Family Treasure

1. Get a blank book

2. Ask each family member over 50 to write down life advice that their descendants in 500 yrs should know

3. Keep passing it down

4. You now have a family treasure that gets more useful over time.

Airplane Mode Hack

• “If you’re stuck on an annoying call, put your phone on airplane mode instead of hanging up.

• The other person sees “call failed” instead of “call ended”.

Reframing Your Day

• “Instead of feeling that you lost the day after a bad morning,

• Reframe each day as 4 quarters:

• morning

• midday

• afternoon

• evening

• If you blow one quarter, just get back on track for the next one.

Fail small, not big - Gretchen Rubin

Keeping your Cool

• “If someone insults you during a meeting, pretend like you didn’t hear them the first time.Politely ask them to repeat themselves. They’ll either repeat the insult and look rude or realize their mistake and apologize.”

Venting at Work

• Be careful who you vent to at work. Just because they listen, it doesn’t mean that they are your friend or have your best interests at heart.

If you ever want software online for free, don’t search for “free”.

• Search for “open source” to avoid limited trial versions and malware.

“e.g.” and “i.e.” are not the same

• e.g. = for example

• i.e. = in other words

Email Address Hack

• Add “+1”, “+2” before the @ in your email address

• Websites will register it as a new email, but still send mail to your normal address.

• Makes organizing accounts or free trials easy.

Example:

Primary: pavanyara@gmail(dot)com

pavanyara+1@gmail(dot)com

On Arguments

• “What proof would it take to change your mind?”. If they can’t give you an answer, then stop wasting your time.

Anger and Mistakes

• “Getting angry at people for making mistakes doesn’t teach them not to make mistakes. It teaches them to hide their mistakes.”

• Society is addicted to expectations, our emotional well-being is at risk if we always attach success to results
• Reflecting on his book, Think like a Monk, he prioritized and valued the shared effort put into it, you can’t control the result from there

• Lesson #2: You can’t always find joy and happiness but you can always find meaning and service

• “When you feel like you’re a part of the solution, the problem affects you less. When you’re trying to heal and help others, you heal yourself in the process.” – Jay Shetty

• There is a toxic positivity movement – everything is not always fine, solutions can require struggle

• Lesson #3: Remind yourself of the gifts brought by terrible situations (like Covid and quarantine)

• Jay reflects on his inability to travel and do various activities with his loved ones because of the pandemic. But during this period, he found that the absence of a busy life actually made his relationships deeper

• Lesson #4: We have to learn to celebrate people while they are alive

• Never opt out of an opportunity to say you love or miss your closest relationships – you’ll never regret it

• Always know where you stand with your loved ones

• Don’t let milestones dictate your outflow of love – don’t reserve personal communication

• Lesson #5: Look at how we are controlled by fear

• “If we’re controlled by fear, we’re in the mode of ignorance” – Jay Shetty
• Setting a goal alleviates the fear of failure; it helps you celebrate incremental success

• Lesson #6: Digital friendships can go deeper than you think

• Shared goals and passions can overpower boundaries set by physical distance

• Lesson #7: Anything can be done in 48 hours

• If you truly want something to happen, you will make it happen

• Lesson #8: There’s never a better time to learn than when you’re not sure what’s going on

• Therapy helps you make sense of your past and coaching helps you build your future

• Lesson #9: When you don’t get what you want, you get more of what you need

• When you’re too attached to what you want, you’ll never be open to what you need

• Lesson #10: Solitude is as necessary as community

• Energy preservation and internal solitude helps fuel your engagement in the community; they are not independent of each other

• Lesson #11: Invest in energy first, expertise second

• Energy is coachable, expertise will only get you so far

• Lesson #12: The mind has to be used by you for what you want to believe

• We can convince our minds to make the most of every situation
• If you can actively see the value in discomfort, you will maintain a much healthier mental state

• Deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other side
• If you do this, you’ll earn respect, trust, and love from others

• Acquire new wisdom daily

• You want to be a lifelong learner, only then will you be successful in life
• “You are not going to get very far in life based on what you already know”
• Warren Buffett is successful because he is a learning machine and spends about half his day reading

• Study history

• Be aware of what happened before you were alive to get a sense of where things are now
• Cicero is famous for saying, “A man who doesn’t know what happened before he was born goes through life like a child.”

