Mental Marginalia

  1. One of the greatest tragedies in life is that you will always be loved more than you will ever know. Someone in class finds your presence inviting and warm, even if you’ve only ever exchanged a few words with them—maybe none at all. Someone on the street loves your smile and it gets them down the next few streets. Someone you used to be friends with still wishes to fondly call your name. Someone you used to be friends with five years ago would give anything to be in the same room as you today. Someone who regularly comes into work is disappointed when you aren’t there to brighten their day. Someone missed you today. Someone noticed you were gone. Someone loves you when you’re there; someone loves you when you’re nowhere to be found at all. You think you have always disappeared when you’re no longer in the picture, but you’ve never left the frame.
  2. You’re not a loser. You just haven’t set a deadline for your goals. Most people don’t lack ambition, talent or resources. They lack urgency and speed. They tell themselves they have goals but don’t realize a goal without a deadline is a fantasy. Winners turn their fantasies into reality by setting deadlines for their goals. The English musician Brian Eno said, “Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.” Set a deadline for your goal and watch how fast you start winning.
  3. Be a lion. Lions work fast and decisively, then take a long rest without guilt. They don’t waste energy second guessing themselves—they strike hard when opportunity arises, then retreat to recover. Most people exhaust themselves in constant motion, mistaking being busy for progress. Lions know real results come from focused bursts of action followed by deep rest. When you work like a lion, you protect your energy for when it matters most. Work with intensity, rest with purpose, and you’ll have the stamina to win again and again.
  4. The critical process of data cleaning and validation should not be viewed as a brute-force effort to create a perfectly “pure” dataset. It is more accurately described as a nuanced statistical exercise in balancing the removal of demonstrable errors against the preservation of genuine, informative market phenomena.
  5. At least 80% of a New Yorker’s personality involves romanticizing an obscenely expensive third-world lifestyle.
  6. People are the ultimate shortcut. The guy you know from networking who works at a company and gets you a job. The woman you know who’s done what you want to do, so she has the best advice. The partner who refers tons of business to you for a small fee or just because he trusts you. The former boss who tells everyone how great you were when working for her. The former client who keeps recommending you to new prospects. Hard work is great, but if you want to get to your goals faster and easier, invest in your relationships. It’ll feel like nothing is happening at first. You might feel like that for months or years, even. Then it’ll change everything.
  7. Lemony Snicket’s advice on how to write a nice thank-you note: Do not start with the thank you. Start with any other sentence. If you first say, “Thank you for the nice sweater,” you can’t imagine what to write next. Say, “It was so wonderful to come home from school to find this nice sweater. Thank you for thinking of me on Arbor Day.” Then you’re done.
  8. Our greatest weariness comes from work not done.
  9. If you want to win, do what most people hate doing. Wake up early. Work on the thing you least want to work on, right now. Eat clean almost every meal. Have hard conversations. Take the hard path in every situation. No complaining. No procrastination. Pretty soon, you’ll be winning.
  10. Maximising your physical attractiveness is the fastest way to improve your life in every single way. Not everyone is born with good genetics but anyone can do something to improve their level of attractiveness. You can go to the gym, clean up your diet, smile, upgrade your wardrobe, improve your posture and learn social skills. Maximising your physical looks is one of the few shortcuts in life that is so simple yet so impactful that doing it feels like collecting free money.
  11. One of the simplest ways to improve every aspect of your life is to exercise. This could mean joining a gym, playing pickleball or taking up jogging. The kind of exercise you choose doesn’t matter as long as it’s challenging and something you enjoy. The more you exercise, the more high energy you become, the clearer your mind, the stronger your confidence and the more people want to be around you. Being physically active is one of the few habits that has all upsides, zero downsides and anyone can do.
  12. When the individual is distraught by cares or pleasantry, or tortured by the violence of his wishes and desires, the genius in him is enchained and cannot move. It is only when care and desire are silent that the air is free enough for genius to live in it. It is then that the bonds of matter are cast aside, and the pure spirit—the pure, knowing subject—remains. Hence, if a man has any genius, let him guard himself from pain, keep care at a distance, and limit his desires; but those of them which he cannot suppress let him satisfy to the full. This is the only way in which he will make the best use of his rare existence, to his own pleasure and the world’s profit.
