And why do others die at 80 and feel like they’ve lived 300 years?

That’s what this essay is about.

But first, let’s go back in time to 1933 and meet a boy called Henry.

1.

In 1933, Henry Molaison is 7 years old, and is playing outside on the streets of Connecticut.

A man riding a bicycle doesn’t see Henry, cycles into him and knocks him unconscious.

Henry is never quite the same again.

It starts with minor seizures, and by the age of 27, Henry is having twenty epileptic fits per day.

Desperate to cure his crippling condition, he volunteers for experimental brain surgery. As Henry wakes up from the operation, life delivers him some good news, bad news, and awful news.

The good news is that the surgery has largely fixed his crippling epilepsy.

The bad news is that he won’t remember the good news, because of the awful news.

The awful news is that the surgery has destroyed his ability to form new memories.

For the next 55 years of his life until Henry dies at 82, every day, every hour, and every minute of his life is forgotten.

His psychiatrist visits him daily and gets to know him well over the years. Whereas Henry meets his psychiatrist for the first time each day.

The most tragic detail of Henry’s life was found in his mirror: Henry would get out of bed, go to the bathroom, look in the mirror and be confused at why his reflection looked so old.

The problem with amnesia is not only do you forget, you forget that you forget.

If Henry forgot every minute of his life, did he have a life?

Henry had a rare condition — but it’s not rare to forget large portions of your life. It’s one of the most common human experiences for time to disappear as you age.

Let’s call it Henry’s Mirror. When you see an older face staring back at you in the mirror, and wonder: Where did the time go?

2.

One of the explanations given of why time speeds up as we age is Janet’s law.

When you’re 5 years old, a year is 20% of your life. And when you’re 50 years old, a year is 2% of your life. Janet’s law states that you experienced roughly half of your perceived life by 20 years old.

Or to put it another way: The summer for a 5 year old feels as long as the 10 years from 40 to 50 years old.

It’s more useful to view time in three dimensions:

1. Clock time - How time ticks on a clock.
   

2. Experience time - How time feels in the moment.
   

3. Memory time - How much time you remember.

One hour in clock time is always one hour on clock time — but it’s not always one hour in experience or memory time.

Your flight gets delayed by one hour, and it feels like five hours staring at the departures board, yet you struggle to remember it weeks later.

Or that hour long sunrise walk laughing with friends speeds by. But one year later you remember that sixty minutes more clearly than the entire month of April where you stared at your laptop.

In Henry’s 82 years, he had lots of clock time. 2.6 billion seconds, 4,278 weeks and 29,951 sunrises. But Henry’s life flew by because it was 0 minutes in memory time.

When people say time is moving quickly, what they are actually saying is they don’t remember where the time went.

Memory is why the first 18 years of your life feel so slow in hindsight. New experiences are encoded into memory. The first day at school, the first time you drove a car, your first kiss or first heartbreak.

It’s why every married couple can remember their first date — but few can remember their 37th date, unless it was novel.

If you don’t break this pattern, soon you’ll catch an older face in the mirror and wonder: Where did the time go?

3.

If you were to compress thousands of scientific journals on increasing human life span, you get the following Three Laws For Living A Long Life:

1. Exercise
2. Don’t smoke
3. Sleep 7-8 hours per night

But in Chapter 7 On The Shortness Of Life, Seneca said: “You must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long.”

So what if you want to exist AND live longer?

Unlike Henry, we have agency over this.

Here’s the Three Laws of Remembering Your Life:

Law 1 - Seek Novelty

How many days do you remember from last year?

The typical answer is about 10-20 of the 365 days.

That’s about 95-98% of the year lost to Henry’s Mirror.

Look at the days you remember. Stare into their soul. What do they have in common? You’ll notice some novel event happened where you broke out of routine and that day got encoded into memory.

In the micro, never let a day go by where you don’t do something novel — no matter how small. It could be a new route to work, a conversation with a stranger, a book opened at random.

In the macro, create at least one genuinely novel day every fourteen days — a day so different to your past thirteen days that future-you will be able to find it when you go looking for it.

Law 2 - Optimise for the best story

How many social media posts do you remember from yesterday?

The average person sees 300 novel posts in a single scroll. If novelty is the only variable for memory, those posts should be unforgettable. And yet hours later, they’re gone.

Now think of a great movie you watched years ago. You can probably recall the plot, the turning points, and maybe even specific lines of dialogue. Why does one great movie from years ago outlast tens of thousands of social media posts you’ve scrolled past since?

Social media is a random series of events, no cause and effect, no escalation, no resolution. A great story is a designed series of events with a clear structure that taps into our emotions. That’s why we remember it.

This is also why university tends to feel longer in memory than other periods of life. It’s split into multiple years (parts) and each year is split into semesters (chapters). There’s a clear progression of the plot towards the finale.

If your life feels like a great story, you’ll remember more of your life. If your life feels like a boring story or a random social media scroll, you’ll forget your life.

A good rule of thumb when you’re making a decision is to ask yourself: What makes the better story?

Even if the decision goes wrong, time will slow down as your plot thickens. And as Entrepreneur Amjad Masad says: “You’ll at least be fun at dinner parties”

Sit down and look at your life story so far. If you were watching a movie, what would the hero do next?

Do that, and you’ll remember more of your life.

As Dostoevsky said in White Nights: “But how can you live and have no story to tell?”

Law 3 - Marvel at the smallest details

You can’t maximise novelty and your life’s plot every single second of the day.

You will wake up in the same bed as your partner most days, take your children to school most days and you walk the dog most days.

