a bottle with a message in it on the beach

Browse all the blog posts here. Hub pages organize posts around certain themes.

Latest blog posts

  • Your four-dimensional body

    Your four-dimensional body

    You are a four-dimensional being. You have definite bounds in length, width, height, and time. And you can cast your consciousness through time: into the past through memory, and into the future through prediction and planning. Are you acquainted with your one-year-ago self? With your future self?

  • Link: How Specialization Enables Systemic Evil

    Society keeps doing foolish things and hurting itself because too many of its members are too specialized to look around and notice the danger/fraud/waste.

  • Manage your indefinite optimisms

    Manage your indefinite optimisms

    Thiel’s diagnosis of “indefinite optimism” in startups also applies at the personal, life-planning level, and I’ve found it to be a really useful, if scary, tool for that. What are the pleasant future daydreams that you passively hope for?

  • Master your sleep cycles

    Figure out your sleep cycles. It’s a simple way to optimize your sleep, completely free. Once you know it, you can use your alarm clock in harmony with your natural rhythm, rather than against it.

  • Control: The mysterious aura of good outcomes

    Control: The mysterious aura of good outcomes

    Some people often fail to show up or follow through on plans, not because they lack ability or care, but because “unexpected” life interruptions seem to follow them around. What’s going on there? What is actually within your control?

  • Responsibility: The trait of honorable obligation

    Responsibility: The trait of honorable obligation

    The second key trait of productivity is responsibility. Responsibility is a moral reality, unlike agency, but it often increases agency in a person’s life – sometimes tremendously.

  • Agency: The “main character” trait

    Agency: The “main character” trait

    It’s popular to describe high agency as “Main Character Energy,” referring to the fact that the main character in a story is the person who does interesting things and has unusual experiences. The modern world includes so many opportunities to do interesting things, but also presents us with more tempting lifestyle scripts that keep us stagnant.

Hub pages

There are some things that pretty much everybody should dabble in: fields where everybody should have, say, roughly two university courses' worth of knowledge. So we're all "necessary generalists," in the sense that we need to have these few things covered, even if we'd rather put all our focus into a single separate thing.
This hub page is about the meta-skills that all generalists should have—skills to help keep their lives in balance and avoid common pitfalls. This is a list of the skills and mindsets that I've found necessary to use myself, and I'll add to it in the future as more ideas come up or are suggested to me by others.