My favorite motto is: Become the person you would otherwise be envious of. That is, use the envy as an emotional for how you emotionally want to direct your life, especially when you don’t know yourself very well (for whom none of us really do).

Also: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

Below is a list of unhinged cognitive science doodles and hot takes about cognition and learning. I plan to organize these with more exposition, but for now am listing them together here.

Learning, Cognition, and Meta-learning

• You can read page 6 and find it gibberish. But reading through, carefully, unpacks the mystery of what is being communicated. Life plays these tricks on you: understanding something’s meaning takes care, time, and effort.
• Watching a 1 minute Youtube short the second time “feels” faster than the first time around.
• Learning is an active process, and every class is an opportunity to learn something. For a 60 minute class, you can be outside the classroom or inside it listening to the speaker – the 60 minutes is going to pass by anyways, it’s up to you to actively participate in the material and fit it into your conceptual understanding of a topic.
• If you forgot what you’re about to say, try remembering the trajectory of your thought process. For instance, if you discussed topics X1, X2, and X3, then went on a tangent of Y1, remind yourself of the X-sequence to increase your chances of remembering X4.
• Fellowships are designed to support people doing what they want to do, not provide instructions.
• The fun thing about experimenting is that, for the next 3 hours, you get to try 10 different things and 9 of them will be wrong before you find something that works. Check your ego in these instances – until you’ve learned this skill, it’s going to be cognitively painful.
• Actively thinking (ie taking a conscious effort to think) about something over a long period of time will enable your subconscious to synthesize ideas and come up with a succinct solution to whatever problem you’re working on. This helps with writers’ block.
• The goal of writing is to communicate effectively for people who are distracted with 15 other things to do, at 6:30am, and in need of a second cup of coffee.
• If you’re working on someting (e.g., a project proposal) and the timing’s not right, keep stacking. Try again in 5-10 years. See [Jocko Willink “Good”].
  • First drafts suck and they’re hard to write. The process is going to take longer than you think it should. Keep working at it.
• If you’re having a conversation with an LLM, take notes by hand. Even if you save the conversation for later, you want to take the time to upload it into your brain. You have to do that with notes by hand, and it’s the most time-effective to do this as you’re having the LLM conversation, rather than coming back to it later. This is one of the differences between access to information (e.g., your lecturer’s notes) and understanding or synthesizing the information (i.e., incorporating it into your understanding of the world).
  • Related: I’m in favor of hand-written notes in the classroom above computer notes, as evidenced by studies on learning in the classroom, per my understanding.

Decision-Making, Heuristics, and Cognitive Strategies

• Deadlines in school are artificial. Although, in practice, timelines must be met for certain deliverables.
  • For certain problems, it’s better to take the perspective that you only get so many hours to solve a problem you care about, rather than you only have to work for so many hours.
  • Imposing cognitive presure helps put people in the right mentality for doing the work that needs to get done. Parkinson’s Law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
• Judge yourself by your inputs, not the outputs. – Alex Hormozi
• Cognitive heuristics for easier decision-making
  • Choose a default decision and then wait, pivot if you feel regret. That’s easier than choosing between two similar options.
  • Trust your past and future selves to recognize missing information, in case you can’t handle everything now. Thank your “later” and “former” “me.”
  • Think via foreshadowing. Make a decision as though: in 5 min, what decision would you have already made? Hindsight is easier to reason about than the present.
• For a (probability) variable X in [0,1], values 0 and 1 are categorically different than those in (0,1). Especially since in most circumstances, probability distributions can’t be estimated accurately.
• There is a time and (cognitive) energy cost for searching for a better solution than what you have already. Part of the Game of Life is to not get stuck on too sub-optimal solutions, or as an entrepreneur, to help people find better information efficiently, at scale, so this isn’t incurred by every individual who needs this type of solution. Theoretically, insurance companies should be taking care of a lot of this, within their respective domains, but retail may not have enough evidence to suggest that prices are correct and not exploitive. Politicians (e.g., with insurance price caps) regularly distort these types of signals.
• If you are procrastinating on X with Y, you’re (usually) lying to yourself that you don’t have time for X; you just prefer Y > X.
• As a retail voter, I’d recommend treating politics like the Median Voter Theorem [Wiki] and vote accordingly, rather than voting through the party line. That is, take some time to go through high-contensions issues and determine your own views on things. Then figure out which tradeoffs you value more, and which politicians are individually representing your beliefs (subject to those tradeoffs). You’ll likely find that the politicans are voting through the party line; but you don’t have to, to get your ideas heard.
• Ask LLMs questions like you’re asking for mentor feedback:
  • Given what you know about me, who am I? What are my character traits? What are my strengths and weaknesses? What is one piece of advice that someone 10 years ahead of me on this path would want me to know? What should I focus more or less on? What am I likely to encounter in the next 5-10 years that I’ll either succeed or struggle with?
  • Ask questions from the third person: What would X think if I said Y? What does X likely think about Y given context Z?
  • Don’t ask “is X good” because it’ll provide you evidence aligned with your own confirmation bias. Instead, ask “by what process should I decide whether this is good or not?”
• Consult your advisors, mentors, and stakeholders during your decision-making process, not just after it’s concluded. These people shouldn’t be surprised that you’re leaning a certain direction. Signal your intent in opportunities before you’re ready to jump the gun.
• Pareto curve for food: time, money, effort to aquire or put together, taste or quality, health (long term) or fit with desired diet (medium term) or effects of refined sugar and other substances on your body (short term), side effects (e.g., cognitive side effects from digesting food, if you do eat, or nutritian deficits, if you don’t eat)