• Learn the big ideas in your domain and other disciplines

• Then interweave them in a mental latticework so you can use them in everyday situations

• Live below your means

• Mozart spent more money than he made and lived a miserable life because of it

• Appeal to interest, not to reason

• If you want to persuade someone, appeal to their interests

• Avoid working under people who you don’t admire or want to be like

• You want to work under people you admire so you follow into their footsteps

• Have a checklist routine -If there’s a process or procedure you perform often, have a checklist of each step to avoid errors

• There are 2 types of knowledge:

• Planck knowledge: people who really understand the subject
• Chauffeur knowledge: people who can just repeat what they have heard

• If you want to become successful in a specific domain, you must have an intense interest in that area

• The only way to be really good in something is to be obsessed with it
• “An intense interest of the subject is indispensable if you are really going to excel”

• Have a lot of assiduity

• Sit down on your ass until you accomplish what you’re set out to do
• Look for partners that have an assiduity mindset

• View every mischance as an opportunity to behave well and learn something

• “Your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion”

• Live a life in which your heroes would be pleased with your actions

• Go through life anticipating trouble and be ready to perform adequately when it arrives

• Be a person people can trust

Mental Models

• Inversion: Reverse the idea or task to get a new perspective on it

• For instance, it’s hard to answer the question “what does it take to be successful in life?” but it’s easy to answer the question “what does it take to fail in life?”

• Iron prescription: Avoid extreme ideologies and don’t be entitled to have an opinion on a subject unless you can state the arguments against your position better than the people do who are supporting it

• Avoid self-serving bias: You should not believe that you are entitled to do whatever you want to do

• Avoid self-pity: Self-pit is disastrous behavior and should be avoided

• Avoid perverse incentives system: Structure your incentives incredibly carefully or you will get undesired outcomes

• Avoid perverse associations: Don’t work for people you don’t admire

• We are all subject to the control of authority figures so try and figure out how to work under people you really admire

Two out of these three have to trigger for me to say YES:

1. KNOWLEDGE: Will I learn something?

2. FUN: Is it fun?

3. MONEY: Is it financially worthwhile

Tim Ferriss: So time billionaires. What does that refer to?

Graham Duncan: I was listening to a guy introduced a speaker a while ago. And he was saying people don’t really understand the difference between billionaires and millionaires. He said a million seconds is like 11 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. And I remember that …

Tim Ferriss: Oh, shit. That’s a hell of a way to think about it.

Graham Duncan: Right?

Tim Ferriss: Wait. Can you say that one more time?

Graham Duncan: A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is slightly over 31 years. And I was thinking about – Tyler Cowen has a thing about cultural billionaires –

Tim Ferriss: Marginal Revolution?

Graham Duncan: Yeah. In one of his books, he talks about cultural billionaires. I feel like in our culture, we’re so obsessed, as a culture, with money. And we deify dollar billionaires in a way that – it’d be nice to co-opt that term the way Tyler Cowen did with cultural billionaires. And I was thinking of time billionaires that when I see, sometimes, 20-year-olds – the thought I had was they probably have two billion seconds left. But they aren’t relating to themselves as time billionaires. And I was thinking about how if you could – what would Rupert Murdoch, who’s worth $20 billion – he’s 87 years old. What would he pay if he could take the next five years of someone’s 20-year-old healthy body, mind, etc.? And for that 20-year-old, how would they price it? Because I was thinking at various points of my career, I might have sold the next five years for something.

And over time, my pricing has gone vertical because the next five years, if I were to lose – and the key to this question is that you can’t sell the five at the end of your life. You gotta sell them right now. I don’t know how I’d price it because my kids are of a certain age that they’ll never be again. But I don’t know that I live every day that way. But I aspire to. So I was trying to capture – I heard Tim Urban on your podcast. And I started reading his stuff. And I find his writing style and the topics he is interested in just amazing. He has this concept of life calendar. And I bought his life calendar. He sells it as a poster. And what he does is he puts a week – he does a circle for each week. So he has 52 circles on the horizontal and then 90 rows so that you can see a 90-year life in weeks. And what’s startling about the picture – again, to this question of how long is a billion seconds – is how short it actually is.

1. The ability to empathize with people who disagree with you is one of the most underrated skills. Rather than asking, “Why would someone think that?” you’ll get farther asking, “What have they experienced in life that I haven’t that would cause them to think that?”

2. Peoples’ desire to have an opinion far exceeds the number of things that need to be opined on. “I don’t know” is a phrase that should be praised for its honesty, not belittled for its detachment.

