I liked most of this, and upvoted, but to register one disagreement and one caveat:
76. After a breakup, cease all contact as soon as practical. The potential for drama is endless, and the potential for a good friendship is negligible.
This is completely different from my experience and that of several other people I know. I'm on friendly terms with most of my exes and still consider at least one of them family-in-spirit (and was just asked to be a secular godparent after she had a child a few months ago). My parents also remained in good terms with each other after breaking up, and I've seen plenty of other people likewise have no trouble being friends with their exes.
98. People don’t realize how much they hate commuting. A nice house farther from work is not worth the fraction of your life you are giving to boredom and fatigue.
I think the "commuting is bad" advice mostly applies to driving a car, which prevents you from using the time for anything useful. If you have the chance to use public transit with few to no transfers, then your commute can serve as a nice block of time that can be devoted to e.g. reading or meditating.
Can second the not-driving-a-car commute thing. A long commute by bus I used to have amounted to 5 km of walking going to and from the bus stops, with optional podcast listening, and an hour of focused book-reading time every day. It made a big extra dent in my schedule, but walking and book-reading are both things I'd want to be doing regularly in any case.
With respect to (25) first to market: I have to disagree strongly. It's actually very rare for the business that first reaches the market with a product will be the one most successful with it, or associated. Often it's not even the 2nd or 3rd.
And there's a simple reason for that: Whoever reaches the market first can not from the mistakes of whoever came before, or get inspiration and/or ideas and/or customer reviews to take into account.
A few examples:
The list goes on and on. In general it's often the companies that later arrive to the market that have success, for they can learn from the experiences of their "quicker" competitors, and no longer have to do the legwork of making potential customers want a product hitherto unknown.
This is a great list! However, I was almost immediately turned off because of
2. Some banks charge you $20 a month for an account, others charge you 0. If you’re with one of the former, have a good explanation for what those $20 are buying.
Because this point is nowhere near top of mind for "tips for better personal finance". $240 per year should never make or break your life (among people who are reading these comments, anyways), so I'd suggest something more along the lines of:
The cash-on-time return for getting these basics right is much much higher than switching banks to save a measly $20/month (or e.g. worrying about interest rates on your savings accounts)
$240 per year should never make or break your life (among people who are reading these comments, anyways)
Well, that's a somewhat off-putting aside. I've been broke and reading LessWrong, had friends unable to pay bills or living on disability, etc, and there are definitely times your advice is impractial for people who may in fact be reading this site. Not getting into countries with different power-per-dollar or banking situations than the US who may nonetheless access it.
When you are scraping the bottom of your bank account, fees can compound by hitting you with an overdraft fee when you don't have enough money to pay the fee. Bank fees tend to increase with low bank accounts. A $35+$20 fee when you have <$20 is very bad.
Sometimes $20 is your monthly expense budget. Maybe you have a source of food and shelter but need exactly one prepaid phone card for job searching. Maybe you have to spend it on food and are partly starving, but surviving.
Your circumstances may not allow you to save over a certain amount in assets at a time without losing benefits, at which point, because those circumstances might be not being able to work due to disability, you can't earn much at all.
You are...
First off, I'd like to apologize; I wasn't trying to gatekeep LessWrong or anything like that. This is part of what's hard about giving advice online; my mental model of the audience is shaped by the few I know personally + myself, but it's by no means comprehensive. Some people need to hear "this is specifically how you can save $20/month" and not "this is the general way to approach personal finance"!
That said -- I still want to push back. When it comes to personal finance, it's easy to focus on cutting costs and personal spending; it feels virtuous, and the benefits are visible. But the huge gains in personal finance come from a getting a handful of things very right, almost all of which are related to making more money rather than cutting your costs.
In my head, these things are:
One intuition for this is the amount of money you can earn is unbounded; no matter who you are, I'd guess you personally know someone making 2x as much, and know of someone who makes 10-100x as much. But the amount of expenses you...
Hmm, I disagree with the "one intuition" way of looking at finances. Yes, you can't drop your expenses by more than 100%, and you can increase your income by more than 100%, but what you really care about is increasing the ratio of income to expenses. In this context, halving your expenses is equivalent to doubling your salary, and if you drop your expenses to zero, that's equivalent to increasing your income to infinity.
