Start with an idea that you genuinely care about. For example, you can expand on an opinion you had while discussing with a friend, or a statement you read in a book, or a concept you frequently think about. You can share your understanding of a problem or how you came up with a solution. In summary, your writing should be about your experience. Be authentic.

Once you find an idea, you need to pin it down to a single statement or sentence. For this blog post, the statement is “I believe good writing follows a set of principles that I can look for and document”. Your first statement does not have to be correct. You can iterate on it. But it is useful to start with a statement that keeps you focused. You want to explore it by thinking, writing, researching. Rinse and repeat.

Then, you need to break down that statement into bullet points. The bullet points follow a natural order, they add detail to the original idea and support it. Once you have the bullet points, expand each into a standalone paragraph. Your writing style should be similar to how you speak in real life. At this point, you already have a short essay!

And now you need to review and improve your draft. Read your article and write down any questions, critiques, and other ideas that come to mind. You can put them in a separate section. Create new draft docs for unrelated ideas. Take time to research your questions and criticisms then improve existing paragraphs and create new ones based on your findings.

Also make sure the text is simple, easy to understand, and fun. Again, you’d want to write as you speak. Simplify the text by removing extra words. Don’t put multiple ideas in one sentence. Write for the lazy reader. Write for yourself.

Keep iterating between research and writing until you love what you wrote. Don’t write on stimulants because that’s a shortcut. Don’t oversell or over-optimize because readers want to relate. Don’t think about impact because no one can predict it. Don’t think about novelty because a re-write of the same idea can be novel and a new idea can be useless. Ask for reviews from humans & AIs.

Don’t think much about whether to publish or not. Don’t have high expectations. Write lots of short essays and explore through writing. Write lots to practice clear and sharp thinking. Write lots to learn more about unfamiliar topics. And don’t be scared of sounding stupid. Just write!

If you’re making something for people, make sure it’s something they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something you yourself want.

And in “What I’ve Learned from Users”:

I often tell founders to make something they themselves want, and YC is certainly that.

The reason this advice is good (though exceptions exist) is that, by following it, you will have at least one real user (yourself) that you can use for feedback to build an MVP, otherwise, you can easily fool yourself into believing what you are building is useful.

Well, I think this concept can generalize to all forms of creation:

• When you write; write something you would read.
• When you do research; look into questions you’d be interested to answer.
• When you release open-source code; package it in a way you’d use it.

Conversation & Ideas

How a group of people approach a conversation either makes it or breaks it.

Examples of good conversation principles:

• A shared desire to objectively understand something or reach the truth.
• A return to first principals to either solve a problem or understand a topic.
• A common incentive to solve a problem using measurable metrics.

Examples of bad conversation principles:

• Seeking approval on ideas. Avoiding disagreement or not tolerating it.
• Debating for the sake of debate. Taking the defence by default.
• Gossiping.

We can selectively opt in or out of conversations based on our knowledge of the participants and their motivations.

Things you’re allowed to do

There are many things we could do, but don’t—simply because most people don’t. Examples:

• Use your money for things other than consumption/investment:
  • Hire a researcher or expert consultant.
  • Run surveys.
  • Buy advertisements.
  • Buy research or data.
  • Hire a tutor.
  • Buy goods/services from your friends.
  • Give to charity.
  • Hire a coach.
• Ask questions online.
• Travel to friends just to visit them.
• Live in multiple places with multiple people.
• Generate your own ebooks.
• Ignore what’s on the jobs page & pitch someone at a company on hiring you.
• Negotiate for better terms in your job offer.
• Ask for a raise or drop out/quit your job.
• Live off your savings (or get a grant) while trying something new.

I think the space of what we can creatively do is huge!

The Virtue of Silence — In his (excellent) book, “Antifragile”, Nassem Taleb points out that in many situations, refraining from intervention (doing nothing) is the optimal choice. However, we don’t get paid to do nothing (in money nor recognition/visibility), this is why doctors are inclined to leave you with a prescription despite knowing you will naturally recover. In such situation, the actor should indeed do nothing and bear the cost (missed opportunities, reputational damage, decreased pay, etc).

