50 Principles for Life and Work (#20)

0. Context-Setting

It is Sunday, August 16 2026. I have just finished making my lentils for my work lunches for the next 6 weeks (see Principle 29).

I've wanted to write something like this for a few years but never carved out the time to write it down. I kept a document in Obsidian for a few weeks and gradually filled the list in. This includes a lot of my catch-phrases and hobbyhorses that I've repeated to friends over the years.

I am reading:

• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (print) — revisiting the Cromwell Trilogy so I can prepare to final read the third and final volume.
• The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin (audio) — a fantastic look at the Progressive Era.

I am listening to:

• Vilde Frang's recording of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto. She's my new favorite violinist.
• The new Protest the Hero album Within.

Principles (Life thru #29, Work after)

1. The categorical imperative is a good ethical foundation.
2. Reality has a surprising amount of detail

   Before you’ve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know what you’re looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent. Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive? How about the details and insights you have that led you to be good at the things you’re good at?

3. View things not as binary either-or options, but as continuous tradeoffs.
4. All changes have been contested in history. There were many Loyalist citizens during the American Revolution; many Northerners opposed the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves; MLK famously criticized the White moderate in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. I think there is an endemic technocratic "third way"-ism that just assumes that we can find policies that will be all upside. This is not possible in most situations. Tradeoffs must be made, and because of that, changes that upset the current balance will be contested. Just because your preferred plan is contested DOES NOT mean that you are evil, or whatever else your detractors say about you.
5. A shorter version of the above: you can't live a bloodless life. Conflict is inevitable. Embrace it instead of running away from it. (This is not a license to pick fights.)
6. So much of life is determined by contingency — your parents, where and when you were born, your relationships. Be humble and grateful for your good luck.
7. Delayed gratification is good but it can be taken too far. This is when things feel like grinds or slogs for weeks on end. Take a break. Celebrate incremental milestones.
8. Figure out what makes you feel good inside and prioritize those items as mandatory upkeep. For myself, they are:
   1. Greater than 7 hours of sleep per night
   2. About ~2 cups of coffee worth of caffeine per day
   3. Cardio exercise minimum 4 days per week
   4. 2 meals with leafy greens per day
9. Related: nutrition 80/20:
   1. Eat whole foods; avoid processed foods
   2. Avoid refined/added sugar
   3. Eat whole grains; avoid "white" grains
   4. Eat lots of leafy green vegetables
   5. It's ok to have one vice, as long as consumption is done in moderation.
10. Related: do not choose a career or a lifestyle that is ruinous to your health unless you are convinced the tradeoffs are worth it. For instance, my need for sleep eliminated the medical profession from my considerations very early on.
11. Most lessons must be learned the hard way. You can't tell people anything.
12. There is a huge difference between superficial understanding of something — understanding the logic when someone explains it to you —and having that knowledge embedded in your conceptual framework. A lot of repetition is needed to transform the former into the latter. Chess has taught me this lesson many, many times.
13. If you are one of the rare few who can learn from and avoid repeating other people's mistakes, that is a huge advantage.
14. My life — and your life — would be a lot better if we didn't indulge patterns of experiential avoidance. Avoiding difficult tasks or conversations is poison that slowly kills you. Work up the courage to face them. If you're procrastinating, just get started!
15. Beware the temptation of believing in the moral double-dip.

    And this brings me to what I really want to pass judgment on—namely, this kind of moral “double dip,” which is absolutely pervasive in mainstream liberal culture. If something is immoral, it is also always ineffective. It’s like they want to be Kantians and utilitarians simultaneously—and somehow the math always works out, even though anyone who has taken an ethics class knows that they are famously incompatible positions. A great example is the constant refrain that doing something morally necessary will actually help the economy. Responding to climate change will create jobs! Giving people financial support actually boosts GDP! Single-payer healthcare would make the job market more dynamic! In every case, the utilitarian claim undercuts the properly moral principle, because it opens the possibility that the speaker would take the immoral position if the benefits did not accrue.