That's a good point, actually; one takeaway from the FIRE (Financially Independent, Retire Early) community is that your retirement date is basically a function of your current expenses; assuming a safe withdrawal rate of 4% you "just" need 25x expenses to retire forever.
But dropping your expenses to zero is fairly hard; in fact, dropping your expenses by any meaningful amount is hard since people have fairly sharp intuitions about where their money is going, and probably not wantonly spending it in the first place.
And moreover, the goal isn't to extend your personal runway to infinity, but rather to improve the fuzzy metric of "living a happy, fiscally secure life". Presumably, most of your expenses are reasonably rational purchases on that axis, and getting rid of them would make you less happy overall.
My thesis is that, for the same amount of annoying dealing-with-financial-institutions-effort, setting up an online brokerage account to put the majority of your money in index funds is like 10x to 100x return on effort for many, compared to saving $20 a month switching banks.
[Epistemic status: experience-based synthesis, likely biased]
Most of these seem reasonably sane, of course with varying levels of cultural and situational slant and specificity (as one would expect from any list like this). One of them, however, strikes me as actively dangerous in a way worth mentioning:
- If you want to become funny, try just saying stupid shit until something sticks.
Doing this visibly in more sensitive or conformist social groups can be a disaster. Gaining a reputation for saying erratic things can make you the person that no one can take anywhere because you might ruin the environment at any time, and then you're in the hole. Depending on your interpersonal goals, it may be that exiting a group like that would be a net benefit for you, but even if that's true for you, you may want to examine those options first before playing roulette with your status.
Bouncing things off yourself doesn't have the same problem, but seems like a much weaker way of developing a quality which is fundamentally social; it can work if you have an internal sense of what's funny but haven't “found” it for conscious access, but it doesn't work if you were miscalibrated to start with. B...
- Establish clear rules about when to throw out old junk. Once clear rules are established, junk will probably cease to be a problem. This is because any rule would be superior to our implicit rules (“keep this broken stereo for five years in case I learn how to fix it”).
"Any rule is better than no rules" explains many things about junk I didn't understand before.
- Food taste can be made much more exciting through simple seasoning. It’s also an opportunity for expression. Buy a few herbs and spices and experiment away.
Find a store in your city that sells bulk spices. Find another store that sells herbs without packaging. It'll be a fraction of the price.
- When googling a recipe, precede it with ‘best’. You’ll find better recipes.
The best chocolate chip cook recipe I've ever followed really does have "best" in its name.
- You can automate mundane computer tasks with Autohotkey (or AppleScript). If you keep doing a sequence “so simple a computer can do it”, make the computer do it.
You can take this to the extreme with a command line interface.
- Learn keyboard shortcuts. They’re easy to learn and you’ll get tasks done faster and easier.
You can take this to the extrem...
1 .If you want to find out about people’s opinions on a product, google <product> reddit. You’ll get real people arguing, as compared to the SEO’d Google results.
This used to be my go-to strategy. However, I think brands are increasingly catching on to this. Anecdotally, I have been observing an increased amount of astroturfing in reddit product threads.
A good solution is to be skeptical and check commenters' post history. If the account is old, they are active in diverse subreddits, and generally seem like a real person, it is likely to ...
60. (~This is not legal advice!~)
DO NOT TALK TO COPS.
This one stood out as kind of puzzling. Especially as the link is to a 45-minute lecture whose thesis seems to be "one should always exercise one's 5th amendment rights when being questioned by authorities." I think summarizing that as an all-caps "DONT TALK TO COPS" is weird and inaccurate.
By far the most common context in which anyone I know has interacted with the cops is when filing police reports for damaged or stolen property (stolen bike, car break-in, stolen phone, etc.) In which case... yo...
I once got into a minor car accident (no one was hurt, thankfully) in which the other driver was clearly at fault. I spoke to the police and a report was filed.
I received no compensation from the other driver’s insurance company (nor did he receive any compensation from mine). However, my insurance company subsequently raised my premium (and, no doubt, the other driver’s insurance company raised his premium as well). Filing the report was worse than useless.
I do not know anyone who has their bicycle insured against theft, or their phone insured against theft. I have never heard of anyone I know who’s had their cars broken into (nor do I know anyone who has their car insured against break-ins).
As far as I can tell, none of these alleged reasons to talk to cops applies to me or to anyone I know, despite me and a number of my friends owning cars, bikes, phones, etc.
