The Secret to Life
Reading Time: 6 minutes
All of my previous articles have been examples of principles that I want to live by.
I guess this article is going to tie all those ideas together.
Maybe if I was a celebrated writer, this’d be my magnum opus.
I can’t recommend these ideas enough.
Yurui’s Summary
Self-actualisation is the process by which an individual reaches his or her full potential. Always following your personal principles, staying true to yourself, hence living to your full potential. I think that this is the secret sauce to living a fulfilled, self-actualised life.
You have to balance carving your own path and drawing inspiration from established concepts - defining values/priorities through regular introspection.
Asymmetric success in one area usually leads to asymmetric failure in another. That’s okay, as long as it is true to yourself.
If you do the right thing, your conscience will support you. If you don’t, your conscience will destroy you. Living true to yourself will bring you inner peace.
Every small action adds up to shape your character. It all adds up. Don’t lose faith, and always stay true to yourself.
You are incredibly unique, and to realise this, you have to take time to introspect and discover your principles.
Life is all about enjoying the passage of time. Each day, live true to yourself, live to the fullest, and reach your highest potential. I think that’s how you live a happy, fulfilled, meaningful life.
—
I’ve done a lot of soul-searching recently.
I really want to make the most of this gap year I’m taking. And to do that, I’ve realised that I need to have some sort of idea of what I value at the moment.
After a ton of thinking, I think I’ve found the secret to living a good life.
It’s a simple idea, but hard to execute.
All of my previous articles have been examples of principles that I want to live by - I guess this article is going to tie all those ideas together.
I’ll try my best to do it justice.
Self-Actualisation
The concept I try to align myself with is called self-actualisation, which is at the very top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs - the most elusive one, which should be pursued after acquiring all the other needs. I’m very grateful to be able to focus on self-actualisation.
Self-actualisation is the process by which an individual reaches his or her full potential (from Britannica).
How I like to think about it is: always following your personal principles, staying true to yourself, hence living to your full potential.
I think that this is the secret sauce to living a fulfilled, self-actualised life.
It’s pretty simple. You only get to live one life, and we’re all going to die one day, so you might as well live a life true to yourself.
What I mean by that is doing what you love to enjoy the passage of time - constantly re-evaluating the principles that you want to live by, and acting in accordance with them.
There’s a critical distinction between reasoning from first principles (internal) and reasoning by analogy (external).
Tim Urban describes it in an epic way - being a ‘chef’ vs being a ‘cook’.
When you’re a chef, you take core facts and observations to put together a conclusion - sort of like a chef playing around with raw ingredients to make something original and delicious. But as a cook, you look at the way things have already been done, and model your work with that analogy/paradigm - like a cook following an already written recipe.
Creating vs. copying. Originality vs. conformity.
It takes a ton of time and energy to reinvent the wheel and I guess I don’t advocate for that either. Creating and copying are two extremes of a sliding scale, of course, and you can’t create everything. You have to find a balance between carving your own path and standing on the shoulders of giants. There’s no way that I’m creating a new laptop and monitor by my own design if there’s already an epic one out there.
And conformity is okay, if it is aligned to your personal principles. (I’ll be using this term a lot. It’s synonymous with ‘staying true to yourself’.)
I think that there are parts of your life which are deeply important, with which we form our own individuality - where we choose to live, the kinds of friends we make, whether we want to get married (and to whom), or how we go about defining our lifestyle priorities.
As long as you live to your personal principles, I think you’ll live a happy and fulfilled life.
Values
Now this sounds idealistic. Always living to some set of values? Where do I go about finding them?
I write every day - so I like to think that I’m very intentional with reflection. Each night, I sit down and ask myself how I felt about the day, how I reacted to information and stimulus, what I learnt along the way, and if this was how I wanted to spend my time.
I guess that each day ultimately adds up to a whole life - so this was, indeed, me asking if this was the life I wanted to live.
It’s led to some pretty profound revelations - the best of which I write up on this blog. Not only reading but also experiencing, success is what I define it to be, happiness is a verb, and a lot more.
And so, as I write down and internalise all these principles and values, I’ve realised that they aren’t set in stone.
A really important thing to realise is that we are not nouns - we are verbs.
Humans are verbs.
That’s a weird statement.
What I mean is that we are constantly changing as human beings, as we have more and more novel experiences. Which is why it’s so important for us to regularly reflect on how we’re living life.
For me, it’s every single night, journaling up my experiences and thoughts. I also commit to one day a month, clearing my calendar for a “Think Day” - or as those who know me have heard me call it, “Life in Review” meditation session.
If you do this, you’ll live a life true to yourself. And as Naval says, we should do what feels like play to us but looks like work to others. Naturally, when you pursue your interests and curiosity, you’ll have so much more energy than those who pursue things because others tell them to. Obsession over motivation.
That’s what leads to self-actualisation.
I have some really simple values (macro, compared to the micro I write about on my blog).
Family, career, health, and experience. If I get these four right, with many sub-values under each of them, I think I’ll live a really fulfilled and happy life.
Living an Asymmetric Life
Especially in the startup world, there’s a lot of survivorship bias regarding hustle culture and building the next big unicorn.
I was chatting with a Stanford student, who told me something along the lines of: everyone is so impressive and talented here, and their accomplishments will inevitably shape you as a person. That’s why it’s so important to take time for yourself to reflect and introspect on how you can live a life true to yourself.