When you’re doing repetitive habitual events, squint and marvel at the small details so your brain slows down the perception of time.

When you look at your partner, can you spot a freckle on their face you’ve never consciously noticed? When you look at your child, try to see a new depth to their eye colour. When you listen to your favourite song, is there an instrument you can notice that you’ve never heard before?

In Japanese culture, this idea is called Ichigo Ichie, that every moment, even when it feels repetitive, is unique and will never be repeated again.

When you’re at dinner with old friends, notice how it’s the first time you’re all this exact age, in this exact month, with this exact weather, eating this exact meal — never to be repeated like this ever again in the history of the universe.

Your morning coffee is never the same coffee. The temperature is slightly different, the first sip lands differently, your mood is different, the light comes through the window differently. Look for those small marvellous differences.

One of the best ways to notice the small marvellous details is to view today through the lens of your 85 year old self in a care home. What are the small details they’d notice if they could go back in time to this moment?

Do not go gentle into the good night of forgetting your life. Rage, rage against the dying of the light by marvelling at the impermanent details.

4.

The good news is that you’re not a passive victim of time like Henry. You don’t have to forget your life.

If you live your life on autopilot, you may die at 80, but feel like you died at 30.

If you take agency over your life, you may die at 80, but feel like you died at 300.

If you seek novelty, create stories and marvel at the small details, when you see an older face staring back at you in the mirror, you won’t wonder: Where did the time go? You’ll say: “Oh, I’ve got so many stories to tell.”

If you enjoyed this, I’m putting together a list called anti-slop — the list of the best 50 resources — books, movies, podcasts I’ve consumed. Get it by putting in your email below.

But first, let me tell you about my morning routine.

1.

Here’s how I started my day this morning:

1. Got out of bed

2. Walked to the bathroom

3. Brushed my teeth

4. Had a hot shower

You might not be impressed, but if the ghosts of kings, queens and emperors could see me, their jaws would drop in awe.

The most powerful man in the world and ruler of Rome, Emperor Augustus, slept on a sack of straw.

Marie Antoinette, the future queen of France, lived in an era where people threw their bathroom visits out of the window. As she strolled around the palace of Versailles, someone emptied their bathroom visit from the top floor and drenched Marie.

Speaking of Queens, Queen Elizabeth I's teeth were black from decay. The Queen was convinced that cleaning them with sugar would help, but it only accelerated her rotting mouth.

Genghis Khan and Julius Caesar never experienced a hot shower. Hot showers as we know them today weren’t invented until the 1860s, and didn’t become common for the average person until the ~1960s.

I forgot about air conditioning because it silently works for me 24-7: In 1881, as President Garfield lay dying, engineers had to gather over half a million pounds of ice and blow air over the ice in an attempt to keep the president’s room cool.

I started my day dancing on the graves of dead problems that dead people thought could never die.

Dead problem = Problem that’s been solved

Alive problem = Problem yet to be solved

2.

Take a guess: How many years did it take for human beings to create fire, build shelter, and hunt with spears?

About 2.2 million years. 1.5 million years to master fire, 500,000 more years to build shelter. Another 200,000 years before we sharpened a spear.

I used to think humanity progressed like the red line, but it actually looked more like the green line.

Suddenly in the 16th century, a boom happened. More problems started getting solved in one year than past humans did in hundreds of thousands of years. It’s known today as The Enlightenment.

If you imagine the entire history of humanity as one year, this boom only happened at 11:40 PM on December 31st, just twenty minutes ago.

For most of human history, when humans faced problems they:

1. Assumed they were unsolvable
2. Assumed authority had the answers

If people questioned 1 or 2, they risked isolation like Galileo, who claimed the Earth orbits the sun, confined to house arrest for nine years. Or like Giordano Bruno, who declared the universe was infinite, taken to the town square and burned alive.

So what changed?

Human beings began to solve the ultimate problem, the giga problem, the problem of all problems: They solved the problem of how problems are solved.

3.

In 1934, Austrian philosopher Karl Popper published The Logic of Scientific Discovery. It contains the best explanation I’ve found of solving the problem of how problems are solved:

1. Notice a problem - You notice something doesn’t work or conflicts with what you expected.

2. Create a guess - An explanation that is specific and risky.

3. Test your guess - Don’t look to confirm your guess, look to test it with:
   A. Logic test - Look to spot contradictions.
   B. Reality test - Run an experiment.

4. Eliminate errors - If your guess fails the tests, improve it or discard it.

5. Repeat - You’re back at step 1 making a new guess with the lessons learned. Or you’ve solved it, and moved onto a new bigger and better problem.
   
   

I simplify Popper’s ideas into something I can loop in my head:

Guess, Test, Correct.

I call it the boom loop:

1. Make a guess

2. Run a test

3. Correct errors

Pick a problem in your life right now. Have you made a guess about how to solve it? Have you tested your guess with logic and experiments? Have you eliminated the errors that happened? And how many times have you repeated the boom loop?

Whenever you’re stuck on a problem without progress, you’re in the doom loop.

4.

The boom loop is delicate. Remove just one variable and you end up in the doom loop.

If you’re not making progress on a problem, it’s because you either:

1. Didn’t guess
2. Didn’t test
3. Didn’t correct

Let’s go back and look at somebody stuck in the doom loop, Queen Elizabeth and her rotting teeth.

1. Queen Elizabeth makes a guess

Sugar is expensive, so it must be good for my teeth.

