Last Updated 

Principles

A list of principles, organized into categories, in no particular order. Very few of these are originally mine, but I haven’t tracked attribution.

Epistemology & Cognition

  • The map is not the territory. — Alfred Korzybski
  • Cogito, ergo sum. — RenĂ© Descartes
  • Curiosity is the First Virtue — Eliezer Yudkowsky
  • That which can be destroyed by the truth should be. — P. C. Hodgell

  • Context is that which is scarce

    • Keep building deeper and longer context by focusing on the same topics
  • Plain text is more conducive to deep reasoning than rich media
  • You can get more mileage from thinking than just being smart
  • Scrolling and reading too much drowns out your inner voice.

  • Have Will to Think — Enrico Fermi

    • Put energy into thinking deeply
  • Do your homework - be the most prepared person in the room

  • Profound insight come from focusing intently on the smallest details

    • Go deeper, narrower, or simpler with all ideas, projects, etc
  • Minimize number of areas where to specialize
  • Commoditization of knowledge gives lived experience a comparative advantage
  • It’s possible to know more than anyone else on a topic
  • It’s possible to become a world expert in a niche topic in months or years
  • The most interesting people are the most interested
  • Go back to the future: use past predictions to understand the future

  • Introspection promotes Inaction

    • introspection is important, but during times of high agency it can be counter-productive. Introspective people already have contemplated many scenarios and should be able to trust their gut during a critical period.
  • AI is an intelligence amplifier, your output is proportional to your input
  • That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence — Christopher Hitchens
  • The educated man can entertain an idea without accepting it.

Agency & Optimization

  • Solve for freedom: complete autonomy of one’s schedule
  • Take responsibility so agency is within
  • Action precedes motivation.
  • Vision without execution is hallucination
  • Speed is THE primary business strategy — Mike Cassidy
  • Relentless force applied consistently

  • Uncomfortable activity leads to growth.

    • Comfort leads to stagnation.

  • Use world entanglement as a forcing functions to accomplish things

    • e.g.: commit to public speaking, workshops/conferences, exercise with friends
  • Pursue visions
  • Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood. — Daniel Burnham

  • I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail. — Muriel Strode

    • An agentic individual is someone who takes an active role in shaping their life, making choices, and pursuing goals rather than passively reacting to circumstances.
  • Run your own race
  • Be comfortable with low status - avoid status games
  • Keep your identity small — Paul Graham
  • Put yourself in environments where you have to perform to your utmost
  • “Instead of valuing your work in terms of what you get in return, consider how much value you can add to the work itself. Do great work.”

  • Maximize your amplitude

    • Double down when you feel energized and intentionally rest when drained

  • Do hard things, do your thing, do it for decades — Graham Weaver

    • Live an Asymmetric life — Graham Weaver
  • Live the most unlikely version of your life

  • Try new things regularly

    • One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. — AndrĂ© Gide
  • Relentless is really hard to compete with.
  • Build a life. Don’t run away from it.
  • You don’t do anyone any favors by lurking, put yourself out there!
  • You can just do things.
  • Action produces information.
  • Structure is not the opposite of freedom; freedom without structure can turn into aimlessness

Decision Theory & Strategy

  • Conditional probabilities are not in your favor

    • e.g.: if selecting for wealth, parenting quality will go down
  • Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity
  • Increase surface area of luck — Jason Roberts
  • Skill is knowing when you’ve gotten lucky

  • Outcomes are correlated to luck inversely to its dependence on skill

    • Eg: beating you at a game of chess is probably skill, beating you at a hand of poker is luck
  • The efficient market hypothesis is a lie
  • Never ever ever lose at the finish line. Win all deals.

  • Cutting losses quickly is the foremost rule of speculating — Edwin Lefèvre

    • Set a stop‑loss at e.g. -5% but wait a month to avoid wash rule
  • Folding (as in poker) is only a small mistake
  • What can go right: avoid cynicism and focus on the positives.
  • Look under every rock: have obsessive exhaustive behavior to find opportunities.
  • A hurt ego can lead to greatness
  • Some people do well during struggle
  • When you first feel like quitting, go a bit longer, and then re‑evaluate
  • Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term. — Naval Ravikant

  • Fear is almost always a reason to lean in

    • Any really strong reaction is a clue that we should do something.

  • Serendipity lottery tickets eventually pay off

    • The idea of always leaving enough slack/budget for exploring the unknown
  • Put yourself in positions where new things will happen to you

Social Dynamics & Coordination

  • Trust is the greatest economic force
  • The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate. — Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker
  • Culture is what happens on the margins
  • Great company/team culture is best manifested in the form of frequent positive surprises.

  • Communication is both essential and an overhead.

    • Organize to minimize unnecessary communication.

  • Goals and Milestones should be exciting.

    • Bring a marketing mindset when crafting internal objectives.

  • It’s good to have a mission/values and recruit accordingly.

    • Diversity of thought taken too far leads to an organization where the intersection of ideas == null.

  • Find your people: only talk to 10s and the occasional 9

    • Work with people you really respect
    • There are some people who, after you talk to them, you feel more energized and you want to conquer the world or climb a mountain.
  • Good relationships require high expectations and high support
  • Trust is consistency over time
  • Your network is your net‑worth
  • Be the person called when others are in the thick of it
  • Authentic self‑promotion through education
  • Move up the quality curve
  • Benefiting others from my surplus
  • Give people a good “user experience” when they interact with you.

  • Show up. Go to where the action is.