Career, Work, and Professional Growth

• Fancy apartments are facades, albeit niceties needed for human fostering. Functionally they’re all just places.
• The people at your job are who you’re going to become in 10 years by staying at that company.
• “What do you want to be” is a descriptive ask; “What do you want to do” is an active, planning one.
• Intentionality: recognize your tradeoffs and design your career strategically, just as you’d design your own college degree based on courses you find interesting, if you could.
• There’s a difference in doing research based on: do you want to be the person who gets X done, do you want to take the credit for getting X done, or do you want someone else to do X so that you can do something else based on X’s results?
• You work hard in school for the opportunity to be entrusted with work for substantial compensation, later in life.
• Jocko Willink suggests Extreme Ownership. Brian Tracy suggests “you’re responsible for everything in your life.” This means identifying the state of things how they are today, what you’d like them to be, and then creating a plan over the next 12 quarters on how to get there. Certain things, such as habits, addictions, relationships, skills, and cognitive patterns, take time and effort to change. Regardless, they are in your control to change. Joe Brown of Heresy Financial says: even if it’s not your fault, it is your problem.
• Everything compounds. You will always be slower at something at first than when you’re months into a project. The goal when starting out isn’t to be good. It’s to get the ball rolling, especially to gather the resources you think you will need in 4 wks/mos when basic parts are starting to come together.
  • [Brian Tracy: The Laws of Accumulation]
  • Capacity vs autonomy. You can (autonomously) train your capacity over time even if you’ve reached capacity today.
• One goal as a team leader is to enable your trainees to tell a quality story about the time they spent working with you.
• Questions to ask about task allocation, whether this is something simple you need to accomplish (eg synthesize your weekly financies together) or a significant project (eg 12+mo research agenda):
  • How important is the task?
  • What are the costs of doing it (opportunity cost) versus not doing it (hanging over your head), including money, time, and cognitive side effects of learning by doing?
  • How much effort will it take to get the desired outcome (synthesize new knowledge, improve efficiency, gather background information)?
  • Is it cheaper to do it yourself or allocate it to someone else? If it’s chepaer to subcontract, who is the right person for the job? How will you communicate the task to them? How will you verify that the task is “good enough,” while you fix any remaining issue?
  • When will you do the task? e.g., it might take 2 hrs to do if you start at 10am or 6 hrs to do if you start at 11pm
  • How will you minimize downside risk of your investment, so that, with 100% probability you only lose X amount, while with 95% probability you only lose Y amount?
  • What are the enumerable ways the task could go sideways? (e.g., a college student finishing a 10 page semester-long essay at the last minute, at scale.) How likely are these possibilities?
• There are levels to this game.
  • Professionally, socially, financially
  • The skills you need when climbing the latter are all different and complex:
    • Associate -> junior: doing the work the first time yourself
    • -> senior: when you are consistent at doing enough reps that you can take on larger scope projects and more responsibility
    • -> team lead: where you can guide the direction for a project and enabling others to succeed
    • -> division manager: where you’re creating an environment together and organizing people for their growth and success
    • -> company executive: where you’re guiding the direction of the business while enabling culture and process
  • Compensation is rewarded by scale of the people you impact and difficulty / scarceness of the problems you solve. “Solve rich peoples’ problems” - Alex Hormozi.
• There are key words for interfacing with retail workers or bypassing them to get help from a manager. Recognize that 80-90% of consumer queries get triaged in the most efficient mannar. Complex queries, like getting help rolling over your 401k into a Rollover IRA, often require manager help. Businesses tend adapt to the needs of the majority of their clients.
  • See [Comedy Central]
• Goodhart’s Law states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
• One anecdote: good people (highly skilled and works well with peers and clients; not a measure of morality) tend to get pulled up in opportunities; poorly skilled people tend to get pushed out.
• The work works on you more than you work on the work - Alex Hormozi
  • This is the major danger of using LLMs to supplant your work, as well as with the idea of company towns. In that, you can complete work and get paid for it, during a job itself, but part of your goal as an employee (or contractor / company with respect to its clients) is to develop transferable skills, as you’re going your job. If you are not learning the skills that you think you should be learning over the next 2-5 years, during a current job, you’re missing out on a skill-wise opportunity cost even if you’re being paid well.
• If you don’t define your value proposition in a professional environment, either management will assign you to one or start wondering what you’re doing there and why they need you. I realized that one big story of business is to (A) become responsible for solving a problem, (B) continually justify why it’s important that this problem gets solved. This explains (1) my above point in that you do hard work in school for the opportunity to continue doing hard work at a job, (2) individuals continually justifying to HR why they’re important at the company, (3) planned obsolescence.
• Going to university is about a skill tree: through classes X, Y, and Z you now have acquired skills A, B, and C. Make sure to ask yourself whether this route, or any other, is worth the cost. (Although this includes personal and professional development; socializing, networking, learning to live in your late-teens-to-early-20s; etc factors that comes along with going to a top tier university.)
• Get feedback from others by making conjectures that might be wrong. If the other person thinks it’s important engouh to correct you, then this’ll provide you another data point about your ideas. (You do have to check your ego though and let yourself be wrong in public.) Another advantage to declaring your ideas is that, if you’re unpracticed, you don’t know how you’ll tell a story before you actually start telling it. This give you evidence about your own processing of the subject matter, including gaps in your understanding.
• One key pillar of entrepreneurship and business is that time is valuable. If you want to do 100 things in a year = 8 things per month = 2 things per week and you can only allocate 10hrs / week to do them, how do you build leverage for doing this? You build assets to do scale the success of your projects. See [Hamilton (2014). The Millionaire Master Plan].