2. Queen Elizabeth tests her guess

A. Logic test - If her majesty looked for evidence against her guess rather than evidence for her guess, she would have seen her peasants who couldn’t afford sugar had better teeth than the wealthy aristocrats who could.

B. Reality test - Queen Elizabeth went ahead and rubbed sugar on her teeth.

3. Queen Elizabeth didn’t error correct

She had an error, her teeth were getting blacker, but she kept rubbing sugar on her decaying mouth.

The Queen denied and hid reality: When foreign ambassadors came to her Palace, she would hold a cloth in front of her mouth to hide her teeth when she spoke.

A German visitor, Paul Hentzner, wrote in his diary after meeting the Queen in 1598: “Her teeth were black. A defect the English seem subject to from their too great use of sugar."

People around Queen Elizabeth could see her doom loop, but who wants to error correct a Queen?

5.

Imagine the outside world as the ocean. And now imagine your head as one giant bucket. Reality is pouring into your senses and the words your reading soak up from the the screen into your eyes and then into your brain.

But the bucket just had a leak.

If you go back to the 2nd sentence and read it slowly, you’ll see I wrote the twice, but ~90% of readers’ minds skip over this.

If you did notice the double the, well done, but now notice the sensation of your feet. Why has the sensation of your feet only just appeared? Where have your feet been? Did you have no feet until you paid attention to them?

Your mind is not a bucket passively soaking in information. Your mind is a guessing machine.

Imagine your great-great-grandparents time travelling from 100 years ago to stand opposite you now. What problems have humans solved that would blow their mind?

Every single one of those problems was killed by a guess. Guessing is the mother of all solutions.

The hot shower, the air conditioning, the mattress, the toothpaste, the toilet — it all started as a guess.

You learnt to walk, talk and read these words I type as a guess.

There was no textbook. It was a guess, the guesses were tested against reality, errors happened, and the errors were corrected by new guesses.

And at some point… Boom. Problem solved.

Now, are you going to make new guesses about your problems? Are you going to test your guesses? And are you going to error correct those guesses?

Every solution starts with a guess.

Now who would’ve guessed that.

Here’s the catch: Mr Shy will never introduce himself to you. He’s awfully shy.

Mr Shy isn’t on a poster, Mr Shy won’t call your phone, and Mr Shy won’t knock on your door and say: “Hi, I’m Mr Shy”.

Mr Shy is sometimes hiding in plain sight across the room, but you don’t want to believe it’s him, other times he’s hiding in the dangerous part of town underneath a closed-down Italian restaurant called San Carlo’s.

How would you find Mr Shy?

Finding Mr Shy is what it’s like solving a problem.

The more difficult the problem is, the shyer the solution will be — or the shyer Mr Shy will be: There’s more locations Mr Shy could be in, people are trying to stop you from meeting Mr Shy, people are judging you for wanting to find Mr Shy, there are thousands of people that look like Mr Shy, rooms you think Mr Shy might be in bring up memories of where you failed looking for Mr Shy in the past or people say it’s impossible to find Mr Shy.

I’m going to give 4 different stories of people finding Mr Shy, and what lessons we can take for finding our own Mr Shy.

The first story is about why it’s important to believe Mr Shy is always out there. Let’s begin.

1.

In 1939, mathematician George Dantzig wrote to legendary professor Jerzy Neyman to study under him at Berkeley. Neyman accepted. Dantzig tells what happened next:

“During my first year at Berkeley I arrived late one day to one of Neyman’s classes. On the blackboard were two problems which I assumed had been assigned for homework. I copied them down. A few days later I apologised to Neyman for taking so long to do the homework—the problems seemed to be a little harder to do than usual. I asked him if he still wanted the work. He told me to throw it on his desk. I did so reluctantly because his desk was covered with such a heap of papers that I feared my homework would be lost there forever.

About six weeks later, one Sunday morning about 8 o’clock, Anne and I were awakened by someone banging on our front door. It was Neyman. He rushed in with papers in hand, all excited: “I’ve just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it out right away for publication.” For a minute I had no idea what he was talking about. To make a long story short, the problems on the blackboard which I had solved thinking they were homework were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics. That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them.”

The number one reason people don’t find Mr Shy is that they believe he doesn’t exist.

That’s his speciality: If people think he doesn’t exist, they won’t even bother looking for him. The next time you hear your mind describe something as: “Unsolvable”, “Can’t be done” or “Unrealistic” — that’s Mr Shy’s propaganda campaign.

If you go into a problem thinking Mr Shy exists, there’s no guarantee you’ll find Mr Shy. But if you go into a problem thinking Mr Shy doesn’t exist, there’s a guarantee you’ll never find him because you won’t look.

That’s why it’s important to remind yourself: Solutions are shy.

George Dantzig was an incredible mathematician who would go on to win the National Medal of Science, but his advantage that day was being naive; he carried on because he believed his task was homework.

The easiest way to get into Dantzig’s state of mind is when faced with a problem, ask yourself the golden question: Does solving this problem defy the laws of physics? Your brain will answer no and start to view it as a solvable problem.

Now, let’s go and meet a very angry man trying to walk his unwalkable dog.

2.

Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon Dilbert, spent years in frustration walking his dog:

“For years I found it annoying to walk my dog. All she ever wanted to do was sniff the grass and trees upon which other dogs had left their scent. Neither of us got much exercise. It was like tug-of-war to get Snickers to move at all.”

Adams felt like a failure for years and could not find a solution to make his dog want to go on a walk. One day, he was watching a video of a dog expert explain that “dogs might need the sniffing more than the walking. Their brains light up when they sniff, and it can tire them out when they engage in vigorous sniffing.”

