What I've Learned Since I Was 20
A college student on the verge of 20 recently asked me what I’d learned since that age. I’m not going to focus here on precise and concrete skills like coding or how to write a press release, even though those have been important, but instead on the big lessons. Here we go...
1) I learned how to reframe discussions to make them more useful.
There are infinite frames and reframings -- that is, the assumptions on which a discussion is based. Knowing when to question the frame and propose another more useful frame can move a discussion in the right direction. Partly, this ability comes from experience, things you have lived that make you question the frame and intuit another. Partly, this ability comes from the courage to suggest that a discussion is heading in the wrong direction.
Complex adaptive systems (which include most societies, businesses, industries, and life forms) are very hard to reason about. The best way to know them is through direct contact, to see what they do when you nudge them. That is, the best reasoning about them is empirical, based on experiments, and the worst is often pseudo-deductive, based on assumptions so absurd that they are not even wrong. (Many recent discussions of AI and society fall into the latter category.)
A non-AI example: I was recently part of a discussion talking about how we can identify experts. The frame of the discussion was: “Are prediction markets a good way to decide who’s an expert on subject X?” Personally, I find prediction markets next to useless in identifying the kinds of experts I care about (people who can build or heal or do things), and we ended up talking about other signs of expertise: e.g. high energy; generating new language to describe an undertheorized problem; the ability to get very detailed; doing way more work on one’s area of expertise than any salary would require.
While “reframing discussions” may seem like a strange way to start this list, as you start to work with groups of people to accomplish something greater than you could alone, being able to reframe the discussion to maximize everyone’s understanding and focus them on the right parts of the problem becomes a very high-leverage skill.
2) I romanticize people and places less.
When I was young, I romanticized people and places a lot. I thought they contained something special, exotic, and alien to me such that, by winning the love and acceptance of those people or by moving to that foreign country, I might transform myself. I did this, for example, with Paris and certain people in Paris. Entire industries are built on such romanticizing. They exist to create illusions in us.
Anyone trying to sell you stories about "the Russian soul" or the "French way of raising kids/losing weight" is wrapping shiny packaging around ethnic commodities that will ultimately mislead you. Many of these packaged places rely on throwback impressions of some golden age.
That said, I do think some places are special and useful for some purposes. Anyone interested in tech, startups or AI should find a way to move somewhere close to San Francisco, for example. Other cities are good for other things (New York for finance, Paris for fashion). Moving to the right city increases your luck surface, the chance that you will find the right people to learn and live with.
Scenius is real, it’s domain-specific, and it’s ephemeral. Paris is no longer a writer’s and artist’s haven as it was in the early 20th century, if for no other reason than the rents are too high. Seattle has changed a ton since the late 80s/early 90s grunge movement. Berlin was magical before the wall fell (and for a few years after). The same can be said for many cities, but for the sake of attracting tourists, they will continue to advertise simulacras of themselves. Trust the scene you find, and keep moving til you find the right one for you. Scenes have legs and so do you.
A corollary and subset of scenius is lineage. By lineage I mean finding one or more people who can show you the ropes. The world is really just lineages all the way back. (For example, Nobel laureates cluster together.) If you’re part of one, you will be accelerated on your path, and if you’re not, you have to work harder at every step to learn that secret knowledge held in someone’s lab notebook or mentioned in passing in the hallway. Some people are born into lineages and others have to find them later. While institutions like universities have a bad rap in some corners of tech, for the young they remain important places to find peers as well as mentors. Don’t underestimate the power of strong institutions to make it easier for you to find great ones.
Finding a place dense with talent in a sector that inspires you, and where you can somehow cover the rent without selling the majority of your soul, can be a great move. If you do relocate, keep paying attention to how you feel, and moving around within that place until you find the right niche. Scenes are neighborhood-dependent. If a place is socially viscous (ie hard to actively network through due to distrust or traffic), extremely overpriced, or otherwise depressing, then move to another!
It might seem like I’m contradicting myself, saying that I romanticize people and places less, but they are still important. I’m actually just saying that you should pay attention to what they are now, and give less weight to what they say they are or to your preconceptions of them. When you’re young, sometimes preconceptions are all you have. But with careful attention to how people act and how places shape your life, you can quickly accumulate experience and use it to make better decisions.
It’s a paradoxical balancing act to shrug off certain common illusions while also cultivating more grounded hopes.
3) I’ve been cured of naive cynicism.
Among the young, say teens and 20-somethings, cynicism is like cigarettes. It makes you look more grown-up than you are, and it poisons everyone close to you. That cynicism usually requires two elements: 1) pessimism, and 2) overgeneralization. You take a bearish stance on a broad swath of phenomena. "Experts never know what they're talking about."