Personal Productivity and Concentration

• Not every hour is created equal. Brain effectiveness fluctuates throughout the day and week.
  • Identify conditions to enable your brain to focus more efficiently.
• Your body is a control system, similar to central planners affecting the economy via measuring the Beveridge Curve. You apply treatments to affect your body’s state, including how much sleep you got the past few nights, whether you take a 20 minute walk in the sunlight to refocus your study brain, or if supermarkets blast your senses with light and sound so that you experience decision fatigue and induce you to buy more than you intended.
• When you’re in a rut, check your systems. Sometimes your mood is a lagging indicator of your sleep, fitness, socialization or relationships, sunlight, eating habbits, smoking/drinking/vices, etc. In the mean time, at least have fun. What can you do that’ll make your system feel endearing, fit, appreciative, or grateful?
• Task Switching is a significantly more complicated problem for my own concentration, than I realized back in college. I can try to be productive for 8 hours, but, depending on how much depth their is on one project in my cache, it may take 20-40 minutes to re-focus on a completely different task. So if I’m bouncing around between different projects and meetings throughout the day, every 30-90 minutes, there is often very little time to actually dig deep into understanding the implications of the project I’m working on. I have to only budget light cognitive tasks during these periods.
  • Likewise, two hours is not enough time to dig deep into a subject. If something is going to take six hours to accomplish, you can spend these two hours on tasks that will enable your future self to be more productive, such as outlining what types of edits to make, across a document, rather than focusing in on editing one particular section of the project.
• It is recommended to wake up and go to bed the same time every day, and generally keep consistent habits throughout a week. Your concentration and mood depends on external factors and internal factors. For example, if you only get 2 hours of sleep one night, this will override your mood more so than your general day-to-day variance. If you keep consistent sleep habbits, you will only be affected by your intrinsic daily variance.
• There are four type of “time” in business. You must measure your efficiency (productive hours / hours spent) against each one.:
  • Hours on a billable project
  • Hours spent working in a day
  • Wall clock time
  • Cognitive time (brain power / personal energy focused on a topic)

