The "life is a game" mental frame puts you in a fun frame of mind. You just can't wait to see what happens next. Maybe you'll lose, perhaps you'll win -- who cares! As long as it's interesting, keeps you amused, engaged, and learning.

Chances are the second proposition sounded more appealing to you. But look again, both these propositions are identical. The second version attracts more positive answers[1] because it's framed as cost whereas the first version is framed as a loss and who wants to lose?

"Life is a game" mental frame Once a motherfucker get an understandin' on the game, and what the levels and the rules of the game is, then the world ain't no trick no more, the world is a game to be played. -- 2Pac in "Starin' Through My Rear View"

The risk anxiety can paralyze you and unless you act you're just making your situation worse. One handy mental frame to adopt in this case is "life is a game, and I'm playing it." If life is a game, then you're there to play it.

In situations where it's painful, you have to remember that time will go by, nothing lasts forever, and that you'll eventually be on the other side. What's important now is to execute!

A excellent technique to couple with the worst-case scenario mental frame is what's called "negative visualization". An age-old technique invented by the Stoics in ancient Greece, you visualize or meditate on the worst. Like, actually imagine it happening. If it does happen, you're already at peace with it, and if good or neutral thing happens then it's ecstatic!

There is a lot more to this, and I'll try to keep this as a live document. But for now, I need to get back to playing the life game because time won't wait for me, and really, what's the worst that can happen? I want you to remember though, that I'm not only my job, it's true that I learn a lot from it, but I contain multitudes!

Theory of Constraints: A system is only as strong as its weakest point. Focus on the bottleneck. Counterintuitively, if you break down the entire system and optimize each component individually, you’ll lower the effectiveness of the system. Optimize the entire system instead.

Talent vs. Genius: Society is good at training talent but terrible at cultivating genius. Talented people are good at hitting targets others can’t hit, but geniuses find targets others can’t see. They are opposite modes of excellence. Talent is predictable, genius is unpredictable.

Life is easier when you don’t compete. (

Demand Curves Slope Down: The harder something is to do, the fewer people will do it.

Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Hock Principle: Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.

Creativity Begins at the Edge: Change starts away from the spotlight. Then, it moves towards the center. That’s why the most interesting ideas at a conference never come from the main stage. They come from the hallways and the bar after sunset

The Invisible Hand: Markets aggregate knowledge. Rising prices signal falling supply or increased demand, which incentivizes an increase in production. The opposite is true for falling prices. Prices are a signal wrapped in an incentive.

I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. —Vincent van Gogh

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were once interviewed on stage. The host pointed out that each man had built a defining company of their generations. Gates responded: “Steve and I will always get more credit than we deserve, because otherwise the story gets too complicated.”

One of the reasons people discount the possibility of big, crazy events is that we assume big events need big causes. A huge recession, in our minds, must be caused by a huge, rare, risk hitting us at once. But most big things – companies, events, careers, pandemics, etc – are just a bunch of small, random, boring things that compound at just the right time and explode into something bigger and more powerful than anyone imagined.

Life is also a form of self storytelling. We're continually retelling ourselves our life story, but very few people think of themselves as authors of their story, not mere subjects. People with extraordinary high-agency realize this early in life and start maximizing the interestingness of their life story.

Another thing that I've detected in myself that would make me fallback on the "I'm a perfectionist" excuse is decision fatigue. You can get tired from just making decisions if you had to do so many of them while working on something.

That people much smarter than me will look at it and laugh about how bad it is. That's almost never the case. I've written some really silly posts and code and it rarely gets ridiculed

likes to say: "under-promise, over-deliver".

In conclusion I think that perfectionism is mostly a thin veil hiding a multitude of insecurities, fears, and logical fallacies. And it's something we need to face in order to reach self-actualization.

In prior eras, a b2b startup founder might've been a skilled trader. Whereas a successful culture-changing founder would've started a revolution or a religion.

Tell your story. Don't rely on the media machine to tell it for you because, ultimately, they're part of the gatekeeping class. Many are owned by the priesthood.

Enjoy yourself. And remember that quitting is never an option. When it's darkest and most intense, you're closest to victory.

