Time and time I have found myself at different crossroads in life. These are the principles that I have developed by my constant failures, observations and interactions overtime to achieve unfair advantage and keep on winning

  • Don’t Die: in the sense that don’t ever go to the point of no return, where you can never get back up. Be obsessed with the death boundaries and downside scenarios and always prioritize survival
  • Never Quit: Things take time, some people die from an unlucky accident on a random day, some people make the fortune of their life in a day but these are rather fleeting events. Sharp rises are always met with sharp declines. If you set your mind to something then why quit what changed? Darshan if you followed this framework you are not dead then keep moving you are still in the game. “Too early” happens only when you quit. When you feel down or feel quitting, score yourself on a different scoreboard and start compounding the results. Some of the best things started slow (pytorch, transformer, nvidia) and then compounded to heaven. Have patience. slowness is needed when you are finding out your goal on a map
  • Lock In: Be obsessed over the thing that you are working on, Always be in the game observe the game and their players, how they are playing the game. There are many players playing the same game which you are. If you are not spending 100% of your focus on the game, you are already out of the game. There will be many things that prevent you to get lock in 100%, think about ways to delete, defer or delegate these tasks
  • Do Hard Things: Doing hard things is weird but that is okay because winning is different and makes you weird and means that you are different from others. You will look like a noob and a fool frankly when you do hard things. They will underestimate you but you are compounding. You will create a massive vertical between you and the next participant of the game before they know what hit them. People by nature take the path of least resistance, don’t be like them. It’s very easy to build the surface thing but the right (hard) infrastructure, mental model or technology compounds. Doing hard things allows you to go deeper into things and gain advantage over others
  • Play by the Rules: This is one thing that the universe does not reward. There are people who don’t play by the rules but they are exceptions or their time will come. Don’t be tempted to do the same. Stay focused. Playing by the rules is hard. But it is the hard things in life that force you to innovate your way out of problems. These innovations compound in weird and interesting patterns resulting in long term moats. There is an irish revolutionary song that encapsulates “The higher you build your barricades the stronger we become”
  • Don’t chase after thin desires: thin desires are an everlasting hunger for things that we can’t articulate why we want them, and cannot actually attain them, from a source that has no interest in providing them. Chase thick desires instead, they transform/shape/mold you in the act of pursuing them. Thick desires are effortful to acquire and are impossible to gratify. Thick desires also make you antifragile. It’s completely fine to have desires but make sure they are worth pursuing and they will shape you in the process of pursuing them
  • Put Something Back: Putting something back seems neat, but it also helps you in the long term. Karms seems real. When you put something back into the pool, your reputation grows, people will be familiar with your work and they will want to be around you and work for you or with you. Winning can be compounded by giving back. Win and give to win more later
  • Don’t become the machine: Everyone seems to praise the hustle culture these days, you have to work harder than that, you have to push yourself everyday, you have to wake up at 5am and yade yada. You don’t have to become a machine to succeed. Just do the work at your body’s natural pace. Your body will tell you when it’s enough and what it’s limits are. Efficiency is a measure for the machines, please don’t eval yourself like a machine. Aim to be nimble, adapt quickly to uncertainties, be anti fragile
  • Update your mental models: When you know so little, you don’t know how much there is to know and things feel trivial and everything you think is clear. You are also more certain about it. Infact certainty peaks before competence in the dunning kruger curve. The less you know the more you seem to be confident about it. It’s far riskier to be certainly incorrect most of the time than be uncertainly correct all the time.
  • Cultivate Confidence: Invest in things that challenge your confidence and let your anxiety go away. Being shy is not an excuse for being rude. Confidence in other player’s cooperation also influences our own actions. Having negative interactions can lead to a downward spiral going all the way down and taking you with it. Have positive interactions with people and be around people with very high urgency and agency. The positive spiral can take you to the stairway to heaven
  • You have to be strong: This shit ain’t for the weak. They will eat you, they will hunt you, they will abuse you, they will laugh at you, they want you to be down, every time you spent crying, spiraling downward they will win. The trick is to adopt the stoic principles of focusing no what you can control and ignore what you can’t. Your can’t control when a tragedy is going to happen but you can control how you respond and what you learn from it
  • Invest in People: I believed that your work speaks for itself, no it doesn’t it just sits silently in your repository. Your manager mentions you in a conversation or a meeting. A peer who you spent 5 mins chatting with you gets impressed and recommends you for a short project. Decisions get made in meetings you are not invited, using summaries you didn’t wrote by people who have 5 mins and 12 different tasks to work on. If no one can articulate your impact when you are not in the room then your impact is optional. Make the value chain legible to everyone including yourself