Important Beliefs

Your beliefs shape your reality, so change your beliefs to change your reality. Beliefs about what you are capable of doing, uncapable of doing, what is hard, what is easy, what is normal. All of these are based on biases and you have "downloaded" them from society.

Akrasia is the result of inner incoherence. Identifying what you have akrasia for, and solve it.

Don't do bullshit. http://paulgraham.com/vb.html

Your environment is the most important lever you can change. You are a product of your environment. [[environment-design]]

Ignorance debt is real and one should reflect on it. What this means more in depth is You are paying for every single aspect of your life. You're paying a large ignorance debt. For example, if you are unhappy with your current life circumstances, then you are paying the ignorance debt of the pain of those poor life circumstances by just not knowing how to make your life circumstances better. It is rarely the case that there are things in your life that are completely out of your control or that, if you were super intelligent, you would not be able to solve. If you are able to decrease accidental risk by 1% but you do not know how to be good, that is ignorance debt.

Wasting time is the ultimate tragedy. If you are not spending your time doing the most important thing to get to your goals, then you are losing an opportunity cost.

Not only wasting time, essentially choosing actions that are bad for your discounted self. For example, choosing to watch youtube instead of working on business. It is related to being unconscious. Every time I make a mistake twice, it is a waste of the immense opportunity. It is abnormal to think in this way, but is it wrong?

There is a very real, unseen cost of time most others don't see. There is huge opportunity cost. the cost of "not doing the best action you can do given your information" is actually enormous. probably in the trillions of dollars of GDP for a given individual... Is this false? I.e. Could people become as good as elon musk in terms of business? Note from 2026-07-18: Hmmm, i don't believe as much of this. this is a question or hypothetical that is not realistic. a previous mistake in reality i was making was that one could act based on the best information possible to them, but that isn't how people work.

The only goal that matters is maximizing my positive chemical response over the course of my life. note from 2026-07-18: wow, its been a while since I thought like this. this was in my longevity days. This is perhaps theoretically true, and what I mean by this is the only goal that matters is maximizing my values (which is a tautology), rather than wireheading myself

Life is not a video game. there are no do-overs. every wasted hour is a wasted hour. I do not want to waste hours. I have very ambitious goals and I need to realize I right now am not capable of achieving them at my current rate. I need to grow, cut things out of my life, be better, grow up. My ideal life is something I can create and grasp, if I only make the choice to. I will have the freedom to do whatever I want, focus on big problems, be able to support my parents, pay kindness forward, and have incredible experiences. But I need to make the choice to do so.

99% of everything is a distraction. The "good" actions significantly outweigh the bad.

[[pygmalion-effect]]

[[reticular-activating-system]]

Beliefs are integrated through repetition.

Most of your thinking is in your subconscious. "Until the unconscious becomes conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." - Carl Jung

We believe everything we're told (this actually might not be true) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TiDGXt3WrQwtCdDj3/do-we-believe-everything-we-re-told

The more you are repeated something, the more you will believe it.

Growth mindset trumps fixed mindset.

I can choose to express my emotions, I can just express my positive emotions more [['2025-12-04T20:17:49.521867+00:00']]

Signaling matters [[signaling-theory]], marketing matters. I try to deny this fact, but if I say i went to Harvard or Princeton, then others perceive me as more valuable. If I say I am an ex-google ai software engineer, that would be very good for my consulting buisiness. To take advantage of this, identify what are the most prestigious "signals" and try to attain them. [[the-case-against-education]] [[credibility-arbitrage]] [[applying-signaling-theory-to-my-life]]

Your network and relationships set up your success in life, partly due to the pull that incredible people have on what direction you go towards. They are your environment, they are the "5 people you spend the most time with" [[the-5-people-you-spend-the-most-time-with]]. [[never-eat-alone]]

Society is structured to distract people from the decisions that have a huge impact on happiness in order to focus attention on the decisions that have a marginal impact on happiness. The most important decision any of us make is who we marry. Yet there are no courses on how to choose a spouse.

That what you repeat becomes easier (habituation, mylenaion of the brain), that what you do not, you lose. Therefore, there is extreme benefit in doing good things early as they will not only compound in time, but also make it easier to do them more in the future. the actions you choose every day, make your desinty. how you do anything is how you do everything.

Extreme Ownership: You are responsible for everything in your life, the good and the bad. No excuses, no blaming others. If something bad happens, look for what you could have done differently to prevent it. If something good happens, look for what you did to cause it. This mindset empowers you to take control of your life and make positive changes.

You can have anything you want but not everything. [[essentialism]]

I should actively be finding and exploring "pockets" of thinking that are useful. Right now, when I talk with people, I am able to share them useful information I've heard through reading rationalist/agency related ideas. There are ideas and ways of thinking that would be useful to me. I want to/need to explore them. This will make me better at acheiving my goals and easier to relate to.

tldr I will always keep having a problem until I actually fix that problem or make a system that is robust that fixes that problem. this is a reason for a single tasking or like committing a lot of time to trying to solve the problems that you have. so for example, I spent a lot of time being diffused working on a bunch of different systems and I've had some of them stick but not as effectively as if I just only worked on one system, tried to implement it and then go to the next one. this is another way I can implement my systems better

reflect on how you think, dont do what is harmful [[anti-principles]]

Problems and solutions are functions of systems.

If you do not solve a problem, it will keep recurring.

Mistakes are not random, they are a function of you, your environment. Although you cannot entirely stop mistakes from happening, because they are a function of you and your environment, you can change yourself and your environment and prevent mistakes from happening. Thus, it is good and very efficient to learn from the mistakes of others. [[mistake-prevention-system]]

For the most part, I am not really trying. I have motion, not progress. Most people are not really trying, they are limiting themselves. [[on-really-trying]]

The "empowering aspect of naïveté" is quite useful when trying to solve problems. [[empowering-aspect-of-naïveté]]

For every hour "consuming" you should spend an hour "doing". This will solve the bottleneck of learning. Learning is consumption, although it does impact your thinking and get stored in your brain, by not doing you do not improve.

For everything you do, you should spent at least 10% of your time reflecting on what you did and improving

ou will continue to have a problem until you solve it; you will continue to make mistakes until you learn how to not make mistakes.

frusturation tolerance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDBkiBnMrHs

Never burn a connection. There are many connections I believe I have burned due to not "showing up"/playing my part or ghosting them and I feel bad for. Never repeat this mistake again. For example: Blooket, Nicole Bateman, Zev Mendelowitz,

We never own anything, it is just a game, at the end of our lives, we just die and push our chips back.

Everything in your life, you choose your life, your lifestyle, what do you. you have the choice and decision to do something differently [[the-courage-to-be-disliked]]

Past trauma doesn't exist, it is only what you do in the present that matters.

I ask for what I want, even when I might not get it. The people who get extraordinary things are the ones who ask for extraordinary things. I am not afraid of hearing "no" — every rejection is proof that I am playing at the right level. If I am not getting rejected regularly, I am not asking for enough.

one of my most important beliefs is the belief that "only winning matters". Winning is defined as achieve your goal or objective. This can be applied when things such as negative feedback are given. It doesn't matter if the feedback was negative, the person you want to work with is an asshole, all that matters is that you win! This is also related to general social change and the abolitionist movement in the UK. they formed a coalition with slaveholders convinicing them to ban the slave trade because wining is all that matters.