What is this?

These are some systems and mental frameworks I use currently to keep happy, healthy, and productive. They are for me, the fruits of a favored hobby, trying to understand myself. The following series is not comprehensive because it was getting long and I wanted to move on to other things but I may continue with further posts later on. I’m writing it down for a few reasons:

• I want to organize and collect what have been previously disparate thoughts and strategies scattered across my brain and sometimes google docs

• I want to make a sort of time capsule for my current conception of self management. I’m interested in comparing it to my thinking in the future. I'd love to look back at this when much more about the brain is understood and see what I got right as well as find out what misconceptions and illusions I had about internal processes. Though to be clear much of this either obviously or implicitly interfaces with the way things feel internally since that's what I have direct access to.

• I think some of these systems, hacks, and frameworks may be helpful to others, port them into your brain and try them out if you like.

• I’m curious what other people think, I wonder about other people's self discoveries and how they are different/similar to mine. Writing and sharing my thoughts is a good way to elicit this kind of discussion!

I recommend skimming the posts to mine for anything that seems interesting. You can also read with an eye to implement for yourself or use it as a window to some structures in my brain. If you want to experiment with the implementation of any of the below I recommend seeing the habit accrual and systems testing section in Bifurcation of the Mind and then applying those principles to bootstrap through the stack of things you’re interested in one at a time.

I invite you also to read the following as a skeptic, keeping the ideas at arms length initially, mulling over them and maybe trying them out. The systems/frameworks outlined herein are both

a) personally tailored to/for me,

and b) part of my continued iteration and hence a work very much in progress.

Plausibly something in my way of thinking could be straight up harmful to you, so keep your guard up. I’ll put a 🚩if I think a section is more likely to fall in that category. I can confidently say the following is as best I can ascertain, serving to make me happier, healthier, and more effective but boy are biology and neuroscience complicated so mileage I’m sure varies a lot here. Consider drug interactions and side effects for example. A life saving medication for one person might cause dreadful side-effects for another, two drugs might each work for you on their own but in combination some unintended consequence arises. Finally, I’m a mere enthusiast in these matters. None of this is professional or expert advice.

With all that said, here's an outline. I’ll talk about:

• Guiding Principles - these are like anchors of personal philosophy I return to often. They do a lot of heavy lifting for me. They might be interesting to you, you may find them agreeable.

• Bifurcation of the Mind - I describe two modes of thinking and a variety of systems/frameworks I employ in each one.

• Misc. Hacks - I include a mix of fun little hacks that I enjoy and find helpful.

I decided it was better to write more stream of thought and polish less so apologies and bear with me on that. I may return to clean up later or it may remain a hastily scribbled brain dump.

Guiding Principles

Gardening for the Brain

You are a gardener, cultivating, planting, and tending to the patterns of your mind. Sometimes rooting out weeds, sometimes seeding flowers or trees to bear fruit in years to come. It takes time to build your garden. The work is never truly done. It is peaceful but not passive. It takes patience as well as toil, planning, and digging. The cold trowel of logic and the green thumb of self care.

But it is deeply rewarding, from the first bloom of intentional self modification gratifyingly rewarded to the moment—now, or perhaps years from now—when you look inward and see: The garden of your mind is a place you love to be.

Your brain is a machine of patterns—some inherited, most learned. These patterns include your habits, thoughts, beliefs, emotional responses, ways of interpreting the world, and so on.

• Being a gardener of the mind means cultivating the patterns that serve you, those that make you happy, healthy, resilient, capable, and kind—while rooting out those that choke growth, drain joy, and lead you to behave in ways you wish you wouldn’t. It’s an iterative process: small changes, repeated over time, reinforcing what helps and letting go of what doesn’t.

Idealism and Pragmatism

I used to feel this tension thinking I had to choose between idealism and pragmatism, between being a dreamer and being a realist. Some days I valued my childlike-wonder, my naivety, my rejection of reasonable expectations. Others I felt the prescience of consequence, and knew that only a cold facing of reality with grounded actions could bring better outcomes.

I now no longer see these as being at odds. Both are needed. The trap of idealism is failing to see the world as it is by focusing on how you wish it were. The pragmatist by contrast is sensible, making sound and savvy judgement. But pragmatism cannot substitute for ideals. The practical at any given moment is only by rare happenstance the ideal, worth dreaming and fighting for. One should then shackle pragmatism into the service of ideals. Ideals are the compass, the source of direction and pragmatism is the razor, answering at each step, How best from here to one step closer?

Idealism is about stripping away the bog of the is to imagine how things ought to be. Pragmatism does not mean setting reasonable end goals, it's about setting reasonable next steps.

• Wield pragmatism in the service of ideals. The ideals are the direction, pragmatism is a tactic which is meant to find the path of least resistance or the path best suited to succeed. Pragmatism as a source for goals itself does not a recipe for grand futures make.

Myopia and Haze

We are not omniscient, of course. We see only so far. In particular, we have each observed a limited subset of the evidence available which is itself a subset of the evidence entire. We have to recognize the inevitability that even a perfectly rational agent who is not ourself (and hence has seen a different subset of the evidence available) will disagree with us and be justified in doing so. If we assume that we ourselves are perfect reasoners, that we will draw the conclusions most suggested by the evidence we observe, we notice we will still be sometimes wrong. At times despite trying to obtain diverse, high quality evidence we will obtain instead a misrepresentative sample of the evidence and reason well straight to the wrong conclusion.

Worse, our myopia is exacerbated by our limited memory. We don’t recall all the evidence we’ve encountered accurately and we can fail to fit enough context into working memory to reach the right insights. These limitations cloak reality in a haze of uncertainty which one has to be diligent in trying to fight back against. Certainty is difficult to come by. So difficult that it is often a thing to be regarded with suspicion and we should act in ways that seem robustly good even amid ambiguity when possible.

An example of this is the familiar author’s dilemma in which you have finished writing an essay. You’ve checked it for errors, reading it line by line and ensuring each part was correct so far as you can tell. But immediately after finishing you ask yourself. Am I certain there are no errors? You know that you previously affirmed it line by line but now thinking back you can’t trace your full reasoning process or recall with high fidelity your state of mind at any given line to know if indeed you remained attentive, used sound logic, and missed nothing. You know the essay is many pages long and it seems likely you’ve made some mistake somewhere in the text though, if you checked it once more you’d likely affirm each line as accurate again. In essence we can hold many beliefs, and when we check them they appear well founded yet we know to hedge, imagining that some belief we hold somewhere in the list is surely mistaken. This is good, it's recognizing that we have blind spots, that we are finite things in a complex world.