3. Intelligence is great, but it’s easily muffled by four things: Ego, the inability to change your mind, the inability to communicate with others, and the unwillingness to compromise with a team.

4. Psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman once said, “The idea that what you don’t see might refute everything you believe just doesn’t occur to us.” Take this seriously and you realize that few things matter more than being open-minded and surrounding yourself with people from different backgrounds and experiences.

5. Past success always seem easier than it was, because you now know how the story ends, and you can’t unremember what you know today, when trying to remember how you felt in the past.

6. Learning how to lose gracefully, without being ruined and while learning something new can be far more valuable than learning how to be right.

7. Your skill isn’t that important. What matters is your skill relative to your competitors. This is as obvious as it is overlooked – especially in investing, when you often don’t really know who your competitors are.

8. The coworkers I’ve gotten the best work done with are rarely the smartest or the most experienced, but the nicest and easiest to work with. Emotional intelligence can be so much more important than book intelligence. I wish they’d teach this in school.

9. There’s often a negative correlation between experience and humility. The more experience you gain, the more you see how less precision and more room for error is vital in a game where we overestimate skill and underestimate luck.

10. Most complicated things have a simple explanation. If you can’t understand something when you were the intended audience, the person who wrote it is either bad at communicating or intentionally deceptive.

11. Expectations can change faster than outcomes, so the successful businesses, investors and people are often in some state of, “Eh, whatever.”

12. The people who add the most to financial journalism are those who would be writing the same stuff even if no one were reading. They just love what they do, and passion is more powerful than a profit motive. This is true in many fields. The number of people on the Forbes Richest list who “were never in it for the money” is quite high.

• Learn how to learn from those you disagree with, or even offend you. See if you can find the truth in what they believe.

• Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.

• Always demand a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. It prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.

• Don’t be afraid to ask a question that may sound stupid because 99% of the time everyone else is thinking of the same question and is too embarrassed to ask it.

• Being able to listen well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love keep asking them “Is there more?”, until there is no more.

• A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier.

• Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.

• Treating a person to a meal never fails, and is so easy to do. It’s powerful with old friends and a great way to make new friends.

• Don’t trust all-purpose glue.

• Reading to your children regularly will bond you together and kickstart their imaginations.

• Never use a credit card for credit. The only kind of credit, or debt, that is acceptable is debt to acquire something whose exchange value is extremely likely to increase, like in a home. The exchange value of most things diminishes or vanishes the moment you purchase them. Don’t be in debt to losers.

• Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.

• Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence to be believed.

• Don’t be the smartest person in the room. Hangout with, and learn from, people smarter than yourself. Even better, find smart people who will disagree with you.

• Rule of 3 in conversation. To get to the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they just said. Then again, and once more. The third time’s answer is close to the truth.

• Don’t be the best. Be the only.

• Everyone is shy. Other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them, they are waiting for you to send them an email, they are waiting for you to ask them on a date. Go ahead.

• Don’t take it personally when someone turns you down. Assume they are like you: busy, occupied, distracted. Try again later. It’s amazing how often a second try works.

• The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth, to flossing.

• Promptness is a sign of respect.

• When you are young spend at least 6 months to one year living as poor as you can, owning as little as you possibly can, eating beans and rice in a tiny room or tent, to experience what your “worst” lifestyle might be. That way any time you have to risk something in the future you won’t be afraid of the worst case scenario.

• Trust me: There is no “them”.

• The more you are interested in others, the more interesting they find you. To be interesting, be interested.

• Optimize your generosity. No one on their deathbed has ever regretted giving too much away.

• To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.

• The Golden Rule will never fail you. It is the foundation of all other virtues.

• If you are looking for something in your house, and you finally find it, when you’re done with it, don’t put it back where you found it. Put it back where you first looked for it.

• Saving money and investing money are both good habits. Small amounts of money invested regularly for many decades without deliberation is one path to wealth.

• To make mistakes is human. To own your mistakes is divine. Nothing elevates a person higher than quickly admitting and taking personal responsibility for the mistakes you make and then fixing them fairly. If you mess up, fess up. It’s astounding how powerful this ownership is.

• Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

• You can obsess about serving your customers/audience/clients, or you can obsess about beating the competition. Both work, but of the two, obsessing about your customers will take you further.

• Show up. Keep showing up. Somebody successful said: 99% of success is just showing up.

