Principles

May 2024 | Reading time: 2 min

1. Be curiosity-driven: maintain an inherent sense of wonder.
2. Work should feel exciting, meaningful, and fun. More often than not, it’s the people involved that make or break something, so pick wisely when possible.
3. Recalibrate speed and acceleration over time. Don’t slow down and become complacent, but do ground yourself on your own timelines, not those of others.
4. Be friends with people first and foremost, don’t be transactional. Be sincere and thoughtful. Offer support/help because you genuinely want to, and not because you expect something in return.
5. Don’t half-ass conversation, people, or work. Show you care, when it matters.
6. Be respectful of others’ and your own time.
7. Consistency matters. Once you start something, try to finish it (accounting for pivots).
8. When in doubt, pick the hard thing and do that first.
9. Observe the details. Practice noticing things and pattern matching.
10. Appreciate the infinite things you can learn from almost anyone. Think less about yourself, but not less of yourself (C.S. Lewis).
11. Self-agency is self-reinforcing over time. Take accountability for yourself.
12. Be more intrinsically motivated than extrinsically.
13. Health comes first: physical, mental, emotional, etc. Burnout is real.
14. Give more than what is taken and give second chances. The world lacks kind people by orders of magnitude more than it lacks smart people. Also, kindness != niceness.
15. True respect is earned over time.
16. Separate people from their work. Some people who do incredible work are also incredible themselves, but this is not always the case.
17. Succinctness is correlated with humility.
18. Don’t forget how you started or those who helped open doors for you. Likewise, don’t shut the door behind you once you’ve crossed to the other side.
19. Balance the talking:doing ratio. Be loud when it matters (and put yourself out there), but otherwise, talking too much usually indicates little real work is being done. When distracted, it is easy to convince yourself you are doing diligent work when you are not.
20. Write things down: ideas, thoughts, and reflections. Use writing as a tool to work through thought processes. Self-rationalizing too much can quickly become a negative feedback loop.
21. Don’t make excuses or give a roundabout answer. Be direct, but not rude.
22. Maintain integrity. Be honest with others and yourself.
23. Shortcuts rarely lead to lasting success. What is hard-earned is also hard to take away.
24. Approach new ideas and people without judgment.
25. Don’t take feedback personally. Be receptive to valid criticism and being proven wrong.
26. Surround yourself with all kinds of people, not just those similar to you or those you get along with.
27. Advice is overrated, you cannot replicate someone else’s journey step by step. Instead, ask specific questions to gain perspective and build context.
28. Learn how to build intuition about people and things. Tacit knowledge is underrated.
29. Don’t skip breakfast.
30. Life is short, don’t waste time agonizing over things that don’t matter. On the flip side, do invest lots of time in things that matter. The same applies to people.