Looking suspicious is not a jailable offense.
Lying to the police... or making an innocent mistake that seems like lying on purpose... or even telling the truth when the police misunderstands (or lies about) what you actually said... can get you in jail.
I assume that maybe 5% of people in prisons haven't done anything wrong... they just were in the wrong place at the wrong time, didn't have enough money to hire a good lawyer, or made some mistake. This advice is about reducing your chance to become one of them.
The downside of getting used to multiple monitors this is that I now find it impossible to get anything done on a laptop. There's a constant low level background irritation when I find myself confined to one tiny screen.
There's diminishing returns of course, but I've found 3 monitors to be the best for me. One portrait and two landscape.
69. When you ask people, “What’s your favorite book / movie / band?” and they stumble, ask them instead what book / movie / band they’re currently enjoying most. They’ll almost always have one and be able to talk about it.
I can't imagine narrowing the dimensions of my preferences in such a way that one single piece of media can become my "favorite" so I'm never sure what to think when someone else seems to have done so.
Always lovely such practical advice.
By the way, if you can live so close to work that you can cycle or walk to it, you can combine a lot of great things: more excercise, less commuting, more money. If you can then commute together with coworkers, even better.
I think a good addition to the rationality section would be to "steel man" instead of "straw man" positions you disagree with.
Rather than find the least plausible or credible piece of someone else's argument, find the strongest piece of evidence they have, ask them for it, if they don't know it, often the case in my experience, start researching it for them to see if there really isn't anything of merit there.
Doing that will not only strengthen your own position by likely cutting away the weakest pieces of evidence you have for your own position, you will ...
If your work is done on a computer, get a second monitor. Less time navigating between windows means more time for thinking.
I agree with the premise that efficiently moving around application give you more time for thinking, but I disagree with the proposed solution.
For context: I work as software engineer and I spend at least ten hours a day working on my computer.
Few years ago I reached the point of having three monitors but I found that they were a constant source of distraction. There was always something taking away my attention on other m...
5. If your work is done on a computer, get a second monitor. Less time navigating between windows means more time for thinking.
Agree. I'm stacking two of these bad boys: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L9HCJ2V
For most professionals, spending $2k is cheap for even a 5% more productive computing experience
I like this post because it following its advice has improved my quality of life.
59. Those who generate anxiety in you and promise that they have the solution are grifters. See: politicians, marketers, new masculinity gurus, etc. Avoid these.
Although grifters do this, there are real problems and real solutions out there. Someone telling you the truth is not necessarily a grifter. They could be an honest, sincere "friendly". Easy examples: public health officials during COVID. Climate scientists. Sometimes, people who tell you not to be anxious are the grifters.
Great list!
26. Are you on the fence about breaking up or leaving your job? You should probably go ahead and do it. People, on average, end up happier when they take the plunge.
Kind of true for less serious relationships, and especially true for jobs, I have found. But studies have found that married couples who stick it out through a rough patch are happier on average, five years later, than those who don't. Of course, it depends on the circumstances. We immediately think of abusive relationships. But for most instances of e.g. marriage, it is good f...
To the author of this post: I continue to plead for help. If not from you, there must be someone that you know.
I must say "first to market" (25) is inaccurate. If we think of examples of ubiquitous products, it is most often the LAST to market, rather than the first that sticks around. Because being last means the product is so great, later entrants have a difficult time competing. Whether it be search engines (??? vs. Google), social media (??? vs. Facebook) coffee (??? vs. Starbucks).. the examples are numerous. (The unknowns illustrate my point precisely.) Ultimately, execution is far more important than hastily entering a market. In fact, the Spanish have a say...
I've been reading the compassion section once a week for the past few months. Just wanted to thank you!
Ditto on Autohotkey. It's amazingly easy to learn and very useful. (eg. for making Yoda Timer windows anywhere with even the most basic of programming experience). I've taught it to quite a few people and would be happy to teach anyone if they want to schedule a call:
calendly.com/meetsquid
I'd recommend AutoIT instead of AHK. Not that AutoIT is a great language, but it's a better language than AHK, using more standard language constructs.
I am really fall in love in all of these 100 Tips and I also really appreciate for sharing these Tips because I found them significant, practical ( both for those who have already practiced or not), effective and they work, I am sure of it!