• Separate the processes of creation from improving. You can’t write and edit, or sculpt and polish, or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgement.

• If you are not falling down occasionally, you are just coasting.

• Perhaps the most counter-intuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you’ll get. Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.

• Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.

• This is true: It’s hard to cheat an honest man.

• When an object is lost, 95% of the time it is hiding within arm’s reach of where it was last seen. Search in all possible locations in that radius and you’ll find it.

• You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.

• If you lose or forget to bring a cable, adapter or charger, check with your hotel. Most hotels now have a drawer full of cables, adapters and chargers others have left behind, and probably have the one you are missing. You can often claim it after borrowing it.

• Hatred is a curse that does not affect the hated. It only poisons the hater. Release a grudge as if it was a poison.

• There is no limit on better. Talent is distributed unfairly, but there is no limit on how much we can improve what we start with.

• Be prepared: When you are 90% done any large project (a house, a film, an event, an app) the rest of the myriad details will take a second 90% to complete.

• When you die you take absolutely nothing with you except your reputation.

• Before you are old, attend as many funerals as you can bear, and listen. Nobody talks about the departed’s achievements. The only thing people will remember is what kind of person you were while you were achieving.

• For every dollar you spend purchasing something substantial, expect to pay a dollar in repairs, maintenance, or disposal by the end of its life.

• Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It’s the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows.

• When crisis and disaster strike, don’t waste them. No problems, no progress.

• On vacation go to the most remote place on your itinerary first, bypassing the cities. You’ll maximize the shock of otherness in the remote, and then later you’ll welcome the familiar comforts of a city on the way back.

• When you get an invitation to do something in the future, ask yourself: would you accept this if it was scheduled for tomorrow? Not too many promises will pass that immediacy filter.

• Don’t say anything about someone in email you would not be comfortable saying to them directly, because eventually they will read it.

• If you desperately need a job, you are just another problem for a boss; if you can solve many of the problems the boss has right now, you are hired. To be hired, think like your boss.

• Art is in what you leave out.

• Acquiring things will rarely bring you deep satisfaction. But acquiring experiences will.

• Rule of 7 in research. You can find out anything if you are willing to go seven levels. If the first source you ask doesn’t know, ask them who you should ask next, and so on down the line. If you are willing to go to the 7th source, you’ll almost always get your answer.

• How to apologize: Quickly, specifically, sincerely.

• Don’t ever respond to a solicitation or a proposal on the phone. The urgency is a disguise.

• When someone is nasty, rude, hateful, or mean with you, pretend they have a disease. That makes it easier to have empathy toward them which can soften the conflict.

• Eliminating clutter makes room for your true treasures.

• You really don’t want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person.

• Experience is overrated. When hiring, hire for aptitude, train for skills. Most really amazing or great things are done by people doing them for the first time.

• A vacation + a disaster = an adventure.

• Buying tools: Start by buying the absolute cheapest tools you can find. Upgrade the ones you use a lot. If you wind up using some tool for a job, buy the very best you can afford.

• Learn how to take a 20-minute power nap without embarrassment.

• Following your bliss is a recipe for paralysis if you don’t know what you are passionate about. A better motto for most youth is “master something, anything”. Through mastery of one thing, you can drift towards extensions of that mastery that bring you more joy, and eventually discover where your bliss is.

• I’m positive that in 100 years much of what I take to be true today will be proved to be wrong, maybe even embarrassingly wrong, and I try really hard to identify what it is that I am wrong about today.

• Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist you don’t have to ignore all the many problems we create; you just have to imagine improving our capacity to solve problems.

• The universe is conspiring behind your back to make you a success. This will be much easier to do if you embrace this pronoia.

Man lives by time. Inventing the future has been his favorite game of escape. We think that changes in ourselves can come about in time, that order in ourselves can be built up little by little, added to day by day. But time doesn’t bring order or peace, so we must stop thinking in terms of gradualness. This means that there is no tomorrow for us to be peaceful in. We have to be orderly on the instant.

It is only then [when the mind is completely still] that the mind is free because it is no longer desiring anything; it is no longer seeking; it is no longer pursuing a goal, an ideal—which are all the projections of a conditioned mind. And if you ever come to that understanding, in which there can be no self-deception, then you will find that there is a possibility of the coming into being of that extraordinary thing called creativity.

Some heuristics to make decisions. Please add your own and challenge these.

