ki jai, when I'm powerless, then slave morality zindabad
It has always been easier to make people ignore the moral part of their personality, by giving them medals, money, validation in various forms
Meaning comes from overcoming odds and struggles. If your life is too comfortable, like in the developed world, you have to go to developing worlds to seek out meaning
Produce more than you take, that should be your philosophy. Not every interaction, but over the course of your life
The fear of a late death should be more than the fear of an early death
To understand the simplest of concept, you have to understand the entire universe (or ecosystem for a local level understanding)
It is hard to compete with an ecosystem, customers have a hard time switching ecosystems, because there are so many products and services they need to switch which adds so much friction
We are story tellers, exploring is just the journey to achieve that goal
We are producing new tools, but not teaching folks how to use them effectively. We need more teachers
The interface is more important than the implementation
A father and mother are also born when a baby is born and they grow up together with the baby
We already have deeper relationships with songs, podcasts than with humans around you, because we don't talk about those feelings inside us that matter, that has become the culture of the world.
How we treat the people we never meet represents our values, especially in a global world full of proxies, which let you suspend applying your values to those beyond the proxies.
Instead of saying, I don't mean any disrespect, say, I know I'm being disrespectful, but I'm trying to make a point here, can we focus on that. It's more honest, to yourself and to the other party
The fact that what society cares about is money and fame is a good signal that survival is what the vast majority of the world is struggling with right now. If not, we would appreciate creativity more
Marketing is like spiders making webs all over. The skill is to pick the right place and how large to make the web there to catch the most amount of food. And that comes from observation, previous experience, talking to other spiders
You don't have to take everything too seriously. But take the serious things seriously, like your body physical support structure, your nutrition and rest
The feeling that you get when you try hard and finally succeed, for some people, who see themselves as failures and are too afraid to try, the same feeling comes when they see someone try hard and fail
There is no good, evil, powerful, powerless, meaning, love, etc. it is mostly about leverage. Everything else is a tool available to folks to gain leverage
Invert, always invert is such an important advice for leverage. Because once a concept becomes main stream, the only way to gain leverage is to invert it and make it work
It's a sign of a failing society when paying your taxes is considered a loser activity
Technology can be a weapon for the strong for offense and a weapon for the weak for defense
Life seeks out love, the dead seek out respect
We are limited by the number of words we are allowed to define a concept. The number of words is decided by how much time we have. A lifetime is too short. But over generations, we can create enough word structure to explain everything. But it takes just as long to understand it. Or rather to beat the stone that is our mind to understand it
The problem with jobs and hiring is that for every job, there are many qualified candidates (whether it's a plumber or an engineer or the president of a country) and success in the job is a mix of qualifications and vision and a big chunk of luck and we can't get a consensus of what mix of these will lead to a successful outcome and we also can't get a consensus on the time period to measure these outcomes
Major metro cities are just ads for the rest of the world
Numbers and time should not be a single number, it should be range. No yes/no options, it should be multiple choice
Rights are earned, not granted. If you didn't earn them, your parents or ancestors earned it for you and if you don't continue earning, eventually you will lose them
You are born a parasite, living off your mother, then your parents, then a bit of help from the community and the government to become a symbiote in society. You cannot remain a parasite forever. A test for parasitism is, if you are earning to pay your own bills for clothing, housing, dreams, etc. If not, you will be scared or angry or both and spread pain to all those around you. Accept your fate, the cards dealt to you, then work to change them and fight for justice if you feel the cards were unfair
Most of the content online, the interviews, the podcasts, the influencers are just doing what a spider does, build webs in which you can catch some attention and make money from it. The bigger the web, more likelihood of catching attention and volume of attention
It is always a mix of emotions that we feel and observe in others. But we always reduce it down to a major emotion and ignore the others and then anchor on the major emotion for too long not allowing for the possibility of the major emotion changing over time
Fraud emerges for the most part when the system has too much leverage
Maybe the problem with modern societies is that there is no time to think, to learn, to educate ourselves about how the world works
Proxies reframe the world for you. The proxy can be the screen, your parent, the grocery store, so you don't have to think about a lot of the underlying happenings in the world
The system is the culture of the world
The argument that hey someone committed an atrocity, mine is not as bad, so it's forgiven or someone got a freebie or does not do work and gets paid, so I also want to get paid for not doing work has caused so much suffering out there. Anecdotal evidence is not proof of a pattern and not a piece of evidence you can file to collect some payment
Own land, rent out to renters is the financial model for nations…hmmm…real estate ownership is basically trying to replicate the same thing
Art/beauty is something you cannot explain
You cannot explain something if you didn't have it first, then you earned it or discovered it or built it yourself
The problem is defining what a baseline global quality of life should be and how to efficiently deploy capital to migrate the world to that place
Leverage is making someone play a game they don't want to play
You are part of someone else's identity and others are part of your identity with or without consent. Like your parents, people you know, your community, city, country, etc. and their achievements are part of yours and your achievements are part of theirs
Do we call the people who have stories that no one wants to hear or cares about…losers?