One of my favorite is the following like "78. If you have trouble talking during dates, try saying whatever comes into your head. At worst you’ll ruin some dates (which weren’t going well anyways), at best you’ll have some great conversations. Alcohol can help." which seems me really useful because for me it's s ki...
Thanks so much for this list, I turned it into a flashcard deck so that I can remember it forever and hopefully put some of it into action. My heuristic is if I am happy spending ~5 minutes to remember each point over my life time, it's worthwhile remembering!
https://app.thoughtsaver.com/share/gN6ipahCaD
(You are also able to embed this into the post if you want too!)
I have a serious problem with the tea section. It is simple, but not that simple. The minutes may apply to western-style of brewing, but definitely not Chinese (Gong Fu) style brewing. In there you use much more leaves of tea and brew for a much smaller period of time (30 seconds might already be too much.)
Continuing on this note, the steeping times should be correlated with not only the type and quantity of tea, but also the water temperature. It is generally advised that for instance green teas be brewed at lower temperatures (75 - 85) degree...
Really enjoyed the read - thank you!
I’m currently trying to improve my communication skills and way of communicating ideas in a more structured way. Any recommendations for good content (books, podcasts, workshops etc) on that?
“28. You can improve your communication skills with practice much more effectively than you can improve your intelligence with practice. If you’re not that smart but can communicate ideas clearly, you have a great advantage over everybody who can’t communicate clearly.”
Just a piece of advice. A lot of people in this world are living with terminal illnesses. Myself included. I don't need to be told to remember I'm dying.
16. Learn keyboard shortcuts.
The easiest way I've done this is with shortcutkiller.com if you click on the little dice it pulls up a flash card game
I love #38
A time-traveller from 2030 appears and tells you your plan failed. Which part of your plan do you think is the one ...?
And I try to use it on arguments and explanations.
13. When googling a recipe, precede it with ‘best’. You’ll find better recipes.
Cooking tip from Twitter to complement this: "Use Google image search for recipe searching! Quality of the photography seems to be a good indicator of the quality of a recipe, maybe because it speaks to attention to detail?"
2. Some banks charge you $20 a month for an account, others charge you 0. If you’re with one of the former, have a good explanation for what those $20 are buying.
I think an alternative that captures the intent might be:
Know how you are paying for a service - watch for hidden/ambiguous fees, subscription changes, short-term discounts, sale of personal information - and what you're paying for. Everything costs something, and unless you're a contract lawyer who also barters professionally, you are not getting the better end of any offered deal. Read every con...
Response to #5
If you can't acquire a 2nd monitor for what ever reason you can make better use of a single monitor using a tiling windows manager.
For Windows : https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys (i use this every day)
For Mac : https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst (first google result, might be better)
For Linux : hehehe, good luck
These are also quite useful if you've got multiple monitors
Great list. Thanks for posting.
20. The 20-20-20 rule: Every 20 minutes of screenwork, look at a spot 20 feet away for 20 seconds. This will reduce eye strain and is easy to remember (or program reminders for).
I noticed my eyes were horribly bloodshot yesterday, so I just downloaded a Chrome extension that will remind me to do this every 20 minutes. (File under: Automate literally everything)
...23. (~This is not medical advice~). Don’t waste money on multivitamins, they don’t work. Vitamin D supplementation does seem to work, which is important because d
Where is the tip when #57 and #58 are not avoidable and are #34 ?
Many of those tips remind me of the famous tip "It's better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick"
Its technically true but miss the point.
I disagree about 56. In fact, I believe that trying to solve them can lead us down worthwhile paths. Many religions and branches of science have been grappling with these questions for centuries. The process of exploring these questions can help us to better understand ourselves, our priorities and our place in the world.
Additionally, I don't think that only lonely and fatigued people have existential thoughts. In fact, I believe that these questions are important for everyone to consider, regardless of their circumstances. Discussing these questions with friends can be a great way to connect with them on a deeper level and to learn from each other's perspectives.
29. You do not live in a video game. There are no pop-up warnings if you’re about to do something foolish, or if you’ve been going in the wrong direction for too long. You have to create your own warnings.
One great tool for creating those warnings is Habitica - a free and ad-free productivity app for gamifying your own good and bad habits, regular and one-off tasks and self-rewards.
27. Discipline is superior to motivation. The former can be trained, the latter is fleeting. You won’t be able to accomplish great things if you’re only relying on motivation.