  13. Be the person that wins in silence. People that never achieve their goals love to talk about their plans but never execute. Instead, be the person that speaks with his hands not his mouth. Form a crystal clear vision of who you want to be and wake up every day with the sole intention of fulfilling that vision. Make it a habit to do the things you need to do without seeking approval from anyone else. Don’t brag about your wins. Keep it low profile and enjoy your life. When people get confused about how you became an “overnight success” just smile and nod. This is the way of the silent killer.
  14. Create the habit. That’s it. You’re not studying a new skill to turn it into a better career or successful business, you’re just studying. You’re not going to the gym to get super buff or healthy, you’re just going to the gym. Forget about your goal, even if you want it badly. Forget about performing at a high level, even if you know you can. Your only job is to become a person who has that habit. Nothing else matters.
  15. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in *Brave New World Revisited*, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”
  16. “If he writes her a few sonnets, he loves her. If he writes her 300 sonnets, he loves sonnets.”
  17. Adulthood is just a day-to-day struggle of losing more and more people, losing more and more things, losing more and more places, losing more and more memories, and not having enough time to grieve over loss. And the only antidote is to make an active effort to meet new people, try new things, go to new places, and take new experiences. Otherwise, adulthood is just a never-ending story of loss and grief over the absence of love.
  18. Stop sharing ideas. Start building them. Nobody cares about a company you want to found until you found it. Nobody cares if you think you’re gonna be a big success, they care after you do it. Nobody cares that you want to get fit until you’re in the gym. Get in the game and start winning a little bit. That’s when people will start to notice and care.
  19. One of the most profitable skills you can develop is simply being relentless. You show up every day. You do hard, hard work to get what you want. You recover from setbacks right away and try again quickly. You don’t take anything personally. You let nothing shake your commitment. You’d rather fail the rest of your life than give up. Almost nobody is like this. If you are, you’ll have a massive advantage.
  20. To be happy at home, said Johnson, is the end of all human endeavour. As long as we are thinking only of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and that all economics, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save in so far as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of spirit.
  21. The Centipede’s Dilemma: Ask a centipede which one of its hundred legs moves the fastest and it forgets how to move. Reflecting on what we normally do without thought ironically worsens performance. A culture of endless self-reflection, therapy, and navel gazing is eroding important life skills.
  22. “Prestigious” titles that are secretly low signal: Forbes 30u30, Any MBA, Investment Banking / Consulting, Amazon, UPenn, 80% of VC firms, 80% of PMs, “Co-founder @ Stealth Startup,” “Entrepreneur,” Tech Influencer.
  23. When it comes to friends, colleagues, family, or anyone else you know personally, however, just don’t give advice. You can answer practical questions safely if you know the answer, but when it comes to emotional angles, listen, sympathise, support, but don’t advise.
  24. We are always living in expectation of better things, while at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again. We look upon the present as something to be put up with while it lasts, and serving only as the way towards our goal. Hence most people, if they glance back when they come to the end of life, will find that all along they have been living *ad interim*: they will be surprised to find that the very thing they disregarded and let slip by unenjoyed was just their life—that is to say, it was the very thing in the expectation of which they lived. Of how many a man may it not be said that hope made a fool of him until he danced into the arms of death!
  25. The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
  26. And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
  27. One of literary history’s severest deadlines was successfully met by Dostoyevsky, who in a scant four months was forced to write an entire novel of approximately five hundred pages (*The Gambler*) while completing an equally long one (*Crime and Punishment*), or forfeit the rights to all his previous works to an unscrupulous publisher. (He dictated both books, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, to a stenographer who became his second wife.)
  28. When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago. — Nietzsche
  29. I think the most effective social shaming is done at Orangetheory. If you’ve never been: they put a livestream of everybody’s heart rate on a wall, and you look like an idiot if you slow down. The combination of shame and competitiveness hacks my brain, and I work out much harder than I’d do on my own.
  30. Be “boring.” Date one person and fully devote yourself to them. Go to sleep early and wake up early too. Eat a simple diet. Take walks. Do a good job at work. Spend most of your time hanging out with family at home. Don’t get locked in a routine you hate, but don’t think that you have to break way out from what most people typically do. The best lives are relatively uneventful. Peace will make you happier than fun.