It is difficult to hold every claim at arms length and evaluate it impartially again under the light of new evidence. We end up distilling our observations into beliefs about the world. It can be easy to lose track of the conditions under which a belief holds. It can be difficult to know where you may be going wrong in a tall stack of assumptions but reliably, statistically, our worldviews are full of little bugs. Often subtle or difficult to trace for us, sometimes obvious to others, sometimes indetectable.

• We are myopic, the past and future are cloaked in a haze of uncertainty. Epistemic humility is a necessity. Be most happy with goods that work under a wide variety of assumptions and worldviews. Be on the lookout for inaccuracies in your model of the world. Be scientific in building understanding.

You Are A Machine

You’re a machine, act like it!

No no, not in the way you might assume. I do not mean robotic (in the likely soon to be archaic sense of the word meaning stilted, cold, heartless). Certainly not. You are a machine of exquisite complexity, including incredible features like emotion, aesthetic, and artistry. When I say you are a machine do not picture some clunky cash register abandoned on a shelf, conjure in mind the greatest mechanical marvel you’ve beheld. An F1 race car is simple and mundane compared to you.

One hundred billion neurons firing in patterns more intricate than intergalactic filaments, connected through hundreds of trillions of synapses that outnumber all stars in our Local Group. To the thrum of your heart beats thirty-seven trillion cells orchestrate a symphony of molecular machinery, converting apple molecules to thoughts. Oxygen dances ancient waltzes with hemoglobin, and a microscopic internal ecosystem curated by your diet influences your moods while roving internal armies defend your cities. Self healing tissue actively repairs your exterior while muscle fibers string together precision combination moves reacting to millions of bits of information collected by sensors with enough acuity to detect a single photon. A colossal moving structure with countless tightly bound parts running at an operating energy comparable to a light-bulb, you are jam packed with the best technology discovered in over 3.5 billion years of evolution on Earth.

You’re like a starship, a machine of inspiration, something to study, to know a lot about, something to handle thoughtfully. Your capability is impressive but it is not magic. It is layered complexity. Expect to be a student of yourself. You are completely unique in the universe. This is incredible but it also means you have no user manual.

There are a million little knobs to dial and you’re a system with complicated feedback mechanisms. In the brain there are emotions, and thought patterns that create emotions and emotions that stem from thought patterns and matters of perspective, and cocktails of neurochemicals, and your brain is changing dynamically trying to adapt, and it's a hierarchical mix of brain regions inherited contingently from the way evolution unfolded and the brain influences the body and the body the brain and on and on etc. etc.

When distressed we may want to ask questions like ‘What is wrong with me?” but yeesh, this is tough. You have to give yourself substantial time to try to figure things like this out and it's good to get comfy with the realization that you’re a pretty intricate lil’ system. I claim, you want to

a) recognize that understanding yourself is a tough problem in life

b) be systematic/scientific in figuring it out. Oftentimes the vibe-ometer will be a good signal but other times it won’t and you need a full system diagnostic!

• Study and become the expert engineer for starship You. It’s a many year journey in this vessel of yours. You’ll need a good mechanic to keep you in tip top shape and nobody’s got the chops to be as good at it as you.

We’re Also just Monkeys

Two things can be true at once. We are fascinatingly intricate biological machines capable of sending rockets to Mars and composing symphonies. We're also hilariously cobbled-together primates whose bodies betray our evolutionary heritage at every turn.

Yes, my fellow bald apes with random patches of hair, our ridiculously narrow birth canals make childbirth a medical emergency. We share a single pipe for breathing and eating, offering the fun opportunity to choke on our own spit. Goosebumps, hiccups, city planners for the mouth forgot to tell the wisdom teeth their build contract was canceled.

Evolution is a blind process, like a developer working with legacy code full of bugs, but the "fix later" list never gets prioritized. We're the magnificent result of billions of years of innovation, carrying also, the hilarious baggage of creatures we used to be.

Being happy and effective is largely about being a good juggler of the goofy little goings-on in body and brain. One particular area that was a point of struggle for me: How serious is life?

Life is often serious—occasionally absurd. Your actions have real consequences, affecting people for better or worse. As adults, we're expected to recognize when seriousness is required. But if you take yourself seriously perpetually, you'll miss countless harmless opportunities for amusement. I’d even say one of the great ways to cope with life's gravity is by being delightfully unserious!

The key is getting really good at switching quickly. You want to notice when you're weighed down by unnecessary seriousness and give yourself permission to lighten up. Try to stay attuned to signals from people and situations, flip from silly to serious on a dime and vice versa. Listen closely for cues about which mode serves the moment. A decent rule of thumb for fun in serious situations is maybe, a quick quip is usually worth a go, humor shouldn’t halt proceedings.

Adults who overlearn that growing up means getting serious lose things we desperately long for: a good giggle, a little carefreeness, a sprinkle of mischief, a pinch of unguarded glee. Would you rather be a goat or a matter baby?

Learn Voraciously

You are one human among billions, born into a fleeting moment in the vast sweep of history. You grow in a particular place, shaped by a narrow sliver of the evidence the universe has to offer. In our time, we explore. We observe, we question, we infer, trying to understand who we are, and what we ought do as embers in defiance of entropy.

One day, from our deathbeds, we’ll look back on our voyages through the space of ideas, scientific, cultural, philosophical, etc. and realize we wandered only a few islands in a boundless archipelago.

You glimpsed distant shores, passing them by, knowing you could not visit them all. The land is vast, and your time is short and who can say what amusements of strange flora, and jeweled caverns of insight you miss.

It is up to us to choose where to sail, which islands to land upon, what fragments of knowledge to sketch into our map of the world. I think that begs us to sail far and sail fast. If there is any domain in which insatiable appetite is not a vice it's in the pursuit of information. Knowledge is special, you can give it away and still keep it!

• The world is a buffet of inexhaustible depth and breadth if following curiosity sustains you

See also my little love letter to neophilia: Through Every Looking Glass ‘Til ‘Neath the Waves We Sink

Bifurcation of the Mind

(Planner/Driver)

One of the biggest challenges in effective decision-making is knowing when to think more versus when to think less, when to zoom out for the big picture versus when to focus on immediate execution.