I have the opposite experience - Discipline is external motivation that is forced on people by raising them, schooling them and training them in the army. It's driven by fear of not living up to expectations of others and disappears as soon as these others stop watching. Such a person is only productive in a team or with regular reporting.
On the contrary inner motivation won't d...
A great read, some wise and compassionate stuff: reaching such insights will have taken time. Comments will, no doubt, be interesting too! Thanks.
There are so many great tips in the list. However, one I'd like to disagree with.
"52. If you want to become funny, try just saying stupid shit (in the right company!) until something sticks."
I've been that guy...don't be that guy. If you aren't funny, it's ok. Sounds cliché, but just be yourself.
#61. "It is cheap for people to talk about their values, goals, rules, and lifestyle" - spot on. Now we are in new year, we are going to see plethora of such posts in LinkedIn and other social media.
Also thinks that "5. If your work is done on a computer, get a second monitor. Less time navigating between windows means more time for thinking as well as procrastination".
Vitamin D deficiency is incredibly easy to remedy: go outside. This is also good advice for everything from boredom to nasal congestion to depression.
How much time you need outside depends on the level of melanin in your skin, the amount of cloud cover, and the time of day, but it is very low.
(I am also not a doctor.)
#60 Makes me think you are not really in a position to be dolling out advice if you can be that biased (see #35). Police are not evil and do tremendous amounts of good. It should read, never incriminate yourself.
I've tried working with 2 monitors (instead of my laptop's display) for a few months, and it doesn't do anything for me. I didn't feel more productive, I barely noticed any improvement. The downside was greater - I was tethered to my table and my chair instead of being free to sit or lay in all the different places in my apartment. This is very bad for me, because my back and a leg ache ache very annoyingly if I sit in one place without moving for a long time. Thus, I ditched the monitors and now I happily work on my laptop's display.
I was with you until the relationships category. For 78. you encourage the consumption of alcohol, this can lead to issues down the line if you come to rely on alcohol. For 76. I personally disagree that a good friendship is negligible. If you're both willing to work at it and keep firm boundaries, you can have a great friendship in time. I've seen it happen, but it won't happen every time.
I wanted to say that I tend to disagree with 56, but I like the way you put the problem and you're definitely right.
"Their force upon lifestyle fixes." Just that. Those questions are important, you don't want to get rid of them entirely or to forget about their essence - you just want them to stop having a negative impact on your life.
58. Some people create drama out of habit. You can avoid these people.
Sometimes the people that are creating drama out of habit might be your family. And it's kinda hard to avoid relatives for a while. "If this id...
15. You can automate mundane computer tasks with Autohotkey (or AppleScript). If you keep doing a sequence “so simple a computer can do it”, make the computer do it.
It's not exactly the same, but IMO Keysmith and Keyboard Maestro are closer Mac alternatives to AutoHotkey than AppleScript is.
(Disclaimer: I built Keysmith.)
I don't know the best way to phrase this but some of this advice is really foundational (eg exercise, sleep, etc). There should be an item here about rapidly and persistently getting professional medical and mental health when you have trouble with the basics.
Re: “92. You have vanishingly little political influence and every thought you spend on politics will probably come to nothing. Consider building things instead, or at least going for a walk. “
This sentiment is perhaps the crux of our decay as a country? What about “building things instead”— a different way of doing politics that is joyful and inclusive? Sortition comes to mind?
https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/ https://democracywithoutelections.org/ https://healthydemocracy.org/
….please consider that your suggestion to not participate IS a form of parti...
9 - wrong. Lots of green teas require less than 60 seconds brewing time (with cooler water too)
22 - wrong. diet is the best you can do for your health. In the USA low physical activity comes 10th > figure 2 in doi:10.1001/jama.2018.0158.
23 - also add B12 - a must for vegetarians but also 70% for the rest of the population
Don't get me wrong, there are some really useful tips here that illustrate why this list is much better than ones with equivalent 'click-baitey' titles.
But this list shouldn't have been 100 tips long. There are so many times I read a tip and thought either
Few examples...
(Cross-posted from my blog)
The other day I made an advice thread based on Jacobian’s from last year! If you know a source for one of these, shout and I’ll edit it in.
Possessions
1. If you want to find out about people’s opinions on a product, google <product> reddit. You’ll get real people arguing, as compared to the SEO’d Google results.