1. Schedule time to think.

2. When considering options, watch your heart rate.

3. If all things are equal take the road less travelled (i.e., hard decisions easy life, easy decisions, hard life.)

4. No decision is sometimes the best path. If you can’t get comfortable deciding, the answer is to explore the tension not force a decision.

5. Instead of fight or flight, gather info. Think about what you can do to get the information you need to make a better decision.

6. Saying no is more important than saying yes.

7. Use time to filter people and ideas. The majority of the time you don’t need to be an early adopter.

8. Look for win-win decisions. If someone absolutely has to lose, you’re likely not thinking hard enough or you need to make structural/environmental changes.

9. When stuck work back to first principles and build up.

10. The rule of 5. Think about what the decision looks like 5 days, 5 weeks, 5 months, 5 years, 5 decades.

11. Let other people’s hindsight become your foresight.

12. Avoid things the best version of yourself will regret.

13. Ask what information would cause you to change your mind. If you don’t have that information, find it. If you do, track is religiously.

14. Focus on collecting feedback to calibrate your ability to make this decision.

15. If you’re outside your circle of competence and still have to make a decision, ask experts HOW they would make the same decision not WHAT they would decide.

16. Lean into (not away from) what’s making you uncomfortable.

17. Put things on a reversibility/consequence grid —irreversible and high consequence decisions likely require more time. The rest of the time you can usually go fast.

18. Identify the 2-3 variables that really matter and break them down to unearth assumptions and get the team on the same page.

19. Fast decisions should never be rushed.

20. Too much information increases confidence not accuracy.

21. Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.

22. Walk around the decision from the perspective of everyone implicated (shareholders, employees, regulators, customers, partners, etc.)

23. Some warnings signs that increase the likelihood of stupidity are (environment, the pace of change, rushing, physically tired, hyper-focus, authority, consensus-seeking behavior).

24. Own the decision. (If you make decisions by comittiee have one person sign their name to the decision - someone needs to own it.)

25. Decisions are nothing without execution.

26. Ask yourself “and then what?”

Suddenly you are closer to the 2nd half of your life than than ever. You hair starts turning gray and you are less confident of things around you - career,friends, family and society at general. And, you get to think deeply about people and things that you experience at times. You no longer tend to take things for granted - health, family, friends, career, relations, hobbies.

In this context, chanced up on these three articles today:

Life is Short

Source: PG’s popular essay on Life

Relentlessly prune bullshit, don’t wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That’s what you do when life is short.

If you ask yourself what you spend your time on that’s bullshit, you probably already know the answer. Unnecessary meetings, pointless disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people’s mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.

As I’ve written before, one byproduct of technical progress is that things we like tend to become more addictive. Which means we will increasingly have to make a conscious effort to avoid addictions—to stand outside ourselves and ask “is this how I want to be spending my time?”

One heuristic for distinguishing stuff that matters is to ask yourself whether you’ll care about it in the future. Fake stuff that matters usually has a sharp peak of seeming to matter. That’s how it tricks you. The area under the curve is small, but its shape jabs into your consciousness like a pin. The things that matter aren’t necessarily the ones people would call “important.” Having coffee with a friend matters. You won’t feel later like that was a waste of time.

If life is short, we should expect its shortness to take us by surprise. And that is just what tends to happen. You take things for granted, and then they’re gone. You think you can always write that book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then you realize the window has closed. The saddest windows close when other people die. Their lives are short too.

The usual way to avoid being taken by surprise by something is to be consciously aware of it. Cultivate a habit of impatience about the things you most want to do. Don’t wait before climbing that mountain or writing that book or visiting your mother. You don’t need to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn’t wait. Just don’t wait.

I can think of two more things one does when one doesn’t have much of something: try to get more of it, and savor what one has. Both make sense here. How you live affects how long you live. Most people could do better. Me among them.

The Tail End

Source: Tim Urban’s Essay - The Tail End

Instead of measuring your life in units of time, you can measure it in activities or events. If I’m 35, then assuming that the average Indian life is about 70 years old, then I’ve about another 30-35 years left to live - which means:

• in sports parlance, about 9 cricket world cups, 9 football world cups, 9 olympics left

• if I travel a week every year, then I’d have been to 35 different places in rest of the life time.

• if I spend 5 days a week working for another 10 years, then I have about 2500 working days left.

