Mimetic

Make sure your job has clear price signals for success and failure. Be suspicious of roles that compensate you with status or non-financial rewards.

It’s important to have a strong learning signal — a fast feedback loop between effort expended and success. This way, you’ll know quickly what it takes to succeed, and whether you can be happy doing so. Look for environments where competitors see themselves as playing a game, rather than fighting for survival — this prevents rankings within the hie... See more

Maintain a diversity of pursuits — you want to ensure that, no matter how engrossed you become in one, you never forget that the others exist.

Don’t force yourself to do anything you hate. If you get too good at this, you won’t be able to figure out when to quit.

That’s the mimetic trap in a nutshell: it hurts to leave, and there’s nowhere to go. It decouples the social reward signal from the rest of objective reality — you can spend years ascending ranks in a hierarchy without producing anything that the rest of humanity finds valuable.