Five simple things that have helped me recently

More unsolicited life advice

Here are some simple things I’ve learned recently that have helped me immensely.

1. I am fully in control (of nothing). There is only one thing in my life that I can control. One. The only thing I have any control over is how I respond to reality. There is what is, and then there is how I react to what is. This is the only real choice I get. My reaction becomes my reality. Something “bad” happens to me. I am in full control of how I deal with that reality. I make it bad or good, meaningful or meaningless. This is such a freeing concept, and it has improved my life on every conceivable axis.

2. Sleep well, make money. The single most important financial decision I’ve ever made is to prioritize getting a good night’s sleep. What do I mean by this? Investing is a tough sport. It’s endurance above all. Success comes from thousands of good decisions compounding over a lifetime. What I’ve realized is that the only way to achieve this sort of longevity is to do what feels right for me. I used to think optimizing for the perfect strategy was the goal, but what turned out to be more true is that I need to optimize my investing strategy for myself. The optimal strategy for me is the one that helps me sleep at night. A bit of extra cash. A bit of stock picking so I avoid the FOMO. It’s not objectively perfect, but it’s perfect for me. If I get this wrong, even the “best” strategy will fail because I won’t be able to stick with it.

3. Hard days, easy life. It’s true. It sucks, but it’s true. Doing challenging things has made me a better person. I’m trying to default to doing something hard every day. Some days it’s a hard workout, some days it’s a walk, and some days it’s as simple as sending a text or making a call I’ve been dreading. I don’t have to go full David Goggins mode, I just need to step out of my comfort zone that day and do something that feels hard to get that sense of reward.

4. Simple mornings and evenings. I’m a classic optimizer, always looking for the perfect way to do things. While optimizing feels good in the moment, I’ve learned that it rarely actually works. If I try to optimize, I never stick to the thing because there’s always a better way—I can always optimize further. In the spirit of un-optimizing, I’ve been trying something for my mornings/evenings that has been working very well. My mornings and evenings only have three hard rules each, the rest is noise. Most importantly, I don’t aim for perfection, I just try to show up often.

   1. Morning: 1) Wake up early and at the same time every day, 2) Exercise or get outside for a walk, and 3) No phone for as long as I can (usually the first 60 minutes).

   2. Evening: The 3-2-1 rule: No food 3 hours before bed, no liquids 2 hours before bed, no screens 1 hour before bed.

5. Follow the light. I know it sounds cringey or like something you’d hear at a South American ayahuasca ceremony, but hear me out. The light, for me, is basically interest. Things that I encounter and feel a connection to. It’s a feeling and a knowing that a particular thing is unquestionably relevant for me, right now. The challenging part is that the light is not always visible. Sometimes it’s dim, sometimes I’m looking in the wrong direction, and sometimes it’s blinding me. That said, it’s always on, and it’s always pointing the right way towards what is uniquely relevant and interesting for me.