Tech Success for Men in Their 20s - Adapt or Die

Level 2- Value Investor

This is a guest post by BowTiedFox.

This is entirely focused on Tech and directionally focused on younger people. In the end, you have to adapt or die. It’s a long post so enjoy if this applies to you!

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Introduction

Regardless of any societal shifts in the world, one group of people have always won: those who think like a fox

In the 18th century, it was those sailing across the atlantic to trade shiny pebbles for expensive beaver pelts. Or in the 19th century, selling denim jeans to California gold rushers. More recently in the 20th century, walking into an office with a firm handshake and strong eye contact™

In any time, in any place, in any system, there are always loopholes. Although these people are now gone, the sly fox still lives through their sons

Those descended from fur traders are now hiring dot indians instead of feather indians. The denim jean sellers are now selling to memecoin addicts. The firm handshakers are now sending razor-sharp DMs

Every era in history has had a strategy, a hidden ruleset, a META (most effective tactics available)

Your goal is to figure out the meta, quickly, so you can capitalize on it before others discover it. The world is getting more competitive each day:

Here are four sly tips on how to think like a fox:

1. Life Is About Filtering

Most young people are considering whether to go to university

(Skip to section 1.1 if you aren’t)

I think it’s a simple decision–pay a reasonable price (2ish years max to pay off debt) for the highest rank uni you can get into

Once you get in, here’s how to hack the education system:

• Use reviews. Use RateMyProfessors to find easy professors for useless subjects. The only time difficult professors are worthwhile is if they are intelligent and teaching something useful. I wouldn’t have minded taking Balaji Srinivasan’s class at Stanford in 2013 to learn about Bitcoin even if he destroyed my grades (or maybe I’d figure out a way to sneak in 🦊)

• Grademaxxing strategy. If you want good grades, go to every office hour session. For STEM, listen to the other students’ questions. Bring a copy of your best attempt at the solution, then use the professor, teaching assistants, or classmates to get the correct answers and free tutoring. For non-STEM, look up the professor’s beliefs and just copy-paste their propaganda onto your assignments. If your professor has any industry experience, the assignments and exams will bias towards the work they’ve done. Remember: you’re not learning how to think for yourself, you’re memorizing how to think like your professors

• Make intelligent friends by collecting goodwill. This how “networking” actually works: getting smart people to like you by sharing value. If you find something relevant to a someone’s work (coworker, classmate, professor, literally anyone), shoot them a quick email, text, or mention it during office hours. I showed my professors automation workflows, publication ideas, connections with relevant institutions, anything that is “hey look at this cool thing,” and it’s unlocked enormous opportunities long after I completed my degree. Also started noticing some winks during office hours when reviewing a homework problem that coincidentally ended up being on the exam…

• Find exam questions online. You can google the name of the class to find exam questions on forums or other websites such as Quizlet

• Figure out your career plan. Read my career guide

• Get internships. If you want competitive internships, get to know a professor who can get you referrals with people they know. You can get closer with a professor by checking their lab to see if they’re looking for research volunteers. Or better yet, try to get a teaching assistant position, which will get you callbacks from almost every company. Otherwise, unpaid internships at your Uncle Faukes’s company 😉 will get you paid internships, which will get you competitive internships, which will get you prestigious jobs. Go for an upgrade each year

• Spam apply to scholarships. Lots of money around for just copy-pasting essays. Combining multiple could mean a year or two for free. Use scholarship aggregators like GlobalScholarships. Read examples of previous winners. Good practice for sales (selling a story)

• Use AI tools. Do I even need to mention chatGPT. Finish all your work in a fraction of the time. No–they can’t identify the latest models, but if you’re worried, don’t copy-paste the output. Reword it to sound less repetitive and more natural. Use it to refine your work, summarize, research

Here’s advice from one of my neurobiologist friends:

You hit the three biggest points (teach yourself, get paid experience, collect goodwill). Here’s what I know from teaching hundreds of students per semester for years, on how to max out grades with the least effort

I had ~100 students in any given course. They fell into 3 brackets:

1. Score Maxxors (5%). They were either very smart or studied a lot. If you aren't in the 'very smart' category, don't waste your time scoremaxxing because a 3.7 GPA looks the same as a 3.9 to a future employer

2. High Performers (15%). They were either very smart and winged everything, or kinda smart and studied efficiently

3. Glue-Eating (80%). These guys tried really hard and still got C/D's. Couldn’t really help them, but hey–they might end up dropshipping dick pills and making $100M and beating the entire right side of the IQ curve. Actually, these people are probably just kratom addicts now

Here's the strategy if you're kinda smart and want to get good grades with minimum effort (TLDR—an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure):

1. Go to office hours. Some of my kinda smart students would do poorly on a test, then come to my office hours. "I was just really confused on these problems 🥺"

   Then I'd teach the concept to them in 5-10 minutes and they'd understand it completely. So why didn't you just come to office hours before the test? Would have saved you 20 points that you don't have to hustle to get back. Isn’t it easier to just get perfect scores on the homework, so when final exam season rolls around, you can afford to get a 70% and still keep your A?

   Another example: there was a late penalty on homework, and if it was even 1 minute late, I'd take off points. If you emailed me 1 second before the deadline, I'd give you an extension. I told students this on day 1. Even made slides to hammer it home. And people were still late. They spent hours trying to argue their points back (didn't work).

   Just email bro.

2. Schedule out deadlines. When I was a student, I'd get the syllabus for each class, and write the deadlines out on a calendar. Then, I'd grind the first week of classes (called "syllabus week", where you don't even have homework) and get 1 week ahead

   So my calendar would have my "internal" deadline for every assignment (1 week ahead) and the actual deadline. That way, if something came up like a family emergency, and I could drop everything without missing any points. This takes zero extra effort besides the first week of class, and keeps your grades high so you don’t have to stress about exams

3. Distribute your studying. Don’t cram the night before. It's easier to do little amounts of spaced study because sleep maximizes memory consolidation

   When I'd schedule my homework on my calendar at the start of the semester, I included tests and a date to begin studying

   For an easy class, I’d study 20 min/day for 10 days before the test (~3.3h total)

   For a hard class, I’d study 30 min/day for 14 days (~7h total)

   Only 1-2 of these periods would overlap at a time, so you'll spend <1 per day studying starting ~1-2 months after the semester started. More like 2 hours during finals week. But you'll near max your scores for little effort

   While all my friends would be stressed during finals week, cramming 12h days in the library, I'd study 2 hours and go mess around, ride my bike through all the trails in the city, grab a beer, whatever. It was great.