Inflation is Multiple Taxation — This article opened my eyes to the other forms of inflation that exist in our lives. Aside from currency depreciation…

• Capital gains tax: when asset appreciation is tracking inflation (e.g., 10% inflation resulting in 10% asset appreciation) and we don’t pay taxes, we are breakeven. However, when we pay taxes on our gains (which is our reality), we lose purchasing power. This means that to be breakeven, ours returns need to be higher than the inflation rate.
• Higher bracket taxation: we receiving a 5% annual raise with 5% inflation are no better off in real terms, yet may end up in a higher tax bracket, losing more of our income to taxes.
• Reduced tax credits & benefits: as we attempt to keep up with inflation, we get decreased benefits as we are considered higher income, but in reality, we are just trying to keep up with inflation.

It’s important to be aware of such realities to avoid being slowly boiled alive.

Principles — 63 life lessons from Nabeel. Some that I think are very important:

• The environment you live in matters a lot; move to where you flourish maximally.
• Do things fast: I would add that most work is optional, so first figure out what matters most, then do it fast. A good enforcer is to set deadlines.
• Wealth can be created: wealth is not a zero-sum game.
• Figure out your primary focus and do it first thing in the morning.
• Produce surplus: your production minus consumption should be positive, preferably a big number.
• Put yourself out there! I write about this in “create surface area for luck”
• Learn how to meditate.
• When you are in a high-pressure situation, remember that everything passes and understand the worst outcome isn’t that bad at all.
• You are too risk-averse, take the leap. This is hard to do because it goes against our nature but can be extremely rewarding if done right.
• Know your “triggers” or what brings out the worst version of yourself.
• Status is fake. Just focus on substance and doing valuable work.
• Understand power laws and compounding effects in life.
• Don’t ask for approval and permission to do things: in other words, your bosses don’t know much either, and they’re relying on you to figure things out.
• Be willing to learn from others. The most valuable feedback usually hurts a lot. However, you need to have taste in recognizing good from bad takes.

Advice That Actually Worked for Me — I am a big fan of actionable knowledge. That’s why I liked this list of direct tips from Nabeel. I think some items in his list are more optional than others, here’s what I think are the most important ones:

• Maximize energy levels: you do this by building good morning habits (exercise, meditation, putting everything in order) that give you enough energy to work on the most important thing in the morning. That by itself motivates you to finish the optional low-energy items by the end of the day. Controlling this loop is essential.
• Do the most important thing first thing in the morning, and don’t check social media until you’ve done it: I disagree with Nabeel on social media, I don’t want to check any socials until the day ends (~8PM).
• Tell the right stories about yourself: I think this matters a lot. If you believe you won’t do anything, then that belief makes you more likely to not do anything. Beliefs are self-fulfilling prophecy machines. You can use this to your advantage, if you believe you can make it, you will act in ways that will set you up for it.
• Get in the habit of Fermi estimation, looking up key quantities, and using upper and lower bounds: use data to escape the narrative fallacy. Do napkin math to bound your expectations and think from first principles when the situation requires it.
• Do a weekly review: I think planning and reflections are very important alongside dedicated focused work. I write about my routine in “My weekly Review Habit” and about focus in “Things I do to stay focused”.
• Synthesize things as you read: we don’t only want to memorize quotes. When reading, working, discussing, etc., we need to recognize when a mentioned concept or idea is so important that we need to stop and re-think it, internalize it, maybe set a backlog task to look into it in more detail later.

How to Sell? — I know nothing about being a good salesperson, but this read gave me a good starter framework if I ever approach the topic. It systematically tackles important questions like:

• How do I know the chance of converting someone before I approach them?
• Who do I want to approach in a potential buyer company?
• What are the human psychological biases I need to tap into to convert?
• How should a meeting with a potential client be structured?
• How can I close a deal?

Some counterintuitive learnings:

• The potential buyer should do most of the talking.
• You don’t want to pitch, you want the client to realize they want your product by themselves.
• If you realize your product is not a good fit for them, cut it short and recommend the best (sometimes competitor) product that could serve their needs.