Though the video wasn’t explicitly about Adam’s problem, that’s when he immediately considered its implications, Adams could hear whispers of Mr Shy:

“I had noticed how happy Snickers looked when sniffing, but my brain couldn’t connect the dots because sniffing dog urine sounds inherently unpleasant to my human brain. But to the dog, it was the equivalent of checking her social media. I started naming the trees and shrubs in the park accordingly: Muta (formerly known as Facebark), Twigger, LeafedIn, Instabush, and Treemail. Obviously, the garbage receptacle into which people flung their dog poop bags was TikTok. Once I understood the importance of sniffing, I reframed my experience this way.

Usual Frame: Taking the dog for a walk and failing.
Reframe: Taking the dog for a sniff and succeeding.

That reframe completely changed my subjective experience. Instead of failing at walking, I was succeeding at being a sniff-assistant.”

The second biggest error when it comes to finding Mr Shy is starting with a false assumption about him that you don’t even think to question.

You frantically look all over town for a man who has a mullet, when he’s actually bald. Or in Adams case, the dog is broken, and I’m a bad owner.

In Adams’ case, Mr Shy was there the entire time in front of him on that walk each day — he just never once thought to question: Why is the dog sniffing?

His entire model of what Mr Shy looked like was stacked on top of the wrong foundation: Why doesn’t this dog want to walk?

Useful rules of thumb when it comes to assumptions:

1. Assume the problem is a side problem. The main problem is usually how you’re viewing the problem. If you solve the main problem, the solution for the side problem often reveals itself. You often find yourself outside of Mr Shy’s house.

2. Assume your first 5 thoughts about Mr Shy are wrong. He loves to spread false propaganda about himself.

Now, let’s go and meet a young James Cameron trying to find Mr Shy in Jamaica.

3.

It’s 1981.

James Cameron, who would go on to direct 3 of the 4 highest-grossing movies of all time: Titanic and the Avatar franchise, has arrived in Jamaica.

Cameron is set to shoot his first-ever film: Piranha II.

Unlike Titanic and Avatar, which had a budget of $200 million and $237 million, respectively, Piranha II has a budget of $145,000.

As he steps off the plane, he drives over to meet the production team to see the rundown of the locations they’d secured for filming.

Cameron finds out there is no rundown because they’ve not secured one location for the film.

Cameron thought his team had found Mr Shy for him, and now Mr Shy was long gone.

Before looking at what Cameron did next, ask yourself: If you arrived in a foreign country to shoot your first ever film and found out days before it was to start that there were no locations secured, how would you react? How would you find Mr Shy?

Here’s the list of low agency responses my brain came up with: Conclude I’m not cut out for the movie business, get angry at my production team and call them amateurs, go back home, go to the beach, delay the shoot, fantasise about an alternative reality where they secured the location and I get angrier and angrier looping on why I’m not in that version of reality.

Here’s what Cameron did next, as described in The Futurist, Rebecca Keegan’s biography of James Cameron:

“He ripped open the petty cash drawer, grabbed all the money and a Polaroid camera and stormed out. On the sidewalk, Cameron flagged down the first person he saw, a young Jamaican guy with a battered white car, and offered him some cash to drive him around for a day.”

By the end of the day, Cameron had visited a hotel, a school, a police station, asked to speak to the person in charge, negotiated a deal in cash to film there, created handwritten contracts on pieces of paper on the spot and secured filming locations.

Just because someone else lost Mr Shy doesn’t mean he can’t still be found — but watch out, he loves to hide behind your anger and rumination of what could’ve been.

What James Cameron did to find Mr Shy wasn’t rocket science. He just asked: What’s the simplest route from where I am now and where I want to get to?

One of the best tweets I’ve ever read on this comes from Indigo: “When you miss a turn, your GPS doesn’t judge you, it recalculates. No matter how many detours you take, it finds another way forward. Life works like that too. You’ll make mistakes, but your destination doesn’t vanish. The route just changes.”

Forget all past attachments to Mr Shy. What’s the simplest route to find him today?

Now, one more final story about a phone call.

4.

In 1967, Bill Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, one of the largest technology companies in the 1960s, was relaxing at his home in San Francisco.

His landline starts to ring, so he picks up the phone:

“Hello, Bill Hewlett speaking”

“Hi, I’m a twelve-year-old boy. I want to build a frequency counter for a science project, and was wondering if you have any spare parts that I could borrow?”

Bill Hewlett asks how he got his number.

“I found it in the yellow pages”

Bill bursts out laughing, agrees to give the 12-year-old the spare parts and offers him an internship at HP for his boldness.

That 12-year-old boy, Steve Jobs, would later recall how this moment shifted his perspective on life:

“Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask. And that’s what sometimes separates the people who do things from the people who just dream about them. You gotta act. And you gotta be willing to fail, you gotta be ready to crash and burn. I’ve never found anyone who said no or hung up the phone when I called. I just asked. And when people ask me, I try to be as responsive, to pay that debt of gratitude back.”

One of the simplest ways to find Mr Shy is to ask other people if they’ve seen him, or if they can show you where he is.

54-year-old Bill Hewlett, with 12,000 employees, isn’t going to pick up the phone and call a 12 year old about his science project to help him.

The people who know Mr Shy aren’t going to pick up the phone and tell you about him: You must ask.

When asking for other people to help you find Mr Shy, be polite, be specific, and keep going. If someone won’t help, that’s the work of Mr Shy trying to hide; keep going.

