Acknowledge your inherent unreliability in the moment and establish well-thought-out rules, agreed upon by various aspects of your personality, to guide decisions and prevent future self-sabotage.
Shift your focus from personal credit or being ‘right’ to achieving the best possible outcome, recognizing that ego protection can unconsciously lead to undermining others’ ideas and hindering collective success.
Focus on strategically positioning yourself for multiple possible futures by building optionality, rather than trying to predict a single future, even if this means choosing suboptimal solutions in the short term for long-term advantage.
Understand that true creativity requires both the capacity to generate many ideas and the capacity to effectively filter them, consciously managing these opposing processes for optimal innovation.
When developing new ideas, avoid getting stuck in a middle ground; instead, dedicate distinct periods to being brutally bold (offense) and then brutally pragmatic (defense) to allow each aspect to fully develop.
Actively choose who to seek feedback from and how to interpret their criticism, prioritizing granular, specific feedback over summary judgments to improve ideas effectively.
When receiving high-level or unspecific criticism, lean into the discomfort, swallow your instinct to push back, and patiently ask follow-up questions to get to the specific underlying concerns.
When building habits, aim for daily consistency rather than intermittent frequency, as removing the daily choice of whether to perform the action significantly reduces friction and makes the habit easier to maintain.
Establish a ’low bar’ for habit completion (e.g., just showing up to the gym, writing 50 words) to ensure consistency, recognizing that the act of showing up is the victory, and often leads to doing more.
When founding or leading productive endeavors, consciously ask how you can make yourself obsolete by distilling, communicating, and teaching your essential contributions, which fosters organizational growth and personal development.
Overcome the ego-driven desire to be indispensable by articulating and communicating your unique skills and knowledge, allowing others to learn and improve upon them, which ultimately leads to your own growth.
When making decisions, consciously ask yourself about the ‘hidden alternatives’ or ‘consequences’ that are left out of your immediate mental frame, bringing them into consideration to make more informed choices.
Recognize that time’s value is not fixed but can be made more or less valuable based on your hedonic experience during its use, encouraging you to prioritize activities that maximize positive utility.
View time as a finite resource and strategically use money to create more time or optionality, rather than spending time solely to create more money, to enhance overall life quality.
Actively engage in ‘mental consumption’ of the valuable assets you’ve acquired (relationships, experiences, achievements) by regularly reflecting on and cherishing them, rather than just acquiring and hoarding them.
Write emails to your future self (e.g., three months or a year from now) detailing your current thoughts and feelings, as this provides a ‘wormhole’ to your past self and offers surprising insights into your mental evolution.
Take responsibility for intentionally creating mental habits that foster positive experiences, such as nostalgic moments, rather than passively waiting for them to happen spontaneously.
Continuously keep a new idea or concept ’top of mind’ and actively look for its instantiation in the world around you, treating it like a ‘scavenger hunt’ to deepen understanding and activate new connections.
When learning a new idea, initially allow yourself to ‘overfit’ by seeing it everywhere, as this helps the new concept gain activation and compete with existing, highly active ideas in your mind.
Evaluate ideas not just by their recognition capacity (seeing them in the world) but by their ‘generation capacity,’ meaning how much they open doors to further questions, ideas, and actionable steps.
Dedicate time to simply notice and become aware of your own mental processes, as this practice can generate new questions and insights about your behavior and thinking patterns.
Identify situations with asymmetric risk-reward profiles where a small, inevitable cost can provide significant protection against a low-probability, high-impact negative event, such as stocking up on essentials.
Develop confidence in your ability to make ‘mostly in’ bets when the future becomes clearer, as this trust allows for greater patience and effectiveness in the positioning phase.
Actively track and record the optionality you create in your professional and personal life, treating it like a ‘hidden balance sheet’ to better visualize your long-term assets and the true costs of extinguishing options.
Leverage technology and behavioral science to gain highly personalized and contextualized actionable insights about your own life, moving beyond general self-help to understand your specific behaviors and patterns.
Regularly ask trusted friends or colleagues, ‘What do you know about me that I don’t know about myself?’ to uncover your blind spots and gain valuable external perspectives for personal growth.
Embrace the increasing availability of ‘objective tape’ (data and recordings) in your professional life, using it for self-coaching and interpretation, potentially with a human guide, to identify blind spots and improve performance.
Recognize that knowledge creation is a two-way street between academia and practical application; actively seek to understand both sides to contribute more effectively and stay at the frontier of your field.
Before forming or expressing an opinion, strive to understand and articulate the opposing viewpoint better than its proponents, ensuring your convictions are well-grounded and not based on surface-level information.
Practice giving specific, detailed feedback (positive or negative) to others, as this skill is transferable and improves your ability to receive granular criticism yourself.