    • E.g.: sign up for random events and conferences even if you have to travel
  • Find people you love. Then do life with them
  • Most important thing is winning and winning requires leadership
  • Best advice givers only give advice when asked
  • The calling of a leader is to put themselves out of a job

  • Invade an institution and take over from within

    • How people amassed incredible power
  • Crush your enemy totally. — Robert Greene
  • Build enduring institutions
  • The youth pushes, the wise steer

  • Be an instigator

    • In the context of causing things to happen which otherwise wouldn’t happen.
  • You can get used to being famous but you never get used to being ignored

Resource Allocation & Capital

  • Market is a voting machine in the short term and a weighing machine in the long term. — Benjamin Graham

  • The more you know the less you diversify

    • Most people are ignorant and don’t diversify enough
    • Build wealth by owning a lot of a great asset

  • Losers average losers — Paul Tudor Jones

    • On dollar cost averaging stocks on the way down
  • It’s not just what you buy, what you pay counts. — Howard Marks
  • Good investing doesn’t come from buying good things, but from buying things well. — Howard Marks
  • There’s no asset so good that it can’t become overpriced and thus dangerous, and there are few assets so bad that they can’t get cheap enough to be a bargain. — Howard Marks
  • Time is the denominator: a week is 2% of the year
  • Stock compensation is a way to “borrow” from employees.

  • A lot of wealth is made through deal‑making between private parties

    • Private is better than public (mark to market is distracting)
  • For new tech invest early, for mature tech invest late
  • A lot of wealth is generated during periods of multiple expansion (1999, 2021)
  • Feeling sadness after a bad trade trains emotional resilience and deeper learning through the limbic system.
  • Venture capital is an access (not asset) class
  • Self-made wealth signals competence
  • Life begins with more time than money; and ends with more money than time.
  • Invest time with purpose and meaning
  • Pay attention to your production/consumption balance. If you’re only consuming and not producing, fix that.

  • Do a review of your year

    • Every year, write it out, figure out what was good and what was bad, use this to make your goals for the next year.
  • Doing as much as you can every day is a form of life extension.
  • Talent is the best asset class — Graham Duncan
  • Own companies and hold them forever
  • Invest early in people you know and where you share values
  • The core task of investing is making predictions about the future. Neither doing more work nor having higher conviction leads to better predictive accuracy. — Brian Chingono

  • You can’t fight the distribution

    • If an asset class has power law returns, your portfolio will have power law characteristics

Systems Thinking & Emergence

  • The purpose of a system is what it does — Stafford Beer

    • There was a debate about this on ACX, but it still resonates with me.

  • Technological advancements that enhance resource use efficiency often lead to higher, not lower, consumption. — Jevons’ paradox.

    • demand for compute, like energy, can be infinitely high at low enough prices
  • Software was a layer below humans; now software will be in the same layer as humans
  • “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” — William Gibson
  • Move to where the action is. Agglomeration effects are powerful.
  • The best way to predict the future is to invent it — Alan Kay
  • Consider problems that don’t have a clear cost function (e.g. generative AI)

  • Productivity as measured by GDP ignores important factors.

    • Phone/elevator operators added no value. Less wasted time everywhere.

  • I just don’t change jobs — Jensen Huang

    • I think there is an idea here where one continues to expand instead of quitting and having to restart. I don’t think this means to stay on the same job forever. But perhaps is about waiting for an inbound opportunity instead of looking to leave.
  • Customers want fewer vendors
  • Start with the Demo
  • The world is full of signals. Make sense of them.
  • Information is the resolution of uncertainty. — Claude Shannon

Personal Philosophy & Meaning

  • The purpose of life is the pursuit of happiness and achievement. — Victor Niederhoffer
  • Pursue radical work‑life integration
  • Be in flow by doing things for their own sake.
  • Find your duty and do it without fretting about the outcome
  • The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it. The meaning of life is to give your gift away. — David Viscott

  • It’s much easier to work on things that are exciting to you.

    • Follow your compulsion
  • Desire’s a contract you make to be unhappy until you get what you want. — Naval Ravikant
  • Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose. — Naval Ravikant
  • Hedonistic freedom won’t bring you happiness.
  • Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! — Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Find the bottomless well within.
  • When the light of consciousness illuminates a part of our mind, it highlights our values at some deep level.
  • I’m the main character of my own life, and that’s okay.
  • Life is an adventure of self‑discovery.
  • Get the most out of getting the most of.
  • “I am not done” — John Maeda
  • Divine discontent with our performance — David Ogilvy
  • We live in an age of infinite leverage, and the economic rewards for genuine intellectual curiosity have never been higher. — Naval Ravikant

  • The world is a museum of passion projects. — John Collison

    • How much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway.
  • Your dream has to be externally focused – service, rather than self serving
  • Your attitude determines your attitude.

  • Make familiar things strange

    • Avoid daily life becoming uninteresting. Make the usual salient.

  • It can be helpful to think of our anti-virtues as diseases or disabilities

    • “I have the envy disease” gives us permission to be compassionate to ourselves

  • Failure isn’t real. It comes from our perception of how we are perceived.

    • If we were in a deserted island and had to survive, a failed project would just be a learning experience.
  • Don’t believe everything you think.
  • There’s who we think we should be and who we are best at being, and often they are not the same. - Me
  • “My biggest goal for myself is that my drift is back to real—back to the real me.” — Chris Sacca
  • To underestimate oneself is no more virtuous than to overestimate oneself.

  • Get busy living or get busy dying. — Stephen King

    • From Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.
  • We pass our time to forget time is passing.

Similar Lists