lessons at 24
fragments of self imprinting wisdom out of context
Be grateful. I am living in a special, special time. To be here on this planet at one of the most consequential time in history, to be in the best city in the world where people dream all their lives to get here, to have the Internet and iced macadamia milk matcha latte and a free bed to stay in Mexico UK Singapore Vietnam, is a privilege.
Buddhism is true. There is no self. I am suffering from my own thoughts. If I can just let sadness be sadness, fear be fear, joy be joy, without running away, just gentle, compassionate acceptance, there is no suffering.
If I don’t set my own agenda, someone else will.
The world is made of artificial barriers. I can email Tyler Cowen and Phyllis Rose and Min Jin Lee and they would respond. The most important thing is to show up consistently, do good work, and keep knocking on doors.
Love the moat of low status. Do things that are embarrassing, fail flat out on your face, reflect, then try again.
Optimize for rate of learning. It is simple: action + reflection. I often think too much & don’t act enough. Swing bats more frequently.
It’s all in the framing. I can be a software engineer at an 8-person company, or it can be third engineer at a YC climate start-up raising $4.2 million, building a LLM model to parse local laws and restrictions for renewable energy across the US. Learning to frame myself in a way that is relevant to the conversation and show expertise is important, and valuable.
Accept people as they are, don’t try to change them. See the person for what they are, in the moment, in front of me. If they don’t want me, they are not the one, move on. Be honest in communication, but not everyone deserves to know me until I feel trusted. Experiment - what are good way to be closer to people in my milieu?
Relationships are the most important thing in my life and invest in them deeply. Spend disproportionate time on the people I love & care for. If someone I love need me, DROP EVERYTHING TO BE THERE FOR THEM. Love is unlimited, time is not.
Sometimes I will love very much and try my hardest and people would still leave my life. If that’s the case, bow my head and say thank you, for the memories, the time spent, and learn to let go, without holding grudges. Love is most beautiful when it is free.
But keep loving anyways, be open to being hurt, even if it’s scary, because the alternative is building walls around my heart, to never truly open myself, to never experience the depth of loving. And such is a life I never want to live.
Human connections are always possible, but the ones you’ll deeply connect with, people you’ll feel seen by, those who would behold you and walk their life alongside you, they are rare like stars in the sky. It might only happen a few times in a life. So if it happens, pause, take a look, keep trying to have them in your life. I choose hard with you.
A relationship is when two people continually choose to show up and engage with each other, to play an infinite game that knows no bounds. The only rule is to keep showing up, keep playing.
Devote my life to things, people, work that makes me feel whole and trust that it would lead me to a path of joy.
Keep making, more than i consume. even if it is shitty journal pages that no one would see but me. Fail? Try again.
Henrik Karlsson says he’s trying to optimize for the number of great essays he can produce in the next 50 years. I’m trying to optimize for: the volume of carbon removal we will have in the next 50, number of words that would be useful to someone else. Depth of relationships with people who I value and would grow, co-evolve with me.
Do not take advice from people whose life I wouldn’t want to live, whose values I don’t care for.
Beauty is part of oneness. My heart wants me to be separate, to be special, but to see what is beautiful, to reach deep within, is to remove myself from that separated-ness. Then I’ll see beauty everywhere.
Bravery is not the absence of fear, it is feeling the fear, taking a deep breath, and diving right in. It is crying before sending a message. It is feeling burned by a rejection and gets up the next day to keep going. It is to double down when things get hard. It is to have faith in the dark.
There is a kind of hope that is not dependent on outcome. The kind of hope is based on values, based on what I would wake up every day and choose to act, because it is important to me. It is a kind of commitment that transcend reasoning, and the most important one there is.
On that same vein, the world is made up of people no smarter than me, they are just people with confidence, maybe even arrogance, that I did not internalize. This is like a different flavor of hope - I will prevail, even if it takes many tries. The one that is independent of outcome.
Keep reading, fervently, wildly, chase the tail ends of my reading list with devotion. Maybe I will find answers in the footnotes of stories I read. Keep dreaming, stretching my window of possibilities, keep being reminded that the world with its arbitrary customs and social scripts is silly, it doesn’t have to be this way, it wasn’t this way at one point. And it could be different, gaping, barren for me to tread.
The world is a museum full of passion projects. Everything that has been put in front of me have at once been someone else’s invention. What is the thing I would put back into this beautiful, precious world?
We get to experience all this once. So be kind.