I imagine myself as having two distinct modes, or as consisting of two distinct people, only one of which I am at a given time. These modes help me avoid over- and under-thinking respectively. I try to notice whenever I get a signal that one of these common pitfalls is occurring and switch seats, so to speak. I think of these as the Planner and the Driver.

Sometimes I am the Planner, ensuring my day-to-day decisions align with my long-term plans and values, orchestrating my arcs. Other times I'm the Driver, recognizing that the Planner couldn't have foreseen the minute-to-minute minutia and knowing it's my job to improvise skillfully, to be present and to react to the world around me.

Sometimes I put them in tension and let them debate. I become a third-party observer, arbitrating their discussion and giving authority to whichever aspect seems most worthy, or forcing a compromise.

At the moment, for instance, the plan had been to head to the park at 4pm for a workout, but Driver has a good streak of focus and doesn't want to be disturbed. Planner worries that if I postpone the workout, I'll fail to do it today—reneging on commitments, costing me a day's fitness improvement, or worse, creating a slippery slope towards my couch potato era. Driver counters that the words are flowing easily and feels confident we'll still be motivated to work out later tonight.

Both positions seem reasonable. I set a hard cutoff for 5:30pm and outline minimum requirements for the workout in advance, anticipating waning motivation as the day goes on.

This works easily today because there is a streak of good trust that both lens’ are acting in good faith on my behalf. Sometimes the driver can be a bit of a maverick. The driver is the part of me that’s actively enjoying the rewards. It can often be too reward seeking as an aspect and needs to be reigned in. On the other hand, the planner can be destructively over critical and restrictive. It’s easy to lay out plans, it's harder to execute them. Both aspects need to have an awareness of the other and of what they bring to the table.

This distinction often also mirrors the Idealism/Pragmatism balance mentioned in the previous post. It’s the planner’s job to see the forest for the trees and say “Hey remember, we’re going north.” It’s the driver’s job to see the trees and say “Right north… I just have to get through this brush with a little detour and then remind me to get back on track please.”

Some more plannery jurisdiction

• Scale of months and years

• 1,000 foot view

• Vision, values, big goals

• Personal morals and philosophy

• Boundaries and rules

• Strategy

• Catch the driver on motivated reasoning

• Thinks of how you would feel in the future

• Reflects deeply on experiences, surveys memories, holistic perspective

Some drivery vibes

• Scale of seconds, minutes, hours

• Task decomposition, execution, and prioritization

• Workflows

• Presence of mind, high fidelity, in the moment, on the ground

• Monitoring, observing (internal and external, collecting information)

• Improvising and reacting to unforeseen challenges

• Catch the planner on being unrealistic, or draining the joy from life

• Thinks of how you feel now

In general you’re the driver the bulk of the time. Much of life is handling the thousands of micro decisions you make every day. Still the planner should be given some hours, maybe in mornings, evenings, or on weekend retreats to cogitate. The Integration of your experiences to update your values, planning out your long term goals, and reflection on your personal philosophy is all real cognitive labor and it takes time.

You’re often in a position where you must cede authority to either the planner or the driver. Consider which pitfall is more common for you, over-thinking or under-thinking? Are you too in the moment, acting impulsively and short changing yourself on your long term goals? Or are you too in your head, having difficulty acting effectively because integrating each micro decision into your cohesive greater self is too paralyzing?

Get good at switching seats. Experiment with ceding more decision authority to the aspect that helps you relieve this failure mode.

From here I’ll go into some specific frameworks and systems for each aspect respectively.

Systems for the planner

Habit Accrual / Deletion

The brain is passively adaptive. As you go through life, it constantly forms new mental structures and lets old ones atrophy to fit your behavior to your environment. This is a remarkable power, it means you can reliably change the way you behave and the things you enjoy.

The Planner wants to use this ability in a targeted way. Instead of letting the environment dictate the habits you develop, we want to consciously sculpt our habits by continuously acquiring new ones we like while deleting old ones we don't like or feel are no longer useful.

The inspiration for habit change can be general: "I want to read more" or "I should eat less junk food." The habit should be a concrete, specific behavior that helps you with the goal. For example:

"I'll read for 15 minutes before going to sleep every night"

and "Before going to the supermarket, I'll eat a full meal so junk food seems less tempting when I arrive."

Research suggests about two months on average as the time it takes to form new habits. You can try to learn many habits at once, but I'd recommend a slow and steady practice of habit accrual. What I do is the following:

My 2-Month Cycle:

• On my calendar, I break the year up into 2-month chunks

• At the start of each period, I pick one habit to build and one habit to break

• I keep an eye out for the trigger or context where the habit should occur

• When I notice it, I prompt the behavior I want to turn into a habit

• For the habit on the chopping block, when I notice I'm about to do the maladaptive behavior (or just did it), I pause, reflect, and do it the right way if possible

With this strategy, you pick up 6 good habits every year and break 6 habits that aren't helping you. What also happens is that habit formation itself becomes a meta-habit. This makes it easy to continue modifying yourself and develops your awareness about spotting and intervening on behavioral patterns more generally—so you can reinforce beneficial patterns and weaken unhelpful ones.

If you experiment with any of the other systems I describe, you can also use this method to integrate them bit by bit into your mind.

If you want to try it now:

• Brainstorm for 2-3 minutes. Make a short list of habits you want to build and habits you want to break. You only need one of each, but feel free to capture more ideas for later.

• Choose your favorites. Pick one habit to make and one to break. Distill each into a single, small practice you're confident you can manage. When in doubt, go with whatever excites you most.

• Commit for 2 months. Add your habits to your calendar or track them however works best. Start with the minimal version that gets you going, then gradually ramp up intensity as it becomes manageable, working toward your more idealized version over time.

System Testing

Just as you build habits, you can develop personalized systems, mental frameworks, and heuristics, taking ideas like the ones in this document and adapting them to your unique neurochemistry, goals, and preferences.

Think like a scientist studying yourself. Make neutral, judgment-free observations about your patterns. Form hypotheses about what mechanisms create your desired and undesired experiences. Then dare to experiment: "What if I intervene here? What if I try this different approach?"

