📶 112 life lessons from the first half off 2022

Every day, I capture thoughts that make me stop and think.

Here are 112 of those thoughts.

Hopefully something in here makes you see the world differently.

January:

• Your rating system changes based on the environment you create. If you’re around 6’s all the time, eventually you forget 10’s exist.

• Every dollar you invest in somebody else is an implicit bet against yourself.

• Luck is the macro result of thousands of micro actions.

• Death by domestication is the worst way to die.

• Nobody thinks it will happen to them until it does.

• Society wants you to experience less randomness so you become predictable. Especially as a young person (<30), you should be optimize for randomness in your day.

• Not living up to your full potential should be your biggest fear.

• The more obsessed you become with probabilities, the more shocked you are of deviations.

• Everything is arbitrage. In order to win, you have to either be good at exploiting these opportunities or pricing your time at a premium to your work.

• The majority of people know exactly what they need to do, but they still won’t do it.

• Trillions of dollars in value would cease to exist of every person was in incredible shape.

• People don’t want to be told what to do. They want to figure it out on their own.

• Software, media, and alcohol are the best margin businesses.

• The more accessories a person wears, the less confident they naturally are.

• What we reward online makes us more intolerable to be around offline.

• Less than 5% of the population have true purpose. If somebody asked you your purpose today, how would you respond?

• The world is becoming more and more frightened of being direct.

• Constant stimulation is how fatties and boring people are made.

• You can only be interesting if you have interesting stories and can tell those stories well.

February:

• You can’t be busy and broke.

• The world has not grown more sophisticated. It has only gotten more complicated.

• Building wealth is the combination of 1,000 skills.

• When you’re miserable, you’re driven to change. When you’re happy, you’re driven to complacency.

• The pursuit of happiness was never the objective of life. This idea only began to pop up with the post-war generations. Life should be about finding purpose and working towards that purpose every day.

• The skills that got you to where you are today are the same ones that are holding you back from reaching the next level

• If it’s not going to grow over time, it’s not worth doing.

• Success is not a final destination. What's the point of being "successful" if you have no stories to tell about your climb?

• A lot of success and evil was rooted from time spent alone.

• Those who forget the body to pursue a “perfect mind” have no idea where to start. If you want to become a better thinker, you have to make your physical health more of a priority.

• The world doesn’t punish errors. It punishes getting caught.

March:

• Being in major cities breeds mediocrity. Being alone is the only way to stop you from thinking like the masses.

• All that our brains do is create and destroy meaning.

• If it’s digital, sooner or later it’s going to be free.

• The financial system is meant to keep you poor. The healthcare system is designed to keep you unhealthy. The internet wants you distracted. The entire system is designed to keep you weak.

• If your community is free, then somebody else is subsidizing the cost. If it’s paid, then you have to justify the price of membership. Network and knowledge are subjective, and demonstrating an ability to recoup investment is the only way to prove ROI.

• Services for CF; SaaS for wealth.

• You form different relationships with people you struggle with. The friends you party with have a weaker bond with you than the people you lift with.

• A 401k and 30-year mortgage are only good investments if you are bad with money.

• Progress to some is deterioration to others.

• "He who suffers the least complains the most."

• The early part of your career should be about learning and performing favors. The next chapter should be cashing in those skills and favors.

• Cold email works with transactional business models (one-time / success-based fees). The majority of subscription purchases happen because of trust built before purchase (word of mouth / SEO).

• If you want bad service, start the agreement by haggling over price.

• Life is a series a baggage accumulation. You’re only truly free for a finite amount of time. Make the most of it.

• It’s easier to make big bets when you’re poor. You become more defensive of your money when you have something to lose.

• Life rewards an antifragile portfolio, but people don’t. If you spread yourself too thin, you will burn bridges, and you’ll have to continually find new people to work with.

• Human beings loved being ruled.

• The devil can’t hear your thoughts, but he can hear your words.

• Loving sleep is hating life.

• Humans are predictably irrational.

• Don’t use platforms to redirect people. Add value where people are, and you’ll be rewarded.

April:

• All radical ideas are the result of too many years of safety.

• The only “independent thought” you own, is deciding WHO to listen to.

