Serious
Planted 02024-07-28
Surely you can be serious
Kimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me that “the standard pace is for chumps” — that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than most people, you can do way more than anyone expects. And this principle applies to all of life, not just school.
Never confess to me that you are just as flawed as I am unless you can tell me what you plan to do about it. Afterward you will still have plenty of flaws left, but that’s not the point; the important thing is to do better, to keep moving ahead, to take one more step forward. Tsuyoku naritai!
As I got older it became clearer to me that not many people are really serious about anything. Some people go their whole lives without ever having met anyone else who I might describe as actually serious, so they find it hard to believe that anybody could really mean what they say, since everything everyone says is bullshit. I remember feeling like that myself at some of my low points in life, when I was at my most depressed.
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I want… to be as serious as I can about the things that matter to me, to be encouraging to everyone else who wants to be serious too, and to be kind to everyone who doesn’t quite manage to be.
I don’t know what being serious looks like for you. I barely know what it looks like for me. But no matter who you are, being serious means holding something sacred. And if you don’t feel like you’re doing that right now, it means taking a small but perceptible step toward doing that tomorrow, and then another step after that.
There is not some distant future where it will be easier to be serious, and no one is ever going to give you permission to start. You don’t have to be 100% serious right now, nor do you have to be 100% serious about everything—these are just excuses not to be serious about anything. But the goal is to be 100% serious about at least one thing, and soon.
have a disinterested obsession with something that matters
“Bruce had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run the three miles in twenty-one or twenty-two minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile [Note: when running on his own in 1968, Lee would get his time down to six-and-a half minutes per mile]. So this morning he said to me “We’re going to go five.” I said, “Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are, and I can’t do five.” He said, “When we get to three, we’ll shift gears and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.” I said “Okay, hell, I’ll go for it.” So we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m okay for three or four minutes, and then I really begin to give out. I’m tired, my heart’s pounding, I can’t go any more and so I say to him, “Bruce if I run any more,” –and we’re still running-”if I run any more I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.” He said, “Then die.” It made me so mad that I went the full five miles. Afterward I went to the shower and then I wanted to talk to him about it. I said, you know, “Why did you say that?” He said, “Because you might as well be dead. Seriously, if you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.”
negative energy is wasted energy.
You want to become a master at overcoming hard moments. That to me is the sign of a champion.
The best in the world are not the best because they win every point… It’s because they know they’ll lose… again and again… and have learned how to deal with it.
You accept it. Cry it out if you need to… then force a smile.
You move on. Be relentless. Adapt and grow.
Work harder. Work smarter. Remember: work smarter.
Research is, of course, only a part of life, and must be understood in relation to the rest of life. The foundation of effective research is a strong motivation or desire to do research. If research is not incredibly exciting, rewarding and enjoyable, at least some of the time, then why not do something else that is? For the purposes of this essay, I’ll assume that you already have a strong desire to do research
find the things in life that ignite you and deepen your understanding of the world and those within it.
No matter how far my goal is, now matter how small the steps I take are, as long as I don’t stand still, someday I’ll get there.
Anyone can do obstinacy. Indeed, kids and drunks and fools are best at it. Whereas very few people have enough of all five of the qualities that produce the right kind of stubbornness, but when they do the results are magical.
Be more agentic
late 15c., “one who acts,” from Latin agentem (nominative agens) “effective, powerful,” present participle of agere “to set in motion, drive forward; to do, perform; keep in movement” (from PIE root *ag- “to drive, draw out or forth, move”).
You wake up in a 3rd world jail cell. You’re only allowed to call one person you know to get you out of there. Who do you call?
[…]
It’s a combination of three distinct skills rarely found together:
- Clear thinking
- Bias to action
- Disagreeability
It’s impossible to imagine someone breaking you out of a 3rd world jail cell without all three.
If they can’t think clearly, they will charge ahead with the first bad plan that pops into their head.
If they lack a bias for action, they’ll never move their ideas from theory into the real world.
If they aren’t disagreeable, they’ll quit and conform when someone in authority tells them “No”.
Life is a form of self storytelling. We’re continually retelling ourselves our life story, but very few people think of themselves as authors of their story, not mere subjects. People with extraordinary high-agency realize this early in life and start maximizing the interestingness of their life story.
Having a fascinating life story is not just an exercise in vanity – it has a real impact on your success in life. You’ll have an easier time attracting friends as well as life and business partners. It’ll also make it much easier to sell yourself or your products. It has a kind of compounding halo effect
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So next time you’re faced with a tough decision, consider the path that makes a more interesting story. If it turned out to be the wrong decision to have made, you’d at least be fun at dinner parties.
You can just do things.