   I could’ve even cut my study time in half to get solid B's. But it’s better to make as many easy A’s as you can early on, so you have some leeway in your GPA when courses get more difficult as a senior

4. Talk to your teachers. If you ever run into a grad student or professor that is brilliant and just "gets it," go to their office hours and chat them up
   
   Not for 'networking' (homosexual behavior). But because they'll want to help you, and they'll turn you on to good resources or opportunities you didn't know existed
   
   They might be an asset later on, but don't talk to them just hoping to get something out of it because it’s random

   One of your professors might start a biotech company and make you an early hire. Or have a colleague that needs something and will pay through the nose for it
   
   It’s good to make a habit of sharing value because people will want to give it back to you. Karma is real

So what’s the point of all this, anyway?

Why go to university at all if you’re just doing fake work?

Well, back in my day, I could get a fake email job with a useless degree. But now, free money has dried up, and AI tools have made companies hyper-efficient. Real results matter more than ever

But, university is still useful because:

1.1 You Pay for Filtering, Not for Knowledge

Imagine a 5/10 girl on Tinder. Your dream truckstop NPC tradwife. No butterfly tattoos. Slightly unkempt with at least 2 exaggerated facial features. But physical appearance doesn’t matter as you get older, right? Most men would be happy to have children with it

Let’s call her Tinderella. Tinderella is getting swiped right by every man on dating apps. She has 5,000 men who want her. Would it be realistic for her to evaluate each one? Even one date EVERY day would require almost 14 years

So what’s the solution? Filtering. A man in finance. Trust fund. 6'5. Blue eyes.

2 matches. Neither respond.

Okay, the filters are too strong. How about >6 ft, 6 figures, 6 inches

200 matches. Doable.

In an era where everything is always available at any time, where there are an unlimited number of options, you need to filter out as much as possible

This is how everything in life works:

• There are an unlimited number of “best time of your life” events to attend

• Unlimited number of Tweets to like and subscribe

• Unlimited number of tinderellas to sleep with

• Unlimited number of “get jacked with this one trick” pills, powders, and potions

• Unlimited number of “changed my life” books to read

• Unlimited number of “just this once” desserts and pastries

• Unlimited numbers of “for the price of only two coffees™” Substacks

Not only do you have to say no more often but you also have to understand that everyone is filtering you, too. You may be a great person, but there is no way for people to quickly evaluate every possible person they come across

Sly Fox Tip: This is why having standards and saying “no” is an attractive trait in sales and dating. If you need to filter, it means you have many options. If you have many options, it means you’re in high demand. If you’re in high demand, there must be something special about you

Think of it this way: not all broke people are slow, but all slow people are broke. How is Tinderella supposed to know the difference? She can’t. It doesn’t mean she’s a gold digger–she just has too many men trying to court her!

How should she filter through them? It’s not like she can look up your social credit score on WeChat, so she uses external signals like your fitness and social skills

Same with companies. You could be the most cracked engineer in the world, but zero work experience. “He says he’s a results-oriented, fast learner that works well under pressure™. But no results? Whatever, I have a thousand other applicants with internships to go through. Let’s see… summer internship at ‘Faukes Institute’? Let me look up their website...”

🙉: B-but Fox, why should I go into an industry if it’s this saturated?

Do the most vibrant flowers bloom in a desert or a rainforest? Everything valuable is saturated. Beautiful tan brunettes are in a saturated market. What are you going to do, settle for Tinderella?

No. You get good. Compete to get past more filters.

How? First, understand how it works:

1.2 What Is Filtering?

There are two aspects to getting through filters:

1. Results (“Product”)

2. Signaling (“Marketing”)

As I said previously, you can be a great person, but how are people supposed to know? This is the reason university can be useful

Sure, sure, you may be the next Zuckerberg who drops out and becomes a billionaire, just like the million other dropouts who say the same thing

But how many dropouts are actually drug addicts versus billionaires? 99.999% versus 0.001%? Having a piece of paper that says “I have a degree” also says “I’m a functioning adult”

It’s also minimizes risk for the person hiring. Imagine I hire someone from Harvard. You hire a dropout. If the Harvard kid messes up, it’s their fault. If the dropout messes up, it’s your fault. You shouldn’t have picked someone so risky

Still, uni is so easy these days, that even if you had the next billion-dollar idea, you can work on it while skating through classes for only a few hours a week. If you can’t do both? ngmi, he don’t got that fox in him

The point is, at the end of your studies, you’ll have some kind of safety net with the degree. You’ll be able to find work more easily. You don’t have to get a job, but the skills, network, and cash flow help you start a business

1.3 Balancing Results vs. Signaling

A major mistake people do is trying to signal without results. “I’m actually a HIGH VALYOO MALE” 😤

Lmao ok buddy. What this does is the opposite–it’s a countersignal, putting you in the same group as all the other monkeys who say the same. Nobody who is [trait] needs to announce they are [trait] because the results speak for themselves. Let your actions do the work AKA real G’s move in silence like lasagna

The trick is managing the results-signaling tradeoff. Putting more effort into a degree isn’t going to make the paper shinier. So minimize effort for signals and maximize effort for results

In practice, this looks like those hacks I mentioned in the beginning. Do what you need to do to get the grades, then spend the rest of your time on things that matter

Sly Fox Tip: If you can’t tell what’s valuable, think of what people pay money for. When the market is willing to pay for something, it means they’re willing to sacrifice other things they could’ve bought instead. Sacrifice is a genuine measure of effort, which is why people compromise for their loved ones

Some valuable activities include:

• Learning useful topics

• Getting as much PAID experience as possible, including freelancing

• Creating revenue-generating projects to improve your skills

• Networking by sharing your accomplishments online. Show cool things you’re building and how you’re making progress towards your goals. Your network will emerge because people will want to meet you. Much better method than annoying people by spamming their inboxes

• Sharing value to make friends with professors and hard-working classmates

Notice I said hard-working.

🙉: “Omg so you judge your friends based on their productivity? You must be an output-digger!”

Absolute monkey business. Don’t forget: there are an unlimited number of bananas to eat. Filter them. Focus on getting to the top of the tree, and you won’t have to look for ripe bananas

In other words, you’ll make friends naturally based on who you’re surrounded by, so just take care of your environment, and the rest will fall into place

How? Go to where the filters are strongest. Here’s an easy one: wake up at 5AM to enter a different society than the one after 8PM. Not all people awake at 2AM are degenerates, but all degenerates are up at 2AM

1.4 University Is a Great Filter

You pay for filtering, not for knowledge. If you’ve only received offers from garbage universities, either transfer out or speedrun an online credential, then focus on practical experience. Sales will be easiest for you to get into. See my career guide

At good universities (and companies), though, the network is more valuable. Everyone had to pass a certain level of wealth, intelligence, long-term thinking, self-control, health, productivity, family stability. The more competitive the institution, the stronger these filters, the stronger the signal

Even if you don’t go to an elite uni, educated people in general are perceived as:

• more civilized (Brazil has separate criminal facilities for educated versus uneducated people)

• better immigrants (easier to get a visa for most countries)

• not having aspergers (like how you can tell when someone is “off” if they were homeschooled)

And most importantly… it determines your social class.