• if I spend 2 days a month for another 10 years with parents, then I have about 240 days to spend time with them

  When you look at that reality, you realize that despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life.

The three takeaways are:

1. Living in the same place as the people you love matters.

2. Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you—not by unconscious inertia.

3. Quality time matters. If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.

The days are long but the decades are short

Source: Sam Altman’s reflections on turning 30

About 36 life nuggets from Sama covering life, family, friends, career, health, money, hiring and more…

1. Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your priority list. Prefer a handful of truly close friends to a hundred acquaintances. Don’t lose touch with old friends.

2. Life is not a dress rehearsal—this is probably it. Make it count. Time is extremely limited and goes by fast. Do what makes you happy and fulfilled. Don’t spend time trying to maintain relationships with people you don’t like, and cut negative people out of your life.

3. How to succeed: pick the right thing to do (this is critical and usually ignored), focus, believe in yourself (especially when others tell you it’s not going to work), develop personal connections with people that will help you, learn to identify talented people, and work hard. It’s hard to identify what to work on because original thought is hard.

4. On work: it’s difficult to do a great job on work you don’t care about. And it’s hard to be totally happy/fulfilled in life if you don’t like what you do for your work. Work very hard—a surprising number of people will be offended that you choose to work hard—but not so hard that the rest of your life passes you by. Aim to be the best in the world at whatever you do professionally. Even if you miss, you’ll probably end up in a pretty good place. Figure out your own productivity system—don’t waste time being unorganized, working at suboptimal times, etc. Don’t be afraid to take some career risks, especially early on. Most people pick their career fairly randomly—really think hard about what you like, what fields are going to be successful, and try to talk to people in those fields.

5. On money: Whether or not money can buy happiness, it can buy freedom, and that’s a big deal. Also, lack of money is very stressful. In almost all ways, having enough money so that you don’t stress about paying rent does more to change your wellbeing than having enough money to buy your own jet.

6. Talk to people more. Read more long content and less tweets. Watch less TV. Spend less time on the Internet.

7. Don’t waste time. Most people waste most of their time, especially in business.

8. Have clear goals for yourself every day, every year, and every decade.

9. However, as valuable as planning is, if a great opportunity comes along you should take it. Don’t be afraid to do something slightly reckless. One of the benefits of working hard is that good opportunities will come along, but it’s still up to you to jump on them when they do.

10. Go out of your way to be around smart, interesting, ambitious people. Work for them and hire them (in fact, one of the most satisfying parts of work is forging deep relationships with really good people). Try to spend time with people who are either among the best in the world at what they do or extremely promising but totally unknown. It really is true that you become an average of the people you spend the most time with

11. Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it. Get rid of distractions in your life. Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap you don’t like doing pile up and take your mental cycles, especially in your work life.

12. Keep your personal burn rate low. This alone will give you a lot of opportunities in life.

13. If you think you’re going to regret not doing something, you should probably do it. Regret is the worst, and most people regret far more things they didn’t do than things they did do.

14. Exercise. Eat well. Sleep. Get out into nature with some regularity.

15. Go out of your way to help people. Few things in life are as satisfying. Be nice to strangers. Be nice even when it doesn’t matter.

16. Tell your parents you love them more often. Go home and visit as often as you can.

17. This too shall pass.

18. Learn voraciously.

19. Do new things often. This seems to be really important. Not only does doing new things seem to slow down the perception of time, increase happiness, and keep life interesting, but it seems to prevent people from calcifying in the ways that they think. Aim to do something big, new, and risky every year in your personal and professional life.

20. Don’t screw people and don’t burn bridges. Pick your battles carefully.

21. Forgive people.

22. Don’t chase status. Status without substance doesn’t work for long and is unfulfilling.

23. Be grateful and keep problems in perspective. Don’t complain too much. Don’t hate other people’s success (but remember that some people will hate your success, and you have to learn to ignore it).

24. Be a doer, not a talker.

25. Given enough time, it is possible to adjust to almost anything, good or bad. Humans are remarkable at this.

26. Think for a few seconds before you act. Think for a few minutes if you’re angry.

27. Don’t judge other people too quickly. You never know their whole story and why they did or didn’t do something. Be empathetic.

28. The days are long but the decades are short.

Some of these key life lessons include: 

1. Resolve all conflicts before you go

People carry so much baggage, unnecessarily, all through their life only wanting to drop it at the very end of their journey. The trick lies not in not having conflicts but in resolving them as soon as one can,

2. Simplicity is the truth of life

People stop eating indulgent food when they know they are going to go. The understanding that dawns on many people in their final days is that they should’ve lived a simple life. They regret that the most.

