Before seeking mentors or learning from others, cultivate a baseline of self-awareness to understand your strengths, desired skills, and weaknesses, enabling more effective and targeted learning.
When approaching any endeavor, ask specific questions to get the information you want, making the process of learning, improving, and achieving success more likely.
Actively collect powerful questions from various sources (e.g., books, interviews, magazines) and regularly revisit them, especially during journaling, to refine self-inquiry and stress-test beliefs.
When facing a challenging decision or problem, ask yourself, ‘What might this look like if it were easy?’ to simplify the issue and uncover more elegant solutions.
To reduce cognitive overload and make life more elegant, constantly seek to remove as many unnecessary pieces or connections as possible while still preserving the core essence of your goals.
Instead of constant optimization, deliberately identify areas in your life where you can de-optimize (e.g., stop measuring, ignore certain information, reduce reading) to enhance overall well-being and create more mental space.
Actively transmute personal pain and suffering into something meaningful, using your experiences to connect with and help others, thereby finding redemption and purpose.
Recognize that you will average into the holistic sum of the five or six people you spend the most time with (including parasocial relationships), so choose these influences very carefully.
To examine your true motivations for an action, ask yourself: ‘If I could never talk about this, would I still do it?’ This helps reveal if the motivation is intrinsic or for social signaling.
When faced with multiple project choices, ask yourself, ‘What would I do if I knew I was going to fail?’ to uncover intrinsic motivations and identify what you’d pursue for the process itself.
Cultivate intellectual humility by frequently admitting ‘I have no idea’ or ‘we have no idea,’ and follow this with a proactive approach to ‘figure it out’ or ’try some things.’
Prioritize learning ‘just-in-time’ information (relevant to current needs) over ‘just-in-case’ information (speculative future needs), to avoid wasted energy and ensure relevance.
If you are a hyper-planner or control-oriented, incorporate improv components into your life, such as taking an improv class or trying fiction writing, to introduce less control and foster adaptability.
Annually conduct a ‘Past Year Review’ by going through your calendar, identifying people, places, activities, and commitments that produced peak positive and negative emotional experiences, to create a ‘do more of’ and ‘do less of’ list for the upcoming year.
For activities you want to ‘do more of,’ ensure they are explicitly scheduled in your calendar, as they are not ‘real’ until they are allocated time and will otherwise be crowded out by less important tasks.
Create a predictable weekly schedule and batch similar activities (e.g., podcast recordings, administrative tasks) to improve focus, reduce cognitive switching costs, and prepare for extended absences.
Schedule regular ‘off-grid’ periods (one week or longer) to force the implementation of better systems and policies in your daily life and work, improving efficiency and reducing reliance on constant presence.
After an intense retreat or ‘off-grid’ period, plan a two to three-day integration period to slowly re-enter your routine, avoiding immediate full schedules to prevent system shock and preserve benefits.
Actively cultivate the ability to sit still and tolerate boredom for short periods (5-10 minutes), as constantly escaping boredom with distractions can erode calmness and make one more susceptible to manipulation.
Refrain from engaging with social media first thing in the morning, as it can be a ‘poisonous activity’ that erodes focus and well-being.
To combat the engineered addictiveness of social media and prevent self-discipline from being overcome, remove social media apps from your phone.
Recognize that arguing on the internet is often unproductive and frustrating, as it rarely changes opinions, and instead focus on what works for you.
By refraining from unproductive online arguments, you gain a competitive advantage as others waste their vital, non-renewable resource of time.
Realize that much of what occupies your time is not truly important, freeing up capacity to prioritize and engage in more meaningful activities.
Recognize that modern life often leads to ‘awe deficiency disorder’ due to constant distraction; actively create space and breathing room for genuine, transcendent experiences of awe.
Incorporating activities that are the ‘antithesis of optimization,’ such as reading poetry, into your life to balance a hyper-productive mindset and foster a greater sense of well-being.
Schedule writing during late night or early morning hours (e.g., 10 p.m. to 4 a.m.) when distractions are minimal, and only write when ‘in the zone,’ prioritizing sleep if not.
Utilize Scrivener, a program designed for writing, to gather and organize research, documents, and drafts, allowing for novel arrangement and simultaneous viewing of research and work to improve writing efficiency.
Capture as much data as possible without bias using tools like a web clipper, and mark potentially important items (e.g., with three asterisks) for easy retrieval and re-evaluation after a second review.
When writing, use ‘TK’ as a placeholder for information that needs to be inserted later, to maintain writing flow and avoid interruption.
To avoid self-deception and make informed decisions, develop scientific literacy by reading books like ‘Bad Science’ and ‘How to Lie with Statistics’ to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of scientific studies.
Dedicate one to two weeks to learning the building blocks of scientific literacy for reading studies, as this skill provides an enormous life advantage.
When considering interventions, prioritize those that are easy to implement, have high adherence rates, and carry very limited downside risks, rather than waiting for definitive proof.
Identify interventions with plausible upside and limited downside, even if supported by anecdata, and consider trying them if you can cap the potential negative consequences.