Some people might say that social class doesn’t matter, only money does

“People in trades make plenty of money, and that’s all that matters.” I don’t know. Maybe with enough money, you can do whatever you want

But what I do notice is that only affluent people broadcast how much they support the trades, while privately doing all they can (even risking prison) to ensure their kid gets into a top university

Lesson in there.

There’s something about your entire circle being doctors, lawyers, scientists, professors, engineers, politicians, consultants, and bankers–people that overwhelmingly influence culture and policy. You will pick up how to speak and move like a professional. People can tell whether you’re on the same level of class, intellect, and other psychological attributes. Your study buddies in your 20s will end up being being directors of major institutions in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street by your 30s–and the relationships aren’t the same if you meet them later in life. Plus, this social network becomes a lifelong hidden dating market, because wealth marries wealth.

Compare that to a circle of ex-convict construction workers, carpenters who don’t speak English, dropshippers, growth hackers, onlyfans managers, crypto pump-and-dumpers, NFT collectors, ebay flippers, keto influencers, podcast bros, airbnbers, meme pagers, instagram models, holistic honeys, yoga healers, facebook ad agency owners, high-ticket closers, self-improvement gumroaders, daytraders, forex course sellers, fake therapists, political print-on-demanders, pickup artists, masculinity bootcampers, and marketers marketing marketing to coaches coaching coaching

I know which group I want to be in.

So, if you paid for filtering, where do you get the knowledge?

2. Don’t Allow School to Ruin your Education

If there’s anything school is great at, it’s destroying your desire to learn. Whether intentional or not, we know this: any kind of classroom instruction will always be less efficient than one-on-one tutoring because it caters to the average

And not just slightly less efficient. An average tutored student does better than 98% of the students in a classroom. This is called “Bloom’s 2 Sigma Problem.” And it’s why rich elites in all of history have paid so much for tutoring and mentoring their children

There are two reasons you should teach yourself:

1. Better resources

2. Personalized teaching

2.1 How to Find the Best Learning Resources

The first key to efficient learning is using the best resources. Overweight teachers, like overweight doctors, rely on outdated knowledge from decades ago. They rarely keep up-to-date with the meta, which is why you need to take your education into your own hands

This is crucial because competition doesn’t start until the top 1%. The best of the best have dialed-in every aspect of their life. Which means… the gap between the top 1% and the top 5% isn’t just a tiny difference, but 10X

This is where you get the meme of the 10X engineer—people who do 10 times the output of a normal person. They’re real. And the same goes for teachers. Good teachers are not just slightly better. A bad teacher is like watching a YouTube video at 0.25x speed instead of 2x. Don’t waste your time

So how do you find 10X resources? Use the internet. The reason we know Khan Academy is better than your local maths teacher is because the internet is a filter

There is no way a platform would have been consistently ranked at the top 1% if the content weren’t excellent. They had to fight tooth-and-nail for attention against millions of other competitors every day for years. Compare that to your local teacher who just had to wobble into class without spilling their soy latte

🙉: “B-but Fox, WHERE do I find the best resources?”

Google. Seriously. I’m stunned at how few people have tried to search “how do to x.” You can find all of Harvard’s degree requirements online. MIT has OpenCourseWare which posts free courses (you could DIY an unofficial MIT computer science degree on it). Reddit has detailed information on their posts and sidebars. YouTube has lectures on everything. Amazon and Goodreads rank books on every subject. Archive.org and Google have PDFs of almost every book in existence–and you only need to read three in a subject to become an expert in it. Information is everywhere.

Just don’t be a data hoarder. Look up what you “need” to know, not what you “might need,” or you’ll end up like this guy:

How do you know what to know? You just need better prompts. Here’s how:

2.2 How to Teach Yourself Efficiently

The second key to efficient learning is personalized teaching. Online learning is so powerful because you can pause, rewind, fast forward at your own pace. When you get stuck, just prompt chatGPT to fill in the gaps

🙉: “B-but Fox, isn’t chatGPT not REAL learning? How do you know it’s not hallucinating?”

Oh, silly monkey. If you’ve played video games or group sports, you should know that even if your teammates are bad, you HAVE to work with them anyway if you want to win

Grandpa Faukes might be terrible with computers, but I don’t expect that from him. When I visit, I do things that he’s good at: hunting, farming, fishing

Stop judging wise old Chad Jipi Tea on his unreliable memory. He’s great with words. Let’s see how he can help you learn:

2.3 Learning How to Learn

Mr. Chad Jipi Tea helps me learn at 10X speed. The reason you’re not a “fast learner” is because you’re not making connections between your existing knowledge and new knowledge

When I was a kid, I took this to the extreme. I always interrupted teachers to ask for clarification. I was annoying–but I blew past my peers because of it

My parents even told me to stop asking questions, but I knew that the rest of the lecture didn’t matter if I didn’t understand something right away

There was no point in listening because I didn’t understand, so I’d get bored, then cause trouble. So I asked questions anyway because the punishment for being annoying was less than the punishment for mischief

The way I understand learning is like this:

Imagine you're learning about the human body for the first time. Your teacher tells you there are bones, _______, and skin on top of that

You didn't really understand the middle part. But it's fine, you’ll figure it out later because the teacher needs to continue the lecture for everyone else

Now, every time you learn something new, you don't “get it.” But your understanding is just enough to get by

So you start learning about the body's reaction to touching a hot stove. You sort of see that there's a reflex and your body pulls back. You memorized it enough to pass the exam. Plus, you can repeat the facts back to an employer, so it seems like you know what you're doing

But as you keep adding on to this incomplete model of the body, your understanding continues to get worse. How do you make sense of things like weight? Are fat people just big-boned?