If you’re polite and specific, not only will lots of people help you find Mr Shy, they’ll root for you and want to be part of the mission. Everyone can relate to when they were looking for Mr Shy.

So, next time you find yourself hunting Mr Shy, remember:

1. Mr Shy exists - Unless your problem defies the laws of physics, it’s a solvable problem.

2. Mr Shy is deceptive - Question all assumptions. Don’t trust your first thoughts about a problem.

3. Mr Shy could be right in front of you - What is the simplest step from A to B? If I turned on GPS brain and looked at this problem fresh, how would I approach it?

4. Ask if anyone has seen Mr Shy - Who do I know that might have an idea about this problem? Can I send them a polite and specific question?

PS. Speaking of step 4, can you help me find Mr Shy? If you have any Mr Shy stories, include them in the comments section.

11 thoughts on the busy trap:

1. Behaviour rewarded at school, but punished later in life: Doing the work without asking why.

2. Behaviour punished at school, but rewarded later in life: Asking “Why am I working on this?”

3. The energy razor: If you don’t schedule actions that produce energy, assume they’ll never happen. If you don’t monitor actions that drain energy, assume they’ll keep expanding. All low agency roads lead to entropy.

4. “If you're busy at work, odds are you will eventually be replaced by a robot.” - Nassim Taleb

5. “It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: Busy! So busy. Crazy busy. It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint…. Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet.” - Tim Kreider

6. The busy trap: Being busy today causes you to be busier tomorrow. You never get the time to question, delegate or prioritise your schedule.

7. Sign of being too busy: You don’t know what the most important question to solve is. Hint: If you don’t know what the most important question is... Good news: You’ve just found that question. “What is the most important question I should be thinking about right now?”

8. Bringing a Victorian factory worker mindset to the age of infinite leverage is like bringing boxing gloves and a gumshield to a drone war.

9. “There’s so many people working so hard but achieving so little” - Andy Grove

10. “You waste years by not being able to waste hours” - Amos Tversky

11. The output of clear thinking has never been higher in human history. The output of being busy has never been lower in human history.

A wealthy man walks into a bank in New York.

“I’m going away to Europe on business for two weeks and need to borrow $5000”

The bank officer says the bank will need some security for the loan. The man hands over the keys to a new Rolls-Royce, which costs $250,000. The bank officer is shocked but agrees to accept the car as collateral for the loan.

After the man leaves, the loan officer, the bank’s president and all their colleagues enjoy a good laugh at the man for using a $250,000 Rolls-Royce as collateral against a $5,000 loan.

One of the employees drives the Rolls into the bank’s underground garage and parks it there.

Two weeks later, the wealthy man returns, repays the $5000 and the interest, which comes to $15.41.

The loan officer says, “Sir, I must tell you, we’re all a little puzzled. You’re a multi-millionaire — why would you need a $5,000 loan?”

The man replies, “Where else in New York City can I park my car for two weeks for only $15.41?”

The mistake people make is treating creativity like productivity. They try to work harder and expect creativity to appear. Instead, sprinkle in new inputs and watch new outputs appear.

Here are 12 inputs that help increase creativity. Let’s turn some bank vaults into cheap parking spots together:

1. Translate aggressively - Got a written idea? Draw it. Got a visual idea? Write it down. Calculating an equation? Explain it out loud. As you translate an idea from one language to another, creativity leaks out in the migration process.

One of my favourite examples is that Christopher Nolan drew the plot of Inception.

2. Scroll for anti-social proof - Go to YouTube or Substack, scroll through the explore page, and click only on content that has under 5,000 views. You’ll find niche ideas that haven’t yet mimetically spread. 90% will be a waste of time. Like a successful venture capitalist’s portfolio, the 10% of hits cover the 90% of misses multiple times over.

3. Avoid content made after 2016 - Something happened in 2016. The internet became less weird, less creative. Whatever the cause, pre-2016 content has a distinct flavour of strangeness that has vanished. My favourite hack for this: Find a book or essay you love. Open up ChatGPT deep research. Ask for 50 similar books or essays, all created before 2016.

4. Create your own time zone - Most people peak creatively whilst others are asleep. At 2 p.m., your brain tracks what others think. At 2 a.m., nobody’s watching. The ideas that seemed too weird at lunch suddenly seem worth exploring. Your brain fills the silence with ideas you’d normally censor. If creativity is your main goal, wake up absurdly early or go to sleep ridiculously late.

5. Increase time in the bathroom - Aaron Sorkin, the writer behind A Few Good Men and The West Wing, takes 6-8 hot showers per day when he’s writing. Another hack is to be slightly overly hydrated. You may only have shower thoughts once per day, but you can increase your bathroom thoughts by drinking more water.

6. Fight an evil twin - Imagine there’s an evil identical twin of you whose sole job is to out-think you. What are they thinking? This thought experiment allows the mind to explore dangerous ideas because you can blame it on the twin. If the twin produces any useful ideas, you can steal them. You have no skin in the game.

7. Spin wheels - Collect the best questions you find. Add them to a spinning wheel app. Spin the wheel before bed. Leave the question with the subconscious overnight. Brainstorm on the question first thing in the morning, before any inputs.