Run real experiments on yourself. Apply good scientific principles—don't confuse correlation with causation, quantify what you can, and test things over meaningful time periods. You'll be running n=1 studies where you're both researcher and subject, so interpret results cautiously and calibrate slowly across many experiments.

Acknowledge the limitations. Your self-studies will be suggestive rather than definitive, and you'll rarely have robust controls. But even given these constraints, a thoughtful approach to testing and iterating on your ways of thinking and doing yields dramatically better results than just going with the default.

Fuel Sources

We often feel ‘tired’ or ‘low energy’, making it hard to get things done. But this doesn't make sense, most of us in the developed world have functionally unlimited energy available. Right now in my apartment, there are probably 30,000 calories sitting around. The store has hundreds of thousands more. On minimum wage, you can earn enough for your daily 2,000 calories in just minutes of work.

If you're facing genuine food insecurity, then yes, energy becomes a crucial resource requiring strategic money management and careful nutrition planning. But if you're reading this, you've likely achieved escape velocity from caloric scarcity.

So what's really going on? ‘Low energy’ isn't actually about energy, you’ve got tons and tons of that. We need to diagnose the feeling more precisely and take appropriate action:

Physical fatigue: "My muscles are tired"

• Normal fatigue? Good! You're getting stronger and healthier. Keep going!

• Excessive fatigue with injury risk? Rest those muscles, switch to different ones, or take a break entirely!

Mental fatigue: "I feel sleepy"

• Got enough sleep last night? Try to wake up and power through, consistent schedules improve sleep hygiene!

• Sleep deprived? Weigh the costs: sleep at an unusual time (disrupting your schedule) versus pushing through while impaired (which can be unhealthy).

Motivational fatigue: "My body feels fine, I just don't want to do the thing"

• Ah! You don't need more energy, you need a source of motion, my friend!

Sources of Motion

In my view, there’s a different sort of fuel that fuels your actions beyond the mere access to the physical resources needed to do it in the body, these are the sources of motion in your brain. You might rely on just one or two, but ideally you want to be a hybrid. Only the Avatar (that's you) can master all sources of motion and bring harmony to their soul.

Motivation

Motivation is your premium fuel. It can stem from positive feelings like excitement or negative emotions like fear, both serve their purpose, though for maximum enjoyment, you want to engineer your life around positive sources of motivation as much as possible.

• Collect motivators. Surround yourself with things that energize you, music, art, people, whatever sparks enthusiasm. You are the constant curator of your environment and there are countless things out in the world that motivate. Your desk needs knick-knacks that make you smile. You should hang around people who motivate you and are enthusiastic about things you care about. Tiny celebrations, a graveyard of the hundreds of ToDo’s you’ve already crushed, that playlist that just hits right now, curios from significant experiences, reminders of why you care about your work, all these things can help. Done right the spaces you inhabit are chock-full of motivational batteries which you can grab onto to replenish your mana and bolster your resolve at will.

• Fix broken reward loops. You'll lose steam if rewards feel too sparse or distant. Many worthwhile pursuits don't come with built-in dopamine hits, so use your clever human brain to create a trail of intermittent reward breadcrumbs along the way. Does it work if you’re rewarding yourself? Partially yes, some parts of your brain are silly simple… Pavlovian even and when solving math homework results in a snack math homework starts to be tastier. This is good, you don’t want to be able to substitute all your reward with chocolate proxies, just enough to power through when evolution didn’t really wire you up to intuitively understand why the stationary squiggles on the paper are worth staring at for an hour.

If we worked perfectly our motivation would signal the things worth working toward. In practice however there is often a mismatch. Our motivation is supposed to drive us to take actions that we expect will deliver us reward and it's supposed to protect us from undue drive to pursue a reward that never comes by dwindling as work to reward ratios seem unfavorable. Further, many motivations bubble up from complex, evolutionarily inherited subconscious systems that may simply map poorly to what you should actually do.

This basically breaks down into failure modes like:

• You're motivated to do a thing you should do but the level of motivation is inappropriate (too much or too little)

• You're motivated to do something you shouldn't do

• You're not motivated to do something you should do

Some classic examples:

• Project burnout: The motivation to complete a project runs out before the final mile. When you evaluate it, you feel the project is worth doing but some subconscious process made a bad determination that the project wasn't rewarding enough soon enough and you just feel bleh about it now!

• Evolutionary mismatch: You become highly motivated to eat dessert and eat too much of it even though we don't live in an environment of caloric scarcity. The impulse to stockpile excess calories is now maladaptive but your biological hardware still motivates it because it used to be a good strategy when meal times were unpredictable.

• Procrastination paradox: You're highly motivated to organize your entire workspace when you should be working on a specific deadline, because organizing feels productive but avoids the harder cognitive work your brain is resisting.

When motivation fails you, inertia or will power becomes your source of motion.

Inertia

Inertia is easy motion—motion by default, motion for free. You increase helpful inertia by decreasing friction in your life and establishing good habits. But inertia can also work against you, creating motion tangential to or opposite from your target trajectory. You want to remove these sources of negative inertia (like doom scrolling habits). You can harness inertia by making things you want to do easier and things you want to avoid harder.

Examples of reducing friction for good habits:

• Keep healthy snacks at eye level, junk food in hard-to-reach places

• Set up your workspace so starting work requires zero decisions

I love this ritual, I wake up in the morning and flip on the coffee machine then press the power button to turn on my desktop. Electronics whir, neon lights glow, and pitiful water is transmuted into divine beverage as man’s two greatest inventions set to work. I sleepily press two buttons and as my brain slowly comes online with coffee in hand I see the automatically restored instance of my browser, cursor blinking… inviting me over. The easiest most pleasant thing to do in the morning is getting straight to work, I engineered it that way. That’s the power of inertia.

Examples of adding friction to bad habits:

• Delete tempting apps and games from your phone/computer. If you consciously decide you want to play them you can just download them again within a few minutes but you’ll never accidentally find yourself on them because you’ve got to go uphill.
  

Willpower

Using Willpower

We celebrate the inexhaustible human spirit—the power to persevere, to never give up. We adore seeing our heroes stand again and again to face impossible odds. This is noble. It's good to be disciplined and strong. But avoid martyring yourself at the altar of will for will's sake.

Your force of will is an essential power that enables you as a conscious being to recognize when your motivation falls short and intervene—superseding the motivations you were given for the ones you reason you should hold. But willpower is your backup plan, something you employ when motivation falters.