Zuko's I'm angry at myself, because I'm confused and don't know what to do, one of the most simple and profound things I connected with
You cannot teach courage, it's a choice, because most of the time it seems stupid
Some people see the moon or the sun and they spend their life trying to touch the moon or make the sun. Some tell stories about how life is much better where they are and they don't want to do all that and then there are some who try to stop others from doing it, because they are scared of the unknown
It's hard to explain the universe in anything other than something like math. Trying to imagine space and time metaphorically or visually is maybe useful for entertainment, but it's not going to help you understand
The algorithm does not have your best interest at hand unless you are providing the energy and infrastructure to run it. Same with humans
You have to go there and come back to write about it in a useful way
The counter to transparency is overwhelming amount of transparency, where the truth (or useful information) becomes a needle in the haystack to find
The story is trying to survive, life is just a carrier
A culture of curiosity is better than a culture of fear
Some people are curious and want to discuss everything and learn more. Some people want validation, they just want you to agree with everything or fight
The people who go around holding mirrors at others are usually too scared to look at their own reflection
When you are outside the walls of the garden, you want to tell yourself that the garden is hyped up, the people inside suck, I'll create my own garden. And when you make your own, or get into the garden, you want to make sure the walls keep out others who were like the old you or teach them, make them pass an exam before entering into your garden. Because a garden take a lot of work to build and preserve, but no work to decay and die
Learning to sell something you offer for money and learning to pay for something with money is a basic life lesson that everyone should learn
When you are younger, you are fast and can shoot a lot of arrows, when you are older, you are slower, shoot fewer arrows, but more accurate
Regret is the most painful, infectious disease in the world and a difficult companion to go through life with
Anxiety is your spirit's response to your choices that can cause future regret
We love listening to people who are intuitively good at logic
You are more likely to solve a problem for others if you've faced and solved it for yourself
The past cannot change, but people's opinions about you and your past can change in the future. So live with intention and a good value system
There will always be more people outside the walls than inside and any product/service that can give leverage to those outside the walls will always have demand
Think about lifetime maintenance, repairs and finally trash cost when buying something and add that to the purchase price. If a product is important, then buy full insurance for how long you plan to use it. For a service, think of it as a subscription for as long as you will need it
Money can be earned and you choose what you want to spend and not spend on. Time is a leaky bucket, continuously being spent, you can only decide where to spend it and there is no gaining it back
The people who talk about good and evil are most of the time parasites and have a parasitic relationship with others and other forms of life
Don't just write a manifesto, follow up with a thought out action plan, otherwise you are just whining how the world does not work for you, but not offering any solutions
Art is the expression and manifestation of pure love
Your action and inaction have a cost and a reward/consequence, that you have to pay whether you think it's fair or not
Some people are able to remove themselves from a conversations and truly listen, some make every conversation about themselves
The identity of a person is a story, a story that is a continuation of the stories of people who came before and the world so far. And you spend your life continuing the story and infecting others with your story and getting infected by others stories and accepting/rejecting/forcing stories on each other
Arguing about definitions is futile. Argue about utility and outcomes to make progress
In a system, there are the conformists, then there are those who want to hack the system and control it, there are those who want to break the system by causing an exception or by overloading it, some who want to escape the system. The system is the universe
If we can't learn the language of the universe, can we teach the language we've learnt to the universe
Choose to live in the world most of the time, but also choose to isolate periodically, it is necessary and will do you some good. I mean choose information, not numbness
Lessons are felt, accepted, not learnt
The utilitarian view of the universe, is the computational view. The theories which can help predict the future and help with risk management survive
Journalists are real time historians
The employees of the next generation are parents, build the best tools for them to raise a great next generation of humans and life
Game knows game. Sorrow knows sorrow. Insert emotion here knows insert same emotion here
It's not happiness or peace you want, it's equilibrium, stability. That can only be achieved in isolation, numbness, death. But you can practice not craving it, but spending energy monitoring your needs and countering them with what you know
We are actually arguing about what experiments should get energy and how much
If you treat your body like a temple, it will one day become your prison and a cage. Treat it like a metal that needs to be forged into a shape using whatever stress you are able to deploy and tolerate
We experience the world in gradients, not absolutes and we baseline pretty quickly. Then movement in positive direction creates positive emotions, negative direction creates negative emotions. This is true for money, food, love, people, etc, it does not matter how much you have, it's the changes in them and the direction of change that matters more.