- Learning and decision making
- Hire a researcher or expert consultant
- Ask obvious questions
- Ask questions online
- Run surveys
- Buy advertisements, especially in legacy media
- Run genuine randomized control trials on yourself
- Buy research or data
- Hire someone to pentest/doxx you
- Hire a graphic designer to turn your appalling sketches into beautiful diagrams or slides
- Host small gatherings or conferences on topics you care about
- Hire a tutor
- Dissect a cadaver (even as a non-medical student)
- Pick a spot on the map that simply seems strange and just go there. (HT Michael Nielsen)
- Hire someone just as an excuse to make yourself complete a project
- Interpersonal
- Say “I don’t know” or “I don’t have an opinion” when you don’t
- Not tell white lies
- Don’t drink (alcohol), even when you’re expected to
- Buy goods/services from your friends
- Travel to friends just to visit them
- Move close to friends
- Live in multiple places with multiple people
- Be a nomad
- Ask your acquaintances, “Hey, I want to leave my house more, are there any cool events you’re going to soon?” (HT Sasha Chapin)
- Actively try to make yourself a better conversation partner
- Start a blog or substack so you can say “I’m a writer” without lying. Then start conversations with strangers by saying “Hi, I’m a writer doing a piece about (location/circumstance you’re in). Can I ask you a few questions?”
- Ask people out on dates
- Give to charity
- Support and accountability
- Hire a coach
- Visit a physical therapist
- Buy task-specific devices that prevent multitasking
- Engage a human productivity monitor
- Making the most of your resources
- Modify your stuff
- Repair your stuff, or get it repaired
- Grocery delivery
- Cleaning services
- Laundry service
- Nannies over daycare
- Write on a post-it note affixed to a greeting card rather than on the greeting card itself, so the recipient can throw away the post-it and reuse your card
- Ask for free upgrades or coupons
- Treat fines like payments
- Contest unjust fines
- Don’t pay, or renegotiate, bills
- Let the credit cards on recurring bills expire
- Call/email executives at company to complain about things
- Telemedicine
- Surgery for appearance or comfort
- At-home vet care
- Enroll yourself (or your pet) in a clinical trial or research study
- Generate your own audiobooks
- Generate your own ebooks
- Get verbal things written down
- Personal assistant services (or a real PA)
- Hire a personal stylist
- Paying for parking in convenient location
- Hotels where you can sleep comfortably
- Non-public transportation, especially when traveling
- Buying comfortable mattress, shoes, etc.
- Buying clothes for appearance or comfort instead of just the lowest price
- Buy your way out of advertising on e.g. Spotify or YouTube
- Professional
- Ignore what’s on the jobs page and directly pitch someone at a company on hiring you
- Negotiate for better terms in your job offer
- Ask for a raise
- Ask to waive admission or graduation requirements
- Drop out/quit your job
- Live off your savings while trying something new
- If you can’t live off your savings, get a grant
- Work for yourself
- Cold contact people
- Write forwardable emails
- Follow up many times
- Approach a person or group you admire and ask whether they want to cofound something with you
- Propose that a person, group, or company contract-to-hire you
- Learn how professionals email by reading leaked emails.
- Use contract-to-hire
- As mentioned above, buy research or data, e.g. for compensation
- Market-test a mere idea by (1) setting up a landing page with an interest form and (2) buying a cheap social media ad campaign. (HT @daytimeskye)
- Merge with your competitors, a la PayPal
- Work in public
- Sell to unusual markets
- Charge more
- Write interviews with yourself and send them to journalists (HT Tom Kalil)
- Fly to people for in-person meetings/visits to demonstrate seriousness
- In general, just ask for things, even if you’ve never heard someone ask for them
The standard pace is for chumps. There is no speed limit. Seek discomfort.
Something my mom does, that I now do, that people seem to really dislike
- Choose to walk
- Take the stairs
- Park in the furthest parking spot
- Go for a 5-10 mile walk
- I’ve walked six miles home from being out in a city
How to be more agentic
radical agency is about finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying or unpleasant. These don’t always surface in awareness to the point one is actually choosing – often they live in a cloud of aversion that strategically obscures the tradeoff.
Ask for things. Ask for things that feel unreasonable, to make sure your intuitions about what’s reasonable are accurate (of course, try not to be a jerk in the process). If you’re only asking for things you get, you’re not aiming high enough.
If you aren’t trying to get real feedback from people who know you, you’re cooking without tasting. This is, like, the lowest hanging fruit for self-improvement, but few people really try to pick it.
meet as many people doing related work
Most subject matter is learnable, even stuff that seems really hard. But beyond that, many (most?) traits that people treat as fixed are actually quite malleable if you (1) believe they are and (2) put the same kind of work into learning them as you would anything else.
making changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time where you are actually bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people. It’s called a moat both because you can’t just leap to the other side and because it gives anyone who can cross it a real advantage.
Burnout is the ultimate agency-killer. This is so true that I’ve learned to identify a reduction in agency as one of the first signs of burnout, one that shows up even before I consciously realize what’s happening. A switch flips and I start looking for ways to rule out ideas and actions, to conclude they won’t work or aren’t necessary, rather than chasing better versions.
Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic
- Figure out what you need, figure out who can help you get it, ask them for it
- Thrive on rejections
- Increase your surface area for serendipity
- Get online and post stuff and interact with people. Also get in the habit of sending cold emails.
- Seek forgiveness rather than permission
- To get smart, ask dumb questions
- Consider a wider option space – what is the upper bound scenario?