3. Filter out people’s bad traits

If you focus on the good qualities though, you spend that time getting to know them better or, maybe even, loving them.

4. Be willing to seek help from others

We must help others, but more importantly, have the courage to seek help when we’re in need. Every person in the world knows more than us in some respect. And their knowledge can help us, only if we’re open to it.

5. Find beauty in simple things

Pause to appreciate small things and find beauty in them. If minds are pre-occupied with “seemingly” more important things,  it is hard to find joy in small things.

6. Acceptance is liberation

Accept the situation so you are free to think what you want to do about it and how. Acceptance will liberate you and empower you.

7. Accepting everyone as the same makes service easier

The day you treat everyone the same is the day you breathe light and worry less about who might feel offended or not. Make your job easier.

8. If/When you find your purpose, do something about it

Take action on what truly matters.

9. Habits become values

Building good habits happens over time, with practice. “It’s like building a muscle; you have to keep at it everyday.”

10. Choose what you want to learn

The key lesson here is to be mindful of choosing what you deeply feel will be of value to you.

11. You don’t break ties with people; you break ties with the thought they produce

The divorce is with the thought and never with the person. To understand that is to unburden yourself from being bitter and revengeful.

12. 10 percent of what you earn should be kept aside for dharma

keep 10 percent of your income for goodwill.

/via @Project_Fuel (Source)

Reflections On Reaching Fifty

I was born in April of 1966, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Soon after, my parents and grandparents all lost personal freedom simply for being intellectuals. So I spent most of my childhood rotating between adopted families of peasants and coalminers. From that “promising” start, looking back, I’m amazed as to the long journey that I have taken to bring me here today in America.

I could never image that life would turn out this way. It takes countless bridges, roads, means of transportation, and years of effort to travel this far. The countless people in my life — kind-hearted strangers, well-wishers, mentors, partners, friends — are my bridges, roads, transportations for getting here. Without your help, friendship, and constant encouragement, I simply couldn’t travel this far. So on my fiftieth birthday, my heart is filled with gratitude to all of you, all of my friends, here and elsewhere. From the bottom of my heart — thank you thank you and thank you!!!

If I have anything to do with that journey, it is simply that I took it. Woody Allen is right, 90% of success is to show up. At various stages in my life, I could have stopped, or took the long rest. For some reason, my heart told me otherwise. I just kept going. Half of the time, I wasn’t sure where I was heading. The other half I was probably taking the wrong turns. No matter.

But I was on high alert to correct mistakes along the way. I was careful not to be influenced by emotions that I know are poisonous and counter-productive to the journey I want to take; things like envy, resentment, hatred, jealousy, greed and self-pity. I certainly wasn’t born with immunity to this side of human nature. In fact, my early life experiences may require me to work even harder than others to guard against these human vulnerabilities. And when I did fall for their prey, or when I took a wrong turn, I was fortunate to be able to correct them quickly. Socrates was right, unexamined life is not worth living, certainly not living well. Every once in a while, I would sit down alone to figure out where I might be wrong. Sometimes, what is wrong today is what was right in the past. As circumstances change, so should we. In my experience, every five to ten years or so, I had to change so much of myself that at times it felt like almost a reinvention. I’ve been blessed with the faculties of rationality that help me to form the habit of self-examination. And when I fail in self-examination, I’m even more blessed to have some strong friends who can point out my blind spots. I would have been lost in life’s various mazes if I had not gotten that help.

So through the tumbling and zig-zags, I kept going while at all time insisting on sitting in the driver’s seat. It is my life and my journey after all.

And now that I have made it through the first half, it is time to examine again for the second half.

According to Confucius, at fifty, one should know his purpose in life mandated by Heaven above. In other words, what your life was meant to be. Having been very close to fatality a few times in my life, forgive me if I say I actually believe in Confucius’s dictate. Having done relatively well in additions in life, I’m slowly learning the art of subtraction and focus.

I will fail in a lot of professions. For example, I won’t be good at ballet or basketball for that matter. My temperament and experiences prepared me well for a career in investment. I was extremely lucky to be introduced into the field by the greatest investor who ever lived when I accidentally stepped into a lecture by Warren Buffett at Columbia nearly 25 years ago. And it was even more magical 13 years ago when Charlie Munger became my investment partner, mentor and life-long friend. To this day, I don’t know to what I would attribute this extreme fortune. It is something even the wildest imagination or the best fiction could not conjure.

