But here’s a constant: each year you learn more about yourself. You see yourself in different environments, different styles of living, different communities and friend circles which reward slightly different things. You get to see yourself bend to the world around you as you evolve from one stage of life to another.

I’m convinced each of us has certain fundamental dispositions, whether they’re contained in our genes or attachment styles or Enneagram types. But we’re also prone to making up stories about ourselves, stories that we wish were true. Time is the best antidote to all our attempts at self-deception: it’s easy to lie to yourself for a day, but a lot harder to lie to yourself for a decade.

I don’t believe in the separation between thinking and feeling. I think so, I think of thinking as as an instrument. It’s it’s a it’s like, you know, it’s the intellectual psychological equivalent of like weighing scales and barometers and and rulers. It’s it’s a way of processing information. But most information is actually, like, I mean, emotional information, you know.

what makes a pro a pro and what makes a con a con? If you really dig into it all the way down, it boils down to your feelings about those respective things. And, you know, you might say things that, oh, this is objective because I wanna take that job instead of this job because it pays more. But embedded in that is the fact that you feel that that getting more money is a good thing and you’re you’re choosing to weight(?).

there’s this more abstract kind of big picture, philosophical grand thinking, which is interesting and fun, and there is there’s instrumental thinking, which is very, very functional, very, very, it’s about doing something it’s about getting stuff done basically.

the act of confronting a fear is an act. It’s something that you do. It’s something that, you know, you do with your body effectively. Even if it’s, you know, I’m gonna text my boss, right, and ask for a raise. Like, that’s still an act. It’s something you choose to do. It’s something you have an emotional response to. You feel nervous or you feel scared or, you know, you feel angry. Whatever it is, it is about your feelings and and you think to process your feelings but my cat is here. You think to process your feelings but ultimately you act.

there are quotes like the unexamined life is not worth living and then people flip it and say the unlived life is not worth examining. I think both statements are kinda true

I want the world to have more good thinkers and the way to do that is to, you know, like is to be like Richard Feynman, Feynman, I feel, which is to to enjoy thinking, to show the to show, you know, he described it as I think the the pleasure of finding things out. Right? And the pleasure of really understanding how things work. Because when you really understand how things work, you can manipulate it and how things work.

I am trying to demonstrate my own love for thinking and for processing information and for making sense of reality. And while that’s the case, there’s also a subset of people who may be overrepresented on Twitter and YouTube who kind of take that to to, almost dysfunctional degree where, you know, you decide that thinking is a good thing and then you become obsessive about it and you become kind of it it becomes like your drug. Like, and you think too much about everything.

it doesn’t make sense for me to study everything there is about audio before I start making videos. It’s I should just make a video, keep doing it until and when something goes bad, I will learn by trying to fix it. Right? That’s that’s that is a sort of practical approach to thinking. And it means, you know, being okay not knowing some things so that you can focus on knowing the things that are most consequential, most effective, most powerful.

if you spend all your time thinking, you probably should cut that shit out a little bit. You should you can probably afford to think less. You can probably afford to, you know, do like a weekly review or something and and, you know, like, live your life a little bit.

Horrible advice: find a way to blend your work with your interests so that you no longer understand where your core work hours start and the obsessiveness begins. Do this for > 12 hours a day, every day, holidays included. Tell your loved ones that you're busy with work, and take small satisfaction that what you just said was half true. Develop an unhealthy addiction to liquid stimulants and spring out of bed every morning with a burning curiosity that wont abate until you've tripped over enough hurdles to crush your enthusiasm for a few hours. Rinse and repeat for a decade until you're no longer a jack of all trades, but a master of most. Try to convey your interests to those around you, and failing that, retreat to social media where you will attempt to spin these as career developing STAR moments. Accept the disappointment you will feel in knowing that no one will appreciate the efforts you went to in achieving this level of tedious mastery.

fully regretting that you didn't focus more on that thing, oh and the other thing plus you're certain life would have been better for everyone if you hadn't dont quite so much of...