• The best way to build trust with people is shared struggle. The next best way is to prove you can help them avoid struggle.

• Life is becoming freer for the individual and more unstable for the family; better for adults and worse for kids.

• Internet influence is fugazi. What is the point of having 1mm followers if you nobody respects you in your own town?

• The overwhelming majority of people have zero hobbies and fill that void with depressing routines.

• Building the lottery is better than hitting the lottery. Make your own luck, or run your luck at the casino of life.

• Skills means absolutely nothing without influence.

• Salaried employees have the worst tax structure of any type of worker. The more you work on salary, the more tolerant you become of taxes being taken out.

• An hour of targeted outreach / day puts you above 99% of your competition.

• Life is literally all about reps. Whoever refines their process the most, wins.

• "The world is run by B students." Be smart enough to pass, but savvy enough to not conform.

• “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.”

• No nerves means you didn’t really want it.

• You’re eventually going to die, and nobody is going to remember you. Internalize this so you can start playing the game differently.

• If you’re tolerant of everything, you stand for nothing.

• Every action you take communicates how you are positioning yourself within your mind.

• Saving money will never make you rich.

• Sloppiness in one area of life always seems to carry over to the next. How can you be trusted with money if you can’t be trusted to dress well?

• “Don’t fight perceptions with facts. Perceptions will always win.”

May:

• “Devoting yourself to pleasure regardless of expense quickly turns into expense regardless of pleasure.”

• Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

• If your dreams don’t come true, you didn’t want it enough.

• Smart people will never work for money alone.

• Slow internet reveals true character.

• The majority of the thoughts in your head are internal scripts that you’ve learned from the world.

• People communicate implicitly and explicitly. The best salespeople are the ones that communicate their explicit intentions implicitly.

• “Numbers” people literally are incapable of seeing the big picture.

• Status is how you are perceived by other people (micro) or society as a whole (macro).

• Winners keep winning, so if you haven’t won yet, that should be your only focus.

• Your eyes telegraph to others whether you really believe what you are saying.

• “Aim to die broke. Give to your beneficiaries before you die; it’s more fun and useful. Spend it all. Your last check should go to the funeral home and it should bounce.”

• The human mind needs contrast to make decisions. Salesman use this to pull prospects to the anchor.

• If you think that your life is going to change when you reach a certain milestone (earnings, title, retirement number), you’re in for a sad realization.

• Create your own struggle so life doesn’t create it for you.

• You can only sell value or status.

• Society can only move as fast as the slowest person.

• Making money is about placing yourself between where money is already flowing. It's really as simple as that.

• The music you listen to is subconsciously controlling your emotions. If you listen to degenerate trash all day, don’t be surprised when you start having degenerate behavior.

• If you act like you’re in charge, nobody will stop you.

• "The function of man is to live, not exist."

• Pattern interruptions are the best way to get somebody’s attention. Start noticing the default patterns, and deviate from them.

• What can you talk about for hours? Make money doing that.

• When you admire the work of artists, tell them. And spend money to acquire their work.

• Hard times are only a test.

June:

• We convince ourselves we need something before trying to solve for life without it.

• Hiring is guessing. Firing is not.

• The road to success is always under construction.

• Chronic stress leads to chronic inflammation which leads to elevated cortisol which leads to insulin resistance which leads to belly fat. If you want to get lean, don’t get stressed.

• If you tie your identity to the market, all the masking falls apart when you go down.

• Life changes when you stop becoming reactive.

• You can’t wait for life to happen to you. You have to happen to life.

• Drowning yourself in delusion is better than living a life of being “realistic”.

• A life without commitment is a life without meaning.

• You should aim to be understood by nobody. The more predictable you are, the more boring you become.

• The more you spend on where you live, the more time you subconsciously want to spend there to justify the investment. As a young person, I’d argue that your luck is correlated to the amount of time you spend out of your comfort zone, so you should expect your luck to dry up whenever you upgrade your living arrangements.

• Act your spirit, not your age.

• "When you buy something cheap and bad, the best you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it. When you buy something expensive and good, the worst you’re going to feel about it is when you buy it."

• You die the day that you let the fire go out.