Here, are a few of the best pieces of advice I've ever heard throughout the last 3 years, mainly. I've condensed the ones that struck me the hardest and stuck with me throughout this time. Some of them are also thoughts I've derived from my own experiences combined with indirect advice. I hope this can be useful to whoever finds this:
"Understand" Section:
-
Understand problems at their core (Issue trees + First Principles)
-
Understand the power, concept and consequences of compounding
-
Understand projection, motion and spectrums
-
Understand scopes, grouping and observable universe of stuff
-
Understand abstraction and levels of abstraction
-
Understand basic calculus (mainly derivation), physics (6 easy pieces), linear algebra (vectors and vector spaces) AND statistics
-
Understand sets & set theory
-
Understand game theory
-
Understand trade-offs and opportunity costs
-
Understand signal vs. noise
"Thinking" section:
-
Think geometrically and visually
-
Think in first principles when problem solving
-
Think using MECE frameworks
-
Keep pushing your logical thinking boundaries and ways of thinking
-
Think statiscally
-
Think about inversion (Charlie Munger mentioned)
-
Think using decomposition and recomposition trees
"Execution" section:
-
Over-fucking-deliver
-
Map your levers and always try to leverage yourself on appropriate situations
-
Always question things and their status quo. Be as annoying as possible to understand WHY things are what they are and if they really need to be this way
-
Expose yourself to as many crazy situations/connections as possible
-
Become an active observer whenever it is not possible to act. Act whenever you can
-
Be able to do things and also show them to the right people
"Life" section:
-
Fuck Work-Life balance when you are under your 30s OR without kids
-
Try to go through periods without unnecessary consumption, alcohol, drugs, doomscrolling, etc.
-
Always be cheerful and optimistic towards other people
-
Be optimistic about yourself and your journey
-
Dont pat yourself on the back that much
-
Try to understand who are the people you can really count on
-
Know what you want to optimize for during each of your life moments
-
Know what is the most optimized path towards that optimization (what is the straightest, fastest line towards what you want?)
-
Find mentorship and pick people around you to become your guiding stars of who you want to become (partially and evenly spreaded)
-
Get into a FAST MOVING, HIGH IMPACT, FAST GROWING professional enviroment
-
Don't be scared to fail, but be scared of time
Random thoughts
Similarity
Perhaps, we are complex people in our introspective view of ourselves, and from that we derive a special sense of uniqueness. But, at essence, we are all, within our set of people and contact, very similar one to another, given that we are, in a John Locke's way of thinking, Tabulae rasae. The experiences shared between different people do not shed the same effect upon them, given that even experiences have both an unconscious and conscious compounding component to them. This compounding effect of experiences and their effects on ourselves is the main reason for our uniqueness. But, realistically, we are generally bound to have experiences framed by the society for us to live in the average of our set of people. Therefore, the compounding differences are not as pronounced as we would expect them to be given a free scope of thinking.
Criticae
There is an urge and need for criticism and over-perfection which is only productive given the presumption that the person who delivers the object to be criticized is, usually, not exhaustive in most of their previous work. Therefore, we can preemptively assume that there is a lot of room for gaps within their work; therefore, there is a lot of room for potential improvement. But this presumption, by itself, reveals something about the critic: we default to assuming incompleteness in others. Perhaps this is because we are aware of our own incompleteness. We know how many shortcuts we take, how much AI we have used in our workload and how quickly we think through the problems that are shown to us. This is, usually, a problem derived from the simple factor of time constraints combined with the fact that we rely on inherited mental models and certainty about some facts rather than first-principles thinking about things; basically, we take things for granted. As we are sure that we are incomplete, we are also sure that there is someone who has tried and was able to be complete on some matters, otherwise we would not be sure about our imcompleteness: Descartes deconstructed his perception of almost everything and rationally rebuilt his own perceptions of life through logic. Perhaps, we need to learn from individual pieces and not take things for granted within other people's work. We should, as a rule, try our best to isolate each case into its own context and circumstances, and from that, derive our own conclusions about the work itself before raising any judgment to the person behind it. And even then, those conclusions should shape how we understand their way of thinking, but not permanently color how we receive everything else they produce, given that they will change and even your criticism about their work will, in the future, reverberate effect into their way of thinking.