Knowledge is more than just a collection of facts. Think of a puzzle: each individual piece doesn’t make sense–but when you put them together, they create a bigger picture

Information is like these puzzle pieces; most people just collect facts, but you need to put them together to create knowledge

A whole picture is easier to remember than the drawing on each little piece. And if there are any missing pieces, you can intuitively figure out what should be there

When you learn by making connections, you will learn at 10X speed because you won't have facts floating around in your head that you need to memorize

It’s like someone trying to memorize the individual words in a paragraph instead of understanding the story. Or learning individual musical notes instead of a song. Or learning each brushstroke instead of a painting

I’ve never had to brute-force memorize anything because I always made sure it fit on top of what I already knew

This is why school teaches terrible learning habits. Because even if you make an 80% on an exam, you don’t care about the other 20%. “Yay, I got the score I needed.” When you should instead be figuring out where there the puzzle pieces are missing in your understanding. This is called mastery learning

2.4 Learning Difficult Concepts

Think about this puzzle analogy with mathematics:

• First, you learned about numbers

• Then, you learned how to add numbers

• Next, you keep adding to get multiplication

• Finally, you keep multiplying to get exponents

What people don’t realize is how this applies to learning anything. Everything can be broken down into smaller, easier to understand subproblems. Just like how multiplying can be broken down into repeated addition. Figure out how to break your problem down into easier subproblems, then solve those before you move onto harder topics

If you skip subproblems, you won’t learn anything that comes after. One of the main reasons students hate maths is because they didn’t learn a concept properly, then the lessons kept getting harder

Maybe the student didn’t quite understand multiplication, but then the teacher moved on to exponents

Five years later. “Oh I’m just not good at maths.” Skill issue!

You can’t walk into a gym expecting to deadlift 500kg if you keep trying hard enough every day, so why do people do that with learning? Think of how progressive overload works in the gym. Learn to lift the bar. Then add a little more weight. Work your way up

This is the cure to analysis paralysis. Stop asking how to start a business in the comments and figure out how to break it down into subproblems with more intelligent questions

Goal: Money

Money = Career + Business

Business = Ecom + SaaS

Ecom = Product + Marketing

Product = …

Lucky for us, our wise old friend Chad Jipi Tea is great at breaking things down into subproblems. And if I don’t understand a concept, he helps me connect pieces together

🦊: Hey chatGPT, How do I get from addition to multiplication? I don’t understand how we made that jump…

Wait, I still don’t understand. Can you:

• show me how it relates to this other concept that I do understand?

• talk with me out loud until I understand it?

• break it down into simpler concepts?

• make me a picture so I can see it?

• explain it in a different way?

• give me a real-life example?

• word it in simpler terms?

• make a mnemonic?

• tell me a story?

And unlike my parents or teachers, Mr. Chad Jipi Tea won’t judge for constantly asking questions

I can:

• ask it as many times as I want

• take as long as I want

• have it create as many examples as I want

• make it more entertaining

• turn passive learning into active learning

And it responds instantly. Incredible. The Library of Alexandria in your pocket for $20/mo

2.5 Why Connecting Concepts is Valuable

This skill is so valuable because when you have a connected art piece in your head, you can guess where new pieces fit, or if it doesn’t fit at all. This is called intuition. People with strong intuition have high prediction accuracy, easily recognize patterns, and are “fast learners”

It’s why finance firms have hired so many physicists. People who understand physics have built up this habit of connecting puzzle pieces, which is much more powerful than having googleable knowledge of finance

It’s really easy to tell if someone thinks like this. It’s clear in a conversation: the way someone speaks reveals how they think

If they know lots of facts, but don't know how to put them into a coherent story, you know they're a dopaminer on TikTok: constantly hit with short, punchy facts, memorizing trivia that can be searched

In contrast, a person who reads weaves subtle insights from multiple sources of information, uses chains of logic instead of pieces of logic, and expresses depth in their ideas, not breadth

This is how you survive AI in the long-run: you use it to become superhuman

Think about it this way: how are there AI apps out there that make money just by selling chatGPT output?

People make fun of “oh it's just a simple app made with chatGPT, it’s just a wrapper around it.” So how does it still make money??

Because: people pay for products and services that are specific to their profile AKA “niched down.” There’s value in better marketing and being more specialized

Now think about it this way: you learn from these "AI apps" by becoming one:

• update your training data with the latest and best information sources, and make your output more clear and informative

• improve your computing speed with optimal health and learning strategies

• take bigger prompts (bigger problems) as input

And now you've become valuable to people, just like these apps. On top of this, any limitation that current AI tools have, you can solve

For example, AI hasn’t solved the generalizability problem, which means it can't perform well on problems it hasn't seen before...

But you can.

2.5 Verifying AI Accuracy

Notice how we don’t have to worry about whether chatGPT is “telling the truth” because we already know the truth. You know that addition connects to multiplication somehow. You just don’t know how it gets there

It will tell you. It’s not going to hallucinate about monkeys and bananas when trying to explain connections between addition and multiplication

You’ll be able to tell because verification is always easier than solving. In computer science, we call this concept “P ≠ NP”

Think of a sudoku puzzle. We know that checking a filled sudoku puzzle is MUCH easier than solving it

Like your coworker saying “har har har I wouldn’t’a made that mistake at the Olympics, would’a been an easy gold medal if it wasn’t for my bum knee” 🫃

Same thing. Everyone’s a critic because verification is easier than solving.

Let’s walk through an example:

🦊: Hey chatGPT, how do you solve 3x + 5 = 2?

🤖:

Well, you subtract 5 from both sides to get 3x = -3

Then, divide by 3 on both sides to isolate x

And now you have x = -1

Now, verify the steps:

• Can we subtract 5 from both sides of an equation? Yes

• Can we divide both sides by 3? Yes

• When I plug in x - 1, do I get the correct answer? 3(-1) + 5 = 2 Yes

And if you don’t know whether a step is valid or not… talk to my friend named “Jeeohoh G. Ellie” AKA google

Verification is easier than solving.

Let’s say this is still too hard, and you don’t believe me because I’m a fox. Another way to talk to Mr. Chad Jipi Tea it is to GIVE him the truth:

“Hey chatGPT, help me practice so I can memorize. Here’s a PDF of my notes, can you quiz me so I can review? Also, is there anything you think I’m missing?”

Part of learning is memorization. Yes, everyone memes against “omg memorization isn’t REAL learning,” but you just have to memorize certain things

The only reason you can read this sentence is because you memorized the meaning of the words, right?