I started trimming hobbies. To pacify myself, I told myself that I am not stopping FOREVER, but just for now. It worked. Most of them are gone, I continue with a few, and I occasionally dabble with one or two that I put away.

Start with a group of interests that has the most overlaps in terms of skills or resources needed - call these compounded projects. Out of the compounded projects, start with the one that interests you with 2 weeks of effort. If you can’t make a significant progress in that time frame, you either lack the skills, resource, or interests in them. Move onto the next compounded project.

After you finish with the list of compounded projects, review the original list and prioritize the interests based on your experience. Create compounded projects again and go at it. Repeat.

being elastic with your interest and skills while jumping from project to project is the right approach.

(1) Start by being clear with yourself what things you're interested in knowing about vs. what things you're interested in doing.

The more work in progress streams, the more time you waste context switching. Being intentional about the things you choose to do and the order in which you do them allows you to do more things in the same amount of time than if you tried to do all of them simultaneously.

I had a lot of interests: coding, playing musical instruments, cars, woodworking, embedded systems, audio/video engineering, etc, but I had to pare it down to just a few after having had several bouts of burnouts. I'd recommend trying 200 interests at a shallow level, and eventually you'll find some of them are more interesting than others

As the “am I ready?” question continues to ricochet off myself and others, I’m finally viewing it for what it is: a clever, creative way to procrastinate self-actualization. If you’re asking yourself whether you’re ready, or finding reasons why you aren’t, it’s a sign you have let the gap grow too wide between idea and action. Your mind is probably convincing you that there is some existential reason for that buffer, when in reality, you’re just scared to do a new thing wrong or to look weird doing it. That’s okay. Now that you’ve noticed your inaction, you can act. You are as ready as you’ll ever be, because ready-ness is not measured by thinking, it’s measured by starting.

If you keep waiting for permission from some external source long after anyone is responsible for giving it to you, your ideas and ambitions will whither while you become bitter that no one is letting you do what you wanted to do. But in the end: it’s your responsibility to give yourself permission. This doesn’t need to be daunting. It can be the most liberating epiphany of all to realize that you can start now.

are you ready? to be in the relationship? to start the business? to say i love you to your partner? to forgive the person you resent? to have the hard conversation? to tell the truth? to publish the piece? to admit you were wrong? to create the life you imagine? to do what scares you?

what I’ve leapt at before I felt ready has consistently lead to the most expansive journeys of my life. Pursuing jobs I was too young for. Applying for scholarships that seemed impossible to get. Reaching out to people that I had no business knowing.

The whole notion of needing to be ready is highly corrosive to action. Because how can we really measure ready-ness? What if the only measure of “being ready” is just… starting? Trying? Doing the thing. What if ready is something you prove to yourself you are while you’re making the attempt, instead of trying to prove it before you start? What if being ready is not something you can cognitively analyze, but something that can be only demonstrated through action.

The reframe I am now internalizing is that ready is a felt state you can consciously bring yourself to.

You can imagine what the version of you that is ready would feel like and fill yourself up with those feelings. Or to make it even simpler: you can just start. If it doesn’t work, you can ask why, integrate your learnings, and try a different way. Or move on. Or whatever. But action—action!—is the path to ready-ness, not more thinking.

limiting beliefs. Poor attempts at protecting me from some imagined danger. Blocks created by my mind, designed to keep my ideas inside me and keep my creativity away from the world—away from reaching you. I’m now weeding out this ready-ness block and seeding the belief that the ability to imagine is the only sign of ready-ness you need.

You can go back later to refine what you’ve done. But by then, you’re already in the act. You’ve done it instead of remaining stuck in thought. So, the next time you find yourself wondering if you’re ready: don’t. Instead: start. We become ready by trying, not by thinking. Because ready-ness is a question of boldness, and as Bradbury so eloquently reminds us: intellect doesn’t help you very much there.