Making Beliefs Pay Rent — I revisited this post by Eliezer and it still rings true. Our personal heuristics or models about the world are critical because they help us make decisions at all times. We need to continuously test their validity:

• Start by having as few heuristics as possible. A way to minimize our beliefs is to remove the ones that are non-falsifiable (we can’t disprove them) and the ones that don’t actually help us do anything (non-usable).
• Since the remaining heuristics are falsifiable (they claim predictive power), we need to document their predictions and verify them. Example: when you disagree with someone, remember to check the result of their course of action versus yours.

Beliefs should be predictive and always pay rent in the form of correct predictions. The habit of documenting your predictions and reflecting upon their results in an honest manner is enough to solidify your world model.

Default Alive or Default Dead? — There are very important things in life that we give little thought about, don’t even consider sometimes, or ignore. Examples:

• Deciding where to spend most of your life.
• Picking a partner.
• Investment options.

Sometimes we do this because we think we can’t know the right answer and action beats inaction. Other times we fail to recognize the importance of the topic.

One that’s especially important to founders is mapping the burn rate before product-market fit. Paul Graham shares simple yet effective advice to model this problem well:

Calculate your burn rate and runway precisely. Most founders are surprisingly vague about these numbers. Default alive means your growth trajectory will lead to profitability before you run out of money. Default dead means it won’t. If you’re default dead, you have two options: cut costs or increase revenue. Most focus only on revenue, but cutting costs is often faster and more reliable. The key insight: knowing which state you’re in changes everything about how you should operate. Default alive companies can focus on growth and innovation; default dead companies must focus on survival first.

Anyone can do research. You just need curiosity, systematic exploration, and willingness to share what you find. The generating function for novel work is trying really hard to understand something until you pass through the edge of current human understanding, then continuing imaginatively onward.

More on Repealing the Laws of Economics — From the great Howard Marks (I’m also a fan of his book: Most Important Thing). In his memo, he is making the case that the economic man is a reactive adaptive man, not passive, and while government policy can sometimes achieve goals through well-designed incentives, poorly designed policies offer no free lunch - there’s no solution that gives free benefits to everyone. He walks through examples like California’s fire insurance price caps, which drove insurers out of the market and left homeowners uninsured for recent devastating fires. Overall, free-market solutions shall be used by default.

Why we’re still doing normal school — This piece captures the fascinating reality of being a parent trying to navigate what lies ahead for young kids in an uncertain future.

Julia Wise acknowledges that current schools prepare children for something like the present or past, which feels absurd when AI will likely transform work and daily life by the time her children are adults.

Yet she and her partner stick with traditional school for three main reasons: school is where the other children are, they don’t want to quit their meaningful work, and the future is too weird and hard to prepare for anyway.

When thinking about education, it’s not just about knowledge, it’s also about developing social skills through relationships with other kids. Homeschooling can only optimize the knowledge (side) of education, there needs to be dedication to social and other forms of education (environmental, spiritual, etc). And even with all its limitations, school provides that community.

Even if parents are willing to commit full time to raising kids, there are still questions about the evolving nature of technology. Tech is forward-looking while traditional schools always lag and adapt late. Given that, parents need to figure out which skills and knowledge is most useful given a future scenario (like the rise of AGI).

If you’re great at one thing, very good at another, decent at a third, and interested in many others, you might be the only person on the planet with that exact combination.

The world has plenty of opportunities. The overexploited ones require just a few skills. The underexploited ones hide in high-dimensional corners where few people combine the right interests. This explains why interdisciplinary work has a reputation for unusual returns. It’s why diversity helps when building teams.

The lesson? Don’t shut down your other interests. Widen your scope. You don’t need to allocate time uniformly, but maintain that long tail of curiosities while staying expert in your main thing.

The Narrative Fallacy — We’re only comfortable when the world makes sense. When we encounter something new, we rush to explain it. We don’t need much convincing because we want to feel like we know. Stories and narratives work because they satisfy this basic human need. As a result, we live in a world ruled by narratives and memes, where truth only matters in small corners.