2. Some banks charge you $20 a month for an account, others charge you 0. If you’re with one of the former, have a good explanation for what those $20 are buying.
3. Things you use for a significant fraction of your life (bed: 1/3rd, office-chair: 1/4th) are worth investing in.
4. “Where is the good knife?” If you’re looking for your good X, you have bad Xs. Throw those out.
5. If your work is done on a computer, get a second monitor. Less time navigating between windows means more time for thinking.
6. Establish clear rules about when to throw out old junk. Once clear rules are established, junk will probably cease to be a problem. This is because any rule would be superior to our implicit rules (“keep this broken stereo for five years in case I learn how to fix it”).
7. Don’t buy CDs for people. They have Spotify. Buy them merch from a band they like instead. It’s more personal and the band gets more money.
8. When buying things, time and money trade-off against each other. If you’re low on money, take more time to find deals. If you’re low on time, stop looking for great deals and just buy things quickly online.
Cooking
9. Steeping minutes: Green at 3, black at 4, herbal at 5. Good tea is that simple!
10. Food actually can be both cheap, healthy, tasty, and relatively quick to prepare. All it requires is a few hours one day to prepare many meals for the week.
11. Cooking pollutes the air. Opening windows for a few minutes after cooking can dramatically improve air quality.
12. Food taste can be made much more exciting through simple seasoning. It’s also an opportunity for expression. Buy a few herbs and spices and experiment away.
13. When googling a recipe, precede it with ‘best’. You’ll find better recipes.
Productivity
14. Advanced search features are a fast way to create tighter search statements. For example:
img html
will return inferior results compared to:
img html -w3
15. You can automate mundane computer tasks with Autohotkey (or AppleScript). If you keep doing a sequence “so simple a computer can do it”, make the computer do it.
16. Learn keyboard shortcuts. They’re easy to learn and you’ll get tasks done faster and easier.
17. Done is better than perfect.
18. Keep your desk and workspace bare. Treat every object as an imposition upon your attention, because it is. A workspace is not a place for storing things. It is a place for accomplishing things.
19. Reward yourself after completing challenges, even badly.
Body
20. The 20-20-20 rule: Every 20 minutes of screenwork, look at a spot 20 feet away for 20 seconds. This will reduce eye strain and is easy to remember (or program reminders for).
21. Exercise (weightlifting) not only creates muscle mass, it also improves skeletal structure. Lift!
22. Exercise is the most important lifestyle intervention you can do. Even the bare minimum (15 minutes a week) has a huge impact. Start small.
23. (~This is not medical advice~). Don’t waste money on multivitamins, they don’t work. Vitamin D supplementation does seem to work, which is important because deficiency is common.
24. Phones have gotten heavier in the last decade and they’re actually pretty hard on your wrists! Use a computer when it’s an alternative or try to at least prop up your phone.
Success
25. History remembers those who got to market first. Getting your creation out into the world is more important than getting it perfect.
26. Are you on the fence about breaking up or leaving your job? You should probably go ahead and do it. People, on average, end up happier when they take the plunge.
27. Discipline is superior to motivation. The former can be trained, the latter is fleeting. You won’t be able to accomplish great things if you’re only relying on motivation.
28. You can improve your communication skills with practice much more effectively than you can improve your intelligence with practice. If you’re not that smart but can communicate ideas clearly, you have a great advantage over everybody who can’t communicate clearly.
29. You do not live in a video game. There are no pop-up warnings if you’re about to do something foolish, or if you’ve been going in the wrong direction for too long. You have to create your own warnings.
30. If you listen to successful people talk about their methods, remember that all the people who used the same methods and failed did not make videos about it.
31. The best advice is personal and comes from somebody who knows you well. Take broad-spectrum advice like this as needed, but the best way to get help is to ask honest friends who love you.
32. Make accomplishing things as easy as possible. Find the easiest way to start exercising. Find the easiest way to start writing. People make things harder than they have to be and get frustrated when they can’t succeed. Try not to.
33. Cultivate a reputation for being dependable. Good reputations are valuable because they’re rare (easily destroyed and hard to rebuild). You don’t have to brew the most amazing coffee if your customers know the coffee will always be hot.