Everything we say is us having a conversation with ourselves. When we find the right words, we are at peace. When we don't, we are confused and in pain
You have to be proud of your name yourself, before you put it on something
When the art starts controlling the artist, you, the artist, have the choice to give it away or destroy it or cling to it
Extend the work of your heroes. Don't just worship them, inherit the will they represent
Hugs and kisses is therapy. Blood, sweat and tears is true love
Moral statements based on Boolean statements are fundamentally flawed, they need be based on prioritized and weighted dimensional statements
Some people are expert problem solvers, some are expert problem creators and preservers
Most people seem to not practice thinking beyond one or two steps of a decision. Like for example thinking that donating money will solve problems. But in reality, the money needs to be deployed, without fraud to a prioritized list of actions and people to setup some sort of flywheel effect to achieve its goals and it needs to continue beyond a certain threshold to setup guardrails so we don't regress back
How do you tell the difference between a right and an entitlement, when we can't reach a consensus on the definitions of words
The argument that it hasn't all fallen apart and I'll keep pushing until you die and apologize to a dead body is fundamentally parasitic
Understanding the world is easier than making the world understand you
Secrets are information arbitrage
Intelligence might just be how large of a state machine you can hold in your mind and can compute the next state transition towards a reward 🍰
The story survives and endures. The individual is just a carrier, some times conscious, some times unconscious
Over the course of your life, you continuously reframe your past as you get exposed to new experiences and information
A more utilitarian skill is to craft a narrative for the choices you make and don't make and the outcomes of that. The stories are all that matter in the end if they survive
In a scarcity based economy, how do you choose who gets to live and who doesn't. It's not just about choosing among the people who live now, it's also about choosing the people who will live in the future. And we fight about who gets to choose
Reading < Understanding < Believeing < Accepting < Living
The constitution is the DNA of a nation. The by laws, the DNA of an organization. An anchor that re-orients and restores the system through challenges
Is there a zero day (if you know what I mean) in the universe?
The truth is whatever you believe, under the condition that you can survive
Survival is the gatekeeper of truth
Reading is micro-dosing information infection. Music a bit more. Videos and games are a much higher dose of infection. Give some time for your body to process before consuming more
The strategy to survive the dark forest outside and the one inside you is the same. Expose to the sun, make it all public
Play social games, not lonely games. This is especially important in a world with AI agents where you may no longer need to talk to another human being, because the AI agents could become a new family around you
In business, the valuable thing is judgement and focus as you level up, what should you focus on to maximize value for the customers in the segment you operate in. And how much can you charge for this and how can this help you expand your addressable market
The world is not split into good and evil. It's victims, assholes and losers. The victims make up the overwhelming majority of the world. But the victims think they are losers, the assholes think they are victims and losers think they are assholes.
There is no absolute freedom or free will. We have some freedoms and some free will. There is no absolute anything, there are always exceptions. So talking in absolutes is not useful
Technology is probably the greatest love letter to life. It's built to scale resources and ensure resource security for future generations
What is useful is predicting the future. Uncertainty is dangerous to life, so life rewards folks who can reduce it and sponsor tools that have potential to reduce it. To predict the future, you need to be able to compute it. So computation is useful (has utility). This allows you to have radio, planes, satellites, computers, phones, networking, etc.
Speed is a super power, but not everyone likes or wants super powers.
Language is so incredibly lossy
It's not homeless, it's hope-less. Alone with mental challenges and no one willing to take care of
Think in terms of roles, contracts and proofs
When the premise is wrong, you can do everything you think is right, but end up failing to reach your objective
How do you remember those who don't care/want to be remembered or don't know how to tell their story. It's never anyone's story, it's always your interpretation of their story
It's the people who market and sell the tickets who make the most money, that's the most useful talent to increase likelihood of making money. Actual skill and talent to make things is also useful, but need to be combined with marketing to maximize money making
Who will create agent smith?
