30 things I know at 30

1. Action produces information.
2. Thinking is a form of dissociation.
3. You don't have to keep thinking. You can just stop.
4. Resist the pull of extremes and absolutes. Balance is boring, but usually the right approach.
5. Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.
6. Luck = hard work + opportunity.
7. Being early beats being fast.
8. Serendipity is controllable. It's proportional to your luck surface area.
9. Success is a strong link problem. Iterate, fail, and learn quickly while maximizing serendipity. Enough attempts and success is guaranteed.
10. Health is a weak link problem. Identify the biggest bottleneck and completely solve it before moving to anything else. Benching 225 doesn't matter if you have cancer.
11. Health is a cold start problem. Your mood, sleep, diet, energy, and ability to exercise are interdependent. If you're starting from scratch, you'll have to do a few new things at once.
12. Health anxiety is unhealthy.
13. Anyone who professes to care about their time but not their health is not fundamentally serious.
14. Most people would give up everything they own to go back in time 10 years.
15. The best way to clean up a kitchen is while you're cooking the meal.
16. The easiest path to tastier food is higher quality ingredients.
17. Calling friends, meditation, and journaling is always underrated.
18. Small talk is deeper than deep talk.
19. Tesla will beat Waymo. It won't even be close.
20. Health, social intelligence, attention, agency, taste, and trust will become increasingly valuable as automation eats the world.
21. Angled showerheads > rain showerheads.
22. There is no single unifying experience of New York City. It's a mirror. The sheer diversity & density reflects who you are.
23. Life's better on offense.
24. In a world of increasing convenience, seek friction to fight atrophy.
25. Every world-changing technology is a double edged sword.
26. Learning compounds faster than capital.
27. Energy management over time management.
28. Creation is the antidote to glassy-eyed, drooling consumption.
29. You are not a population. For you, things only need to work out once.
30. Follow the rules so you can break them later.

To friends, family, teachers, strangers, loved ones, authors, avatars, enemies, entertainers, competitors, forefathers, and butterflies: Thank you for shaping me into who I am.