Things I'd Tell My Younger Self
52 bits of advice for a 15-22 year old me
Inspired by posts like this one.
All the obvious financial things - buy Bitcoin, NVidia, etc.
A college degree is a piece of paper that gets you better jobs, nothing more, nothing less.
Experience is a better teacher than theory, especially when creating something.
Nobody has any idea what they’re doing. You’re in good company.
You’re going to fail at basically everything you ever try. That’s good and natural, and why we don’t quit after the first try.
Make it a goal - legitimately - to go on 100 first dates. It’s a meaningless goal by itself, but you’ll learn so much in the process that it’s worth it.
Real fulfillment tends to come from community, not achievement. Doing things is good. Doing things with people you like and/or care about is better.
The perfect is the enemy of the ever actually finishing anything.
You’re going to need pharmacological help to function. That’s okay. Get on it, and track your mood and how much you get done. Switch medications early and often when necessary.
Anxiety is, in some sense, your felt sense of risk. It’s permanently miscalibrated. You can risk a lot more than you feel you can.
Consider buying a condo in your early-to-mid twenties. You don’t like debt, but you also don’t like paying rent that disappears every month.
You’re not actually lazy or stupid. If you’re acting lazy or stupid, it’s because you’re depressed and you need to change your medication.
Salary increases tend to happen when you change companies. This is okay, it’s how the market works. So change companies if you can get a substantially better deal.
Stability and routine are useful for you. There’s a difference between being trapped by a structure and supported by it. You aren’t trapped by your bones, are you?
In the early 2020s, the world is going to lose its mind to a pandemic that turns out to mostly kill those who are old or already sick. This presents several opportunities, both financially and career-wise. Take note.
Study basic economics. It applies to everything, and very few people understand it. Especially politicians and political activists, who seem to have no grasp of it whatsoever.
You’ll regret not doing things a lot more than you regret doing them, even the things you don’t necessarily enjoy. Act in consequence.
Winter is always your worst time of year, mentally. Summer is your best. Get a crap ton of lights, or a job that lets you live in Arizona for several months a year.
Read the book “A Field Guide To Earthlings”. This will teach you how most people’s brains work, which is not how your brain works.
Driving, while the most dangerous thing you do on a daily basis, is a skill that can be increased, and the higher your skill the less anxious you’ll feel about it.
Get Anki. Use Anki. It is the correct solution for memorization.
When you try to cook and mess up, you don’t actually have to eat the results. You can throw them away and eat something else. Knowing this will make you more inclined to try cooking.
When it comes to dieting, there is no “best” or “optimal” solution yet. The primary criteria is that you can actually stay on the diet. Try to avoid processed sugar and empty calories.
You procrastinate because you’re afraid. Acknowledge that fear and anxiety. Sit with it. It isn’t going to hurt you. Often it’s trying to help.
Writing a fantasy novel is actually really hard.
Your parents aren’t perfect. They are people.
Your sister isn’t perfect. She is a person.
You naturally err towards being more agreeable than is optimal. You can say ‘no’, shop around, and consider your options. These are basic rights.
Everyone else has a right to be wrong, and they exercise it frequently.
You are also wrong about a lot of things. This is okay. You’re young. Be willing to change your mind when you realize you’re wrong, and over time this will be less of a problem.
If you can, specialize in AI, specifically large AI models built upon lots of data and neural network/transformer architectures. They are the winning AI technology.
You are smart, but you shouldn’t let ‘being smart’ be your identity, because ‘smart’ is always a relative metric. It’s not a healthy thing to do. Your identity, ideally, should be based on values and qualities that are not relative to others. Someone else being ‘better’ than you in some sense shouldn’t threaten your identity or make you feel worse about yourself.
Try to keep dancing. You enjoy it, it plays well with the ladies, and it’s fun.
Philosophy, as a study, is fun but mostly useless. This is fine so long as you know it. (When it becomes useful, it stops being philosophy and starts being science.)
Everyone, at some point in their life, faces the abyss of nihilism. There are two options: deny it exists, or find a way to live with it. Option one is called ‘religion’ and won’t work for you. Option two is hard, but worth it.
Game nights with friends are, in general, your favorite thing to do. Try to set up ones for Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, and various board games, especially games of social deduction.
You are frugal by nature and nurture. This is good. Remember however that money is meant to be turned into utility. When you find a high-leverage opportunities to do so, take it.
While there isn’t anything wrong with being private or keeping your own secrets, there isn’t anything special about it either. Human connection forms through vulnerability. We see each other through the cracks in our shells.
Get a passport. It’s an annoying bureaucratic process to get one, but having one is useful.
Store important documents in a fireproof safe.
You can only get a certain amount of deep work out of your brain per day. Try to use it, because you can’t make up for it later and you don’t get the day back.
There’s an expression: “work had, play hard”. This does not work well for you. The better expression for you would be: “work hard, recover hard”.
No matter how good you get at communication or understanding people, there will still be stupid misunderstandings. Try to get better at these because it’s what you want from yourself, not out of the hopes that there’s a perfect algorithm for human interaction.
Your brain has difficulties focusing on more than one thing at a time, in a variety of ways. This causes you to fixate on things. Learn to live with it, and learn to do your best to steer it. It’s not going away.
It is impossible to perfectly express oneself. No matter how precise you think you’re being, you cannot take an idea from your brain and put it into someone else’s. Don’t stop trying. Don’t be disappointed when you fail.
You often operate from a place of anxiety and fear. This is understandable. Try to remember that no amount of power or control over a situation will make the fear go away. What makes the fear go away is being confident in yourself that you’ll be okay, even if things go horribly wrong.
It’s possible - and supremely useful - to hold opposing ideas in your head at the same time. Like “I’m a failure” and “I’m not a failure,” or “I’m right” and “I’m wrong.”
Keep lots of lists of your favorite things. Quotes, restaurants, books, movies, whatever. It’s super annoying when you want to revisit one and you just can’t find it.
You’re going to feel like shit sometimes, and you’re going to screw up sometimes. The key is to not let failures cascade onto each other. Don’t make mistakes because you’re so busy obsessing over previous mistakes.
You are under no obligation to finish reading a book you have started. Not all books are worth finishing.
Your time is valuable. Treat it that way.
Take a deep breath. It’s going to be okay.