If life is the product, happiness, purpose, free will are all marketing speak, not the actual primitives to understand it
You are always building a community around a brand (a philosophy, a belief system, etc)
It's only the people who seek out attention who are posting online
The most successful product on earth is life. And we all work to preserve it, market it, sell it, get more market share
The most important things you can learn to say are can you help me, how can I help
Think in terms of roles instead of individuals. Role can have individuals, the count depends on the importance and risk
Eternal conflict between centralization and decentralization. Centralization is control and peace. Decentralization is freedom and risk
I am nothing. I am everything. Two different ways of forming your identity. Removing everything from yourself. Or sucking everything to yourself.
Everyone agrees that things need to change. But we disagree on the pace of change. Some want it to happen in years, some in decades and some do not want it to happen during their lifetimes
Is the universe, fungible particles trying to find a way to become non fungible, creating ego 🤔😄
Instead of thinking in terms of stopping an addiction, think to replace it, you will be more likely to succeed
Truth is information that can help you predict the future
How do you solve an undefined problem
It's easy to give advice than to follow it
When people talk about a country or a race, they are talking about the leaders of those countries and race and their policies and philosophies. The individuals in those countries, races, etc are the same as individuals in any other country, race, etc and have 99% same lifestyle, desires, struggles, fears, etc, raise children, have food and shelter, and later art, luxuries, etc
A good metric for friendship is, time till someone realizes you are dead
The other lesson from the boy who cried wolf, is to always listen and react when someone cries wolf if you want to survive. This has been taken to great extremes in the world with fear based messaging, news, marketing, etc because it is guaranteed to get attention, but is also cognitively very taxing on the individual
It's not clear what's an idea, thought, principle, a code, philosophy, excuse, coping mechanism. I guess depends on the context and the observer/thinker
The way to win people's votes has always been to make them feel sorry for themselves and find someone else to blame for it. Also, the best way to handicap them for life
The relationships that last are the ones which have contracts associated with them, like with your parents, siblings, children and extended family. Work relationships too, but they may end when the contract ends
We watch already successful people talk about their journey and their struggles to inspire you. But we never hear the stories of those who tried and failed.
It is always about training and conditioning and developing a muscle memory in the population using various methods like fear, envy, etc to get yourself more leverage to manifest your wishes for yourself, your version of reality. To get the population to work on furthering your pursuits
Information (ideas, thoughts) has all the properties of a virus. It spreads from one person to another. It affects some, some are immune or dodge it. It incubates and mutates in people and keeps spreading. The bad kind generates fear, the good kind provides stability. I guess DNA and proteins are also information, so…yeah
Ever since the printing press, we've been figuring out better and better ways to pass on knowledge to the next generation. With LLMs, we have the best one yet
At a policy level, maximize individual optionality. Decisions should be made between individuals or between organizations, not mandated by policy
Most of the Indian babas are fancy logicians
Look at our species brethren, ants, cats, dogs, birds, animals and how they behave individually and in collectives, there is a lot that can learnt about what's natural. Though they have not written any religious books, they are also in the fabric of reality and intuitively perceive physics, biology and respond to it to take care of their body, mind and manage risk
You are an ecosystem, a reality within yourself. The conflict within you is a microcosm of the conflict in the world, in the universe, reality. Conflict is just a label, label is just a word, word is information that activates certain parts of your eyes, your mind and your reality and the reality you are part of. On and on it goes to infinity
Focus is not concentration, it is lack of concentration. Your mind is cleared of all the clutter and open for what you need to do right now
We are born and die a parasite. But in between, if we work hard, we can be a symbiote or very hard and be a host and be called a hero
Do not seek truth from a moral perspective, its a flawed premise
The danger with information (knowledge) is that once you are exposed to it, you can't undo it. Once you see it, you can't un-see it
The more important symbols that each individual should try to define are zero and infinity and not God and uni(multi)verse
We are just a biological learning algorithm determined by our DNA and we respond and adapt to stimuli from our environment to survive. In that sense, the waymo fleet is also an organism responding to events from users and moving the cars around to optimize energy while reducing customer wait time. Sometimes the organism is hurt/injured and will require humans to help it recover, but is autonomous and learning, adapting most of the time. Intelligence defined this way, you can see how building an AI will eventually happen
The utilitarian take on the multiverse is, how can we use what we know for gain more leverage for our universe over other universes
Don't atrophy your body, by just exercising your mind. Don't atrophy your mind, by just exercising your body. Stress them both, then give them both rest to recover. Use whatever technique works, yoga, hiit, supersets, etc and keep pushing and working hard. But also rest, take vacations.
