Naked truth of life: Maths
As a kid, I loved math, I think I had not lost a single point on my exams till I was 10 or 11 yrs old and loved being part of our math olympiad team.
I almost considered getting a degree in maths and till date love doing math problems. So years ago, at Stanford when I tried to write down all my life lessons, I found math to be the best language to write them down.
The original post was on my medium, claiming - if you can get math, you can get life!! Here goes some of my rules:
1. You have 10,000 productive days in this world, and every 10 days you lose 0.1% of it.
Give and take, you have about 10,000 productive days in your life. Every 10 days you lose 0.1% of it, and every quarter you lose 1% of it (approx). Thats a rapid decay of the organic mess you are. You are a decomposing piece of mass, and you are decomposing fast.
Therefore every 10 days should have a goal which is immediate, and every quarter should have a goal which takes you to a 10 year version of the future you want to create. Write them down, measure them. Every goal should be measurable, everything can be reduced to numbers. Everything.
2. Investment should be RoI based, and 99% people invest in the wrong asset class.
Investment should be RoI based (and this isn’t Radio on Internet, this is Return on investment). In your teens, 20's and 30's you have decades left in front of you. And, any investment in human beings has the maxmium RoI of all other assets including land, metals, or any stock market. So invest in experiences, invest in yourself. Every opportunity to network, gather knowledge, exploring things you haven’t done, place you haven’t seen is a better RoI than any other asset making financial sense to your parens and dumb elders/financiers. Invest in other things in short term only to maximize long term investment in experience.
Experiences and investments in yourself have the best RoI, most people fail to calculate that or even understand that.
42. Immortality = f (fame) * g (time)
Most people work for ego, recognition etc. which is nothing but a way to be alive post one is dead. Immortality is what I call it.
Fame (higher form of recognition) is what most people understand and get lured by. So higher the fame, higher your reverance in soceity. Most people forget when Fame and time are multiplied — time has a much bigger wieghtage. For e.g. if I ask you the 10 actresses since 2000, you can rattle 10 names, if I ask you 10 actresses in 1960, you will struggle to reach 5 and 1920 might end up as 0 or 1.
If you take a 200 year horizon, 400 year horizon, 1000 year horizon — you realize probably 10 people every 1000 years will be remembered. So either don’t chase fame, its short lived or chose such a fame that can only by achieved by truly creating an inflection in human civilization chart.
3. Passion — Fear continuum
Everything a person choses is either out of love (passion) or fear. If we all be brutally honest and not gaurd ourselves under bullshit words like “practically” “logically” etc. we are either always taking decisions out of passion/love or fear. Motive of life is to move closer to passion/love end of continuum with each decision.
Please don’t comment that not jumping from a cliff out of fear is a good decision, that decision is based on a scientific fact called gravity. What I am addressing are life decisions with uncertain variables.
There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1, if 0 is fear and 1 is passion. We all operate on some point between 0 and 1 for most decisions in life, in some we are closer to 0 and in others we might be closer to 1. The goal is operate closer to 1 on almost every dimension, the goal is to be a bit more howard roark everyday.
4. Output = f A*(input) + B*others
It is the most simple rule, output is a function of input in a multi-variate equation. As you approach the limit the function towards greatness/excellence, the function increases the weight of input i.e. value of A increases substantially.
What most people get confused is seeing why some people work really hard and turn out average or “unsuccessful”, while some other work moderately to be “very successful”.
a) This is possible at low to medium levels as weight of input in the function determining output is lower at lower levels. It increases as one approaches the limit of excellence.
b) Success in society is seen as Value (i.e. Impact, fame or money).
Value = output * value of output.
Value of output reflects the supply -demand forces affecting value creation in your output/input domain. Software engineers today might produce average output yet earn a lot more as value of output in today’s age is very high. In the future biochem people might enjoy this. Same supply demand affects movie stars/music stars — value of output is percieved very high as it reaches a lot of people. So be in spaces where value of output is high or find ways to increase the value of output.
5. Subconscious >>> conscious. (Corollary: Gut >>> rational thinking)
Person ‘A’ throws a ball at 63kmph to a person ‘B’ standing 9.8 ft away, the person ‘B’ is 6 feet tall and the person ‘A’ throws the ball at shoulder height and is 5ft 8 inches tall at shoulder height. How fast will the ball move from the thrower to the catcher? how much will ball dip ?