The goal in exercising your will should be to deliver, to keep commitments, to finish the race. This can mean powering through something you vehemently don't want to do, possibly many times. But when you find yourself relying on willpower for prolonged periods, use that will to bring your motivation into alignment with your values.

The end goal is becoming someone who is motivated to do the things you value.

I include this caveat because becoming disciplined can make willpower your habitual source of motion. You might reason that it only matters that you do what you ought to do, emotions be damned. This is quitter talk. If you fall into this trap, you gave up somewhere along the way. True victory is striving to be the best version of yourself, powering through adversity and enjoying as much as possible of it too.

Developing Willpower

Many people say willpower is a limited resource. I haven't studied it, and I don't plan to. In this case, the truth doesn't matter because the effective belief is clear: your will is unlimited. You can simply keep going until you reach the fundamental limits of biology, chemistry, and physics. What could you do if your life depended on it? Anything and everything your body is capable of. Having a force of will that mimics this level of motivation then is a matter of belief.

Let this be the pattern in your brain—loop it until it's one of your most core beliefs. If your will fails, don't think "I guess I wasn't strong enough." Think, "How could this have happened? I've got more than this." Then get up and go again. And again. And again. Absolutely refuse to accept limits on yourself. The more you act as if your willpower is unlimited, the more unlimited it becomes.

Temper with wisdom: Remember this is your backup system (see also Growth Windows below). You aren't destroying yourself or causing lasting damage to prove something. You push to the limits of what you can tolerate without lasting cost, and you get comfortable there. This way you know that if or when you absolutely have to get through something no matter the cost, you will.

Planning

Well it’s right there on the tin, this is your main job in the planner seat. More than all, it’s long term planning that the planner needs to be responsible for and a key aspect of that is planning for what you want to do with your life. I’ve tried various methods of doing this, my most recent and favorite thus far is a career planning workshop series which some good friends and I developed at uni.

In this workshop you take turns with close friends, outlining your near and longer term career/life goals then opening them up to constructive criticism: Hot Seat Protocol

Systems for the driver

Emotion Processing Algorithm

You are a sailor navigating the sea of life and the course you’ve set is your plans both near and long term. The winds over the water are your emotions. Often your emotions are wind in your sails, boosting you towards your goals, the actualization of your ideal self, and the realization of your values. Other times they blow against you, setting you back or taking you off course. To be pragmatic let emotion be the wind in your sails only, when the winds would blow you off course, take down your sails, tacking against the wind.

Emotions are your brain's executive summary of countless internal and external processes happening simultaneously. Think of them as real-time status reports that compress massive amounts of information, hormone levels, blood sugar, social cues, memories, threat assessments, goal progress, environmental conditions, into a single, actionable feeling.

Your brain is constantly monitoring myriad variables: Is your heart rate elevated? Are people around you smiling or frowning? Did that interaction go well? Are you making progress on important goals? Is your energy depleting? Are there potential threats or opportunities nearby? Rather than consciously tracking each data point, your emotional system synthesizes all this information into feelings like excitement, anxiety, contentment, or frustration.

This compression is both powerful and imperfect. Emotions give you rapid, intuitive guidance about complex situations, fear warns you of danger, joy signals something worth pursuing, guilt suggests you've violated your values. But because they're summaries, emotions can sometimes be based on incomplete information or outdated programming. Your brain might generate anxiety about a presentation by combining memories of past failures, current stress hormones, caffeine levels, and social pressures into one overwhelming feeling of dread.

Understanding emotions this way helps explain why they feel so rich and meaningful, they literally contain multitudes of information, while also explaining why they're not always reliable guides for action. They're your brain's best guess about what all the data means, compressed into something you can actually use to make decisions.

With that in mind then your job is to recognize emotions for what they are. They are important signals to you that may or may not prescribe some action. There are two important distinctions here, first you owe to recognize the presence of the emotion and not ignore it. This is often said as all feelings are valid. I don’t like this terminology. Feelings are real, you really feel them. They may be faint or all-consuming, difficult to pin down or distinct. It's true the feeling is coming from somewhere, you feel it, but it's not guaranteed that the feeling accurately reflects the data you’re receiving or that you should act on it.

Once you understand emotions as data summaries, you can become more strategic about how you respond to them. Not every emotional signal requires immediate action—some are outdated alerts, some are based on incomplete information, and some are simply noting background conditions that don't need intervention.

A useful framework for emotional processing:

Pause and assess: What information might this emotion be compressing? Are you tired, stressed, hungry? Did something just happen socially? Are you thinking about a future challenge? Sometimes just identifying the inputs helps clarify whether the emotional response makes sense.

Check the urgency: Is this emotion signaling something that needs immediate attention (genuine danger, important relationship issue) or is it more like background weather that will shift on its own? Anxiety about a presentation next week doesn't require the same immediate response as fear when crossing a busy street.

Decide your response:

• Take action: If the emotion is highlighting something important you can address—apologize for a mistake, prepare better for the presentation, get some food when hangry

• Acknowledge and wait: Sometimes emotions just need to be felt and will naturally pass—grief needs time, excitement might be premature, frustration often dissipates

• Investigate further: If the emotion seems disproportionate or unclear, it might be worth exploring what's really going on underneath

The goal isn't to suppress emotions or always act on them—it's to become a skilled interpreter of your own internal status reports. Sometimes the wisest response to an emotion is simply noticing "Ah, my brain is telling me something about the current situation" and then choosing your next move consciously rather than reactively.

The emotion processing loop then is like:

• I feel {emotion(s)}?

• Why do I feel {emotion(s)}?

• What should I do given that I feel {emotion(s)}, if anything?

For Example: Sunday evening anxiety

I feel {emotion(s)}? → Anxious, restless, a bit of dread

Why do I feel {emotion(s)}? → It's Sunday evening and I'm thinking about Monday's workload. My brain is also processing that I didn't get enough done this weekend (guilt), I stayed up late last night (fatigue), and I just scrolled social media for an hour (overstimulation). The emotion is compressing: upcoming work stress + weekend regret + physical tiredness + digital overwhelm.

