Notes to self

Things I Keep Re-Learning

These are notes I have to keep rewriting because I keep forgetting them.

I come back to these ideas more often than I would like to admit. Usually after I have drifted, gotten comfortable, or started optimising things that did not need optimising. They are easy to nod at and surprisingly hard to live by.

None of it is original. Most of it is borrowed, learned the hard way, or relearned more than once. It is not advice, and I do not live by these principles consistently. I am still practicing.

A working list. Incomplete, occasionally uncomfortable, very much in progress. I expect it to change. I hope it does.

Theme I: Agency, Asking, and Exposure

1. Let Reality Say No, Not You.
Once you’re genuinely okay with rejection, you’re free to ask for almost anything. Most limits exist because we enforce them on ourselves before testing them.

2. Exposure Creates Luck.
Luck isn’t constant. It grows when you show up, talk to people, ask directly, and stay in motion. Be optimistic. Be visible. Assume goodwill until proven otherwise. \

3. Embarrassment Is Cheap
Looking foolish at the beginning is usually the entry fee. The more expensive mistake is protecting your image so carefully that nothing new can happen.

4. Permission Is Often Fear
Waiting for permission can feel responsible. Sometimes it is just fear dressed in a jacket. Decide what is worth doing, then behave as if it is already underway.

5. Ask the Dumb Question
A good dumb question is often the shortest route to understanding. The people worth learning from rarely punish honest confusion.

6. Stop Lurking
Watching from the edge can feel safe, intelligent, even tasteful. But most lives do not change because someone observed carefully from a distance. You cannot win games you refuse to play. The struggle is not a detour. It is the path.

Theme II: Environment, People and Leverage

7. Environment Beats Intention
Where you live and where you work shape you more than you think. Daylight, air, materials, the rhythm of the day, these are not lifestyle details. They quietly decide what feels normal, what feels hard, and who you slowly become.

8. Choose Demanding Rooms
Spend time where your current standard is not enough. A room full of people who are better than you at something will quietly raise your floor. Comforting rooms preserve you. Demanding rooms revise you.

9. Find Expansive People
Some people leave a conversation and you feel smaller, more careful, and slightly edited. Others leave you ready to start something. The second type is rare. Seek them out deliberately, keep them close, and don't settle for the easier company of people who merely don't drain you.

10. Don't Network. Befriend
Networking usually starts with wanting something. Friendship starts with being curious about someone. The second one works better, and also makes you less annoying.

Theme III: Attention, Consumption, and Inner Voice

11. Protect Your Inner Signal
Too much input does not make you informed. It can make you inaudible to yourself. Leave enough quiet for your own thoughts to have a fighting chance. Skip the news that does not really matter. Walk the dog without a podcast in your ear.

12. Learning Is Not Browsing
Being pleasantly informed is not the same as learning. Real learning has friction and takes effort. It changes what you can do, not just what you can mention at dinner.

13. Your Phone Changes the Room
A phone nearby is not a small object. It is an open door. Part of you is always standing halfway through it.

14. Consume Below Your Output
If you’re mostly consuming, something is off. Creating is slower and riskier but it’s where learning, leverage, and meaning come from. Aim to produce more than you consume.

15. Attention Is Life Material
Attention is not merely a productivity asset. It is the substance your days are made of. Spend it badly for long enough and the bill is not abstract.

Theme IV: Learning, Thinking, and Changing Your Mind

16. Think in Writing
Writing is not just communication. It is thinking with scaffolding. Put the thought somewhere visible before trusting that you understand it.

17. Attack Your Own Opinion
Form a view, then search for the best argument against it. If the view survives, it has earned more trust. If it does not, you saved yourself some embarrassment.

19. Be Specific
Vagueness protects weak thinking. Specificity exposes it. This is irritating, which is why it works.

20. Theories Need Dirt
A beautiful theory about real life should eventually touch real life. If it cannot survive contact with actual people, incentives, fatigue, and mess, admire it carefully.

21. Change Before Reality Forces You
Changing your mind is cheaper than being corrected by events. Reality is an expensive teacher and has no interest in your dignity.

22. Some Places Must Be Felt, Not Read
Travel is irreplaceable because the texture of a place (how people move, trust each other, eat, argue, rest) lives in experience, not description. No amount of reading replaces the bodily knowledge of actually being somewhere. Some things only arrive through the soles of your feet.

Theme V: Risk, Iteration, and Feedback

23. Most Bets Fail
A single bet failing is not evidence that betting was foolish. It is the basic math of trying. The work is to take enough thoughtful shots and improve the quality of each one.

24. Shorten the Cycle
Long planning often hides fear. Short cycles expose reality faster. Build, test, learn, adjust. The sooner you put something into the world, the sooner reality can help you fix it.

25. Write the Worst Case
Write down the worst that can happen, then look at it. Most people are more risk-averse than the situation deserves. When you spell out the actual worst-case scenario on paper, it usually turns out to be survivable, temporary, and far less catastrophic than the vague dread that kept you from acting.