Imagine if you had to look up each word in the dictionary. Memorizing frees up your brainpower so you can focus on more advanced, more creative tasks

The best strategy for memorizing with chatGPT is to use it for:

1. Spaced Repetition: keep exposing yourself to the topic, like every other day, instead of cramming. “Hey let’s talk about what I learned yesterday”

2. Active Recall: actively “pull” things out of your memory instead of passively “pushing” into memory. Think quizzes versus reading

Sly Fox Tip: projects are such an effective tool for learning because it uses both of these. You’re using spaced repetition when continuing to work on a project and pulling knowledge with active recall to build. Then, once you’ve built one project, the next becomes easier because you’ve committed knowledge to memory, so you can focus on more advanced, more creative tasks

Now, you might be thinking: “B-but Fox, what am I supposed to learn?” Well, you could learn how to discover loopholes:

3. Manufacture Your Own Luck

“For 37 years, I practiced 14 hours a day, and now they call me a genius”

— Pablo De Sarasate, Violinist

Here’s the secret to wealth that millionares next door™ don’t want you to know: you can make money doing literally anything if you combine it with internet skills

This “relaxing dog music” channel has 2M subs, doing 800k views/mo, netting $1m/yr

You just have to keep doing stuff

🙉: “B-but most business fail!”

Okay, then keep trying?

This is why I think it’s funny when people argue uni versus trades. They don’t account for effort. Of course a clown who wastes his time drinking will earn $40k/yr after getting into $250k debt, doing worse than a plumber

But if you consider both career paths at max effort? Huge difference.

The key is thinking about the rest of your life: which skills do you want to spend your time mastering?

Think about a talent your parents noticed when you were a kid, something that hypnotized you as a teenager, a common thread that ties your interests together, maybe a skill other people pointed out.

Focus on that one thing, get good, then expand out to combine more skills

And if you can’t? Just do anything instead of nothing because action creates information. Even if you try something that doesn’t work, the experience will help you do the next thing

Success does not look like this:

It’s more like trying things and iterating on what works:

🙉: “B-but I just need an IDEA. Please, I want to start, but I just need a good IDEA”

Pick literally anything. You have to be willing to try 499 things until you strike gold once. Action creates information. Do you expect to find your spouse after one date?

If you try things, you’ll learn about what doesn’t work and learn about problems during the process. Who knows, you may even make a business out of simplifying something difficult!

You are better off moving in any direction than remaining stagnant. Developing your skills will help you be prepared AND spot opportunity

It’s like someone asking me which programming language to learn–it doesn’t matter. Just build something so you can start learning how to solve problems

If you know how to build, you can just look up gaps in your knowledge:

🦊: “Hey chatGPT, I know how to build a house with wood, but my neighbor just invented bricks. How do I build a house with bricks instead of wood?”

🤖: First, lay the foundation. Then, frame the home…

Now, if I don’t know how to build houses, this isn’t going to make any sense to you. You don’t know how to build, so you weren’t prepared

Think about all the engineers who knew programming before AI. They were ready to make AI apps, which were booming last year

You could make a simple chatbot to solve a specific problem, and people would throw money at you. AI was a new technology, but smart programmers were prepared and the opportunity arose

Luck = Preparation + Opportunity

This is true for any skill. Can’t make music without picking up an instrument. It doesn’t matter which instrument. You can change it later. Just learn how to play one. You’ll learn skills about music, because the work “works” on you. This is what makes it easier to play the next instrument. Or hell, you may even discover that music isn’t for you. Make it til you make it

But if you don’t know how to build, how will you learn to ask questions!

The problem with building is when people fall in love with the idea of doing a hundred different things all at once. You can do anything, not everything

🙉: “Bro I want to be a salesmarketman engineering ecomsaas alpha in space”

Learn to build, learn to sell. Anything works. You can’t hide from pain, so pick the pain you want to deal with

Ecom bros need to deal with chargebacks, refunds, returns, supply chain issues, getting copied, social media algorithms being changed, creatives, fickle employees

Software engineers need to deal with repetitive tasks, staying up-to-date, debugging, changing requirements, maintaining legacy code, breaking changes in third-party libraries or APIs, cascading failures, refactoring, insufficient documentation, compatibility issues… the list is endless

Grass is always greener.

What usually happens is most people get to the hard part of something (insecure canyon), then jump back up to the beginning (child’s hill) with a new shiny object:

🙉: “I don’t care, I’ll do anything. I just want to make retire as fast as possible so I can sit on a beach” And then what?

Smart people are like huskies. If you don’t give them an interesting problem, they become an interesting problem. So figure out the problems you want to solve–the money will come.

How? Well, if you dedicated yourself to being the best plumber in the world, you’d probably be a millionaire in a decade. It would be impossible if you truly mastered your craft

Do you really think that if you spent 10 years working in an industry day-in-day-out, that you would be bad after trying hundreds of different ideas?

You’d know the best tools, be up-to-date on the latest Japanese bidet innovations, know about the fanciest scented candles and soaps, have trust with a list of hypothyroid clients that need your services regularly, secure some enterprise contracts for office cleaning, own a fleet of trucks that do on-demand scrubbings, make a franchise licensing your patented cleaning systems, partner with luxury bathroom designers and architects, create a mobile smart home diagnostics tool, get invited to Dr. Huberman’s show to guest lecture on optimal squatting postures, become an NYT bestselling author, offer AI-powered leak detection services, outsource a B2B SaaS that tracks employee microbiomes, sell toilet accessories with e-commerce business, become an affiliate for digestion supplements, have consulting engagements as a subject matter expert on robotic cleaners, take invitations to conferences for green energy cleaning solutions, open a PE firm acquiring related businesses, make have viral TikToks with tan brunettes cleaning, get unlimited leads from your YouTube channel, and have a full hiring pipeline of HUSTLERS 😤 who dropped out because university is for sheep in the matrix™

You will naturally see opportunties as you become experienced by combining more volume with feedback:

3.1 How to Discover Loopholes

The reason I keep saying “you need to do more volume” is because intelligent people win at literally anything once they recognize the patterns

I have never once failed at anything I put my mind to, because I eventually figure out every system and its loopholes

It looks like this:

1. Identify a goal that you’re interested in. Let’s say you want financial freedom

2. Break that down into subproblems, like starting a business

3. Break the subproblems down even further, until you have basic steps. A business needs a product, and a way to get that product noticed

4. Figure out the language around the subject you’re trying to learn. “Getting a product noticed” is called marketing. If I don’t know what marketing is, I read a book, watch YouTube videos, and ask chatGPT to tell me about it

The specific resource DOESN’T MATTER. You just want to learn the lingo because it helps you identify “unknown unknowns,” things you don’t know that you don’t know

When you learn the language of a subject, you make a map of the territory

On this map, some places have already been explored. These places are the tundras, swamps, or deserts. There’s no food there.