16. Related: your sense of ethics should trump incentives. That's why they're ethical principles! Maintaining ethical beliefs is costly. A focus on incentives works at the population level, but they should not determine your actions.
17. Care is an essential ingredient to doing anything well.
18. Grace is a virtue that is not talked about enough. Be more graceful with the failings, flaws, and foibles of yourself and others.
19. No one is 100% correct about anything. Don't write people off just because they were wrong about something once.
20. Don't lie to yourself. Don't pretend to like things because something's popular or people you like also like it. Don't pretend to believe things you know are false because they give you consolation or help you cope.
21. If you want to deepen your experience of something — movies, books, whatever — get in the habit of writing 2- or 3-sentence reviews in a journal or your notes app.
22. Keep a journal that you write in a few times a week. It doesn't have to be every day, but more frequently than weekly. I wish I started doing this sooner.
23. Another thing I wish I had done sooner was to listen to audiobooks instead of podcasts. In general, be honest with yourself on whether the thing you're consuming is entertainment (empty calories) or truly informative.
24. Personal finance 80/20:
    1. Pay off your credit cards every month (never carry a balance)
    2. Contribute extra towards loans to reduce interest
    3. Automate bill payments, retirement fund contributions, and other savings goals
    4. Maximize your retirement savings in low expense ratio index funds
    5. Build a cash emergency fund to account for minimum 3 months of expenses
    6. Maintain a budget yearly to understand how much of your money is going to bills and recurring investments so you do not overspend on discretionary items
25. Be nice to service staff. Conversely, judge people very harshly if they mistreat service staff.
26. When it comes to learning to cook, there's nothing more motivating than trying to recreate one of your favorite dishes at home. I recommend starting with the America's Test Kitchen recipe and iterating from there.
27. One of the best ways to learn about art is to look up the Wikipedia page for your favorite works and check which school/style/movement it was a part of. Understanding the historical context is essential for understanding the meaning behind their aesthetic choices and is the gateway to finding other things you like.
28. Be the person willing to initiate conversations and plan outings. If you don't do it, no one will.
29. Cultivate a high tolerance for sameness. Batching meal prep and subsisting on leftovers saves a ton of time and money.
30. "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.  So you have to be very careful about that.  After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists.  You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."
31. Write things down to figure out what you think. Even better if you have an interlocutor to talk about what you wrote and poke holes in it.

    Putting ideas into words doesn't have to mean writing, of course. You can also do it the old way, by talking. But in my experience, writing is the stricter test. You have to commit to a single, optimal sequence of words. Less can go unsaid when you don't have tone of voice to carry meaning. And you can focus in a way that would seem excessive in conversation. I'll often spend 2 weeks on an essay and reread drafts 50 times. If you did that in conversation it would seem evidence of some kind of mental disorder. If you're lazy, of course, writing and talking are equally useless. But if you want to push yourself to get things right, writing is the steeper hill.

32. Related: Make artifacts for your future self. Provide enough context so you can return to it 5 years from now and understand it.
33. Also related: one of the most useful working relationships you can have is a "sparring partner" — someone who you can just talk through your problems with and use as a sounding board for your ideas. Repay the favor and be THEIR sparring partner.
34. There's a lot of alpha in doing menial work (credit: Nabeel Qureshi).
35. Taking breaks when you're working on hard problems is underrated. When you're stuck, take some time away and return with a fresh mind.
36. "Garbage in, garbage out" is applicable to most things related to work.
37. Related: The Efficiency-Thoroughness Tradeoff (ETTO) always needs to be considered when taking on a task. It is foolish to be maximally thorough all the time.
38. Take meeting notes. Whoever takes the meeting notes controls the narrative of what happened and can set the frame for how work proceeds in the future.
39. Resourcefulness is a virtue and a skill. Learn it. "There's always a move" was my mantra for years in difficult situations.
40. Beware Hofstadter's Law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law." Task estimation is incredibly hard to get right because of Knightian Uncertainty or "unknown unknowns." A good rule of thumb is to take your initial naive estimate of how long the task will take, then double it.
41. The real measure of an organization system is how it helps you get your work done and preserves a history over long time scales. Don't use tool-shaped objects that look fancy and cool but are too hard to use effectively.
42. To that end, I recommend NOT adopting David Allen's Getting Things Done wholesale, but adopting some of his principles. Here's my 80/20 summary:
    1. Your calendar is the "hard landscape." I prefer to say, "my calendar is God." If it's on the calendar, I am committed.
    2. 2-minute rule: if a task can be completed in 2 minutes or less, do it immediately.
    3. Capture habit: have an inbox (can be as simple as a notes doc on your phone) where you write down all the to-do's that come into your head.
    4. Mental sweeps: set a timer and for that period, write down everything that comes to mind.
43. Need to focus on a task? Set a timer and do it, pomodoro-style.
44. Learn to love the moat of low status.
45. Call your colleagues more often. Simply picking up the phone can avoid hours of confused email or IM exchanges.
46. It is very difficult to double-check your work effectively. Where possible, build automated double-checks (for example, using formulas in Excel). If you're composing a very important email, report, or presentation, print it out and revise with a pen.
47. Don't just trust the report; don't delegate understanding.
48. Strive to make others feel like they're "in good hands" when tasks and projects are handed off to you.
49. Name all of your files with YYYYMMDD_filename-v#. It will shock you how much easier it is to remember what files do when they have a date in their file name.
50. Always try to negotiate your salary.

    Salary negotiations are very asymmetrical.   Companies know this and routinely exploit it.  Job seekers don’t, perhaps because they think doing so would be unfair and the word “exploit” makes them acutely uncomfortable.  So we often default by pretending that the employer is evaluating the negotiation like we would.  This is not true, and acting like it is true will harm both your interests and the interests of your future employer.

    For example, many people’s mental model of employment is that an employee with a $60,000 a year salary costs about $60,000 a year to hire.  If they negotiate $65,000 instead, that’s $5,000 extra which has to come from… somewhere.  If the negotiation breaks down, then that is $60,000 saved.  This mental model is broken.