Advice for a Younger Me

October 10, 2025

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What follows is a list of advice I wish I had heard when I was younger, and things I think are generally useful. If it's useful to at least one person reading, then I'm happy. I will try to keep this list updated. In no particular order:

What's worth doing is worth doing well.

Your only limit is what you think you can't do.

Be delusional about things you can control, and pragmatic about the rest.

Document things for posterity.

Try to learn something from everyone you meet.

Don't give your time to those that won't respect it.

Trying to predict long-term outcomes is a futile endeavor; there's too much variance. Make locally optimal choices, and trust that it will work out.

It's better to be excellent at one thing than good at a lot of things.

Your health comes above everything else.

Your brain is a muscle, so do things that require you to think deeply.

Asking good questions is a skill, but you can improve by first determining what you want to learn from someone, and asking lots of questions.

Your brain compresses time when your life is monotonous, so expose yourself to new experiences often.

Be genuinely curious about people.

Be the person who reaches out.

You are the average of the closest people to you (this includes content you consume).

A week is 2% of the year. Make every second count, whether you're working effectively or relaxing effectively.

Ask for what you want, you'd be surprised how often you'll get it.

If you want people to like you and talk to you, you need to be interesting.

If you want to be interesting, do interesting things.

Learning means making mistakes and updating your understanding very quickly, for many reptitions.

Writing is thinking.

If you want to be better at thinking, write more.

If you want to get better at writing, write more (and also read).

If you want to be better at organization, write more.

If you want to understand yourself better, write more.

You can realistically handle 1-2 intense things at one moment in time.

The great normalizer is hard work over time.

You're not dumb, you just lack the prerequisites

Intuition is simply doing related things so many times that you can compose and extrapolate to new scenarios.

If you say you'll do something, do it.

You can only get so far on raw willpower alone, create systems that allow you to easily do what you want.

Edited October 11, 2026