When examining findings or self-experiments, prioritize replication to confirm results and ensure validity.
Pay attention to statements made in absolutes (e.g., ‘always,’ ’never’) in any field, and stress test these dogmatic assumptions, even if they may be right.
To gain significant understanding, study extreme or ’edge’ cases in any field, as these outliers often provide valuable information that can inform the broader average.
When encountering an outlier, seek two or three similar examples; one is an exception, two is interesting, but three makes it worth investigating further.
When seeking cutting-edge information, prioritize studying insights from practitioners (e.g., coaches whose livelihoods depend on performance) over peer-reviewed papers, as practical application often precedes scientific publication by several years.
To predict future trends and identify emerging opportunities, observe what highly technical or specialized individuals (’nerds’) are doing in their off-hours or weekends, as this often indicates early adoption of innovations.
Identify what wealthy individuals are currently doing, as their behaviors and adopted technologies often foreshadow what will become widespread among the general population in 5-10 years.
Look for areas where people are piecing together awkward or suboptimal solutions, as these often indicate opportunities for innovation and improvement.
When interviewing experts, ask them to recommend two close friends or thinkers who are at the bleeding edge of a field and unorthodox, to uncover novel insights and perspectives.
For concentrated personal and professional growth, especially early in your career with fewer obligations, consider moving to a high-density area (e.g., New York, LA, San Francisco) for a period to maximize serendipitous encounters and opportunities.
To build your network and meet interesting people, volunteer at events featuring speakers and attendees relevant to your interests.
When volunteering, proactively address problems and go beyond the bare minimum to get noticed by event producers, which can lead to further opportunities and network building.
Avoid immediately seeking favors from VIPs; instead, play the long game by being professional, reliable, and easy to work with, allowing relationships to develop naturally.
To make a lasting impression on high-performers, be professional, punctual, anticipate their needs or problems, address them proactively, and always be easy to deal with.
To build a world-class network efficiently, focus on the ‘uncrowded channel’ of in-person interactions, as it offers unique opportunities for genuine connection.
At events, approach the moderator (who is often less swarmed than panelists), thank them genuinely, and if a connection forms, ask if they can introduce you to others you might get along with.
Instead of collecting many shallow contacts, focus on developing three to five deeper, more meaningful relationships at events through longer conversations, as these can yield significant long-term benefits.
Do not directly ask someone to be your mentor, as the term carries a heavy connotation of obligation; instead, cultivate relationships where mutual learning and benefit occur naturally.
When feeling dysregulated or overwhelmed by emotion, think of a calm, composed friend or role model and ask, ‘What would they do or advise in these circumstances?’ to guide your actions.
To recompose your body, follow the slow carb diet: avoid caloric drinks, white foods (starches), and fruit; eat 30g of protein within 30 minutes of waking; base meals on protein, vegetables, beans, and lentils; have one ‘cheat day’ per week where anything goes; and remove ‘domino foods’ from your home to prevent overeating.
Perform a glycogen depletion workout before a cheat day to limit the potential negative impact of increased caloric intake.
After a cheat day, consider fasting or significantly reducing caloric consumption the following day to mitigate potential setbacks, if this approach works for you.
Incorporating cold exposure as consistently as practical for mood regulation, as it can serve as a preemptive intervention to mitigate or treat depression.
Consider practicing Transcendental Meditation (TM) twice daily for 20 minutes, as it can act like a ‘warm bath for your mind’ to significantly reduce stress and anxiety.
Engage in 10 to 20 minutes of meditation each morning, using either a concentration practice (like repeating a mantra) or a guided meditation app, to cultivate awareness and mindfulness.
Utilize the ‘Waking Up’ app by Sam Harris, particularly its introductory course, for a structured and logical progression of meditation skill development, especially when returning to a meditation practice.
Regularly spend time in silence in nature, disallowing activities like note-taking or reading, to cultivate awe, insight, and recovery, potentially even combining with extended water-only fasts.
For ‘chaotic’ mental health conditions like schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder, explore the use of the ketogenic diet as part of metabolic psychiatry, as it shows promise for some patients.
If considering psychedelics, approach their use systematically by researching, establishing proper protections, and ensuring safety assurances, rather than jumping in without preparation.
Individuals with a family history of schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder should exercise extreme caution with psychedelics, as these compounds can be heavily contraindicated and potentially destabilizing for such conditions.
Be cautious with injections due to infection risk, and when taking supplements, carefully consider the implications for organs like the liver, becoming more conservative with such interventions.
To mitigate potential risks to reproductive health from cell phone proximity, keep your phone on airplane mode when it’s in your pocket, as this is a low-cost, risk-reducing step.
When taking body composition measurements (like DEXA) or blood tests, standardize your hydration levels and the time of day to ensure accurate and consistent results.
Diversify your physical training by engaging in activities outside your usual routine (e.g., lifting weights if you only do yoga, or yoga if you only lift weights) to address weaknesses and enrich your physical capabilities.