Another example is hiring. Before I came back to academia a couple of years ago I was out doing startups. What I noticed is that when people hire they are almost always hire based on experience. They're looking for somebody's resume trying to find the person who has already done the job they want them to do three times over. That's basically hiring based on Y-intercept.

It is possible to be empowered to work how you want (Autonomy), to be leveraging your skills and expertise (Mastery), and to be proud of your role in a cause (Purpose / Why), and yet still dislike every day of your existence. More than contentment (ikigai), you need Joy.

One person at a time, can be all it takes, as in this serendipitous Slack exchange I had with WPGraphQL founder Jason Bahl:

Sinek sums up the answer: These companies Start with “Why.” Meaning: These organizations have clear, simple, compelling raison d’être, a reason for being, something they stand for, something they would never contravene with their actions, even if it hurts sales or profitability.

Having any two without the third creates a well-defined yet common trap. It’s instructive to understand the traps, because it can feel good to be in the trap

Trap: Skill + Need - JoyThis is classic burn-out. When you do the work all day, you feel drained and exhausted rather than energized (as you would if it were Flow = Skill + Joy). You do the work, because the company needs it done. You do the work, because you are undeniably great at it. Even though you hate doing it, you’d rather take it on yourself rather than foist it on others, whether because you want to “protect them from the drudgery8,” or because you believe they can’t do as good a job as you can, or because you can’t afford to hire someone. Because you create great results that the company needs, it doesn’t look like a problem—not to you, nor your team. But because you dislike it, you grow to resent it, and eventually you can’t face it, and you’re finished

Trap: Joy + Skill - NeedAt the intersection of Joy and Skill is “being in the zone,” a.k.a. Flow7. Wonderful! Unless you’re working on something the company doesn’t need done. Being in flow is intoxicating, and does “recharge the batteries,” but it’s unproductive.

Pink’s model; it is compatible. It adds the missing “Joy” component, while reinforcing “Mastery” with the label of “Skill.” It lacks “Autonomy,” however, perhaps because I created it with the founder in mind—a person who definitionally possesses autonomy, even to their detriment. “Need” is more tactical than “Purpose,” really about being useful.

Therefore, my recommendation is to identify that higher purpose, as described by “Start with Why” or ikigai, and fulfill your own part in that purpose at the center of the three circles.

Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen—in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. —George Orwell, Why I Write

“I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” —Vincent van Gogh

Every sufficiently interesting game has a metagame above it. This is the game about the game. It is often called ‘the meta’.

The best marketers are therefore the ones who advance the best practices the fastest to keep ahead of the mainstream, or are able to identify and develop playbooks for new channels before the old ones become too inefficient to fight in. The quicker they identify new channels and the longer they keep their playbooks secret, the better the marketing game becomes for them.

New tools mean new options. New options mean new viable strategies.

In the late 70s, the meta changed again. A man named Michael Milken pioneered the use of an obscure financial instrument called the high-yield bond, more popularly known as the ‘junk bond’. He quickly realised that these junk bonds could be used to raise immense amounts of capital for the purpose of corporate takeovers, with little to no cost to the acquiring company. Such ‘leveraged buyouts’ (LBOs) — which issued debt on the target company’s assets, not on the parent company’s books — changed the rules of the takeover game in ways that persist till today. The players that emerged to take advantage of this innovation, the ones who skated to the edge of the meta? We know them today as private equity firms.

What is interesting about the meta is that metagames can only be played if you have mastered the basics of the domain. In MtG, Judo, and Splendor, you cannot play the metagame if you are not already good at the base game. You cannot identify winning strategies in MtG if you don’t do well in current MtG; you cannot adapt old techniques to new rules if you don’t already have effective techniques for competitive Judo.

What is true in sports is also true in real world domains like marketing and business; it is true even if you are aware of the meta’s existence. The nature of the metagame demands that you play the base game well. It lives on top of the pattern-matching that comes with expertise.

