Specific combinations of values

It might feel like your values broadly align with everyone around you, particularly your close friends. But your specific combination of values is really quite unique. For each of those close friends, you can probably come up with something that you deeply value but they don’t, or vice versa. That’s not just okay; that’s actually fantastic! If you keep trying to act in better alignment with your values, over time, you will become the best person in the world at embodying your unique set of values.

Your self-worth shouldn’t be based on your usefulness. But if it is, even just a little bit, it can help to imagine “you in 10 years” being the one person in the world most closely aligned with your specific combination of values.

Unlearning is more important than learning

Something I think is both more difficult and more important than learning new things is unlearning things that used to be true but aren’t any more, or things we believed were true in the past but now believe are not true. Part of what makes this so difficult is that a lot of our beliefs are “cached”: you determine what you believe about a thing based on your best current knowledge, but don’t automatically re-examine all of those beliefs when your best current knowledge changes.

I’ve met some older folks who have felt really vibrant and different from most people their age. All of them have that quality of actively re-evaluating long-held beliefs based on new evidence. It’s inspired me to highly value and practice this ability.

Make as many pots as possible

When you learn how to make a thing, there’s this false dichotomy between making a lot of things and making really good things. In practice, people learning how to make pottery who were advised to make as many posts pots as possible ended up with a better “best” pot than students who were advised to make the best pot they can imagine. The world is really complicated. There’s so many aspects of any skill that you can only learn through repeatedly doing and gaining intuition about the craft and the possibility space.

I love the idea that everyone has ten bad books in them. If you ever want to get to the good books, first you have to write all the bad ones out of you.

A tragedy of the English language

I think it’s a tragedy of the English language that the words “million”, “billion”, and “trillion” sound so similar. The actual difference between each number is hard for people to imagine, even programmers who are used to dealing with large quantities and orders of magnitude. My current favorite illustrative example is:

Let’s say you have an operation that takes 0.5 ms to complete and you need to run it on a large data set. Running it on a million things might take ten minutes, a nice coffee break. Running it on a billion things might take six days, a background process you really don’t want to interrupt or run twice. Running it on a trillion things might take 16 years. Don’t do that.

Write more like you talk

Most people’s writing would improve if they wrote more like they talked. You probably learned how to write in an academic setting and do most of your writing in a similarly formal setting. While you’ve probably had plenty of casual conversations in text, people often don’t consider that “real writing” and try not to let it affect their writing style. But you’ve got so much experience breaking things down and clearly conveying them in casual conversation that could benefit your writing with a small change of mindset.