What I Think I Know About Life
My worldview, principles, and personal philosophy.
“Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals.”
- Ray Dalio
1) Always assume that the person you’re talking to knows something that you don’t.
It’s hard to overstate how much I’ve learnt from talking to people.
My mum always says that we can only live the life of one person, but through understanding others’ perspectives, we can gain the most important insights from their lives.
External humility is internal confidence.
If the opportunity presents itself, say hi to a random person on the street. It’s incredible how much a random act of kindness can brighten a day.
Kindness is rare in today’s ago of incessant connection on social media.
2) Be irrationally open-minded.
Trying is an asymmetric bet. You can only win.
So many opportunities appear if you just bite your tongue and ask.
It could be as simple as asking the waiter at a restaurant for an extra thing, or as complex as spending hours crafting personalised cold emails to people way more experienced than you.
Radical open-mindedness. It gives you confidence.
3) Seek discomfort and rejection.
You’ll end up callousing your mind by doing weird stuff that you’ll get judged for.
When you do something that you don’t want to do, you push the barriers of our comfort zone.
If we marinate in comfort, our growth stagnates.
Huberman and Goggins speak about this as ‘growing the mid cingulate cortex, a part of the brain which you build by doing things you specifically DON’T want to do”. Callousing your mind.
The art of noticing - when you observe the intricacies of your surroundings, you realise minute details that you otherwise may have missed.
Same with happiness. If you consciously notice the beauty of every moment in life, good or bad, you can almost purposefully be happier.
How lucky are we to be alive? Every time I think about the billions of decisions that had to go right in order for me to exist, I always seem to smile.
“Our spirits are not trained to be satisfied by non-spiritual things.”
5) Focus on what’s important.
When you focus on the important things in life, it’ll be incredible how much you can accomplish. Cut out the distractions. Eliminate the chatter in your mind.
You enter a flow state and manage to accomplish a crazy amount.
6) Obsession beats motivation, every single time.
Motivation is temporary - obsession is permanent.
When you physically cannot sit still without chasing your obsession - that is when you know you will achieve outlier success.
When the work you’re doing isn’t even work. When you feel energised every single day to pursue your ‘work’.
“What feels like play to you, but looks like work to others?” - Naval Ravikant
7) Live in the present. Focus on the journey, not the destination.
The past is dead, and the future will never come.
Don’t obsess over changing the past, nor the future. Use them as lessons and guides for the present moment.
Your time and attention are your most valuable assets.
There is no reason for regret if you are grateful for what you have now. The best days create beautiful memories, and the worst days teach important lessons.
You literally have no control over how the past turned out, and what you do in the present dictates the future.
If you can’t control it, don’t worry. If you can control it, do your best, and don’t worry.
Rejection is redirection. We should focus on what we can control - our mindsets.
Find certainty in uncertainty.
8) Envy is the enemy of happiness.
Run your own race, and remember to stick to your own lane.
There’s no point comparing yourself to others because we each have different backgrounds.
The only person you should compare yourself to is you from the past. Life is single player.
9) You are not your thoughts - you are merely an observer of them.
So many unconscious thoughts pop up in our day-to-days. I’m definitely an overthinker.
The mind has power over the brain - meditate, and become fully aware of yourself to find clarity.
10) There is no meaning in life but the meaning that you set for yourself.
At the end of the day, we’re all going to die. That’s just how life works - everything fades away as if we never existed.
So, we should live for ourselves. Forge our own paths, stick to our personal principles, and live each day to the fullest.
Take the leap, do what is true to yourself.
What’s the worst that’ll happen? We’ll all die anyways.
11) It’s easier to stick to your principles 100% of the time than 99% of the time.
When you make non-negotiable rules for yourself, they become exactly that - non-negotiable.
If it’s okay to break a rule once, it’ll be okay to break the rule again, and again, and again.
Complete abstinence from rule-breaking is how habits and routines form - it then becomes effortless.
12) If you don’t believe in yourself, no one else will.
Radical self-belief is the prerequisite for contrarian, non-conformist thinking and action.
Intellectual isolation and independence is certain when forging your own path, and you have to maintain an irrational level of self-belief and confidence to persevere.
“I think, therefore I am.“
13) Write for a purpose.
If you want as many people to read it as possible, optimise your volume to insight ratio. People like brevity.
If you want to connect deeply with people, write long-form, storytelling posts. I try to do this on my blog.
14) Schedule the flexible around the inflexible.
This might be the most obvious point on this list - but I seem to find time for a lot of things in life if I manage my time efficiently.
On my Calendly, I schedule calls with those based in the US in Sydney’s morning, and those based in Europe in my afternoon.
If a call is immutable time-wise, schedule the gym around that. If you can grab coffee any time of the week with a mate, schedule it around your deep work.
Simple, but so powerful.
15) You’ll never know what something is truly like without experiencing it.
Experience co-exists with reading.
Reading elevates you to stand on the shoulders of giants, but you will never fully understand something without experiencing it.
I think that reflecting on your own lived experience has the power to teach you an immense amount.
16) There is nothing more valuable than healthy relationships, a strong body, and a peaceful mind.
Money can buy anything except healthy relationships, physical health, and mental peace.
Never sacrifice your personal principles for material gain.
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul.”
17) Remember that life is brief and death is imminent.
We can’t change death, only how we live.
Live each day to the fullest.
“Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.” - Clayton Christensen
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I’m going to update this ‘philosophy/principles’ page occasionally as my thoughts inevitable change. Here are some previous versions:
Philosophy, April 2023
Yurui
Thoughts on Life and Death
Whatever happens in our lives, whether rich or poor, wise or foolish, strong or weak, when the sun goes down, every man must go to sleep. There is no escaping our fates.
The great big ‘fuck you’, but also ‘thank you’ we give to the world is becoming the best versions of ourselves, doing everything we want to do, forcing ourselves out of our comfort zones without fear of judgement, squeezing the juice out of every single moment. Learning, sharing, building, creating, loving.
Living.
Yes, falling in love with being alive; that is how we cheat life. No fear about the uncertainty that we can’t control. Co-creating reality with vigour in our hearts, the indomitable human spirit guiding us to internal glory as we are satisfied to go to rest, having lived a life we are proud of.
We must fall in love with the journey, experiencing each day to the fullest, following the guidance of personal principles rather than material achievement, in doing so, finding success in common hours.
Life is too short, too finite, too ephemeral to do otherwise. If life is indispensable, and life comprises of each and every moment, why shouldn’t each moment be indispensable?
Living as an antifragile idealist.
Yes, that is how I shall live life.
1am aporia, 25/09/2023.
I don’t usually write like this LOL, but I think this is quite a nice piece of writing that encapsulates a lot of my thoughts.
An Epic Quote
To conclude, I quote Sir Roger L’Estrange (in no way seeking to disarm criticism):
Books and dishes share a common fate: neither one is able to please all palates… as I made this composition principally for myself, so it agrees exceedingly well with my constitution; and yet, if any man has a mind to take part with me, he has free leave, and welcome. But, let him carry this consideration along with him, that he’s a very unmannerly guest that presses on another bodies table, and then quarrels with his dinner.
Welcome.