My (More Than a) Kilobyte

For the last day, I’ve been thinking about a prompt I got from a friend. “If you could beam a kilobyte of information straight into the minds of every person alive, what would it be?” Here’s my answer. It ended up being a bit over 1 kilobyte, but I couldn’t really decide what to cut out.

• ”[Your values will] probably be complex, confused, and logically inconsistent, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Don’t let someone else choose what you care about…Choose values that sound exciting because life’s short, time’s short, and none of it matters in the end anyway.” - Elijah
  • Be finely attuned to what makes you excited, and optimize for that (within reasonable constraints). Always do what’s excitingly ambitious.
• It’s a lot easier to change your identity than you might think. You can become the kind of person that reads everyday before bed, doesn’t leave the gym until the workout is over, and/or stays off social media. Justifying a recurring part of your behavior just because “that’s who I am” is defeatist. Just go and do the thing.
  • Doing great things (whatever that means for you) is hard, but the people who do great things aren’t as different from you as you probably think they are. Give yourself permission, and you can join them.
    • ”It’s amazing how quickly you can be world-class at something, just because most people don’t try.” - No idea
• You are way stupider than you probably think you are (and so is everyone else).
  • Try your best not to judge people based on their beliefs. Beliefs are so context-dependent that in a large number of counterfactual realities you probably hold the beliefs you hate most.
• There is no speed limit, but you should be wary about going too fast sacrificing quality for speed.
• Be around awesome people (whatever that means to you). Almost everything else on this list comes by default.
  • Help others be around awesome people and/or be an awesome person for them.