Now that I have compiled a record of my own for over twenty years, still enjoy the game even better than when I started, I think I will simply continue. I’m curious to see how long I can follow the great record set by my teachers, Warren and Charlie, that is by now well over fifty years. Not for the size of asset under management, not for the fees, just keep a score card the way a golfer would after each round and after a life-long career. So value investing is likely a life-long pursuit for me.

Having lived my life so far nearly evenly divided between the US and China, I’ve come to learn something unique about the two countries, cultures and myself. For years, I struggled to fit my own identity into both, often with poor results. It is as if the two cultures ran in different parts of my body — constantly fighting each other for supremacy. But I have learned tremendously in the process. In my 40’s, the two cultures finally came to peace with one other inside me, and I have come to identify myself as both 100% Chinese and 100% American simultaneously. And better still 1+1 is greater than 2. Through the culture lenses of both, I now see a few things neither Chinese nor Americans can see easily. That gives me a unique perspective of looking at both countries, and therefore able to tell one’s story better to the other, and then some more. Indeed, I think 1+1=11 in this case. Therefore, I feel it is both a duty and a pleasure to do so for the country and people that I love most. So this will be another thing I will focus on the second half of my life.

I have three lovely children. They are beautiful, talented and kind-hearted. I’m most proud of them. I love them so much that I will never want to burden them with a large amount of inherited wealth. Instead, I’d love to have my girls join Eva and me in giving responsibly to make the world a better place. In particularly, we want to focus on things I have some knowledge of and care deeply about — to make US and China understand each other better and to make quality education more available to deserved young people.

Lastly, reaching 50 probably makes me closer to the end than to the beginning. Regarding age, my favorite quote comes from Norman Lear. At 94 he is still active in so many different things, collecting fans who are in their 80’s, 60’s and all the way down to the 20’s. I once ask him how old does he think of himself. Without missing a beat, he said, “I’m always the same age as the people I talk to.” Now, that is a cool answer! Ever since, I’ve been paying close attention to who I am talking to ;-)  Now that I’ve officially crossed the half time line, I really need to make more young friends as my new teachers so that I can stay fresh.

So my friends, may we all grow wiser with age and younger at heart always.

[source:valuewalk]

Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.

So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything other than galloping neurosis?

The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all, or not with tangible goals, anyway. It would take reams of paper to develop this subject to fulfillment. God only knows how many books have been written on “the meaning of man” and that sort of thing, and god only knows how many people have pondered the subject. (I use the term “god only knows” purely as an expression.)* There’s very little sense in my trying to give it up to you in the proverbial nutshell, because I’m the first to admit my absolute lack of qualifications for reducing the meaning of life to one or two paragraphs.

• Hunter S. Thompson

(via Justine Musk’s Quora response, retrieved April 22, 2015)

Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant. 

—Viktor Frankl

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

• Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

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Life and How to Survive It

I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.

My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.

On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable.

Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.

And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.

Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.

The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning.

You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process” and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.

The good news is that they’re wrong.

The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.

I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.

You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.

Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper. 

Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.

I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.  After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.  Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.

If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.

What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

** ** Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.

What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over. Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.

The most important is this: do not work.

Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.

Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.

There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan “Arbeit macht frei” was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction - probably a sports journalist.

So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.

Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating.

There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.

I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your

role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.

I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work - the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we cal happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.

You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.

You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

You’re going to have a busy life. Thank goodness there’s no life expectancy.

~Joan Didio

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

~Rudyard Kipling

The Labyrinth Of Solitude | Life And Thought In Mexico by Ocavio Paz

When I compare What I have lost with what I have gained, What I have missed with what attained, Little room do I find for pride.

I am aware How many days have been idly spent; How like an arrow the good intent Has fallen short or been turned aside.

But who shall dare To measure loss and gain in this wise? Defeat may be victory in disguise; The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.~Henry Longfellow

“The rules of the finite game may not change; the rules of an infinite game must change. Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries. Finite players are serious; infinite games are playful. A finite player plays to be powerful; an infinite player plays with strength. A finite player consumes time; an infinite player generates time. The finite player aims for eternal life; the infinite player aims for eternal birth. The choice is yours.”