“The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd, but to think for yourself.”
- Peter Thiel
Aside: I showed this to my friend (shoutout SP for reviewing all my posts before I ship them) and he said this:
“Doing the exact opposite of general norms is simply conforming to the ideology that is opposite - rather than non-conformity. Non-conformity is more like freedom rather than fighting back.”
When I really ask myself if I want to be a founder, I try to think about it objectively. More than 99% chance of failure, 100+ hour weeks, probably limited time for family, cutting years off my life.
Do I really want this?
Well, there’s a reason why so many people, despite this, still embark on the journey of entrepreneurship. Obsession.
My values are still changing, so I can’t give an obvious answer now.
I think I’ve realised that to find asymmetric success in one field, you’ll naturally have to find asymmetric failure in another field. So many billionaires have absolutely terrible family lives, as a result of their prioritisation.
To get asymmetric outcomes, you have to live an asymmetric life.
Again, if that is the life that you truly want to live, then by all means, live it. The core idea is that we each have our own lives to live - and we shouldn’t live it in a way someone else told us to.
“What is the point of success if there’s no satisfaction in the succeeding? Beware of envying successful humans - the price you would need to pay to be the people you admire is often one you would not foot the bill for.”
- Chris Williamson
Integrity and External Opinions
You might believe in an all-knowing god. But I think there is another all-knowing entity - your conscience.
I read Michel De Montaigne’s Essays and Montaigne writes something along the lines of: your conscience will work for or against you, depending on the integrity you carry. In other words, how much you follow your personal principles.
If you do the right thing, your conscience will support you. If you don’t, your conscience will destroy you.
It doesn’t matter if anyone else is watching. At the end of the day, you know what you did.
If you live a life true to yourself, and uphold your principles to the highest integrity, it won’t matter what other people say. You, internally, know what happened, and you have your conscience to back you up, keeping you at inner peace.
This is contingent on you not caring about what other people think about you, which is contingent on having an insane sense of principles
“My own psyche seems to back this up—looking back on my path so far, the mistakes that bother me most are the ones that happened because someone else took the wheel of my head and overruled the quiet, insecure voice of my authentic self—the mistakes that I knew at the time, deep down, were wrong. My goal for the future isn’t to avoid mistakes, it’s for the mistakes I do make to be my own.”
- Tim Urban
Another thing: if you put good things into the world, they’ll come back to you. I think that being a kind and happy person will pay dividends - not only for your own fulfilment, but because other people will notice it. I’ve had many occasions where I’ve been out there, staying true to myself - and serendipitously, I was shown kindness in return.
As the Beatles lyric goes: “And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.”
I didn’t understand this lyric when I first heard it. But I think I do now.
It all adds up.
It’s good to set goals to strive towards, but it’s even better to stay true to ourselves.
If we do this, success somehow comes to us in the common hours. Not if we achieve our ‘goals’.
I’ve realised that success often makes us feel empty, as does failure. You succeed? 10 minutes of joy, then you move on. You fail? A few days of misery, then you move on.
There’s a huge argument against macro-goals, but instead for micro-goals (principles).
For most of this month, I realised that I didn’t have any huge macro goal I was working towards, but I was instead going with the flow a lot more. It felt weird to not be building something of my own every day that I’m incredibly excited about. But until that serendipitous opportunity comes, I’m going to prepare myself.
My point is that it all adds up - every workout, every time you grab coffee with someone, every article you write.
At the end of the day, it all adds up to form who you are. Stay true to yourself, no matter what.
Regret
I think I’ve lost all sense of regret now.
If I live each moment true to myself, then I can’t really regret anything. That mistake was just who I was in the moment.
The best days give us happy memories, and the worst days teach us important lessons.
This revelation took me a ton of learning through experience to find. The best analogy I'd say is: would you switch lives with someone if you had the chance? The answer is probably no - in order to switch lives, you need to switch experiences that build who you are as a person.
Asymmetric success requires asymmetric success (see above).
When you're grateful for who you are as a person, you’re also grateful for the experiences you’ve had - hence, no regret for what shaped you in the past.
Self-Perception
I was on a trip with my family in Tasmania (south of Australian mainland) recently and had this revelation while we were driving.
If a cow is white and all it sees around it are black cows, how would it know that it wasn't black without looking at itself?
The same goes with life - we are all incredibly unique, but without introspection and deep reflection, we won’t realise how truly special we are - that we're like everyone else. We distinguish ourselves with our personal principles, and how we follow them.
”When you're worried about what someone thinks of you, it's rarely about that person's opinions of you. It's about your own opinions of yourself.”
- Lawrence Yeo
Enjoying the Passage of Time
Have a conviction/reason/purpose/intentionality with all that you do. Make sure you have a why behind everything that's according to your principles, and try to stay true to yourself as much as possible.
It doesn’t matter what you do. In this life, we were all born, and we will all die. There is nothing we can do about that. Life is yours to live, and all we can do is try to enjoy the passage of time.
I think that the best way to do that is constantly re-evaluating your principles and values - each day, living true to yourself, living to the fullest, and reaching your highest potential.
I think that’s how you live a happy, fulfilled, meaningful life.
Yurui
