"Tell the right stories about yourself."
I wake up feeling stiff and every morning repeat the "story" that I'm starting to feel old. However, I often ask my 83 year old dad if he experiences the same and he always says no.
Then last week my dad said, "you know I might, but I don't think about it". So this past week I just wake up and start moving and try not be aware of the minor pain from stiffness. It goes away quickly and I avoid telling myself "I am feeling old".
Why focus on something that doesn't serve you if you can tune it out.
'The don't sleep too much and reduce to 7h' is such a horrible take. It really depends on the ppl. It's possible to do all the positive things (having great wlb, workout regularly, eat the healthiest food) and some ppl just need to sleep 8-9 hours. This is self help's guru level of advice
> 5. Get in the habit of Fermi estimation, looking up key quantities, and using upper and lower bounds.
i cannot agree with this enough. there are so many people in my life (work and nonwork) that make vague statements (whether about proportions, predictions, or population) that are more directional than precise. this leads you to commit to actions than you then later backrationalize.
forcing yourself to make fermi estimates and upper/lower bounds helps you understand when your assumptions are wrong and change on a dime, avoiding sunk cost/commitment fallacy. but people are very uncomfortable when you make them put confidence intervals around their predictions.
it's hard for me to get past the sleep advice, it sounds misguided at best. Sure there are studies if you google oversleeping, they define it as sleeping over 9 hours a night and it sounds it usually is associated with low quality sleep. The core issue is what is causing low quality sleep, oversleeping is a symptom to compensate, and it doesn't sound like 7 to 7 and a half hours is the sweet spot, it's 7 to 9 according to the National Sleep Foundation Guidelines[1].
Last advice, have no morality.
Because author of this blog works at Palantir, lol.
Advice that worked for me:
Everything in moderation, including moderation.
Extremes fuck up a lot of shit, to the point of causing irreversible damage. Drinking is fine, but 10 beers a day? Yeah nah and so the list goes on.
"Most people’s mental models of energy are flawed: they think there’s a ‘tank’ of energy that gets depleted as you spend it. This may be roughly true for physical energy, but mental energy is different: spending mental energy on things that you consider productive or important gives you more mental energy for other things: a positive feedback loop."
^^ I had myself believing this "flawed" belief. I like this excerpt.
Great article. If I may presume to add something, I think point 6 (strongest possible counterargument) is a special case of a more general idea: thinking strategically. I also learned that from chess BTW. Whether you're talking about arguments or fixing a bug or planning a career, there's often a huge branching tree of possibilities - things you might do, things others might do, things that might happen because that's how the environment works. Learning to look ahead, apply pruning, etc. to find the best "move" at each point in time can be very valuable. So can prioritization, responding to a setback, and so on - which you can also learn from chess or other games. Not everything is a game, of course, but the strategic thinking that they encourage is very broadly applicable.
Things that work for me:
- see my friends more
- go on walks instead of working
- go on vacation more often
- take care of my 2 kids
- play more music
- strop trying to be more productive
Well written article on here for once. Appropriate title, appropriate disclaimers, well formatted text (bolded points with top-down writing style). Most importantly, well written and interesting content. I found the "think in writing" tip particularly insightful.
I wish more journalism was like this.
"Tell the right stories about yourself."
There is more power to this than meets the eye. Also, don't tell stories to yourself that you would not be telling a friend. We are usually too hard with ourselves, hence a lot of "should bes" and "should have nots".
The thing about advice is that we already know it, but too lazy to follow or just plain forgetful. This was a good read for reminding. Thank you for sharing.
Have not read a good piece such as this in a good while. During the pandemic, my mindset was a giant clusterfuck. I was all over the place. I took a year break from everything. Traveled. Did absolutely fuckin nothing. I started few micro services that I never finished, which I am thinking of going back to them eventually. I started playing games and started to make a game. But the angles kept changing. I started to interview for jobs, but I am just not in the right mindset. I am constantly thinking about the future. I read too much shit on the internet (tech related). It felt good reading your article. Thanks for sharing.
I used to be a night person. One day I realized there are only 24 hrs in a day. There is no "getting more hours" at night. Then I became a morning person gradually where I get most of my coding done before anyone wake up.
Nifty article. My advice on reading advice articles: don’t think of the content as recommendations. Think of the content as considerations and decide for yourself if applicable to your life/circumstance.
> then a billion users. If there’s, what, 100,000 seconds in a day, if each user does 10 clicks per day, on average, then I think that gets you a million transactions per second, ballpark
1e9 * 10 / 1e5 = 1e5 transactions per second
Maybe the author needs to apply their advice and start to "think in numbers" \o/
Jokes aside and apart from the really dangerous idea of sleeping less, I really liked the article!
Nice article, I also liked that it specified "worked for me", rather than trying to sell some ultimate rules for life:)
The one that I would disagree with is the sleeping one. I think sleep is SO important, and people don't do enough to optimise for it. For example eating/looking at screens before bed. Sleep is extremely important, there's so many studies to back this up, and I don't think that it's ever wasted time.
Before finishing the article, I just want to mention: I'm liking the minimal and neat layout. I don't often comment on look and feel like this.
This advice might be awful for some people, esp. around sleep and exercise. Ironically he says you should fact check… so do that, and take into account your health, fitness etc. before changing sleep and exercise patterns.
Getting stuff done is a boost. It can compound but not infinitely. A 10 hour day of programming will take a toll on most people and is jot sustainable. 10h of various stuff including programming maybe!
Interesting point about Fermi estimations. I used to roughly estimate things in my head without knowing that it has a name.
The first point on mental energy seems like its only true for an initial period. Or put differently if you've been doing tricky mental work all day it is definitely exhausting & takes on tank like properties. Still good advice overall though
Solid advice, commenting here so o can go back and find this info later
Points 1 to 5 were the best ones.
I like that your title explicitly calls out "worked for me."
Generally speaking, when it comes to advice, context is ever important. In one context advice may be spot on, but your context may not be my context and that can matter.
For example I often hear good advice about useing SQL. A lot of it is contradictory, which can be confusing. But it turns out that the "right thing to do" is enormously affected by context - are you deploying one DB for one customer, or one each for 1000 customers? Is there a full-time DBA or is your program its own DBA?
It's the same with personal/life advice. How old are you? What kind of job do you have? Are you cash-rich or time-rich? Are there outside stress factors?
For example I don't use an alarm clock on a day to day basis. I let myself sleep till I wake up. That works because I have no morning commitments or responsibilities and flexible work hours. It only works because of my context. Clearly it's useless advice to most people.
When giving advice try and bring context into play. If your context is too different to mine, my advice may be harmful.
When receiving advice dig into the context. If it's too different to yours that advice may be moot, or even harmful.
What works for a bootstrap company does not apply to a VC startup. And very much vice versa.
(question is, is this comment useful if you don't know _my_ context though? :)