Everything That Turned Out Well in My Life Followed the Same Design Process

• I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people to find me, and then I hung out with them. We did projects together.


• I kept iterating—paying attention to the context, removing things that frustrated me, and expanding things that made me feel alive.


• Eventually, I looked up and noticed

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• You observe the context (when applying to university, trying to figure out what my career should be, this would have meant, among other things, observing what kind of tasks I liked doing again and again and again; what kind of people I want to surround myself with; how the job market looks; and what I am interested in).


• You form a mental model of

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• Instead of trying to force a vision, here is how you can lean into unfolding.
  
  
  • You observe the context (when applying to university, trying to figure out what my career should be, this would have meant, among other things, observing what kind of tasks I liked doing again and again and again; what kind of people I want to surround myself with; how th

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The context is smarter than you . It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.

• If you cycle through this feedback loop ferociously for ten years, you will end up with a well-designed life. It will not look like you imagined it would. It will have unfolded around you, and you will struggle to wrap your head around how you ended up where you did.


• You will have lost track of all the experiments and insights that led you to a fit.

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The faster you can collide your ideas against reality, the faster you get feedback. By increasing the speed at which you can act on the context, trying new things will become cheaper for you—and so you will take more risks, and extract more information from the context. Write faster, prototype faster, ask for feedback faster. Velocity is underrated... See more

It will be easier if you can overcome your social fear of looking stupid or incomprehensible. Wanting to be understood by others, or not wanting to contradict ourselves and our established identity—these are major blockers to unfolding.

An essay is good if it fits a context made up of 1) the truth, 2) the intellectual needs of the writer, and 3) the reader's mind. The better the form fits that context—the truer, more insight-generating, and resonant it is—the better the essay.