If you were catching it, you would calculate the answer in mili-seconds as your mind does that calculation to tell your arms to lunge forward, move downwards and catch this object — ball.
Can you imagine how many calculations your mind does on an average drive to work. Acceleration, speed, probability of random brakes, people crossing etc. It calculates it all in miliseconds. You won’t even know the formula for 80% of it.
Thus, always back your gut over your rational being. No matter how irrational, your sub conscious has taken factors whose formula you have no idea of. Trust the fucking gut. always.
6. Greatest weakness= greatest strength. This is the basis of evolution.
Evolution is an exercise in creating strengths in areas of weakness. If you can’t have faster speed, have a bigger mass. If you are too fragile, have too many babies. Thus to evolve follow the nature, follow evolution. In your greatest weaknesses lies your ability to build your greatest strength. Start-up’s biggest weakness is that it is too small — small means lower mass i.e. higher acceleration. So accelerate fast.
So to move ahead, you must evaluate your greatest weaknesses not your greatest strengths and then see what unique advantages can you evolve them into.
The corollary to this is: your greatest strength is going to lead to your great failure. So always be paranoid. always.
7. Life is not fair, too many variables.
It is a randomized experience i.e. the variables governing it are limiting to infinity. Sometimes one of those variable changes (most of these variables are butterfly effects and invisible to our minds) causing different effects for different people.
Accepting this is the best way to move on and understanding variable change, if you do that, you can use it for your benefit.
This isn’t a contradiction of output = f(input) principle — it just says same input does not give same output. Other variables affect output value too. But since you can control only input and it has increasing degree of weight as intended output grows bigger and bigger, you should implement output = f(input) [ Rule 4] really well. And if you take a longer view [ rule 9] you will see this randomization can be accounted for.
This view helps your control variable change, a key governing principle of life. Understand and master it.
8. Practicality and Maturity are social dogmas, not scientific facts or mathematical facts.
This is a very important lesson most people do not realize and often quote practical consideration as facts or near certainties. As an intelligent human being we must understand that these are not facts and never take them as a factor in any decision making. It’s just stupid to do so.
9. Long term view != short term view
Long terms a lot many factors change compared to the short term, the variable change is massive in the long term. Big gains happen by having an eye on this long term view, betting on it. Everyone needs to have a sense of variables driving our surrounding and extrapolate their best guess about 10 years from now, 20 years from now and live for that.
Basically, this is saying some variables will change subtantially in the future - usually technological ones and some that don’t (usually human psych) - so understanding and having a view on how changing variables interact with non-changing ones, allows you to live and operate with alpha.
Everyone is living for short term view, its comfortable and within sight — but then 99% of the world earns less than top 1% of the world. So don’t do what 99% do. Simple.
10. Fundamental >> the construction
We are in such a hurry to build the building visible to all that we spend too few years and too less an effort building fundamentals invisible to most. If you have a 10 year horizon, FOMO won’t be such an issue. Build a strong fundamental, towers will be built on it.
11. Compounding is a powerful life concept
We all learn how compounding works in maths & finance. Lifes is a sum of today’s and compounding has huge benefits and potential downsides.
Daily 30 minutes of workouts, gives you better result than 2 hour kill in the gym once a week. Daily 2 hours of coding will make you a better coder than one 10 hour all nighter. Doing things everyday in continuity — even if moderate gives tremendous returns over a period of time.
When you are young you have 10,000 days — Start compounding.
12. Leverage: Your time on this earth is limited
We all have limited time ( rule 1: look above ), and the only way to multiply our efforts is to leverage. Leveraging has led to almost all great civilizations — not always in the most peaceful or human outcomes. But leveraging is the secret to outgrow your limited time. Quality of leverage matters i.e. smart people’s time is more worthy than dumb people’s time. Therefore, the equation comes down to:
Leverage = Quality of people * time of people * strength of relationships
Strength of relationships is about how much they care or feel genuinely passionate about your case or a shared cause. People’s time is not all the same, we find ourselves more productive in sometimes and less in others. We feel more genuinely inclined to help those who we care about.
Most people create leverage only through buying people’s time. Smart ones focus on quality of people and strength of those relationships.
Always, Always be leveraging!
Note to self: Write these equations down and stare at them often.