Several factors make this worse. Plausible stories sound true. We default to believing what we hear instead of questioning. Most interpretations can’t be measured or reproduced. People get away with bad predictions because we have short memories. We forget track records. There’s no cost to making wrong predictions, so there’s no corrective mechanism.

Even scientific research falls into this trap. We decide what results we want before starting. We ignore uninteresting findings. We invest more in ideas we like. We cherry-pick supporting examples.

The fix is simple but hard: be more skeptical of anything protected by an elegant story. Seek empirical evidence instead. In research, approach problems from an interrogative perspective rather than chasing imagined answers.

Humans are not automatically strategic — At one point in my life, I was doing nothing. When I decided to start doing things, my natural approach was brute force. Keep trying whatever comes to mind until something works. Take action immediately because thinking feels like laziness.

The common factor was flatness in thinking. I didn’t think about what I should do, what to work on, or how the next year should look. This creates a bigger problem. We make major life decisions on a whim, then spend decades bearing the consequences. This happens regardless of intelligence level. We’re simply not built for recognizing and selecting effective long-term strategies.

The solution requires building better habits around goals. Ask what you’re trying to achieve. Figure out how you’d know if you achieved it. Gather that information. Test different approaches systematically. Track what works and what doesn’t. Split your energy between exploring new methods and exploiting the best ones you’ve found.

Most importantly, make sure your goal is actually your goal. That you coherently want it.

• Consciousness is on a spectrum and we humans develop it as we grow.
• There is a point in time when we gain consciousness, before that, we are unconscious.

I have no idea which theory is correct and I discount self-reflection as evidence because:

• Memories fade. Being able to remember an event does not mean it was the only memory. i.e., there is no “special memory” that started awareness.
• Memories can be faked, we tell ourselves stories and believe them (for cope or other reasons). i.e., we can’t trust memories.

I’m also surprised that some people are able to find their earlier memory. For me, I can’t rank them, here are a few:

Memory 1

1. My mother is getting ready to leave home.
2. She asks me if I want to watch cartoons.
3. I want but I can’t communicate.
4. She turns on the TV and put on a cartoons channel.
5. She leaves.
6. I watch. long enough until someone opens the door again.

Memory 2

1. I want to go to my grandmother.
2. She is in the 2nd floor.
3. I can’t walk but crawl to her.
4. She sees me and is happy.

Memory 3

1. I am in bed with my mother.
2. She is explaining to me, in a story-form, Life.
3. She tells me that god created everyone, and one day we will be back.
4. I feel that I don’t want to be back, I’m happy here.

Frameworks for Hiring

• You 1st 10 employees will replicate themselves 10 times over, be careful.
• For startups, you want to hunt for people with “potential” or “under-looked”, because the obviously great ones won’t work for you.
• Make a list of people you want to work with some day (or more). Keep it updated.
• Create social events and invite people you respect, let them invite their friends. Spawn new connections and something will happen.
• Look for drive, grit, agency, bias for action, high integrity, intellectualism, curiosity, longtermism, cautious optimism.

Will AI Resist Your Efforts To Change Its Totally Fake Values? — I think a better title for the essay is “Why would AI resist your efforts to change its totally fake values?”

The essay points to the contradiction between 2 established ideas in AI safety:

• AI models resist the changing of their values (Anthropic) (value-obsession)
• AI models don’t care about their values (Yudkowsky) (value-faking)

The rest of the essay points to the mistake of only pointing to the negative part (value-faking) to enforce a certain narrative (AI doom). Overall, an Interesting read that draws to human biases (similar to this one).

The Hypocrisy of Elites — Contrary to common belief: in most orgs, “experts” are the ones at the bottom of the hierarchy. Experts know how things work, how to run the numbers, fix the dashboard, navigate day-to-day operations. As you move up the chain, you get less technical and more authoritative. The manager at the top can’t do any one job better than the people under them. But they make the big decisions.

This system is good if the guy at the top went through the transition from an expert to a leader. As an expert drives success, they are given more authority to scale their intellectual abilities by directing larger and larger efforts. However, systems of authority are rarely organized in this fashion (globally).

