Mindset — Principles I Try to Live By

Purpose

I’m driven by two forces: curiosity (to understand) and conviction (to build). I’m happiest when they are aligned (e.g., giving tangible form to my understanding). But I feel most awake and alive when they aren’t fully aligned.
I only do things to feel more connected to the world, not to become someone. I don't start a startup to become an entrepreneur. I don't study science to become a researcher. I don't write code to become an engineer. I don't learn philosophy to become a philosopher. I don't create art to become an artist. I always feel an urge to "step out" when a profession starts to define too much of who I am.
The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics and science—and the world they reveal—keep making me question humanity’s place in the universe and every account of what makes life meaningful. I embrace humanism not because I rationally believe any human values are given a priori, but because, when I feel utterly alone in the vastness of the universe, it is the only attitude that makes me want to keep living.
My motivation to build can be broken down into two parts. The first is simply to share with the world the sense of wonder I feel toward beautiful things. There’s this great feeling when something that moves me can move someone else, too. The second is to invent the future that pioneers of the last century were trying to build but was not feasible in their time. Technology opens possibilities, and guided by the study of history, I feel a strong responsibility to shape which ones become a reality.
I am grateful for everything I'm experiencing in life, especially after seeing how much worse things could be.

Judgment

If the cost of failure is tolerable, but the reward for success large, then the decision is worth making. Conversely, if the cost of failure is unbearable, no matter how low the probability of failure, don't do it.
Don't make important decisions when I'm in a bad emotional state.
For every painful failure, translate the lessons learned into principles to avoid making the same mistake twice. Reducing mistakes is much more effective than pursuing perfection.
For small, everyday decisions, speed is more important than quality. For big decisions that are hard to reverse, gather enough information to get them right.

Practice

Think big, start small, iterate.
Meta-thinking is probably the most important way to think about anything. The only way to be good at it is to keep doing it.
It’s consistent effort and strong will that create great work. Decide what truly matters as early as possible (it can go against intuition) and make concrete progress on it every day. Treat attention as a sacred resource; eliminate or automate tasks (with the best tools) that don’t matter as much.
My next twenty years are unknowable because they depend on my next five years. My next five years are unknowable because they depend on my next year. My next year is unknowable because it depends on my next two months. I have the next two months under control. Make the most of them.
Good mental health is based on good physical health.

Learning

Effective learning is primarily driven by curiosity.
The value of learning does not lie in accumulating as much knowledge as possible, but in cultivating the ability to think more deeply about important questions.
Deep understanding and insights often come from the process of deconstructing, reassembling, and describing knowledge in your own words. Only after going through this process does the knowledge truly become your own.
Stay aware of what I don't know. Keep a beginner's mind.
Don't let past successes, failures, or reluctance to try unfamiliar things stop me from trying or learning something new.

Relationships

There’s no fundamental difference between understanding yourself and understanding others. It’s the granularity of our internal language system that decides how well we can understand people.
The essence of a good relationship is not any term or form we use to describe it. It’s the trust, respect, commitment, and skills that we put into building it.
Only spend time on people who value my time.
Never debate with angry people, even when I think they're wrong.
Play positive-sum games.

Worldview

When we look at what we think of as “reality,” what we’re looking at is the result of raw data transformed through layers of theories, concepts, and tools that we don’t notice without conscious effort. We use these layers to understand and interact with things far beyond the reach of our senses alone. However, there are no true foundations behind these theories and tools. While we use tools to conduct experiments to test theories, the interpretation of the experimental results requires the theories themselves, which at the same time requires experiments. While this circular argument can’t be fundamentally resolved, the knowledge is still reliable to us, not because every part is beyond doubt, but because when they work together in practice, they make possible things we could never do without them.
Ought judgments cannot be inferred from purely factual premises. Necessary connections cannot be inferred from repeated observations. There’s something in human nature that makes things feel right when we’ve accepted them for a long time, and things feel like they will happen when they have happened again and again in history. It’s fine to feel that way, but it’s important to not recognize it as rationality.
We use words like “why,” “meaning,” “good,” and “success” without always being clear about what we mean. With these words in hand, we can’t stop our urge to ask questions like “Why do we live?” and “What is the meaning of life?” When we take these words outside the contexts where we normally use them, we can mistake a question that makes sense grammatically for a problem that actually needs solving. These words are like hammers. With a hammer in hand, everything looks like a nail. But not everything is a nail. And some of these questions might not be as important as we thought.
When we attempt to search for the truth about the world, we have this feeling that there’s an independent, rational “I” doing the searching. However, while we direct questions to the world, these questions will turn back to ourselves: why are we convinced by certain evidence? Why do some explanations feel more right to us? Why do we want certain answers to be true? Eventually, the search for truth is not about understanding the world “I” am looking at. It’s about taking apart the “I” we think is trying to understand the world.
Consciousness may be an emergent property of a system of representations that is powerful enough to not only describe the world but also to encode most meta-statements about the system’s relationship to the world in the system’s own representations. It may be the self-referential nature of such a system that holds the sense of self together, rather than any “thoughts” and “feelings” that seem to live above the system.