This seems like an obvious thing to say. But as with most such things, the second-order implications are more interesting than the first-order ones. For instance, because expertise is necessary to play the metagame, it is often useful to search for the meta in your domain as a north star for expertise. The way I remind myself of this is to say that I should ‘locate the meta’ whenever I’m at the bottom of a skill tree. Even if I can’t yet participate, searching for the metagame that experts play will usually give me hints as to what skills I must acquire in order to become good enough.

One of the most dangerous mental traps is the appealing fiction – something that’s false or uncertain but you want it to be true so desperately that you believe it as an established fact.

The optimism bias protects us from accurately perceiving the pain and difficulties the future undoubtedly holds, and it may defend us from viewing our options in life as somewhat limited. As a result, stress and anxiety are reduced, physical and mental health are improved, and the motivation to act and be productive is enhanced.

The late scientist Hans Rosling said, “I am not an optimist. I am a very serious possibilist.”

1. Most good things happened because of a reaction to a bad thing. So one reason I’m optimistic is specifically because I know there will be problems that push people into fixing what’s wrong with the world.

Physicist David Deutsch says “optimism is a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success.” My interpretation of that is: Saying you are optimistic does not mean you think everything will be flawless and great. It means you know there are going to be failures and problems and setbacks, but those are what motivates people to find a new solution or remove an error – and that is what you should be optimistic about.

Evolution doesn’t teach by showing you what works, but by destroying what doesn’t.

Nassim Taleb says, “The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!”

2. The constant human desire to one-up past successes, and the generational knowledge transfer, is a pure example of compounding in action.

Innovation and advancement tend to compound. One person raises the bar over the previous limit, and that becomes the baseline for a new generation to aim for and build upon.

Part of that is a simple generational knowledge transfer. It’s pure compounding: People spend years or decades discovering a new truth, then the next generation begins their careers with those new truths.

Another part is driven by the need to one-up the current leader of a field. Charlie Munger says, “The world is not driven by greed; it’s driven by envy.” You see someone accomplish a new feat and think, “I should be able to do that too – and even better.” It’s hard to imagine a world where that desire goes away – which makes it hard not to be an optimist.

So while thousands of Jack’s Todays will, to an outsider from far away, begin to look like a complete picture, Jack spends each moment of his actual reality in one unremarkable Today pixel or another. Jack’s error is brushing off his mundane Wednesday and focusing entirely on the big picture, when in fact the mundane Wednesday is the experience of his actual life.

There’s no reason to think the staircase doesn’t extend upwards forever. The red alien a few steps above us on the staircase would see human consciousness the same way we see that of an orangutan—they might think we’re pretty impressive for an animal, but that of course we don’t actually begin to understand anything. Our most brilliant scientist would be outmatched by one of their toddlers.

The Higher Being is brilliant, big-thinking, and totally rational. But on the grand timescale, he’s a very new resident in our heads, while the primal animal forces are ancient, and their coexistence in the human mind makes it a strange place:

As humans evolved and the Higher Being began to wake up, he looked around your brain and found himself in an odd and unfamiliar jungle full of powerful primitive creatures that didn’t understand who or what he was. His mission was to give you clarity and high-level thought, but with animals tramping around his work environment, it wasn’t an easy job. And things were about to get much worse. Human evolution continued to make the Higher Being more and more sentient, until one day, he realized something shocking:

The shittiest thing about the fog is that when you’re in the fog, it blocks your vision so you can’t see that you’re in the fog. It’s when the fog is thickest that you’re the least aware that it’s there at all—it makes you unconscious. Being aware that the fog exists and learning how to recognize it is the key first step to rising up in consciousness and becoming a wiser person.

When I look at the wide range of motivating emotions that humans experience, I don’t see them as a scattered range, but rather falling into two distinct bins: the high-minded, love-based, advanced emotions of the Higher Being, and the small-minded, fear-based, primitive emotions of our brain animals.

The way you do that is by developing as much wisdom as possible, as early as possible. To me, wisdom is the most important thing to work towards as a human. It’s the big objective—the umbrella goal under which all other goals fall into place. I believe I have one and only one chance to live, and I want to do it in the most fulfilled and meaningful way possible—that’s the best outcome for me, and I do a lot more good for the world that way. Wisdom gives people the insight to know what “fulfilled and meaningful” actually means and the courage to make the choices that will get them there.