What should I do given that I feel {emotion(s)}, if anything? →

• Take action: Spend 10 minutes planning tomorrow to reduce uncertainty, make some tea to address the overstimulation, set a reasonable bedtime

• Acknowledge and wait: Accept that Sunday evening anxiety is normal and will naturally fade once I'm engaged in Monday's activities

• Investigate further: Not needed this time—the feelings are clear and the response is proportionate

Growth Windows

There is vast opportunity for improvement in virtually every area of your life. You can get stronger, learn more, enhance skills, get healthier, and so on. This should be ever-present in mind—why waste minutes when you could be improving yourself? That means pushing yourself, always asking how you can do more and do better, always trying harder things than yesterday. You have to stretch and strain. You have to put pressure on yourself to grow.

The default is always to remain too comfortable and pass up countless opportunities to improve. But it's clearly possible to push yourself too hard—some boulders won't budge no matter how hard you try to lift them. So how do you know if you're pushing too hard or not hard enough? When should you toughen up and power through versus when are you just doing lasting damage, breaking yourself down mentally or physically?

Maximizing growth is about maintaining your highest sustainable pace.

You want to be constantly stretching—remaining in that envelope for improvement beyond your comfort zone that pushes you but isn't detrimental. The mindset for pushing yourself in life is like training for flexibility. When stretching, you push to the highest level of discomfort you can tolerate while still remaining relaxed. If staying relaxed is trivial, you're not stretching hard enough. If despite every effort to cultivate inner peace you can't sit still and breathe in the stretch, you're stretching too hard.

This is what you're aiming for: By the end of every day, you want to happily collapse into bed exhausted, tired right to the edge of your ability to recover by morning, but not beyond. This keeps you stretching, positioned ideally within the growth window. When you find yourself pushing too far past this edge or falling too short of it, you can course-correct and dial back into the zone.

Push too Hard, at some point when you can afford to break down. 🚩Think carefully about when/if you find yourself at a time in your life where you can safely push yourself too hard. So hard you begin to break down. Do this only if your responsibilities allow space for it. It may not be appropriate or safe to do. But if it is, I say go for it. It’s easy to go through life not knowing what you’re truly capable of because you’re always protecting yourself. Protecting yourself is good. Do it usually. But also, many of us live in a very safe time and place in the world. Maybe you can afford to burn yourself out. If you do, you'll learn something valuable about yourself. Where you’re actually at, how far you can actually go. You’ll also get practice recovering. Really recovering, getting rested, getting your joy and motivation back and that’s really powerful. If you’re bold enough to push hard enough that you become good at this, there’s a way in which you become invincible. You learn that you can absolutely handle breaking down, you gain confidence that even if your life gets tough you will know what to do. You’ll know how to become okay again.

Force it ‘till You Feel It

The slogan "fake it till you make it" always rubbed me wrong, but there's something important to extract from it: things don't feel natural when you first begin. You feel like an imposter, like you’re ‘faking it’ and you have to keep going until to ‘make it’. I think this is the wrong framing entirely.

Of course it doesn't feel natural when you first begin something new. Your brain doesn't know what's going on, there's novelty, unreality, and uncertainty because this doesn't yet integrate with your existing knowledge base and routines. It doesn't feel like you. It doesn't feel like something you do. This will be true for most new things unless they happen to feel fun, familiar, natural.

You don't want to constrain yourself to only developing in areas that initially feel right or natural, this is arbitrary, a byproduct of your contingent path through life. You want to be able to reason about whether something is worth doing and, if so, adopt it and make it part of you.

Hence I submit an alternative slogan: "Force it 'til you feel it."

I’ll grant my version is not as catchy as the original but I think the lens serves better. Forcing, unlike faking, is good. Rather than pretending to be nice—you're putting in effort to make it real even though it isn't easy for you. We replace "make it" with "feel it" because the goal isn't to convince others that you belong or that this is natural for you. The goal is to actually feel it internally.

Brain/Body

When the brain becomes a bad place to be, the body becomes an excellent one

Sometimes frustration is too much, discomfort is too great. When your headspace becomes too loud, too distracted, too uncomfortable, retreat into the body. In particular, take actions which give you mental respite by demanding that your brain attends to present specific sensations in the body. Exercise here is ideal, meditation can be good.

Calendar

• Maybe try Calendly

You can set your availability once and send a meeting link to an invitee. They see your availability and select a time that works for them. This can save you an email or two when you want to make a meeting and that adds up!

• Calendar is for events and commitments of course

• Also use it for habit accrual

Have a countdown calendar for all your significant upcoming life events. I use the Countdowns app which has a phone widget so you can see how many days remain before deadlines, work trips etc.

ToDo

Overplanning, just as how the planner has overplanning as a key failure mode, productivity systems can easily be overdone and have their utility reduced. For me personally, the main failure is trying to over optimize on order of operations or on scheduling. I experimented with various levels of granularity but some detail is best left to improvisation. For me:

• ToDo’s should never be more granularly scheduled than day-level, usually week-level. I have much greater success writing 20 ToDo’s for the week and then improvising an efficient way to get them done.

• ToDo’s are for tasks that take greater than an hour or tasks that I’m likely to otherwise forget to do (tasks that I won’t trivially rederive as necessary/instrumental)

Brain vs Paper, In general the more you can reliably do in your brain the better. The brain is much more flexible than paper, it's easier to reorder, reorganize, and reprioritize. You don’t however want to forget or miss something and that’s an easy error for the brain. To this end jot down ToDo’s if you think there’s a chance you could forget them but be careful not to have fake productivity that takes the form of managing a stack of productivity systems!

Confidence

Confidence can be either founded or unfounded—that is, based in reality or not. You want to cultivate founded confidence, the kind grounded in real evidence, rather than delude yourself. Unfounded confidence is like a balloon: easily popped by reality, often leading people to waste energy defending the balloon of ego instead of building something more robust.

Founded confidence is especially important when you're trying to do something new. People tend to be skeptical of the unproven. Legitimacy comes through establishment, through demonstrated viability. That skepticism is often reasonable—but if you're venturing into new territory, you’ll need to be ready to push against resistance and doubt.

You want to push back when it's warranted, but not be contrarian when your confidence lacks a solid basis. Like most things, confidence requires calibration. In any given situation, you can be either overconfident or underconfident. The goal is to recognize which and adjust accordingly.