8. Take a sakoku - When I ask friends which country they want to visit, the most common answer is Japan. When I ask why, it’s because Japanese culture feels so unique compared to anywhere else in the world. One of the major historical reasons is that Japan practised an isolationist policy for 265 years called Sakoku. They cut off the outside world, whilst most countries traded ideas and customs.
Once every 6 months, practice a Sakoku for a week. Consume no inputs. Sakoku is intermittent fasting for the mimetic mind. Our thoughts feel like our own -- but it’s often society’s voice echoing. When you spend a week alone with zero external inputs -- the echoes disappear and you hear your own creative voice

9. When creativity hits you, sprint to your garden shed in your boxer shorts at 3 am - Christopher Nolan bolted across to his garden at 3 a.m. in his boxer shorts. He’d been stuck on the final scenes of Oppenheimer for weeks. Then, mid-dream, the entire sequence materialised. He grabbed paper and pen in his shed and wrote it down before it vanished. The 3 am idea never changed and was the finale of the film.

10. The creativity faucet - One fun way to spark creativity is to ask: What’s the worst idea possible? Set the bar so low and then just keep improving it. Self-inflicted pressure is the single biggest killer of creativity. My friend Julain Shapiro visualises creativity as a backed-up pipe of water. The first mile is wastewater that needs to be emptied. After emptying the bad ideas, you begin to spot patterns as to why they are bad.

11. Avoid dramatic people - Good news: Your brain is the most powerful supercomputer in the known universe. Bad news: It can only have one conscious thought at a time. Every minute you spend ruminating on someone’s manufactured crisis is a minute you’re not solving your actual problems. Dramatic people eat your supercomputer’s RAM.

12. The Swedish House Mafia Technique - Get a room with friends away from the outside world. Two to four friends is the sweet spot. Throw ideas back and forth like a tennis rally. Keep iterating away. When you’re playing idea tennis with creative people, 1+1 does not equal 2; it equals 11.

Here’s Swedish House Mafia creating the iconic One from a hum and a table tap to performing it on stage. It’s one of my favourite videos on the internet.

If you enjoyed this, share it with your Swedish House Mafia friends.

My default low agency response is to freeze at this question. We’re told luck is like weather, something that just happens to us.

For 99.9% of human history, the weather was uncontrollable. It simply happened to us. Then we invented air conditioning to escape heat, central heating to survive cold, and refrigeration to preserve food.

The harshest climates often develop the best weather engineers. Dubai has some of the world’s most advanced air conditioning. Oslo has some of the best central heating. Meanwhile, locations like London and Amsterdam become unbearable on a hot summer’s day.

The same pattern appears with engineering luck.

Many of the best luck engineers I know faced significant, uncontrollable bad luck early in life. They had to learn the skill of luck. Meanwhile, people who’ve been given luck their entire lives often never develop luck engineering — they’ve never needed to.

I find it useful to distinguish between luck-luck and skill-luck. Luck-luck is pure randomness, like being born in the right country. Skill-luck is when you help engineer luck, like moving cities to the place that has the best opportunity potential for you.

The question of doubling your luck in the next six months moves your focus from the obvious luck-luck you can’t control, to the non-obvious skill-luck you can engineer.

Here are 12 rules of thumb I’ve seen in skilled luck engineers:

1. Make unscheduled phone calls - Over the last five years, we stopped calling people. We started booking Zoom appointments and sending Calendly links instead. When did you last pick up your phone and dial someone without warning? Scheduled calls lock you into an agenda: “Let’s discuss Q3 projections” or “Can we sync on the deliverables?” Unscheduled calls wander. You ask how someone’s doing, they mention a problem, you riff on a solution—and suddenly you’ve stumbled into an opportunity neither of you planned. Super-agent Ari Emmanuel makes dozens of unscheduled calls every day. His opening line: “Can I help you with anything right now?”

2. Avoid boring people - This has two meanings. Avoid people who bore you. And avoid being the boring person in the room. Interesting people get more luck, not because they’re necessarily smarter, but because they’re memorable. When someone has an opportunity to share, interesting people are the first ones that pop up in their mind.

3. Poker mindset > Roulette mindset - Here’s a ridiculous but useful statement... Playing a game of roulette, thinking it’s poker is better than playing a game of poker, thinking it’s roulette. Assume every game has an element of skill — you’ve just not discovered it yet. When I originally wrote this, I wasn’t aware of the story of Claude Shannon and Ed Thorp, who literally did this. To hack roulette, they built the first-ever wearable computer. The device transmitted information about roulette wheels via a cigarette packet-sized box that they placed in their shoe. Shannon and Thorp would use a toe-operating switch to input data on the ball’s speed and wheel rotation to predict a landing zone. They improved their odds by 44% and outsmarted the house.

4. Luck razor - If stuck with 2 equal options, pick the one that feels like it will produce the most luck later down the line. I used this razor to go for drinks with a stranger rather than watch Netflix. In hindsight, it was the highest ROI decision I’ve ever made.

5. Proactively make introductions - If friend A and friend B can get value from each other, introduce them. It’s a 30-second email for you, and it may change their lives forever. Maybe they will start a company together. Maybe one hires the other. Maybe they fall in love, have three kids and become soul mates. Networks are unique because they don’t divide when you share them -- they multiply. There’s no higher ROI on any other 30-second activity. (Note — do not confuse this with making introductions where only one side gets value from it)

6. Avoid fan relationships - Chasing “successful” people you admire rarely works. You’re fan #967 trying to get their attention. They don’t need more groupies in their lives. They prefer spending time with people who knew them before their success. A better strategy that is also more fulfilling: Find talented peers at your level. Their DMs aren’t crowded. Help them. Collaborate. Celebrate their wins. When they break through in five or ten years, you’ll be one of the people who knew them “back in the day”—and those relationships are worth exponentially more than being fan #967.