34. How you spend every day is how you spend your life.
Rationality
35. Noticing biases in others is easy, noticing biases in yourself is hard. However, it has much higher pay-off.
36. Explaining problems is good. Often in the process of laying out a problem, a solution will present itself.
37. Foolish people are right about most things. Endeavour to not let the opinions of foolish people automatically discredit those opinions.
38. You have a plan. A time-traveller from 2030 appears and tells you your plan failed. Which part of your plan do you think is the one that fails? Fix that part.
39. If something surprises you again and again, stop being surprised.
40. Should you freak out upon seeing your symptoms on the worst diseases on WebMD? Probably not! Look up the base rates for the disease and then apply Bayes’ Theorem
41. Selfish people should listen to advice to be more selfless, selfless people should listen to advice to be more selfish. This applies to many things. Whenever you receive advice, consider its opposite as well. You might be filtering out the advice you need most.
42. Common systems and tools have been designed so everybody can handle them. So don’t worry that you’re the only one who can’t! You can figure out doing laundry, baking, and driving on a highway.
Self
43. Deficiencies do not make you special. The older you get, the more your inability to cook will be a red flag for people.
44. There is no interpersonal situation that can’t be improved by knowing more about your desires, goals, and structure. ‘Know thyself!’
45. If you’re under 90, try things.
46. Things that aren’t your fault can still be your responsibility.
47. Defining yourself by your suffering is an effective way to keep suffering forever (ex. incels, trauma).
48. Keep your identity small. “I’m not the kind of person who does things like that” is not an explanation, it’s a trap. It prevents nerds from working out and men from dancing.
49. Don’t confuse ‘doing a thing because I like it’ with ‘doing a thing because I want to be seen as the sort of person who does such things’
50. Remember that you are dying.
51. Events can hurt us, not just our perceptions of them. It’s good to build resilience, but sometimes it isn’t your fault if something really gets to you.
52. If you want to become funny, try just saying stupid shit (in the right company!) until something sticks.
53. To start defining your problems, say (out loud) “everything in my life is completely fine.” Notice what objections arise.
54. Procrastination comes naturally, so apply it to bad things. “I want to hurt myself right now. I’ll do it in an hour.” “I want a smoke now, so in half an hour I’ll go have a smoke.” Then repeat. Much like our good plans fall apart while we delay them, so can our bad plans.
55. Personal epiphanies feel great, but they fade within weeks. Upon having an epiphany, make a plan and start actually changing behavior.
56. Sometimes unsolvable questions like “what is my purpose?” and “why should I exist?” lose their force upon lifestyle fixes. In other words, seeing friends regularly and getting enough sleep can go a long way to solving existentialism.
Hazards
57. There are two red flags to avoid almost all dangerous people: 1. The perpetually aggrieved ; 2. The angry.
58. Some people create drama out of habit. You can avoid these people.
59. Those who generate anxiety in you and promise that they have the solution are grifters. See: politicians, marketers, new masculinity gurus, etc. Avoid these.
60. (~This is not legal advice!~)
DO NOT TALK TO COPS.
61. It is cheap for people to talk about their values, goals, rules, and lifestyle. When people’s actions contradict their talk, pay attention!
62. “If they’ll do it with you, they’ll do it to you” and “those who live by the sword die by the sword” mean the same thing. Viciousness you excuse in yourself, friends, or teammates will one day return to you, and then you won’t have an excuse.
Others
63. In choosing between living with 0-1 people vs 2 or more people, remember that ascertaining responsibility will no longer be instantaneous with more than one roommate (“whose dishes are these?”).
64. Understand people have the right to be tasteless.
65. You will prevent yourself from even having thoughts that could lower your status. Avoid blocking yourself off just so people keep thinking you’re cool.
66. Being in groups is important. If you don’t want to join a sports team, consider starting a shitty band. It’s the closest you’ll get to being in an RPG. Train with 2-4 other characters, learn new moves, travel from pub to pub, and get quests from NPCs.
67. It’s possible to get people to do things that make you like them more but respect them less. Avoid this, it destroys relationships.
68. Think a little about why you enjoy what you enjoy. If you can explain what you love about Dune, you can now communicate not only with Dune fans, but with people who love those aspects in other books.
69. When you ask people, “What’s your favorite book / movie / band?” and they stumble, ask them instead what book / movie / band they’re currently enjoying most. They’ll almost always have one and be able to talk about it.
70. Bored people are boring.
71. A norm of eating with your family without watching something will lead to better conversations. If this idea fills you with dread, consider getting a new family.
