Focus on personal happiness as the foundation for everything else, and the key to mental health is finding a resource to talk to, even if it feels awkward initially.
When starting to talk about mental health, expect it to be awkward and imprecise, but persist because, like any skill, it improves and becomes beneficial over time.
Engage in regular conversations with trusted individuals (partner, friends, therapists) as a primary method to maintain mental health and prevent reverting to unhealthy past behaviors.
Recognize that expressing emotions and talking about feelings is crucial for overall physical and mental health, as the body is a complex interaction of biological and psychological functions.
Recognize that personal and professional lives are deeply intertwined; achieving personal happiness is the fundamental pathway to making sense of and succeeding in all other aspects of life.
Actively identify and prioritize moments that bring profound personal happiness and contentment, such as spending time with loved ones, as these provide energy and perspective for other life challenges.
Avoid placing too much value on business success or external achievements as sources of “oh-wow” moments, as this can lead to unhappiness and distraction; instead, center on personal sources of joy for sustained energy.
Develop self-worth and comfort with your limitations, learning to love yourself despite them, as this process is crucial for happiness and is not correlated to money.
Recognize that imposter syndrome can be an overpowering, lifelong battle that requires an active and continuous process to confront and manage.
Find motivation by striving to do things that your younger self (e.g., 16 or 22 years old) would be proud of, rather than focusing on future self or deathbed reflections.
Strive to speak the truth all the time, as it resonates with people and can be valuable, especially when others feel constrained from being candid.
Understand that lying, even in subtle forms, can be a deep-seated coping mechanism that is ultimately corrosive to oneself.
Actively recalibrate your life and environment to enable yourself to be truthful as often as possible, even if it means saying uncomfortable things.
Practice openness and transparency with your children, as this helps maintain a connection to truthfulness and the goal of celebrating “oh-wow” moments in life.
Actively seek to feel part of a group or “pack” as it helps regulate self-worth, lifting it up in difficult moments and leading to better outcomes.
Cultivate relationships with people who deeply love and care about you, as they can provide valuable pattern recognition and feedback on your behaviors, helping you address blind spots without becoming defensive.
Use venting as a mechanism to release negative energy, reframe life events constructively, and approach problems with a healthier mindset and outlook.
Actively pursue both financial freedom (which can be learned and transferred) and personal happiness (an internal, iterative process unique to each individual) at the same time.
Understand that while money can provide freedom and liberation, it does not guarantee happiness, and pursuing happiness with wealth without being emotionally equipped can be more destructive than doing so without money.
Seek or build a community of like-minded individuals to learn, work, and help each other compound capital over the long term (5-20 years) to achieve financial freedom.
When seeking financial guidance or investment opportunities, look for individuals who act as principals (investing their own money alongside yours) rather than mere agents, as this aligns incentives.
Recognize that successful investing primarily involves fighting against your own psychological traps (panicking, overreacting, etc.) by clinically observing data and re-underwriting risk.
Create and adhere to a set of defined behavioral principles that specifically protect you from the detrimental aspects of your own psychology, as this is a winning strategy in investing.
Dedicate time to understanding yourself, including your blind spots and weaknesses, and then translate this self-knowledge into actionable, written guardrails that you commit to following.
Practice being a “keen observer of the present” by analyzing situations (like political elections or economic trends) in a reasonably unemotional and detached way to discern underlying realities beyond superficial differences.
Develop a plan to allocate capital (or resources) in alignment with the ideas and changes you want to see manifest in the world, effectively “voting with your dollars” to bring them to life.
Identify and invest in long-term trends like increasing productivity and ingenuity, as these are powerful drivers of wealth creation over decades.
When faced with uncertainty about future economic conditions (e.g., interest rates), identify and invest in sectors of the economy that are likely to benefit regardless of the direction of those changes.
Focus investments on high-growth companies, particularly in sectors that address fundamental human needs (e.g., healthcare, education, clean energy), as this strategy is likely to perform well over the long term.
As a CEO, prioritize reinvesting free cash flow back into the business to accelerate growth, rather than distributing it as dividends, to maximize long-term value for investors.
As financial orthodoxy is dismantled, include a small amount of uncorrelated assets (like Bitcoin) in your portfolio as a smart risk management strategy against volatility.
When evaluating individuals (e.g., CEOs), move beyond superficial questions to assess deeper qualities like integrity (through subtle, long-term observation) and mental agility (through open-ended conversations).
Cultivate a healthy mindset of trusting others and assuming their best intentions, but do so with reasonable guardrails, as this de-escalates mental stress and helps in observing true integrity over time.
To assess mental agility, especially in leadership roles, engage in open-ended conversations that allow individuals to reveal their thought processes and frameworks, rather than focusing on functional competence.
Don’t be afraid to ask seemingly “dumb” or random open-ended questions, as these can spark mentally agile individuals to reveal their unique frameworks and thought processes.
To truly understand a situation or an investment, allow yourself to be fully “seduced” by and believe the narrative of others, especially those with extreme opinions, to grasp all nuances, avoiding intellectual laziness that stops at the first confirmation.
Engage with people holding extreme opinions by being unoffensive and allowing yourself to be “seduced” by their viewpoints to learn, but always return to a neutral, opinion-less center afterward.
To process complex information and avoid getting caught up in extreme views, rely on an incredible team or trusted individuals whose anchoring principle is kindness and high integrity, as they can help de-escalate and ground your thoughts.
Engage in efforts to address climate change, not just for altruistic reasons, but also out of a selfish desire to preserve personal happiness and the environments that bring joy.
Approach climate solutions, such as carbon removal, as unemotional experiments that should be conducted to conclusively determine their effectiveness in mitigating negative impacts like hurricane season.
Challenge the business school dogma that redundancy is always waste, recognizing that hyper-efficiency can lead to a lack of resilience and a focus on short-term compensation over long-term value.
Advocate for governments to invest heavily in next-generation industries and be at the bleeding edge of critical future sectors, without the immediate need to generate profit, to propel societal advancement.
Recognize the importance of ambitious, long-term projects (like space exploration) that train people with high-level skills and create derivative industries, advocating for broad support beyond individual efforts.
Consider advocating for government policies like wiping out student debt in exchange for public service (e.g., joining a Peace Corps-like program) to productively allocate capital and foster community work.