# Life Principles & Values This is meant to be an entry point to the principles, quotes and ideas that guide me on a daily basis. It will be broken down into ## Life ### Questions and Quotes 1. **If not now, when?** If you aren't able to feel *mentally strong*, *fulfilled*, *excited*, *relaxed*, *calm* and *fortunate* now, then what will it take? If you can’t live a happy, fulfilled, low anxiety life now, then when can you? 2. Happiness is a skill, practice it. 3. **"Young at heart."** 4. Have a need to find out what is true 5. Regular reflection and running your brain in debugger mode is your form of meditation. 6. What are the patterns of events in life that impact me? What are those that effect me and make me worse? What patterns and behaviors serve me? What hurt or hinder me? 7. What are the second order consequences of the life you are living right now? 8. What would this look like if it were easy? 9. People don't remember what you accomplished, they remember how you acted and made them feel while you were accomplishing. 10. There will always be problems, and you will always solve them. 11. You always want to be learning. Life is iterative. 12. New knowledge is fundamentally unpredictable and can have massive impacts on the way that you live your life. ### Goals 1. **Principle Goals** 1. Operate in a state of calm composure. Do not operate from a position of panic, anxiety or frustration. 2. Accurately understand reality. 3. Become an independent, deep, critical thinker 4. ### Weaknesses - **What are my weaknesses?** - Fear of failure and embarrassment. This leads me to be confident in small groups, less confident when I am worried about sounding like a fool. - Anxiousness, likely due to this fear of failure and embarrassment. The idea of people taking satisfaction in my failure, since I tend to so frequently succeed. This is a good example of caring about what other people think. - What is my painful truth: that I am anxious, especially when not feeling like I am moving in the right direction for too long. - On some level not having thought that I was good enough for Dom. This is likely due to her having not been interested in dating for 2 years, and then your past bad breakup. - **What has lead to these weaknesses?** - Think about the weird ways in which your habits started (the anxiety loop of not wanting dom to think you were more interested in other things in life). It is more meaningful if you are _present_ and have quality over quantity with her! Also remember, you may want to move towards pain (mental struggle is good!) but simply couple it with better habits (don’t bang your head against wall, time box, once hitting wall go get outside and walk or workout, etc) - You have not been a good leader in the past. - You let your anxiety and fear be a large forcing function for you to "go all out" and solve something. But that is not the way to *inspire others*. ### Strengths * **What are my strengths?** * **What has lead to those strengths?** ### Growth * What are the 3 biggest areas you wish to improve this year? What goals are going to get you there? ## Mental Health ## Work Dynamics & Startups Start by looking at the [Startups MOC](Startups%20MOC.md). 1. [Clear Thinking vs Smart](Clear%20Thinking%20vs%20Smart.md) ## Technical 1. [Machine Learning in Startups](Machine%20Learning%20in%20Startups.md) 2. [Startups MOC](Startups%20MOC.md) ### To add * Go through ray dalio principles, pick the ones you like, add them * * Go through Decision by Design, add them * look at [Daily Plan Template](Daily%20Plan%20Template.md) * Go through Naval Ravikant book, add principles * Unsupervised mentors advice * Lean startup advice * ML project advice * Define a clear reflection process * What will your time tracking toggl process be? * Most Important Thing * Explore * Exploit * Deep Work(tag) * Projects: * Kover * Critical Thinking * Tags: * Explore * goal directed * deep * shallow * MIT * reflect/synthesis * organize (tags) ### My Current Reflection Process #### Questions to ask? 1. Explore vs. Exploit 1. Am I balancing these effectively? Am I giving enough effort to the most important things? What areas of exploration am I lacking? Where am I giving too much attention? #### Regular tasks to do * Readwise review * Obsidian card review * Synthesis of ideas you are thinking about * Structured exploration * You of course should have some time where you just follow what you are interested in. However, there should be some greater prioritization in your exploration work. Always prioritize the highest ROI tasks. * Have a weekly time block where you get to focus on a hard technical explore task (as always with a writing/reflection component) * Weekly Reflection * Determine the best explore tasks to focus on next week. This is a function of A) Does it contribute to most important thing? B) Is it a high value/unit time resource C) Is it interesting and exciting * Have a weekly time block where to ### New things to add * Core values * Your goal is to always acquire new lenses and models to view the world. * Beliefs * New learnings * Don't use your moth brain * Beware your mammoth. Where are *my mammoths*? (this could be a good yearly question to ask). Where is my Authentic Inner voice? * What has been impacting my thinking recently? * 7 habits of highly effective people * Worrying is a way to feel like you are having control. But if your actions aren’t changing it’s harmful. Also it is good signal… [Quit your Job](Quit%20your%20Job.md) Find something beyond yourself (naval) - finding truth. That connects me back to the ancient scholars of Athens --- Date: 20211229 Links to: Tags: References: * [Reflection doc in notion](https://www.notion.so/Reflection-Base-80806dfddc9d456498f49252adb95708)