72. If you bus to other cities, consider finding a rideshare on Facebook instead. It’s cheaper, faster, and leads to interesting conversations.
Relationships
73. In relationships look for somebody you can enjoy just hanging out near. Long-term relationships are mostly spent just chilling.
74. Sometimes things last a long time because they’re good (jambalaya). But that doesn’t mean that because something has lasted a long time that it is good (penile subincisions). Apply this to relationships, careers, and beliefs as appropriate.
75. Don’t complain about your partner to coworkers or online. The benefits are negligible and the cost is destroying a bit of your soul.
76. After a breakup, cease all contact as soon as practical. The potential for drama is endless, and the potential for a good friendship is negligible. Wait a year before trying to be friends again.
77. If you haven’t figured things out sexually, remember that there isn’t a deadline. If somebody is making you feel like there is, consider the possibility that they aren’t your pal.
78. If you have trouble talking during dates, try saying whatever comes into your head. At worst you’ll ruin some dates (which weren’t going well anyways), at best you’ll have some great conversations. Alcohol can help.
79. When dating, de-emphasizing your quirks will lead to 90% of people thinking you’re kind of alright. Emphasizing your quirks will lead to 10% of people thinking you’re fascinating and fun. Those are the people interested in dating you. Aim for them.
80. Relationships need novelty. It’s hard to have novelty during Covid--but have you planned your post-Covid adventure yet?
81. People can be the wrong fit for you without being bad. Being a person is complicated and hard.
Compassion
82. Call your parents when you think of them, tell your friends when you love them.
83. Compliment people more. Many people have trouble thinking of themselves as smart, or pretty, or kind, unless told by someone else. You can help them out.
84. If somebody is undergoing group criticism, the tribal part in you will want to join in the fun of righteously destroying somebody. Resist this, you’ll only add ugliness to the world. And anyway, they’ve already learned the lesson they’re going to learn and it probably isn’t the lesson you want.
85. Cultivate compassion for those less intelligent than you. Many people, through no fault of their own, can’t handle forms, scammers, or complex situations. Be kind to them because the world is not.
86. Cultivate patience for difficult people. Communication is extremely complicated and involves getting both tone and complex ideas across. Many people can barely do either. Don’t punish them.
87. Don’t punish people for trying. You teach them to not try with you. Punishing includes whining that it took them so long, that they did it badly, or that others have done it better.
88. Remember that many people suffer invisibly, and some of the worst suffering is shame. Not everybody can make their pain legible.
89. Don't punish people for admitting they were wrong, you make it harder for them to improve.
90. In general, you will look for excuses to not be kind to people. Resist these.
Joy
91. Human mood and well-being are heavily influenced by simple things: Exercise, good sleep, light, being in nature. It’s cheap to experiment with these.
92. You have vanishingly little political influence and every thought you spend on politics will probably come to nothing. Consider building things instead, or at least going for a walk.
93. Sturgeon’s law states that 90% of everything is crap. If you dislike poetry, or fine art, or anything, it’s possible you’ve only ever seen the crap. Go looking!
94. You don’t have to love your job. Jobs can be many things, but they’re also a way to make money. Many people live fine lives in okay jobs by using the money they make on things they care about.
95. Some types of sophistication won’t make you enjoy the object more, they’ll make you enjoy it less. For example, wine snobs don’t enjoy wine twice as much as you, they’re more keenly aware of how most wine isn’t good enough. Avoid sophistication that diminishes your enjoyment.
96. If other people having it worse than you means you can’t be sad, then other people having it better than you would mean you can’t be happy. Feel what you feel.
97. Liking and wanting things are different. There are things like junk food that you want beyond enjoyment. But you can also like things (like reading) without wanting them. If you remember enjoying something but don't feel a desire for it now, try pushing yourself.
98. People don’t realize how much they hate commuting. A nice house farther from work is not worth the fraction of your life you are giving to boredom and fatigue.
99. There’s some evidence that introverts and extroverts both benefit from being pushed to be more extroverted. Consider this the next time you aren’t sure if you feel like going out.
100. Bad things happen dramatically (a pandemic). Good things happen gradually (malaria deaths dropping annually) and don’t feel like ‘news’. Endeavour to keep track of the good things to avoid an inaccurate and dismal view of the world.