In marketing, nobody puts ads on spoons. Maybe it’s something new you could try, but 99% of the time, deserts don’t have any food. Common sense will tell you that it’s a waste

Other times, there’s clear roads to other towns. Paths that are well-known. They’re boring. You can put up posters to get your product noticed, but it’s not high ROI

And then, the most interesting–the forests, the caves, the oceans. Uncharted territory. Very few know what goes on here:

• Some may gone through the forest and discovered paradise. They never want to go back, so you’ll never see them. Or they found treasure, but why would they ever tell anyone? They try their best to hide their map

• Many step in for a little bit, then some back with some fruit. Most of the time, they’re empty-handed

• Others have gotten lost and died inside, and you’ll never hear from them again

Let’s call the forest digital marketing using methods like Facebook ads

We want to get through the forest. What are some basic things we already know? You need some food and water for any long expeditions. To run a marketing campaign, you’ll need at least a small budget for adspend

It would also help if you got a little bit of knowledge from other explorers. Maybe you could go to the wise old man named Chad Jipi Tea, who can tell you the lore behind his scars and stories from his mentors

Or, you talk to some young travelers who have scurried in and out. These are your marketing books and videos

You won’t learn everything about how to get through the forest, of course, but they’ll tell you about the tigers (like ad accounts getting banned), so you remember to avoid certain areas

Others who can help include merchants or blacksmiths who offer tools. These are your virtual assistants or Upwork contractors

Now do you see why it was important to learn the lingo?

Notice all the vocabulary I discovered just by drawing myself a map:

• posters

• ROI

• digital marketing

• Facebook ads

• campaign

• budget

• adspend

• ad accounts

• virtual assistants

• upwork contractors

Because I learned all these words, I knew what to ask about and who to look for. If I pointed at a blank map, people would call me a monkey. Just like how Google won’t return any search results for empty searches

But now that I have a rough drawing of what the territory looks like, I can point to different areas and get more information: “How do I get across this bridge to get to that down?” How do I get a high ROI on my ads?

I can prompt with more specific questions. I can start to put puzzle pieces together

But talking to people all day won’t do much. You’ll keep hearing the same stories on YouTube, with maybe one little fact once in a while. Some things won’t even apply to your specific situation

Others might even give you bad information: it could be outdated or worthless, or they’re trying to sell you something, or maybe, they’re just outright malicious

So you can’t just keep consuming. You need to do stuff to validate the information and see how it applies to you

You need to actually *go* to the forest after you have about 70% of your map so you can collect feedback. This is how you balance learning and execution: volume and feedback

Make trips through the forest. Just do stuff. You’ll fall over a plant that nobody told you about because it grew recently

Keep going

You’ll get a rash from the white jade bush, thinking it was a delicious white dragon bush

Keep going

You’ll see some thick vines in your way, but you cut through

Keep going

Machete mindset

Eventually, you’ll have spent enough time inside the forest collecting feedback that you’ll know so much more than the people outside

You’ll be able to spot all kinds of predators, even ones you haven’t seen or heard before, because you developed intuition and notice patterns. You gain experience from fighting rats, spiders, and goblins, which make you strong enough to fight red-eyed black dragons

In digital marketing, you’ll need to run ads. You’ll spend money to see what converts and what doesn’t. More attempts. More volume

You start to notice signs: certain colours, words, phrasing that grab attention more than others. More sales, more feedback

Things that you can’t read about or learn from others because it’s about refining your instincts, just like how you can’t learn how to ride a bike at a seminar

You train your subconscious about what is good because the work “works” on you. You develop taste, you filter bad information, you refine your palate. You find practical use-cases for tricks and tips. Your muscle memory eliminates clumsiness. You notice blind spots where there is opportunity. You become better at learning how to learn

You gain a bit of confidence and feel less embarassed. Tools become invisible, so you can focus on tasks instead of how to use them

You learn about all the long and boring rules that others don’t pay attention to. You find loopholes that others haven’t noticed

EVERY skill works like this. Even with personality traits that “can’t be taught”

How do you get good at x? More volume, more feedback

Learning to be funny is just:

1. High volume of comedy, jokes, stand-up, movies, socializing

2. Rapid feedback with laughs

Iterate on what works. Constantly ¡experimentamos! with new ideas, letting natural selection kill off each bad idea until you evolve into a master

This is why everything is a game that can be won

Investing, making friends, martial arts, whatever

Just make your maps and keep exploring

3.2 How to Build Maps Quickly

Action creates information

— Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase

“Mr. Jippity, can you tell me about your stories of the forest?”

Here’s how you ask this in AI-speak:

Generate a comprehensive curriculum for digital marketing

Then, create a directed acyclic graph in GraphViz showing which subjects should be learned in what order

Only output the GraphViz code

Then, after you meet Mr. Jippity, go visit Mr. Gugal:

“Mr. Gugal, can you search for ‘GraphViz online.’ I’m looking for a website that lets me run the GraphViz code. I’m feeling lucky, so I’ll just click the first link”

Copy-paste code, graph output:

Now you have somewhere to start. Go make daily visits to Mr. Jippity and Mr. Gugal to learn about these. Do some research. Use the resources in I mentioned in section 2.1. Start understanding the landscape in general. You’ll get a feel for it, just like how you get a feel for riding a bicycle after trying multiple times

And when you want to expand on a part of this tree, just ask to create another table of contents, but this time, on a lower part of the tree:

Generate a comprehensive table of contents for KPIs

Then, create a directed acyclic graph in GraphViz showing which subjects should be learned in what order

Only output the GraphViz code

Now, as you keep going, you’ll stop asking monkey questions like “how do I start a business.” You’ll make more specific searches. You’ll prompt your way through the advanced material. You’ll understand most discussions, research, textbooks, lectures, anything

But once you have the basics, start exploring the forest immediately. Just like with AI, training data doesn’t make much difference after a certain point. Skills come from creation not consumption. Building helps you collect feedback, improve reasoning, identify opportunity

This is the difference between education (acquiring knowledge) and intelligence (using knowledge to think and reason). You don’t want to be an overeducated midwit, do you? No point in having a map if you aren’t going to use it to adventure!

Don’t end up like this guy:

The quality of your questions reveal your intelligence. Once you have some adventuring experience, people will pay attention to your questions. You can have practical discussions that focus on results, asking pointed questions like “how do I implement cloaking for Facebook ads on a greyhat supplement?”

This is why there are so many 80 IQ millionaires. Because they’re too ignorant to self-doubt. Too slow to be afraid of the forest. They just yolo in. Keep going. It doesn’t matter if you lose 499 times because the 1 win is all you need

No excuses. The only thing standing in the way is yourself:

4. Don’t Let Your Brain Betray You

College should not be the best time of your life, it should help create the best time of your life

— Wall Street Playboys

The world becomes more ruthless as you get older. Especially as a man, because more of your worth is based on your usefulness

Your competition is no longer the cool guy from class, but the guy five years older than you who has been working on his brain, body, and business the entire time

But the advantage you have as a young person is that you’re seen as this little ball of potential. Everyone wants to help you succeed and achieve your big dreams 😊

Sly Fox Tip: This is why a .edu student email address is powerful

Unfortunately… as soon as you finish university around 22-23, you’re not cute anymore. You’re an unemployed man. Ick!