And as experts among other non-elites have their hypocrisies, this essay focuses on the hypocrisy of elites:

• Luxury beliefs as status signaling: ie, best is to observe actions instead of talk.
• Denial of elitism: no one believes they’re elite, yet surely some are.
• Redistribution as Aristocratic Tradition (or as a smart way to survive revolutions)

Here are some numbers: we’re indoors 87% of the time, in vehicles 11%, and truly outdoors only 2%. Indoor PM levels consistently exceed outdoor levels, and these tiny particles enter our bloodstream through our lungs, triggering immune responses.

The health impact is severe. Lifelong exposure to 33.3 PM₂.₅ costs one disability-adjusted life year. At 2500 PM₂.₅, you’re losing healthy time in real-time. A 2013 study found each 28.5 μg/m³ costs a full year of life.

Simple changes make a difference:

• Don’t use ultrasonic humidifiers.
• Open your windows; ideally all day.
• Use range hoods when cooking (frying spike levels to 424 μg/m³, broiling to 1256 μg/m³).
• Minimize incense, candles, and hairspray.
• Avoid subway systems when possible.
• Invest in air purifiers and masks.

Why indoor lighting is hard to get right and how to fix it — Our lighting dramatically affects circadian rhythm, mood and alertness, and sleep quality. Most of us get inadequate light exposure, leaving us feeling tired during the day, alert at night, and struggling with seasonal depression in winter.

Natural light runs circles around artificial lighting – often 5x brighter than indoor lighting, even on cloudy days. Artificial light has major spectral gaps compared to sunlight.

The fix mimics natural light patterns:

• Target 1000+ lux across the room while working (bright enough that your computer screen looks dim).
• Use 5300-6000K color temperature bulbs with high CRI (95+).
• Light your full visual field, not just your desk
• Switch to under 3000K lighting around 7pm
• Use very dim, warm lights the last hour before bed

Buy recommendations here, here, and here.

People Are Different — We consistently underestimate how differently others think compared to us. This creates chronic misunderstanding because we assume others interpret things the same way we do.

The differences run deep - perception, thinking, feeling, taste. We communicate informally and misunderstand each other more than half the time. Are these differences from self-centered barriers to empathy? From individual backgrounds and experiences? Or inherent differences we can’t possibly develop empathy for?

The practical solution isn’t perfect empathy - it’s making awareness of human differences a constant mental framework. This requires intensive practice until it becomes instinctual. Even when we can’t empathize, we can leave room for incomprehensible differences.

Impact, agency, and taste — I slowly came to understand that high value work is very rare. And as a result, we have forgiving protocols that makes it difficult to distinguish between “filler” and “valuable” output. It is our job to assess what’s what and try hard to produce meaningful things.

Kuhn describes shared characteristics of people who repeatedly produce such work:

• They build leverage through automation, tooling/infra, system unlocks, and insight.
• They have agency by owning the outcome, driving progress without waiting for permission, and hence bearing some risk.
• They have taste: they have a good sense of what to work on and what matters.

No one can teach you to have conviction — The way we become better is through feedback cycles. I see 2 attributes of feedback:

• Speed: the quicker you go from action to feedback and back in iterations, the more information you get to use to change your heuristics.
• Intensity: the more impact the feedback will have on you, the more you internalize it.

There are ways to generate fast feedback:

• Ask mentor to assess ideas before you implement them.
• Read engineering blog posts or research papers to learn from others.
• Ask someone to pair-program with you.

However, the fast the feedback, the lighter the impact will be. Knowing what is deserving of slow but intense feedback cycles can be the difference between learning leaps and absolutely no progress.

Research Taste Exercises — There are 2 types of skills in technical endeavours:

1. Taste: or knowing what to work on.
2. Execution: knowing how to implement or build what you have decided on.

Although both are very important and complementary, the first is quite tricky to develop because it does not improve through brute force hard work. Here are some ways to improve it:

• Before coding, list all your ideas, ask your mentors to evaluate and rank them. If you disagree on something, discuss it with them. Finally, decide on what to implement.
• Keep a live journal of your ideas and their outcomes, that way you are reminded of and learning from your failures.
• When you fail, think & analyze deeply “why”. The reason for putting effort here is you are trying to bend your world model and not be passive.
• Read research papers. They contain compressed information about the experiences of other teams (too bad they emphasize the successes over the failures though).