If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed. —Carl Sagan

It seems more than likely. Could we have been created by something/someone bigger than us or be living as part of a simulation without realizing it? Sure—I’m a three-year-old, remember, so who am I to say no?

The good news is, if you can power through a bit of the Dark Woods, something funny happens. Making progress on a task produces positive feelings of accomplishment and raises your self-esteem. The monkey gains his strength off of low self-esteem, and when you feel a jolt of self-satisfaction, the monkey finds a High Self-Esteem Banana in his path. It doesn’t quell his resistance entirely, but it goes a long way to distracting him for a while, and you’ll find that the urge to procrastinate has diminished.

Being impatient is the best way to get faster at things. And across a surprising number of domains, being really fast correlates strongly with being effective.

the most famous, interesting, powerful people all read their own email they’re almost universally good at responding to it quickly they’re always very, very curious. they have very little time. Anything with friction gets done “later”

people tend to be either slow movers or fast movers and that seems harder to change. Being a fast mover is a big thing; a somewhat trivial example is that I have almost never made money investing in founders who do not respond quickly to important emails.

And what you actually need is this bias towards action. The best founders work on things that seem small but they move really quickly. But they get things done really quickly. Every time you talk to the best founders they’ve gotten new things done. In fact, this is the one thing that we learned best predicts a success of founders in YC. If every time we talk to a team they’ve gotten new things done, that’s the best predictor we have that a company will be successful.

That means that moving quickly is an advantage that compounds. Being twice as fast doesn’t just double your output; it doubles the growth rate of your output. Over time, that makes an enormous difference.

In retrospect, I wish those people had just told me “think real hard.” I was looking for an easy way out—One Weird Trick to Programming Better—but programming is too hard for that. That’s my preferred reading of the Feynman Algorithm: there is no one weird trick.

But 99% of the “secret”—the thing that separates me from Gell-Mann, or Jeff Dean—is tacit knowledge. It often can’t be articulated any better than “think real hard.” But, believe it or not, thinking real hard, for real long, does work.

People sometimes tell me that they want to join a startup, so that they can learn how it works, and eventually start one themselves. I usually end up suggesting that they skip straight to step 2 and start one themselves. Why is that? Isn’t it better to learn from someone else’s mistakes than to have to make all of them yourself? At least for me, the answer’s been sometimes yes, but sometimes no.

I knew exactly which parts of our codebase they’d point out as the biggest problems, but that wasn’t the only decision I faced—I also needed to envision what the problem parts should ultimately look like, and then find the fastest path to get from here to there, and then spend months executing the plan. There were too many decisions, and the stakes were too high, for my 95%-accurate simulated guesses to be good enough.

Overall, I probably did a pretty bad job. But, importantly, I was able to see my mistakes play out in the real world. Instead of modeling what other people would tell me to do, I built a model of the problem directly. So when I got negative feedback, it wasn’t “Mentor X thinks this plan is bad” but “the world works differently than you expected.”

You learn many more details about why it was a bad idea. If someone else tells you your plan is bad, they’ll probably list the top two or three reasons. By actually following through, you’ll also get to learn reasons 4–1,217.

This pattern repeated itself across lots of different types of hard decision. I’d start out too uncertain to act with conviction; I’d procrastinate or implement bad plans; but after enough iterations of that, I’d end up understanding a lot more about the problem space. Ultimately, I’d end up with a broad base of tacit knowledge and heuristics that were richer than anything I could get from reading books or talking to people. At that point, I’d finally be able to build the conviction I needed to make good calls.

This applies to any domain that’s open-ended and requires a lot of complex decisions with long time horizons. Take the original example of running a company. By far the most important part of the CEO’s job is the high-conviction decisions. What product should we build? What strategy should we pursue? Who should we hire? And so on.

If you join a company where someone else is already making those decisions well, you’ll never get the type of practice that you need in order to build your own models and heuristics. You’ll end up with a good, but not perfect, model of “what would my boss do?"—a model that can make the 95% of easy decisions, but not the 5% of hard ones that add the most value.