People aren’t as forgiving as you get older. It gets worse every year. A gifted kid is now a plain adult. An awkward teenager is now a freak that should seek Canadian healthcare. An embarrassing attempt at flirting (because you want to start a happy family 😱🤢😠) is now a meeting with HR

You do not want to waste your youth being a dopaminer because it is extremely hard to recover from a bad foundation. If you end up working at a bad company, that’s several years worth of lost income, experience, relationships that compound over time

Not to mention how little time you’ll have once you do start working.

Take advantage of your 20s by making a high volume of mistakes to collect rapid feedback:

4.1 Make Easy Mistakes Quickly

Mistakes are when you look for feedback. It’s about making informed decisions with good intent. Not making blunders “oh whoops haha uwu just young and slow!”

When I say easy mistakes, I’m talking about impermanent, reversible decisions. Sending your first cringey cold email to get in touch with someone in your industry. It’s always going to be bad.

You won’t feel it until you hit send, then think, “Damn that was too long.” Do these fast and get them out of the way so you can get more volume

One way to mitigate the downside of these decisions is to do them where it’s low-stakes. Go travel to shake off the awkwardness and expand your worldview. Send a few emails to some people in companies you don’t care about. Work your way up to some decent companies. Progressive overload.

An easy way to figure out which mistakes are worth making is: “what is the short-term pain I don’t want to go through right now, but my future self would be grateful for?”

The pain of embarassment is worth the skill of cold outreach.
The pain of trying a few funny outfits is worth the skill of looksmaxxing.
The pain of getting rejected by a tan brunette is worth getting the next one.

So now you know what you can mess up on–but how much?

4.2 You Are Always Being Evaluated

It’s easy to not be lazy with your work. Bias towards action AKA “just do it” (high volume). But I’ve noticed it’s more common to be lazy with your listening, lazy with feedback

People notice when you misbehave, but they will smile, nod, agree.

You will let yourself slip if you don't pay attention to people's reactions to you. Communication matters: people give you signals all the time with their eyes, hands, words. Every joke contains a hint of truth

The ONLY time I forgive someone for doing something foolish is if they say "this was 100% my fault, and I will do x to ensure it does not happen again in the future"

If even 1% of the blame is placed on me or someone else… I smile, nod, agree, and never speak to them again

Therefore, you are so, so lucky if someone is willing to be honest with you. Feedback is the only way you will improve. It’s hard to accurately evaluate your own performance

This is why so many companies pay attention to metrics like return on ad spend. Money is honest, and numbers never lie

Most people aren’t upfront, so you need to relentlessly seek feedback. This is so hard to find because criticizing is risky and costly

Nobody wants to get in trouble for being too honest, and nobody wants to waste their time with someone who won't change. Who knows, you may even take it the wrong way and start gossiping and speaking poorly about them

There’s no upside, but all of the downside

However, if you show people that you are willing to work hard and address your flaws, and they will THROW opportunities your way. This is one of the fastest ways to get people to like you–taking their words seriously. Make commitments and stick to them

And yes, you *should* care that people like you, because people WANT to help those they like. This is how networking works: if someone likes you, they will give you opportunities without you asking

Why? High performers want opportunity, or they will find it somewhere else. Winners win. Therefore, you don't have to go hunting for luck, because people that like you will create that luck *for* you to get on your good side

On the other hand, if you are negative: complaining, condemning, criticizing… It reveals more about your deficits than the subject you’re talking about. “Everyone I meet sucks.” Well, you must be attracting them somehow

No one criticizes from above. Say something insensitive, and you’re no longer being considered for your professor’s biotech startup that he’s about recruit for. Nobody wants to be infected by another’s misery

The only caveat to listening to others is to be careful about filtering the feedback you receive. Sometimes, people say things because it’s high status, not because it’s true

If I tell you to go into trades because uni doesn’t matter, I sound like a man of the people. Much down-to-earth. Very empathy. But when you’re not looking, I’m going to do everything I can to get my kids into Harvard

And even if I’m not saying it for status, I could just be wrong. All I can do is minimize bad decisions, learn from others’ mistakes, and copy people more intelligent than me

So, make your own maps, but be careful about the major decisions:

4.3 A Few Decisions Determine Everything

If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labor passes quickly, but the good endures; if you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly, but the shame endures

— Musonius Rufus

There’s different “levels” to decisions. The ones we spoke about previously are the ones you shouldn’t care about–make little reversible errors quickly so you can get more volume. Don’t “overthink” as they say

But I think it’s stupid to “underthink” irreversible decisions. Things like who you marry and whether to have children. These are the most important

And then there are others, which are irreversible, but recoverable. The university you attend and the first company you join. You can work hard to get out of these, but it won’t be easy

I think those are obvious, and mentioned frequently. What I think isn’t mentioned enough is recurring decisions, because you deal with their consequences every day. It’s easy to say “where do you see yourself in five years” but nobody asks: if you continued doing the same thing every day, what kind of person are you becoming?

You need to emphasize the daily decisions: who you work with, what you’re working on, where you live

But even the small habits that you overlook, like going to the gym or whether to eat junk–these drastically affect your energy levels, which affect the rest of your life

There’s a reason AI models improve as more compute is added. Humans also improve their agency with higher energy. You’d be shocked at how much of your “I’m not that smart” is just inflammation and poor digestion. Maximize your energy by eating an animal-based diet with fruit, sleeping early, and moving more. Once your metabolism burns like a furnace, your ambition will ignite the same

But just like AI, you also have to take care of your training data and inputs. Ruthlessly cut out anyone infected with chronic negativity, unluckiness, and unhappiness, else you’ll catch their disease

Think about whether you could interact with someone for the rest of your life. You might want to hang out with your weed smoking friends because they’re hilarious and you laugh (temporarily), but their overall influence is negative. They don’t have any plans to work for more than minimum wage, so you get nothing done with them over the weekends

Your weekends are 29% of your week, though. Do you want your weekly inputs, your training data, to be 29% made up of stoner friends? Or do you want to find future winners and associate with them?

