Some Advice Gathered From People Smarter Than Me

Listening empathetically is nice to do because it makes people feel good, and it deepens relationships. But listening is good for you anyway, even if you don’t care about niceness or feeling good. If you want to get your way, you’ll have to bring people over to your side, unless you have enough power to stably coerce them.

In fact, people with extreme traits can often structure their lives in such a way that they can trade on the ways they’re exceptional, leaving no persistent reason to address some particular deficit they have. And, generally, people are savvy enough to hide their dysfunction. People will disappoint you, eventually.

Avoiding obvious catastrophic failure modes is often more important than improving procedure in minor ways. Slightly upgrading your wardrobe is less important than getting a decent haircut, if your haircut sucks. Improving your knowledge of options trading is less important than not doing leveraged crypto day trading when you’re emotional. If you s... See more

it is absolutely certain that if you bump into the world in some way, it will bump back, often unpredictably and to a greater extent than you think. Just do anything that’s even slightly interesting to you, without paying too much attention to what you’re trying to achieve. You will find that the world will throw behavior at you, and, at some point... See more

Make it incredibly easy to do whatever you want to do. You want to design your life for the least effective, least intelligent, least conscientious version of yourself. That person is probably an idiot.

When you select a profession, you are choosing the scenes that will compose your life. You should think pretty hard about those scenes. If you start a plumbing company with more than one employee, you will be telling plumbers what to do. You’d better enjoy hanging out with plumbers, and telling them what to do. And when you ask yourself whether you... See more