Tenets

“I have money. It's trust and character I need around me.”

Han in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006). Watch the scene.

You can recognize how much you have changed and still underestimate how much you will change again. Beware of romanticizing one version of your life as the life you will always want.

Choose a direction without organizing everything around reaching and preserving that imagined destination. Leave room to outgrow it.

Source: Ben Felix, Using Your Money To Be Happier, around 9:20; Quoidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson, “The End of History Illusion” (2013).

Further reading: BBC Future, “How the end-of-history illusion shapes your life choices”.

When uncertain, favor the choice that teaches you more, especially when you can change course. If you are torn about moving to a new city and can afford to move back, go. Experience can answer what speculation cannot.

Reversible does not mean costless. Know what you can recover, what you cannot, and whether the lesson is worth it.

On reversibility: Jeff Bezos's 2015 shareholder letter.

Treat common wisdom as a starting point, not a verdict. Ask what a claim assumes, when it holds, and how your circumstances change the answer. Seek nuance that improves judgment, not an excuse to avoid deciding.

“Startups are risky”: which risk, for whom, and what does the evidence about this team and business change? Specific evidence should update your judgment, not manufacture certainty.

“You can't get rich on a salary”: what income, savings, time horizon, and definition of rich? Earning in an expensive city does not obligate you to spend your life there. Consider where you want your savings to support you.

Related reading: Naval on renting out your time; BEA regional price parities.

Make time alone to hear yourself. Notice when you are drifting into the status games of your city, industry, or friend group, adopting their goals, ambitions, and measures of success without deciding whether they matter to you.

Step back regularly and ask: “Do I want this, or do I want to be admired by the people who want this?”

Choose which games deserve your life; you do not have to win every game around you.

“Life’s simple, you make choices and you don’t look back.”

Han in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006). Watch the scene.

Give your choice a real chance instead of constantly romanticizing the path you did not take. Look back to learn, not to punish yourself. Change course when the evidence or your values change, not merely because commitment feels uncomfortable.

When in doubt, ask yourself: if your life were a movie, what would the main character do?

Move from imagining an adventure to taking part in one.

Watch the “Space Oddity” helicopter scene in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

When comparing paths, consider how each might affect your well-being, not just its pay, prestige, or upside.

Seligman’s PERMA model, a well-being framework rooted in positive psychology, offers prompts: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. Use these to understand what a choice could give you and cost you, not as requirements to satisfy equally.

Happiness need not outweigh every other priority. The point is to make that tradeoff consciously.

Ask: “Beyond what I would achieve, what would living this choice feel like?”

Seek new people, ideas, stories, and experiences that can challenge, reinforce, or update your worldview. Let your beliefs remain flexible, but let your core values provide a stable basis for action.

Sources: Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset; American Psychological Association, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

When sacrificing the present for the future, ask yourself if your future self would agree with the decision or tell you not to make that sacrifice.

Learn to build and learn to sell; value must be created, understood, and chosen.

Source: Naval Ravikant, “Learn to Sell, Learn to Build”

Choose long-term games with people you respect.

Source: Naval Ravikant, “Play Long-term Games With Long-term People”

Protect your attention; what repeatedly captures it eventually shapes your life.

Source: William James, The Principles of Psychology, Chapter XI, “Attention”

“You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity — a piece of a business — to gain your financial freedom.”

Source: Naval Ravikant, “You Won’t Get Rich Renting Out Your Time”

Many decisions are not information-limited; they are values-limited. When your values are clear and prioritized, hard decisions often stop being so hard: objective measures can compare options, but they cannot tell you which life you want to inhabit.

Source: Ruth Chang, “How to make hard choices”

Familiar appearances and expectations can feel like the whole world when they are all you have known. Growth requires the uncomfortable turn toward clearer understanding rather than mistaking shadows for reality.

Source: Plato, Republic, Book VII, 514a-518d

Self-knowledge tells you what you can genuinely sustain, what you care about, and which trade-offs you have found worth making. But a decision should not only reflect who you are today; it is also a commitment to the person you want to become. Let the present self keep the future self honest, and let the future self give the present self direction.

Activities like cooking, climbing a mountain, or running a marathon can have pragmatic benefits, but those benefits are rarely the reason to do them. A treadmill may deliver exercise, but it does not satisfy the same desire for difficulty, agency, and direct participation as scaling the mountain; pragmatic reasoning is not always applicable.

Building a business, or joining one early, can be similar. Beyond financial gain, its competitive difficulty may have intrinsic value, but if you do not value that challenge, the risks and sacrifices may outweigh the benefits. When your values are broad, be clear about which take priority in this phase of life and whether you are willing to make the trade-offs.

People who challenge your values are valuable when they have examined their own and are open to good-faith discussion; they can be sparring partners for better ideas. Avoid people who tell you how to live while refusing discussion or debate.

Your impulses, family, friends, city, culture, and online world all offer scripts for what to want. Take what you genuinely value without following the whole script.

Question the expectation to climb the corporate ladder, start a company, look a certain way, or win your friends' favorite status game. Even rebellion can become conformity. Make sure the life you are building is one you chose.

Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, “On the Three Metamorphoses” and “Self-Surpassing”.

Primal instincts and inherited values, from family, wealth, capitalism, individualism, and materialism, will shape you; neither suppress them nor let them dominate you. Build personal values that can affirm or override them; keep them stable enough to guide hard decisions, revise them through lived experience, conversation, and reflection, and treat unstable decision-making as a prompt to clarify what you value.

Source: PositivePsychology.com, “Seligman’s PERMA+ Model Explained: A Theory of Wellbeing”

A narrow, even incorrect, worldview can make action easier by concentrating motivation and muting competing aims. Nuance can reveal more of the truth but create internal conflict, so seek enough clarity to act without mistaking a useful story for a complete one.

Every once in a while, do something that scares you. You cannot choose the same fear each time, because eventually you will no longer be scared of it; comfort rots you from the inside out.

Do not mistake adaptation for alignment. If a situation consistently makes you unhappy, do not let familiarity turn it into a life you defend. Ask whether you genuinely chose the tradeoff or simply learned to want what feels available.

Inspired by Jon Elster's concept of adaptive preferences.

Pessimism is ignorance disguised as wisdom.

Use pessimism as a tool, not a worldview. Test the thesis: ask what would make it fail, look for disconfirming evidence, and update. Then build a positive case for action. A business, a bet, or a life direction needs a reason it can work; do not let someone else's resignation become your ceiling.

Irrational pessimism is just as dangerous, or more dangerous, than irrational exuberance to truth-seeking. The negative case is not automatically the rational case. Choose people who tell you the truth without making failure your identity.

“So, I decided to short the mortgage market ‐ and profit from the collapse.”

Source: Michael Burry, Vanderbilt Chancellor's Lecture

Michael Burry's housing short was bearish about mortgage bonds, but it was not passive pessimism; it was an active, researched thesis and a conviction that the bet would work. Read his account of the trade.

Further reading: defensive pessimism; emotional contagion; self-fulfilling prophecy.

Some friends help you enjoy the present; others help you build toward the future. Appreciate what each friendship brings without expecting one person to meet every need.

Notice what you need in the moment, and seek that company intentionally. Leave room for friendships to grow beyond the roles you associate with them.

Alignment is the goal, not balance. Neither orientation deserves equal weight by default. Your values may lead you to prioritize one far more than the other, and sometimes you will have to choose.

Be wary of spending so much time around one kind of company that their priorities quietly replace your own. Let your values determine which takes priority, and notice when the people around you start making that choice for you.