A good place to start is by identifying your baseline pattern: have you generally tended toward overconfidence or underconfidence in your life? Knowing your trend helps guide your correction. People often talk about overcorrection as something to avoid—but it can be a useful tool, especially if you're good at noticing when you've gone too far. You’ll often find the right balance between confidence and humility faster by overshooting and then dialing back than by inching forward cautiously.

That said, be mindful of coming across as erratic. People form expectations around how you usually behave. While experimenting with new ways of being is powerful (and commendable!), others might find sudden shifts confusing. Communication can help smooth this over.

Say you’ve realized you’re typically underconfident, and you’re talking with a close friend. You might say:

“Hey, I’ve been thinking I don’t trust myself enough—examples X, Y, and Z come to mind. I’m going to try leaning more into trusting myself, but I don’t want to go too far. Could you let me know if I seem to be overdoing it? I want to strike a good balance.”

Now, you can try on new behaviors—even radically—and people will understand. They may even admire your growth and self-awareness.

Finally, expect to recalibrate often. Make signs of your overconfidence or underconfidence something you're always attuned to, running this diagnostic quietly in the background.

Signs You're Underconfident

• You regularly second-guess yourself, even after making reasonable decisions

• You avoid taking on challenges or leadership roles, fearing failure

• You downplay your accomplishments

• You hesitate to speak up, even when you have relevant insights

• You often seek reassurance from others before acting

Signs You're Overconfident

• You act without council, or adequate preparation

• You dismiss constructive criticism or opposing views

• Things seem simple and obvious, everyone else seems irrational (life is actually very nuanced and complex!)

Building Founded Confidence

The dialing-in described above is great when your confidence is miscalibrated, but you also want to build founded confidence over time, and you can do this by building skills and experience. Focus on improving. See also: Growth Windows and Habit Accrual. Get comfortable doing hard things. Take challenging classes. Set ambitious goals. Actively develop your capabilities.

Miscellaneous Hacks

Possibly too idiosyncratic for broad applicability but here are some miscellaneous things that work well for me.

Association Clusters

The brain is associational. A single smell can instantly transport you back to childhood, or a familiar room can bring to mind details of past homeworks completed there. Studying in the same context where you learned something often helps with recall because your brain links the material to environmental cues.

This associational nature is a powerful and fun feature of the mind—one you can actively use to shift your thinking, emotional state, or even physiological readiness. You can train your brain to wire together specific clusters of memories—sensory, emotional, informational—so that when triggered by a thought or external cue, they cascade into motion.

Looping through the same pattern reinforces it, making the transition easier and faster. Over time, the sequence compresses: you get better at invoking it with less effort. You can even learn to adjust the “fidelity” of the association cluster—dialing it up for a vivid, immersive recall, or down for a quick mental nudge.

I think of it now like prompting a language model: you load up a chunk of context, examples, and tone to steer the output. In the same way, you can build mental prompts—especially for emotion and mindset. If the pattern is informational, you can build it through repetition. But if it’s emotional or sensory, you mostly have to catch it in the wild.

When you have a particularly vivid experience you want to preserve, make a note of it. Then, begin associating it with other similarly vivid memories—collecting them around that central moment. When you think of one, recall the rest. With practice, you form a potent internal vignette: a cluster of memories that reliably brings you into the state you want each time you run through it.

Some examples of ways I’ve used this:

Bruin Walk

Bruin Walk is the central thoroughfare at UCLA and a pleasant, if sometimes crowded, stroll. During undergrad, I developed a ritual wherein whenever I crushed a midterm or final exam, I’d play my favorite song of the moment and walk down Bruin Walk, soaking up the sunshine and enjoying the high of many study hours paid off.

At some point in senior year, I was feeling particularly satisfied. I closed my eyes and smiled, the music hit perfectly, a pleasant breeze blew, and when I opened my eyes again, I felt a profound sense of confidence and contentment.

Now the ritual has evolved. In noise-canceling headphones I’m walking anywhere, listening to music, and all I have to do is close my eyes for a second or two. My mind races through dozens of post-exam highs, beautiful walks, favorite songs—and thanks to this potent cluster of associations, I can very often turn my mood around on a dime with a lengthy, contented blink of the eyes.

World Tour

A core value of mine is a love of life—a love of living things in particular, like animals and humans. If I could be constantly aware of all the incredible people around the world creating art, laughing, studying, dreaming, I think I’d be eternally motivated.

A big inspiration for me (cf. Collect motivators) is just looping through places I’ve been, people I’ve met in passing, a rolodex of faces. I imagine museums in London, and LA, el Cajas, Ecuador, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon racing toward me. Cargo ships in ports, popcorns of aww around the world from cute cat videos, and rockets launching. Sometimes I’m on one, maybe shooting out towards Jupiter in my mind's eye or recalling the JunoCam sattelite imagery I used to process and pore over. This always makes me realize how incredible it is to be alive and reminds me there is some much worth working toward in this world and on worlds beyond.

Cached Rewards

Life involves chasing big goals—things that take time, effort, and offer no guaranteed payoff. So sometimes, you cache a reward. You can choose something you love and deliberately save it for a milestone.

For me, one was Rent. I love musicals, but held off on listening until after graduation. Four years of anticipation, and I finally hit play on a flight to Europe the day after I finished undergrad. It killed. A sunlit sky, emotions high, cruising above the clouds—absolutely worth the wait.

You can do this on a micro scale too. Having something to look forward to, helps with motivation. Maybe something after work or a few minutes of something enjoyable first thing in the morning to make waking up easier.

Shortcutting Subvocalization

Subvocalization is the internal "voice" that silently pronounces words as you think or read—essentially talking to yourself in your head with full word-by-word precision.

I find that for a variety of cognitive tasks I can speed up significantly by shortcutting subvocalization. Internally this feels like having an approximate version of a thought that's formed, but I haven't rolled it out word by word or selected the particular sentence to capture it.

You can intervene in this process: instead of completing the thought with word-level precision, you roll forward with the approximate form onto the next thought. You can dial this process forward or back—coarse-graining up to the complete thought with each word differentiated from the soup of similar concepts, giving the thought definite shape, or rolling immediately to the next thought upon recognizing its vague form.

When you do this, you're trading accuracy and concreteness for speed. Often this is a worthwhile trade-off, though it's really task-dependent.

I most often use an intermediate level where I'll get partway through concretizing a thought—selecting the opening words—then skip to the follow-up thought without having subvocalized entirely.

