My favs from @lesswrong's 100 tips for a better life:
1) Success 💫
• The best advice is personal/comes from somebody who knows you well
• How you spend your days is how you spend your life
• Discipline > motivation. The former can be trained, the latter is fleeting
2) Cooking 🍵
• Steeping minutes: Green at 3, black at 4, herbal at 5.
• When googling a recipe, precede it with ‘best’. You’ll find better recipes.
• Food taste can be made much more exciting through simple seasoning.
3) Productivity ☕️
• You can automate mundane computer tasks with Autohotkey (or AppleScript).
• Reward yourself after completing challenges, even badly.
• Keep your desk and workspace bare. Treat every object as an imposition upon your attention, because it is.
4) Body 💪🏻
• The 20/20/20 rule: Every 20 mins of screenwork, look at a spot 20 feet away for 20 secs
• Exercise (weightlifting) not only creates muscle mass, it also improves skeletal structure.
• Don’t waste $ on multivitamins, they don’t work. However, vitamin D works.
5) Possessions 🪑
• Things you use for a significant fraction of your life (bed: 1/3rd, office-chair: 1/4th) are worth investing in.
• When buying things, time and money trade-off against each other.
6) Rationality 🧠
• Noticing biases in others is easy, noticing biases in yourself is hard. However, it has much higher pay-off.
• Often in the process of laying out a problem, a solution will present itself.
• Whenever you receive advice, consider its opposite as well.
7) Self 🧘🏻♀️
• There's no interpersonal situation that can’t be improved by knowing more about yourself.
• Sometimes unsolvable questions like “what is my purpose? lose their force upon lifestyle fixes. In other words, seeing friends regularly and getting enough sleep.
8) Hazards ⚠️
• There are 2 red flags to avoid almost all dangerous people: 1. The perpetually aggrieved ; 2. The angry.
• Those who generate anxiety in you and promise they have the solution are grifters. See: politicians, marketers, new masculinity gurus, etc. Avoid these
9) Relationships 👯♀️
• Look for somebody you enjoy just hanging with. Long-term relationships are mostly spent just chilling
• De-emphasizing your quirks lead to 90% of people thinking you’re alright. Emphasizing them lead to 10% of ppl thinking you’re amazing. Aim for them
10) Compassion ♥️
• Call your parents when you think of them, tell your friends when you love them.
• If somebody is undergoing group criticism, the tribal part in you will want to join in the fun of destroying somebody. Resist this, you’ll only add ugliness to the world.
11) Joy ✨
• Human mood and well-being are heavily influenced by simple things: Exercise, good sleep, light, being in nature. It’s cheap to experiment with these.
• Endeavour to keep track of the good things to avoid an inaccurate and dismal view of the world.
1/ I took a week off to ponder my ever-evolving definition of success:
Could the success I thought I wanted.. actually prevent me from doing the thing I actually wanted to do?
a thread 🧵on the downsides of wealth and fame, and upsides of autonomy and creative expression 👇
2/ We all aspire to be rich and successful. But what we don’t realize is that with it come limitations.
Napoleon once wrote: “Today, I’m sort of a mannequin figure that’s lost its liberty and happiness. Grandeur is all very well, but only in retrospect and in the imagination.”
3/ @tferriss on fame: “If I’ve learned anything, it is this: fame will not fix your problems. Instead, fame is likely to magnify all of your insecurities and exaggerate all of your fears.”
🧵ongoing thread to locate the futurists and philosophers of the Internet who are pursuing deep learning and thinking.
Below are fascinating Internet niche communities (that aren't reddit) and long-form publications I've come across:
1) Antilibraries is a community for celebrating books unread, and exploring more broadly the idea of learning from the unknown. We're all about the voracious pursuit of knowledge, creative potential, and shared discovery as a community catalyst.
2) Ribbonfarm is a longform blog devoted to unusual takes on both familiar and new themes. It was founded in 2007 by @vgr, who serves as Editor-in-Chief. ribbonfarm.com/about/
THREAD / the best digital syllabus' i've come across🧠
Web content is pervasive. Curation isn't.
Been thinking abt best of class syllabus' that guide users across existing open materials on the web (podcasts, articles, vids) to quickly get smart on a topic!