A good goal, a good purpose is infinite
Things that give you (new) information are useful. Things that numb you are not useful, maybe therapeutic
Losers are people who don't try because they are too scared and too ashamed of failing
We obviously never will learn from history, because we are forgetful beings and have limited memory capacity. That's why we need to build guard rails for the future and not just rely on education
The biggest misconception that people need to lose is the feeling that the world is filled with stupid people, or uneducated people or people who don't get it (life, economy, politics, whatever). Everyone is doing what they think is right for their survival, survival of their current life style and improve it. And it's just experiments, some work, but most will not. The important thing is to keep trying experiments and not give up. The ones who give up or are too afraid to try are the stupid ones, the ones who are too scared of risk to make a move
It's unclear how much technology is giving us super powers and how much it is atrophying us
You can train yourself to sound smart or identify smart people, but that is different from making yourself smart. It's a different path
Farmed humans call the wild humans losers for not having security. Wild humans call the farmed humans losers for not having freedom
We are farmed by some of our ancestors from the past reaching into the future to remember them
The difference between mania and genius, intelligence and foolishness is success (survival), you only know what it is in the future, not in the present
Symbols are useful to communicate, but they can also constrain and sometimes put you in a box or on a path from which you find it difficult to turn back
Life optimizes to reduce risk and increase optionality, in aggregate. You see this in voting and in markets
Systems which model after the universe and at a local level on our planet, model after nature will eventually win, because they will be the most energy efficient
No one ever calls themselves dumb, they only call others dumb.
It's not either, or, but it's a bit of this and bit of that. The weights of each vary for different people, but it's never 100% this and 0% that, it's 90% this and 10% that or 50% this and 50% that based on the individual
I think the world needs less standup comedians and jesters and more people who make people cry, because sometimes crying is more therapeutic than laughter
It's incredible to think that at some point the theory of relativity will be told like a fairy tale, similar to, the eclipse happens because a monster swallows the moon. As knowledge grows, we will come up with new unified theories of universe and reality which will make the existing theories look like fairy tales in terms of how narrow they were able to explain things. The best explanation of its time becomes the fairy tale of the future
The structure for operationalizing your ideas is ideas => projects => milestones => resource allocation to achieve those milestones
Some parents raise chickens to eat them later, some raise birds to watch them fly
If you stagnate, the evolving system will eventually consume you. Evolve or die. Stagnate and die
If you can't fit into any tribe (economy), organize and create your own tribe (economy). Otherwise you are on the path to decline and demise
The nicest sentence in any language: Its all paid for, you don't have to pay anything
Loyalty -> dependence -> addiction. At some point you lose your personal freedom
When you are young, you want others to respect your rights. When you are old, you want others to respect their responsibilities.
The skill of eliminating ideas is as valuable as generating ideas
It's not the individual or collective or company that is good/evil, parasitic/symbiotic, it's your relationship with them. The evaluation is done by each party in the relationship and come to their own conclusions, you can debate it, but there is no need for consensus, you feel what you feel
You cannot give away or forget your memories (mind, muscle, etc)
Some people have the knowledge encoded in their dna, muscles. Others have to break it down, understand it and practice to build it into theirs
The repairmen will always have a job. Because we keep building and collecting stuff that has wear and tear and will need repairs, especially stuff we get attached to
The only businesses that survive long term in the economy is anything that increases rate and volume of spending
Information loves to spread, if it is good enough to survive, it will attach itself, evolve as necessary and spread. That's why secrets are painful, because it is information that is imprisoned to keep it from spreading and it's fighting to get out
B2C selling is teaching technology to a peasants. B2B selling is selling to kings how to increase your herd size and increase output from them
The counter strategy to transparency is overwhelming amount of transparency or delayed transparency
Is San Francisco becoming Mordor?