26. Feedback Usually Stings
The most useful feedback rarely arrives wrapped in comfort. If it hurts and keeps echoing, inspect it before defending yourself.

26. Don't Worship Sunk Costs
Time spent on a mistake does not make it sacred. Sometimes the bravest move is to stop funding yesterday's poor judgment.

27. Doors Pretend to Be Locked
Most decisions feel bigger than they are. Few are truly final. Try the door before you assume it is locked.

28. Start Smaller Than Pride Allows
When overwhelmed, the useful move is often embarrassingly small. Pride wants a grand restart. Reality accepts five honest minutes.

29. Act As If, Until You Actually Are
Confidence rarely arrives before competence. Usually it has to go first. Stepping into something before you feel fully ready is often the only way to become ready. The performance is not dishonesty. It is the mechanism.

Theme VI: Work, Craft, and Execution

30. Execution Tests Opinion
Ideas behave well in your head. They get difficult the moment you try to build them. It's all about execution.

31. Stay Near the Details
The details are where reality leaks through. Delegate too far from them and you may outsource not just the task, but your judgment.

32. Do the Unglamorous Work
Notes, agendas, checks, follow-ups, ugly spreadsheets, raw data, this is where many elegant strategies either become real or quietly die.

33. Don't Polish the Wrong Thing
Doing excellent work on an unimportant task is still a failure of attention. The world does not reward craftsmanship applied to the wrong thing.

34. Talent Is the Absence of Friction
Talent rarely announces itself. It often shows up as the things other people struggle with simply not being a problem for you. Stop asking where your gifts are. Start noticing what other people seem to find really hard.

35. Work Before the Day Fragments
If something truly matters, do not leave it until the day has been eaten by other people's urgency. Put one real mark on it early.

Theme VII: Integrity, Character, and Self-Respect

36. Keep Your Word Late
Integrity is easy while it is convenient. The real test begins when keeping your word becomes irritating, costly, or unseen.

37. Honesty Is Not a Weapon
Something can be true and still be the wrong thing to say. Use honesty to clarify, repair, or protect, not to hurt people while feeling good about being honest.

38. Watch Downward Behaviour
Watch how people treat those who cannot help them. Character often introduces itself quietly, to someone else, before it ever performs for you.

39. Don't Rationalize the Unease
If something feels morally off, do not let clever reasoning talk over the discomfort too quickly. Sometimes your gut feeling notices the ethical problem before the argument does.

40. Shortcuts Send Invoices
The tempting shortcut usually does not disappear after you take it. It returns later as distrust, cleanup, shame, or a quieter loss of self-respect.

Theme VIII: Relationship, Love, and Repair

41. Relationships Need Maintenance
Good relationships do not usually collapse in one dramatic scene. They thin out through missed calls, postponed visits, lazy assumptions, and the fantasy that closeness maintains itself.

42. Hard Conversations Accrue Interest
Avoided conversations do not stay the same size. They gather resentment, interpretation, and imaginary evidence. Speak earlier than feels comfortable.

43. Second Chances Have Limits
A second chance can be generous. A third often means you are not protecting yourself anymore. Forgiving someone does not mean giving them another chance to hurt you the same way.

44. Most Arguments Are Decoys
Many arguments are not about what they seem to be about. The topic is just where the older feelings finally surface. Winning the surface argument rarely fixes the real one.

45. Love Is Attention
People do not need big gestures from us. They want to be seen, heard, and not always second to a screen.

IX. Energy, Health, and Discipline

46. Your Body Is Not Separate
Health is not a side project next to ambition. It is the floor ambition stands on, usually ignored until it starts making noise.

47. Train for Later
Exercise is not only about today's body. It is a vote for the version of you that still wants to climb stairs, carry bags, travel, think clearly, and not outsource basic life to decline.

48. Don't Decide While Depleted
Hunger, anger, loneliness, and exhaustion are terrible board members. Do not let them vote on important matters.

49. Energy Is the Real Constraint
Time is not always the scarce resource. Often the calendar has space but the person inside it does not. Protect energy with the seriousness usually reserved for money.

X. Time, Mortality, and Perspective

50. These Are the Good Days
The good old days rarely announce themselves. They usually look like an ordinary Tuesday you were too distracted to notice.

51. Use the Good Stuff
Stop saving life for the perfect occasion. The expensive bottle, the trip, the conversation. Use them before they become evidence of a life postponed.

52. Ask While They Can Answer
Ask your parents, elders, and old friends the questions while they are still here to be annoyed by them. One day the archive closes without ceremony.

53. Everything Passes Both Ways
Pain passes, which helps. So do ordinary evenings, small children, healthy parents, strong knees, and the current version of home. This should make us less dramatic and more attentive.

54. Enough Is Not Defeat
Knowing what is enough is not a failure of ambition. It may be the only form of wealth that does not immediately invent a new hunger.

55. Meaning Is Built Anyway
No one hands you a reason for being here. You build one from the work you do, the people you love, the things you keep choosing. It will not feel grand. Build it anyway.

This list changes. I add, remove, and rewrite entries as I learn.
Last updated: May 2026.