Life Principles

• Good is better than bad
• Time is limited
• Optionality: making more mistakes and changing your mind
  • Sources of optionality
    • Money: buying a 2nd chance
    • Career choice: some careers let you change your lifestyle more than others
    • Nationality: security, health, peace
    • Influence: having a say even if you agree with the decision-maker, but being able to hunch when necessary
• Paying for services buys you time to do something else
  • Uber
  • Housekeeper
  • etc
• Not always you will want to buy time, especially when those are high-value, bonding, or difficult-to-outsource tasks
  • Parenting
  • Walking your dog
• Immortality
  • Some humans want to live forever, but others are already doing it
    • Actions
    • Kids
    • Research
    • Book
    • Influence
• Questioning
  • Raising your and is always good, unless this creates a negative feedback loop on others that will prevent them from questioning
• Time
  • Learning from experience is good, but learning can be 100x faster
    • Books
    • Talking
    • Watching
  • Having "useful" habits and hobbies is the best usage of “free time”
    • Think what you want 5 years from now. Imagine what you don't have now, but you could if you had started years ago
    • Start now
  • Saving time is not always good
    • Calm and appreciation for simple things are time consuming but is joyful
  • When prioritizing, it's important to be mindful of short term vs long term benefits
• Discussions
  • If you have something to say, say it earlier rather than later even if that's difficult
  • Elaborate and give clear examples
• Good and Bad
  • Is egoism necessarily bad?
  • What if all decisions are partially self-motivated?
  • Even if we assume that "the continuity of the species" is important, that is selfish when you prioritize yours and not others
    • That is dangerous reasoning as this is what leads to discriminate
  • Don't do to others what you don't want others to do to you. Why? Self-preservation?
• Present vs Future
  • In general, our actions favor people from the present vs people from the future (not yet born)
  • Encourage risk-taking and say “not yet” instead of “no”
• Dispensable
  • Aiming to have others not depend on you is good because that scales time
    • You can do something else and they can do something else
  • That applies to parenting, work, tutoring, etc

Work Principles

Transparency

• Be open
• Encourage bad news, and allow open communication, otherwise people will abstain from talking

Others

• Picking the best choice
  • When the benefits aren't evident: think again and again and again. Uou may find out that there are other alternatives that are better