7. Get more curious with age - Curiosity is like your joints - it weakens with age. Instead, you want to age like Larry Ellison. If you're over the age of 25, a good rule of thumb is to assume your first thoughts about new trends are wrong. It’s fine to have no opinion on new trends. But if you want to have an opinion, put 20 hours into it first. Talk to people doing it. Try it yourself. Get your hands dirty. You’ll be years ahead of everyone your age.

8. Delete the scoreboard - One piece of advice I find myself still thinking about five years later comes from my friend Shaan Puri: Most people have a relationship scoreboard. My score versus your score. When I do something for you, I get points. When you do something for me, you get points.

This creates two problems. First, most scoreboards stay stuck at 0-0 because both people are waiting for the other to give first. Second, the scoreboard assumes relationships are zero-sum—a fixed pie where if you get a bigger slice, I get less. If the score is 6-5 in their favor, I feel like I’m losing -1, when I’m actually +5.

Luck engineers delete the scoreboard. Give aggressively, give early, give without permission. The pie isn’t fixed—it expands when you give freely. Some people will take advantage of you, but they’ll be a rounding error compared to the incredible relationships you build. And your funeral will be jam-packed.

9. Reverse prison advice - The cliche advice given to new prisoners is to find the biggest person in the prison on your first day, and punch them in the face. The questionable logic is that everyone in the prison now knows you’re not someone to be messed with. (My personal approach would be to wear glasses and become the library guy.) Punching a 6’9, 280 lb psychopath might be terrible advice for prison, but the reverse is useful for increasing your luck in the outside world: Find the most talented people you know and help them as much as you can, permissionlessly. Share their projects, give feedback, and make introductions. Successful people have a special place in their hearts for the people who helped them before anyone else did.

10. Work on your introduction - This could be the least British advice I will ever give. I can hear my ancestors spinning in their graves at the thought of what I’m about to say. In British culture, we’re taught to play down everything that we do. “I just do marketing stuff”. The problem with this is that people you meet don’t understand what you do or how they can help you. When you have a clear introduction that describes what you do: “I create Super Bowl-level commercials for fintech companies on social media”, they can now realise ways they can help you: “Oh, my friend Barry is the marketing director at Amex. Let me introduce you!”. Being a great luck engineer is turning yourself into a simple API that people can connect into.

11. Track luck inputs - Luck is a lagging measure. It often takes years to connect cause and effect, so most don’t bother. You publish an essay in 2022—it brings you an investor in 2025. You make an introduction in 2025 — it brings you an introduction in 2027. The lag makes it hard to motivate yourself to do it because you don’t know when the return will be. My friend Ben Levy solves this by tracking luck inputs: introductions made, people helped, or bets placed. He trusts that if he maintains a high luck input rate, the luck outputs take care of themselves. You can’t control the timing of luck, but you can control the volume of luck inputs you create.

12. Get good at advertising - The ultimate meta-skill. If you can create a persuasive advert or landing page, you can create a persuasive CV or job interview. This is an incredible luck-hack because most people are awful at advertising.

13. Dish out baker’s dozens - A baker’s dozen is when a baker gives someone 13 when they expected 12. It isn’t the 12 that makes bakers’ customers happy — it’s the unexpected +1. Surprise generosity creates loyalty. People remember who exceeded their expectations. They tell others. They come back. They reciprocate. Apply this everywhere: Buy someone a book when they ask for a book recommendation. Ship Thursday when you said Friday. Show up twenty minutes early to help a friend set up an event.

PS. I said I’d give you twelve ideas on the skill of luck; I gave you thirteen. I hope you enjoyed the baker’s dozen. That’s my luck input done for this morning. Have a great day.

1. Get a giant whiteboard in your home - My most contrarian belief: We could increase the global economy by 2-3% just by installing large whiteboards in every home. The whiteboard forces you to commit Kidlins’ law: If you write the problem down clearly, then the matter is 50% solved. With a whiteboard, it’s more like 70%; there’s an extra 20% because it stays there over the next few days, whispering into your creative subconscious whenever you walk past it.

(You can get giant Post-it sticky notes the next day from Amazon too)

2. If in doubt, use the luck razor - If stuck with two equal options, pick the one that feels like it will produce the most luck later down the line. I used this razor to go for drinks with a stranger rather than watch Netflix. In hindsight, it was the highest ROI decision I've ever made.

3. Puzzle > Problem - An easy way to increase agency is to remove "problem" from your vocabulary and replace it with "puzzle". It sounds absurd, but "problem" activates my amygdala and "puzzle" activates my prefrontal cortex. Try it. Self-induced placebo that works.

4. Focus on hardware before software - Rule of thumb: Fix hardware (sleep, exercise, diet) before software (psychology). 95% of my software problems seem to magically get fixed when I take care of my hardware. And the remaining 5% is easier to debug once I’ve fixed my hardware. Never try anything more complex without first turning the computer off and on.

5. Ask specific questions - Vague questions could mean anything, so they mean nothing. “How can I be happy?” generates unclear fortune cookie slop: Be grateful. Follow your passion! Live in the moment. Now try: What does my dream week look like hour by hour? What does my nightmare week look like hour by hour? What’s the gap between my current week and the dream or nightmare week? Questions are the answers you might need. (My favourite Oasis lyric)

6. If in doubt, use the story razor - When stuck with two equal options you can’t decide between, ask: What option makes for a more interesting story? Good stories require characters who act. High agency is just another word for being the executive producer of your life. Act as if it’s you at a dinner party five years from now, telling the story. Enhance the plot. Don’t forget Dostoevsky’s golden rule: “But how could you live and how no story to tell?!”.