(The truth is that some experts sometimes know what they're talking about and sometimes don't, and the whole trick is to figure out who you can trust about what.)
Cynicism expresses itself in many ways, however. It can present as both mockery and irony. While these are separate from cynicism, they can be useful tactics to communicate one’s dark disbelief, and also serve a purpose as psychological buffers standing between the world and one’s wounded hopes. The world pays too much attention to prophets of doom, probably for evolutionary reasons. So be forewarned, and try to find people who don’t bum you out. You can’t save the doomers, and there’s no pay off in adopting their beliefs.
In the case of irony, we give up on saying what we mean, and avoid stating our argument. Being ironic means you never have to explain. In the case of mockery, we give up on enthusiasm and tear it down in others. This is unfortunately all too common in schools. In the case of cynicism, we give up on optimism.
As with experts, there are times and places when optimism about specific projects is not appropriate. As a young person, you should be looking for places where a kind of general optimism is rewarded, and general pessimism discouraged, even if certain ideas are criticized based on actual experience by people with skin in the game. (I was saddened to hear that pessimism is common in much of academic science. I know from personal experience that optimism is rewarded in Silicon Valley.)
4) I respect the body I live in.
Doing basic things like keeping a schedule where you sleep 8 hours a night, wake up in the morning around sunrise, get sunlight, eat unprocessed food that you fix yourself, and exercise from time to time has immense effects on your physical and mental health. When you're young, it's easy to neglect your body because it can take a lot of abuse. But that does not hold true forever.
Among startup founders, it is common to sacrifice many things in life that others consider important, and often times those sacrifices are necessary. The one thing you really shouldn’t sacrifice is your health, because when you lose it, you lose everything else, including the startup you sacrificed it for. Energy makes time, and health makes energy. Once you have those, all your other problems become more solvable.
5) I’ve turned away from social media, addictive digital products, and media outrage.
I block most social media on most of my devices and browsers, and when it is necessary for my jobs, I use plugins like News Feed Eradicator so that I'm not exposed to whatever the Borg’s new algorithm is pushing. Likewise, I avoid games on phones and laptops. When I visit news sites, I mostly scan headlines and leave. I deliberately don't click on stories that I think will make me angry because I know the news publishers want to get me riled up.
6) I left behind many fancy abstractions.
There are lots of bullshit artists in the world who get away with their schtick by complicating everything and hoping that no one will ask what they actually mean. By doing that, they waste a lot of other peoples’ time. This can be true for business consultants, academics of various stripes, and scientists.
If someone selling complex ideas and big words cannot descend the ladder of abstraction to explain what they mean in plain terms, and why it matters, and what you should do with your newfound plain-language insights, then you should leave them behind. Life is too short.
Places where I tend to see high-falutin’ abstractions: academic philosophy, business books, hard-to-replicate sciences like psychology, self-help, crypto, fad diets and nutrition. Some of these areas have impressive people working in them, but the signal is hard to find amid the noise. Any field that plays on widespread hopes and fears, fundamental human emotions, will attract its share of snake oil.
Sheer complexity, shiny abstractions, and the promise of belonging offered by their tribe of proselytizers are one of the great enemies of promise, the lures that morbid bureaucrats and shysters of all sorts set for youth.
7) I learned to respect hard things.
Most things worth doing in life are hard.
Raising kids is hard, but there is no greater love. Learning is hard if you're doing it right (e.g. deliberate practice and active recall), but the rewards that come with mastery and better decision-making are immense. Even the best jobs involve some amount of grind, doing things you find tedious. The only path forward is to choose something that matters to you, and pay the price of grind so that you can also do the more interesting stuff.
Exercise, fasting, and ice plunges are all hard, but if you're doing them right, they also have huge biochemical payoffs and health benefits. Building a business is hard, but it beats the hell out of corporate drudgery most days.
Conversely, addictions are easy, at least when you’re starting out.
Many forces in society do not want you to do hard things. They want you to opt for the easy route, and then to pay for it. They want to make you dependent. This is true of for-profit organizations and co-dependent parents, the main difference between them being that one wants money and the other wants emotional security. Each one is damaging in its way. At a certain point, you must give up the coddled life and exit the pity party, or resign yourself to never achieving your potential.
I'm not advocating that you live in a shack in the woods, eat what you kill, and haul your own water up from a stream (at least not most of the time :).
But I am saying that you should seek discomfort, cultivate certain disciplines where you persistently encounter mild to moderate forms of pain. It will do more than build character. It will make you healthier and more skillful. It will raise you up to see a further shore. The road to hell is paved with fragility. By strengthening yourself and allying yourself with unfragile people and teams, you will have a much better life.
* Photo credit: Dorothea Lange; the subject is the hands of her husband Maynard and son Daniel.