Notably, I'm not talking about System 1 vs. System 2 thinking here. This is like a blurry high-speed mode for System 2 thinking.

Conversely, you can also slow down further, really lingering on a thought and taking extra time at the word selection step to explore alternative word choices and formulations.

Last Day 🚩

Be careful with this one—it’s not for everyone. For some, it can be deeply motivating; for others, just distressing.

Attached to my calendar is a countdown: the estimated number of days left in my natural life, based on familial data. At time of writing, it reads 16,411. It’s a pessimistic estimate, I hope—but I watch it tick down, day by day.

Whenever my gaze lands on it, I feel a pang of sadness.

A lot of sadness.

But also a surge of motivation. It reminds me that every day counts. It makes me want to live today in a way I won't regret, in a way I'm proud of. I know the number will be one lower tomorrow. I want to spend it well.

Tea Time Optimized

If you’re someone who appreciates a warm beverage—tea, coffee, hot chocolate, etc.—consider picking up an infrared thermometer. You can dial in and note your ideal drinking temperature for that perfect sip every time. It’s a tiny quality-of-life upgrade, but for me, the difference between a mug of meh and a cup of heaven is just a few degrees.

For me, the sweet spot is a cozy 67 °C.

And this goes beyond tea. Life is full of small calibrations—tiny optimizations that make your day just 1% better. Paying attention, taking notes, and tuning your environment or routines even slightly toward ease and enjoyment? That adds up.

Read More by Not Reading

There's really no substitute for a good book or an insightful, touching poem. Conversation is excellent, but the published written word is a synthesis of the writer's thinking, filtered for your edification or enjoyment—and there's no shortage of things worth reading. Many people wish they could read more or had more time to read. A big limiting factor is eyeball time. Your eyes tend to be busy as you go about your day, and it's difficult to get much done when your visual field is taken up by a book. A sad reality in the buzz of the modern world that has us praying for rainy days, to be sure.

There is a way to "read" more, though: listening to audio versions of your reading material. The disadvantage is that with a book you can dynamically change your reading speed quite easily—slowing down for dense material, speeding up or skimming as desired. This is more annoying on an audio player, but the advantage is that you keep your eyeballs free. Ideally read when you can, but for all the things on your reading list you might otherwise never get to, why not just give them a listen instead?

I always feel naked without my headphones. What if I have to do something boring and don't have my audiobook? Need to do the dishes? Long commute? Load up your reading list and get ready for chores and travel to become your favorite part of the day!

• I like Audible for audiobooks, you can also use Spotify

• For other material, download the ElevenReader app, then just paste the link to any blog post or webpage you want read aloud (bonus you can have it read to you in AI Richard Feynman’s voice).

Sweet Synergies

Eat, pray, love? Meh. I mean you do you but how about walk, lunch, listen!?

Picture this: it's the middle of the workday and time for your midday grub. You grab your meal and either a buddy or your headphones. You head outside with fork and bowl in hand and go for a walk while you chat with your colleague or listen to an audiobook. This is what peak lunch performance looks like btw, mouth and ears living their best life, eyes enjoying the scenery, stomach fed, legs getting steps in. It's so unbeatable, I'm obsessed.

Gaslight Yourself 🚩

Hey, hey, woah hear me out! Be cautious with this one but it’s wholesome for me and worth sharing I think. Often, the biggest barrier to doing something isn’t the task itself—it’s just getting started. That first bit of activation energy is where we stall.

A trick I use all the time is to deliberately underplay what I’m about to do. You tell yourself:

“Not feeling the gym today—maybe just a 10-minute jog and then breakfast.”

And once you’re moving, it’s often much easier to keep going:

“Well, I’m already warm and jogging… may as well workout.”

Actually you can get a lot out of yourself this way,

“Well I could probably do one more minute…”

“Well I could probably do one more minute…”

“How about just one more rep.”

“Half a rep more, just half a rep…”

“Oh halfway though already, come on final rep…”

“One more final rep”

“New_new_final_rep.fr”

At some point you get wise to your own tricks so you’ve got to give it to yourself on occasion but I use this a lot. This is probably too far and bad if you regret it in the end and probably fine if you end up more productive, snickering at successfully pulling one over on yourself yet again.

Thought Games

You may have heard of the “rubber duck” debugging method: when you're stuck on a problem, explain it out loud to an inanimate object—like a little yellow duck on your desk. Just talking through the issue often helps you think through the solution.

Rubber ducks are well and good but I prefer something a bit more animated. Instead of a rubber duck, I invite people from the past into my mind as conversation partners.

For example:
Galileo Galilei might ride the bus with me to campus. As we pass traffic lights, smartphones, and storefronts, he gazes around in astonishment. I narrate the modern world—explaining the invisible pulse of GPS satellites above us, the nature of electromagnetism, or the strange social conventions of 21st-century life. It’s delightful and clarifying. You can learn a lot when you try to explain something foundational to someone who’s never seen a lightbulb. Galileo in particular is also a fan of hip-hop if you’ve got your headphones handy and luckily language barriers need not exist in the imagination.

Or perhaps Newton is peering over my shoulder at my desktop, trying to understand how I’m manipulating light with the motion of my mouse hand. He asks how the cursor follows my fingers, so I start explaining transistors, binary logic, and OLED displays. Then I let him surf the web. He looks himself up. This turns out to be a mistake—he enters a trance, crawling around on Wikipedia for hours, clicking from article to article, asking questions incessantly and refusing to surrender the computer back to me. Still, it’s worth it.

These imagined dialogues do two things for me:

1. They sharpen my thinking. Explaining something to a curious person from the past forces you to clarify assumptions and avoid jargon. It’s an exercise in your world knowledge and theory of mind.
   
   

2. They make me appreciate the world more. Seeing through the eyes of someone centuries removed reframes the mundane as miraculous. There’s magic all around you and it, and it bears remembering.
   

You can try this with anyone—Ada Lovelace, Confucius, Alan Turing, your thrice-great-grandmother. Some of the best insight comes when these simulacrums start asking questions you can’t easily answer. You’ll find gaps in your understanding, fuel curiosity, or maybe re-enchant your day-to-day.

Send Off

Hey that’s all for now! Hoping any of this was helpful and/or interesting to you. Planning to circle back and expand in future, providence permitting. Goodbye and good gardening.