Most Important Life Lessons

I originally wrote this post on Quora dated March 2, 2018.

1. “Figure out what you are uniquely the best in the world at because you just love it. And then just find out who or what needs that the most.”
2. “My whole system of life is keeping at it. The task of life is not to see clearly in the distance but to do the task at hand” — Charlie Munger. Most success comes from repetition, not new things.
3. “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise; seek what they sought”.
4. Doing what everybody else is doing feels like the safest thing to do. But it’s also the most competitive, which makes it the riskiest.
5. To gain an edge, run upstairs. Follow the more difficult path. Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice.
6. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.” — Jeff Bezos
7. Compounding creates success in almost anything.
8. Always ask better questions and obsess over that.
9. Take wherever you’re at and just try to push your understanding deeper.
10. You don’t get paid what you deserve. You get paid what other people think you’re worth. — Seth Godin
11. Young people should identify a senior person’s pain point. Then they should offer to take that person’s work away from them. “Tell me what you need done, I’ll make it my daily mission to do it for you, freeing up your time for bigger things.”
12. Every job is a sales job, especially as you move up the ladder.
13. The #1 predictor of career success is having an open network. This exposes you to more people and new ideas.
14. The Elon Musk’s approach: “You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.” Remember: we’ve only taken a bucket of knowledge from a sea of ignorance.
15. Aim for specific knowledge. You want to be uniquely qualified. You want to figure out what skills does society want, but doesn’t know how to get. Once your skill can be trained, you are replaceable.
16. “Aim to become not the best at what you do but the ONLY person who does what you do”.
17. Run towards trouble. “You get paid linearly for analyzing and solving problems. You get paid non-linearly for spotting and seizing opportunities.”
18. Aim high. Work towards the betterment of Being. Align yourself, in your soul, with Truth and the Highest Good. If you’re not oriented, you bend when suffering comes. The nobler the aim, the better your life. Once you have an aim, focus on the moment.
19. Extremely ambitious goals are sometimes more achievable than moderately ambitious ones. Big goals are energizing both to the person dreaming and to those around them. It’s rarely a mistake to have a bigger goal.
20. Continuous learning is essential. The information you need is free.All forms of work are moving towards paid learning. YouTube is the world’s best school. The internet is one big, global library. There’s never been a better time to be alive.