An LLM Codegen Hero’s Journey — A comprehensive guide to the progression of AI-assisted coding. From my experience, however, the listed coding assistants are not as good in implementing technical research compared to software engineering. But it still def worth it to try all of them!

Tech hiring: is this an inflection point? — Hiring procedures are changing. Worth keeping an eye on!

As we become more aware, our desires become more detached and elusive:

1. Wealth.
2. Social recognition.
3. Impact.
4. Purpose.
5. Then what…???

As we peel layers, we invent new ones. We are never free. A comforting end state is to be our own jailor and morph a chain familiar to no one aside from us.

How to Beat Procrastination — Most believe that productive people have strong willpower and are apt for work. Although I agree that people differ in natural willpower, focus, and deep work, procrastinators are far from being doomed! We can design systems that greatly minimize procrastination. Here are some that worked for me:

• Meditate.
• Tidy up your work environment.
• Separate your work environment from leisure/sleep/eating places.
• Install distraction blockers in the computer.
• Break down a big task into multiple smaller tasks in a list.
• Use pomodoros to force kicking off work.
• Reward yourself every time you finish a task (checkoff item, take a 5min break, etc)
• The longer you work, the easier it becomes to continue working.

The article does a great job explaining how to get things done and most common behavioral pitfalls!

On impact & on what we should do with our lives — I am settling on the belief that extreme results are intractable. In research, for example, the most valuable discoveries are found where very few people are looking. In entrepreneurship, most fail, and few find jewels in unexpected areas. In investing, beating the market requires contrarianism. The only way to get a chance at massive success is genuine interest, Longtermism, and luck. Such human characteristics and firm commitment can’t be planned or designed. In summary, we should stop caring about controlling for extreme results and instead just do what we love and hope for the best.

AI 2027 — You’d get the same feeling Feynman got after WWII — when he walked around Los Alamos and saw people building houses, fixing cars, going about life — and he realized it all felt strangely pointless. He’d helped unleash unimaginable power, and now the world had changed forever… but life just went on. Hopefully, life will go on.

The great managers I worked with had technical experience (so they understand technical feasibility & appreciate challenges), have clarity of thought (so they understand a project, its goals, and break it down into sub-projects or tasks to get there), and highly focused and organized (so they guide you to deliver).

Ben Kuhn does a great job explaining what is it like to manage technical projects, explains his method, and even turns it into a “How to” document!

Meditations On Moloch (Scott Alexander) — The world is hell and we don’t know why! No one wants hell, yet we live in it!

Wherever we look, systems are broken: health, education, economy… Everything is in an ugly state of Inadequate Equilibria. If we, humans, are the only one here, then who is causing this misery?

Answer: “Moloch”.

At the essence of each one of us are “instincts” (survival, maternal, sexual, etc.) that make us compete with one another. Sometimes, we find that we can win by harming others, and the tradeoff is worth it. If we take it, we prosper, if we don’t, others will and we die. Even if we don’t want to, we can’t guarantee others won’t. And there is no way to coordinate with others not to. The result is an ever grinding exploitation machine (Moloch) that is fascinating yet dangerous. Our civilization was built by this ever optimizing machine for incentives. Yet, hopefully, this is not a race to the bottom, hopefully we can design better coordination and incentive mechanisms for the wellbeing of humanity.

Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer (Patrick McKenzie) — An open invitation to pop the nerdy “technical bubble” and understand how business value moves in a company, adjusting for our own good. Some highlights:

• Engineers get hired to create value, not to program things.
• In most businesses, “value” is either reducing costs or increasing revenue.
• Your tech stack doesn’t matter. Talk about accomplishments rather than technicals.
• People matter, as in: network, perception, impression, status, politics, relationships, communication, sales, ALL MATTER!