Those are some of the “lessons” & “observations” that I wrote down as I think through life.
I love to do it this way because it challenges me to put my thoughts in a relatively succinct way, and I also force myself to make it have a poetic aspect in some sense (at least poetic to my level), which gives the information outside of the insights themselves, even more of a flavor.
I want to reflect a bit on why I used “lessons” & “observations”, in this piece.
I think grouping “rules/lessons” & “observations” together is a great mix, because rules are things that can be interpreted in a limited way, because it’s a blunt way or advice to myself and the reader to really engage in something specific,
while observations could be interpreted by the person reading in many different ways, and I love this discrepancy between the two and I think it could be complimentary in many interesting ways:
It’s better to start to fail, than fail to start.
Thamir’s razor:
The outcome where you have to painfully swallow your pride, is the best outcome, and the least outcome you’ll regret.
Just as following the status-quo position, *automatically*, is incorrect,
going against the status quo position *automatically* is also incorrect.
Status quo-ers have a false negative vision, and they think there’s no intellectual nail they can strike on their own.
anti-status quo-ers have a false positive vision, and they think they can strike every intellectual nail on their own,
Both of them are incorrect.
Navigate those things logically & professionally and think outside of those pressures, sometimes the group/“herd” is more correct than you’d ever be, & many other times it isn’t.
Emphasis on already known things, is sometimes more important than new information, per se.
Never underestimate or devalue the importance of people “repeating” things that “everybody” knows,
knowing & emphasising are two different things.
The biggest mystery about expression is that when you’re explaining something to someone else, you’re also explaining it to yourself, as much as you’re explaining it to the other person.
Before you ask a question, reflect if you’re actually asking it to genuinely hear an answer, or for other petty ego-related human reasons, I promise you, it happens more often than you think.
The only mistake that’s not worth making is quitting.
Arrogance is a sneaky vice that could coexist contextually with many good attributes. Never stop consciously hunting for it in your own heart.
Someone can be intelligent, knowledgable, kind, & generous, but still has pride, arrogance & ego ingrained in their psyche.
Don’t fall for the subconscious trap of thinking the amount of work & effort you put in a project should give you the entitlement for people’s attention. That way, you’ll lose the other valuable things/lessons you can extract other than attention,
& you’ll also most likely quit prematurely on almost everything.
Everytime you’re frustrated from a mistake you made in the present, think about how much of a miracle it’s that you can infinitely improve into the future.
Empathy is a consequence of self-awareness, and not intelligence or any other attribute.
The biggest delusion people have is thinking they can reach the horizons of their thought process on their own.
Language is not only expressive, it’s also simultaneously mind-expansive.
Competency & Jealousy are inversely correlated.
Never underestimate your capacity for jealousy or envy, because it’s there, and could sneak itself into your so called cold “rationality & reason”.
An Exception can be the sole enemy of habits. The only objective needed in building a habit is to ask yourself: how do I not fool myself into making a so called “important” exception, today?
We built all these technologies to make things “easy/comfortable”, then “easy” became the new hard on the human psychology…
The collapse of the sacred into the profane, collapsed the moral into the temperamental.