There is a difference between caring for someone (wishing them well) and paying for someone (hiring them)
The role is more important than the individual, the interface more important than the implementation. For resiliency, you need to think in terms of interfaces and migrations (change management)
Existentialism is a meta philosophy and describes how all religions, philosophies are the meaning different people, collectives give to themselves to cooperate with each other
After a certain threshold, no amount of money is going to create that spark that gives you courage to face fear, makes you feel love and give you creativity
Some people practice getting results and some people practice making excuses for not getting results
Brother, sister, son, parent, spouse, pet - these are names of relationships, not names of individuals. It reduces the individual to some dimensions that matter to you and is inherently selfish
Life is about creating a story and then infecting that story to as many people as possible. Our story is a continuation of the story from people who came before us and infected us with their stories and we are carriers and mutations of those stories
Some define themselves by what they own, some by what they make. The latter life is made of passion and good relationships, the former life is made of fear and insecurity
The conflict between slippery slopes and there are no absolutes is eternal
When you eliminate doubt, uncertainty, ambiguity, productivity and profit rises. This is true for project requirements, moral compass, economic policy. The cost of course varies, the blame for which is on the decision maker and enforcer
There are parasites, hosts and symbiotes. You don't want to be the first two. It's full of insecurity, resentment. The effort to make the changes should come from you, otherwise you deserve whatever you get. The identification is done by you, the opposite person and your feelings
Insecurity comes from a feeling or realization that you are living like a parasite. The cure is to make the efforts to become a symbiote
If you can't be bothered to organize to achieve your goals, complaining that someone should do it or that someone else is able to organize to achieve things that are against your self interest is not going to help you achieve your goals
Are you building a wrapper (interface) or an implementation. The wrapper survives long term, the implementation is meant to evolve and change over time to become more effecient
As you come closer to death, your tolerance of uncomfortable things drops, so does your morality. See older people for example, you start to live more for yourself and less for others. Unless you already feel like you have lived a fulfilled life
Some cultures raise their kids like chicken in cages to harvest their eggs and eat them when they grow up. Some raise them to be birds that can fly. Both are disappointed when they grow up and not meet their expectations. You can see which is which based on their actions
Gracefully pass the baton onto the next generation, don't make them pry it out from your cold dead hands
Migration systems are as important, maybe even more important than aggregators. Because they maximize individual choice. It's a good counter to balance out maximizing productivity in the face of lack of innovation
To lure the wildebeest for the herd, the lion probably sends the hyenas to advertise to each one that they deserve better than what the herd has and then show a good time to 10% and get their testimonials and post on their instagram on how awesome the lions are and eat the 90%. Rinse and repeat
You deserve better - distillation of all marketing messages
Build apps that make you more social, not alone. Pretending that you are social because you get messages from a thousand folks is not the same as physically being social with a thousand people, that is more enriching and healthy for your body and mind
Instead of gossiping, now we sit alone and watch other people gossip on phones and tvs
Definitions, evaluations and agreements, this is what we debate and fight on. Whether it's free will, freedom or whatever, how do you define it, how do you evaluate if you or someone else has it and how do you reach a consensus in a large collective that you all have it and when do you suspend them for the greater good and who gets to decide the greater good and suspend/unsuspend them
Do less. This is probably the biggest insight I've had to building successful products and teams. Focus to build reliable systems with good interfaces that lay the foundations for long term sustainable growth
Your reality is the story that goes on in your mind. It can be reframed with new information
Why do we record only the happy moments in photographs. But not the painful ones. When you look back, you have to pretend there was only one emotion, but you lose out on all the other dimensions which leave a big void in your memory
I realized when I complain that the world is unfair, what I'm actually saying is that I was told a lie about how the systems of the world actually work by my parents, teachers, culture about fairness or even the word fair. I guess they were lied to as well. Because if the social contracts are not clear and more importantly not enforced, fraud (or leverage) is probably the most expected entity that evolves in a system
Do you choose an identity or does the identity choose you. Do you choose a home, family, country or does it choose you. Or is it an "and"?
Interviewing is a filtering and a ranking process
Communication is information infection
How many don't become butterflies because they are too scared to go into the cocoon and go through the metamorphosis
Art is mostly personal and is meant to be unique. Business is more social and is meant to be scalable. Decide what you are doing and set your expectations accordingly
Information needs a carrier to transmit to new information. New information is generated, creates a gradient in the system and it needs to spread. A good carrier is just as important as the information itself. The carrier can be a beautiful visual or face or voice or music, or all of them to infect a wide range of audience. The best information is transmissible in many carrier modalities
We need the public to setup their own network infrastructure, because information is now the new tool of power. Pen is mightier than the sword type of thing
The system is setup by nature, the universe. It's not setup by people, not really anyway. The system creates the various personalities, it's not the people setting up the system
It's the people who want their photos taken, want to be remembered, have a lot of photos
If I'm unable to verify something, I'm unable to accept it into my reality. This could be economic theories or theories about astral projections
Identity systems should be built with the ship of Theseus in mind
AI systems, especially the LLM systems will eventually evolve to include modalities beyond what humans sense to all senses of other life forms and eventually seek out modalities to keep pushing (try to break) the computational model of the universe
Your employer should wish that they could clone you