I don’t cut off all my unambitious friends, but I treat them like a vice no different than drinking, and minimize my exposure to them

There was a point where I was in the middle. Not quite good enough to be with the people I want, but moving away from the people I don’t want. In this situation, I focus on what I want to see more of. Just like sales, there will always be 10% of people who dislike you no matter what, 80% most people who don’t care, and 10% who you will connect with strongly. Focus on those 10% who want you, and you want them, then give it time

I don’t actively pursue anyone. Become the type of person others want to be around. Applies to women especially. As the rappers say “a man will lose money chasing women, but will never lose women chasing money”

Once I do find future winners, I add a little fun with them. I don’t mind spending extra time in the gym, studying, or eating together with them because I was going to do those things anyway

The framework I like to use for these kinds of activities is: what would my future self be grateful for? I trust my future self to know better than my current self

I often see people grabbing junk and shoving it in their mouth without even thinking. Was that 5-second moment of pleasure worth it? I’m revolted when I see someone stuffing themselves like a mindless animal

Be honest–how often do you behave the same in other areas of life? Have you compromised yourself to rub skin on someone or something, just so you could expel mucus from your body for 5 seconds of good feelings? Monkey.

Obviously, you shouldn’t become an ascetic monk who abstains from all pleasure, but know when you should stay disciplined. Save the indulgence for special occasions, not your daily routine

Aristotle tells us that the person who lives the best life is one who balances the extremes of excess and deficiency. I won’t refuse my little niece excitedly asking me how her birthday cake tastes, but I won’t eat several slices or keep pastries in my home

This restraint is the only way to develop self-confidence. Confidence comes from loving your future self. Your future self will love you if you remain disciplined, because the pain of discipline hurts far less than regret

Your current self hates you because you past self didn’t care. Your past self ate garbage and let your current self deal with the consequences. Your past self procrastinated and shoved the work onto you. Every pound of fat your past self added is a pound your current self has to deal with

There is a gap between who you are now and who you want to be. Why? Your actions aren’t aligned with what your future self wants you to do

If you imagine your future self as well-read, what would he have to do? Read every day. So, align your current actions with what your future self would be doing

You can also imagine the opposite. Your future self has poor attention span because he won't stop scrolling. And if your current self has poor attention span... your past self got you here

The good news is that you can just solve it. You have access to your optimal policy at all times. You just choose not to follow it. You can just ask yourself, “What should I be doing right now?”

Most things in life aren’t actually that hard. The only real problem I can think of is if you have a permanent disability. Everything else is just a volume-feedback issue AKA skill issue. People just don’t use the internet enough to solve their problems

🙉: “B-but my trauma…”

Well, your ancestors experienced famine, disease, war, getting attacked by tigers, violence at every corner, no electricity, no air conditioning, no heating, no refrigeration, no clean water, no plumbing… And they survived an unbroken chain long enough to give birth to you

Have you tried just doing whatever you want? You can just do things. Your past exists to inform your future. So, don’t let your past cloud your future decisions and it won’t matter

🙉: “B-but some things are out of our control! Like the divore rate!”

I never understood people complaining about “rates” of anything. 80% of people are overweight and eat garbage. Just don’t be like them?

Most problems aren’t real. It’s all skill issues. Even marriage is a skill issue. Divorce isn’t a male-female problem, it’s an IQ problem. Get better at filtering people before you marry them. Don’t marry a slow, immature person who doesn’t know how to communicate. Don’t marry someone because they’re the most attractive person you can conveniently get your hands on. Find someone who disciplines their animal desires, and do the same

You have a brain for a reason: use it to override the instincts that are ruining your life

4.4 Discipline Your Emotions

Not only should you be careful about your decisions with yourself, but also with others

I recommend against burning bridges. Yes, people like to say "f-you money, freedom of speech, I'm just being honest.”​ But at the current pace of medical science and technology, people may live until 120 years old. You don't want a small conflict to last a century, filter you out of opportunities, and be permanently recorded on social media​

Have some decorum! Learn to smile, nod, agree

You don’t know whether the person has nothing to lose. Young Male Syndrome is a real, researched phenomenon: if someone feels insulted, they’ll throw their entire life away to end yours

Or maybe you don’t know whether you were upset for the right reasons. You may look at yourself in a decade the same way you look at a child’s tantrums and think "wtf. that wasn't worth it”​

With AI, there are going to be a handful of people who win EVERYTHING because they can do the job of 100 people by themselves. Careful not to irritate a coworker, an annoying professor, or a nerdy classmate; they may end up being the reason you lose a $100m contract or a tan brunette. The lower class ruins lives with the fist, the upper class ruins them with the pen

4.5 Filter your Inputs

The difference between real material poison and intellectual poison is that most material poison is disgusting to the taste, but intellectual poison, which takes the form of cheap newspapers or bad books, can unfortunately sometimes be attractive

— Tolstoy

The solution to most things is filtering. Removal. Improvement by subtraction. via negativa

People are always looking to add things. You need to do fewer things and concentrate your energy on those things. A hundred different supplements won’t help you lose weight or improve focus or become wealthier

Just stop eating. Stop wasting time. Stop scrolling. Stop chasing the next hype. Do less to achieve more

You would do less damage to yourself if you did nothing, because everything comes with a cost

Eating is not free: when your body is working to remove toxins from the garbage that you’re eating, it’s accumulating damage. You could’ve just stopped eating. You would’ve been better off fasting to cleanse your body than putting that junk in your mouth

You can apply this to any concept. That time you spent scrolling could’ve been spent doing nothing. At least then, you wouldn’t have fried your ability to focus. Or polluted your mind with low-quality garbage on the internet. Or wasted your limited memory on nonsense

Instead, you could’ve been reading great thinkers. Absorbing how they make decisions. Improving your thoughts. Taking in a higher volume of their good decisions to shape your brain

Your information diet chooses the thoughts of your future self. Save your brain for something important. Every psychological illness, every self-limiting belief, every bit of false information is written into your mind when you consume mental junk: pollution. The wrong kind of volume

This has to do with valuing your time. It shocks me how little people care about their time. And this is easy to overlook. Because it’s too easy to waste your future self’s time, who will have to undo the consequences of your current actions. What’s 5 minutes wasted here, 10 minutes there?

Death by a thousand cuts.

Time is the most precious resource because you don’t get it back. As time flows, the past increases, and the future recedes. Opportunities fleeting, regrets mounting.

But you can fix this. The cost of removing distractions is boredom. Are you willing to face the pain of boredom to have more mental clarity and focus? If you can focus on nothing, you can focus on anything

60ish more years left, 20ish able-bodied? You’re not respawning. What are you waiting for? Don’t look back and say, “Damn, I could have been great”

Conclusion

Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way​

Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both​Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it…​

Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both​

This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy

― Søren Kierkegaard

I offer mentorship, and you can find me on Twitter 🦊

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Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

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