Advice: 2024 edition

Following the idea laid out by Kevin Kelly in Freakonomics Episode 507, “103 Pieces of Advice That May or May Not Work”, here is a list of advice from me, compiled at the end of 2024. Is it good? Who knows! (Disclaimer: much of this was pulled from ideas I’ve jotted down more than a year ago.)

1. Be critical of any advice you read online.
2. Be intentional with how you spend your time.
3. Come to terms with the fact that you can either do a lot of things at a mediocre level, or a few things at a high level. Neither is inherently better or worse, but you can’t have it all. If you desire greatness, you must decide where you want to pursue greatness, and where you can accept mediocrity.
4. Instead of pursuing ever more complicated ways of managing your life, consider an alternative: reverting to a simpler way or working. Rather than an additive approach to your process, consider a subtractive process. Taking away complexity may unlock far more power than adding capabilities to “do more”.
5. Generosity and patience are the two most important psychological characteristics to maximize professional happiness.
6. Get enough sleep.
7. Decide for yourself what is “enough sleep”.
8. Embrace “good enough”. Not everything is important enough for perfect execution, and you can save a lot of time and energy by aiming for good enough.
9. Not everything is truly important enough to get done. It is natural and OK to let some things drop off your To-Do list. Think of a sick day - does the world end even though you stopped being productive for a day? Of course not. Apply this logic to more of life and figure out what you might be doing which isn’t essential.
10. Satisfying the ego is not inherently superior to boosting the egos of others, because we are less important than we think. Selflessness is perfectly OK, and has more value than much of society assigns to it.
11. Don’t worry too much about maximizing your money. You may already have enough, and chasing more will only serve to make you greedy. (This is targeted at professionals with high incomes.)
12. Learn to question the demands of your own ego. Ego is simply a survival mechanism. Once you reach a threshold where you don’t need ego for survival, you no longer need to feed your ego. It will only prevent you from being compassionate and patient.
13. Regarding online outrage culture: remember that you are but a single person. Your outrage does not matter to anyone but yourself. In 100 years or less, all vestiges of your existence will be scattered at an atomic level, and wholly dissociated from your person. In other words: it doesn’t matter. Save your energy for useful things.
14. The meaning you assign to your own actions is the most important metric of value. You have ultimate freedom to make the life that you want to live.
15. The next time you want to say something, stop and ask whom it benefits. If it is only yourself, shut up.
16. Accept that making mistakes is a natural part of life. People are so reluctant to let you make mistakes, they would rather stop you from acting at all than let you act and learn from a mistake. I think some people assume that at some point in life, you stop making mistakes. But mistakes are as normal as life. You keep paying attention and you keep learning. There is only an end to mistakes if you stop living; the act of being alive and making choices is an act of accepting the possibility of mistakes.
17. If you always act your best, then you never have a need to regret anything. Regreting past actions only makes sense if you weren’t making the best decisions available to you in the moment. (You may still feel disappointed in certain outcomes; this is natural.)
18. Take time to regularly reflect on actions you regret. Ask yourself what patterns you see. Make an effort to act differently in those situations in the future.
19. Don’t take yourself too seriously 😛
20. Spend time identifying your core values in life, and work to align your actions with your values.
21. Something is always better than nothing. Action is always better than inaction. When in doubt about whether or not something is “worth it”, assume the answer is “yes”. Incremental progress is the way the world works; you will never do anything if you always wait until the moment in which you can enact massive, simultaneous change.