Motivation, Habit Formation, and Self-Improvement

• When to write things down:
  • Saying to yourself “I’m going to remember it later” is a lie. Write it down, especially when you’re about to fall asleep.
  • Use a ‘distraction notebook’ when you want to explore a target idea but don’t want to get distracted from what you’re currently working on.
    • Micro-decisions are cognitively taxing throughout the day.
  • Write down what you want to get done during the day, first thing in the morning.
  • If you take a break on a project (e.g., restarting it the next day), you may have to spend some time to re-cache to remind your short-term/active/working memory of where you were in the problem solving process.
  • Write down repeated thoughts you have over weeks, months, or years. That’s your subconscious announcing something to your consciousness that you need to verbalize explicitly.
  • Write down helpful hints as you go. It’s easier than trying to compile down all of your heuristics at the end of an extended project.
  • Writing things down allows you to externalize the background processes in your brain cache. You don’t need to store as much information in your head, while you’re filtering through them, when you can look at the ideas already scaffolded and written down on the page. This is especially useful for essary drafting, but also complex project work, generally.
  • It also helps with blank-page syndrome: discussing what topic you want to discuss is sometimes cognitively easier than actually discussing it.
  • Write down ghost ideas, on the tip of your tongue, before you forget them.
• If you’re unmotivated or something is hard, recognize that certain things in life just take time. The goal is not necessarily to get everything done, but to work with what you have as best as you can, including your own concentration. Do a little portion now and spread out the task over a few days (as long as it isn’t urgent; otherwise, you’ll have to sit down, suck it up, and get it done). Doing this now will make the next hard task easier as you get stronger and upskill.
  • Building the habit of a task (eg volunteering, reading, going out of your comfort zone to make friends) is often more important than your day-to-day success. Even if you move in the wrong direction at first, it’s easier to pivot than build momentum in the first place. [Life Changing Advice For When You’re At a Low Point In Your Life. Jocko.]. The best habit (eg for a diet or fiscal responsibility) is the one you will actually keep.
  • Do you remember how many win vs loss days you had in the last month, year? If not and it’s important, build a system, write it down. How much slippage do you have in your wallet, unallocated money it gets lost because you don’t have a system? Is it <1% on a small principle or oncome, so it doesn’t matter too much in the long run, or 1% of a 1M which needs cutting down? Or is it a habbit like investing $5 a week, or donating $100 every few months, which starts the ball rolling? See [James Clear, Atomic Habits].
• When you come across something you don’t know, write it down instead of dismissing it. For example, thinking that accredited investor rules don’t apply to you since you don’t qualify. People don’t know what they don’t know, until they realize that such a concept is useful and important for their well-being.
  • Many important concepts in life are on a need-to-know basis.
• Living in your body takes you out of your mind – Sol Aziz
• When someone’s talking and you form preconceptions about what you want to say next, catch yourself – write down your thoughts perhaps – but actually pay attention to the ideas offered by the other person. Your friend is more important than the topic itself.
• A major goal for your projects is “handoffability”: the ability to hand off the project to someone else, who is smart and skilled but doesn’t have any context, so that they can quickly and easily understand and implement your protocol without you.
• A company culture and physical environment affects your day-to-day productivity, unless your “will” is strong enough to assert what you bring to the table. You can be very successful on one project and not successful on another, at the same time, depending on their scope, skill, culture, and project management. Part of playing the professional Game of Life is putting yourself into situations where success will come easily, and avoiding situations that are structurally misaligned for you (individually). Intuitively this stands in contrast to the notion of “how you do anything is how you do everything.” However, even though environments are often out of your control, you often have choice over which environments to participate in.
• Certain prices are extractive. For example, a water bottle costs $0.30 in the grocery store and $5 at an amusement park. They’re just seeing which “suckers” will accept their rediculously high margins. Don’t let that be you.
• Grocery stores overload your senses with loud music, bright lights, and saturated colors to induce cognitive overload and enable you to be less selective when you’re choosing what to buy. TikTok and scrolling is hyperstimulative but drains your attention capacity. See Bernays’s Propoganda, Cialdini’s Influence, Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, and Flobot’s (2007) [There’s a War Going on For Your Mind].

Life Philosophy and Meta-Observations

• Embrace change. A river looks the same yet its water is always changing. No two experiences or relationships are ever the same.
• A Tale of Two Seas. “The Sea of Galilee is flowing and lush; the Dead Sea takes but never gives.” This demonstrates the need to donate and give back to your community. Example [source].
• For big life (or investment) decisions, try to prove yourself wrong, not right. This is to counteract confirmation bias.

A list of questions you should ask people ahead of you

• What is one thing you would tell your past self before you started?
• Any book recommendations?
• What types questions should I be asking to complete my understanding of this topic?
• TBD