April 2024

“To travel means, ultimately, nothing more than coming back home a different person from the one who left.” — PICO IYER

Transport, like transcendence, has nothing to do with frequent flyer miles or passport stamps. Any journey has the potential to transform us—“if only we can open our eyes and look with more care at what we so often take for granted.”

“Today is the worst AI will ever be.” — Alex Irpan

To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.

“No man was ever wise by chance.” — Seneca

“Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.” — Neil Strauss

“You can’t achieve greatness by doing what everyone else is doing.

If your choices resemble those of your friends, you’ll get the same results they get.”

“The single most powerful thing you can do in a relationship, whether it’s personal or professional, is to give someone 100% of your attention.”

“Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and in others, is education.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Nobody’s going to love you more than you love yourself. Nobody can care about you more than you can care about yourself.

When you think about your own time and life, busyness and laziness have the same impact: you’re not in control. Your schedule and all the responsibilities you’ve stacked up are dictating your time.

Figure out what you’re good at without trying, then try.

You can go to hell without moving an inch, just focus on what you lack.

You can taste heaven without leaving earth, just rejoice in what you have.

The reason people get good ideas in the shower is because it’s the only time during the day when most people are away from screens long enough to think clearly. The lesson is not to take more showers, but rather to make more time to think.

Don’t sacrifice life for a living.

“Nobody wants to believe happiness is a choice, because that puts responsibility in their hands. It’s the same reason people self-pity: to delay action, to make an outcry to the universe, as though the more they state how bad things are, the more likely it is that someone else will change them.” — Brianna Wiest

“Writing is nature’s way of telling us how lousy our thinking is.” — Leslie Lamport

Time is the friend of the consistent and the enemy of the inconsistent.

“I think one thing that is a really important thing to strive for is being internally driven, being driven to compete with yourself, not with other people. If you compete with other people, you end up in this mimetic trap, and you sort of play this tournament, and if you win, you lose. But if you’re competing with yourself, and all you’re trying to do is — for the own self-satisfaction and for also the impact you have on the world and the duty you feel to do that — be the best possible version you can, there is no limit to how far that can drive someone to perform.” — Sam Altman

Admitting that “I don’t know” at least once a day will make you a better person.

Forget trying to decide what your life’s destiny is. That’s too grand. Instead, just figure out what you should do in the next 2 years.

Aim to be effective, but unpredictable. That is, you want to act in a way that AIs have trouble modeling or imitating. That makes you irreplaceable.