7. Work less. Focus more - A good rule of thumb I want tattooed on my brain: working hard is overpriced, focusing hard is underpriced. Most of our lives are spent inside the Grove Trap: “There are so many people working so hard, and achieving so little” - Andy Grove. One door out of the Grove Trap is deep mode: Focus 90% of your work hours for 2-4 weeks on your number one bottleneck. Most people context-switch between C-tier tasks all day—emails, meetings, small fixes. They never identify the A-tier task, much less focus on it. One month of clear-minded focus beats a year of distracted hustle grindset.

8. Low agency is downstream from taking yourself too seriously - One thing that helps with taking life less seriously is exploring the absurdity of astrophysics. It’s hard to take my life too seriously when there’s a black hole at the centre of the Milky Way 4 million times the mass of our sun, or staring into the night sky and seeing light from stars that existed over 10,000 years ago in the present moment. My fear of cringe looks tiny when placed in the grand scheme of the universe, let alone the multiverse. If you stare into the stars long enough, the stars begin to stare back into you.

9. Kill your to-do list. Play video games instead - To-do lists trigger anxiety. Video games trigger excitement. Take something that sounds impossible: teaching yourself quantum mechanics. My brain immediately freezes. Where do I even start?
Why? I’m starting at level 300 of the video game. What are the first 5 levels of that video game?

• Level 1 - Write down every learning idea that comes to mind, no filter.
• Level 2 - Search “quantum mechanics beginner” on Amazon. Buy the top-rated intro book.
• Level 3 -Read the first 10 pages.
• Level 4 - Put anything confusing into ChatGPT: “Explain this like I’m a smart 12-year-old.”
• Level 5 - Based on what you learned, write levels 6-10.

The golden rule: Level 1 should always be so easy it’s impossible to feel overwhelmed. Before you know it, you’re at level 5. Bathe in that dopamine and watch overwhelm fade away.

Let me know which one was your favourite. I’ll try and do a version 2 soon. I’ll also be putting more ideas on Substack, as it’s one of the few places that encourage long-form writing.

1. Overthinking is a tax on life - The average person spends nearly eight hours per day mind wandering. If you’re awake for sixteen hours per day, that’s half of your conscious existence spent lost in imaginary thought. To appreciate how large this life tax is: it’s the equivalent of January 1st to June 30th each year. If you add sleep into the equation, it gets worse: January 1st to August 30th, unconscious or absent-minded. This leaves you just from September 1st to December 31st for mere scraps of life.
Doestovsky described the overthinking trap as an illness: “I swear to you that to think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease.”

2. Overthinking is amnesia - On a typical day, humans have between 30,000 to 70,000 thoughts. Here’s the tragedy: can you remember a single clear sentence of thought from yesterday? If you’re one of the rare people who can, how about last Tuesday? The same thought loops that feel inescapable in the present moment are then deleted from memory — into the abyss. You don’t consciously notice how much you forget because, by definition, you forget just how much you forget.

3. You can’t run from your mind - An escape route many try for the overthinking trap is travelling. They board the plane, leaving their former life behind, hoping to wake up on the other side of the world free from overthinking. Only to discover the one thing they couldn’t leave at home: Their minds.

4. Overthinking is downstream from low agency - The low agency model of time has three modes: Past, present and future. The high agency model of time has five modes: Past-dwelling, past rectifying, present, future-worrying, and future-building. The low agency model of time assumes all time spent thinking about the past and the future is the same. It’s not. Rectifying the past is 100x better than dwelling on it. Building the future is 100x better than worrying about it. Thousands of hours lost to looping on a past or future worry could be closed with one phone call, one letter, or one email.

5. Never trust a thought - Nietzsche had a rule of thumb: “Never trust a thought you have indoors”. This idea is great, but Friedrich didn’t go far enough. To take it one step further: never trust a thought. Only begin inspecting its truth once it’s gone outside of your mind: Writing, drawing, walking, talking, spreadsheet. Trusting thoughts that happen inside skulls or buildings is a breeding ground for low agency slop.

6. Stop making decisions. Start making experiments - Retire the word decision from your vocabulary. Never use the D-word again. Replace it with experiment. Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for his work on decision-making and concluded that the biggest lesson was that decision-making theory didn’t make him a better decision-maker. Reality is smarter than your ruminations: Create a hypothesis. Design experiments. Run them. Blitzkreig! Even so-called irreversible decisions like having a child with someone can be turned into an experiment if you think hard enough: Experiment with a dog first.

7. Overthinking is caused by self-importance - Overthinkers believe they have low self-worth, but spend all their time thinking about themselves. Overthinking isn’t low self-worth; it’s narcissism. In rare scenarios where overthinkers think about others, it’s worrying about what that person is thinking about them. Escape the overthinking trap by embracing your inner Galileo: remove yourself as the centre of your universe. Try to think as another person in the room. Imagine all their ruminations and worries. Your self-centred rumination loops will fade away, and you’ll sneak in charisma through the back door.

8. Arrange your mind with Napoleon’s cupboard - Napoleon arranged his mind like a series of cupboards: “Different subjects and different affairs are arranged in my head as in a cupboard. When I wish to interrupt one train of thought, I shut that drawer and open another.” Have a worry cupboard that you visit for 30 minutes per day. Review your worries and action them. At the end of the session, close the cupboard. If a new worry appears, put it in the cupboard, and tell it you’ll see it during your scheduled slot tomorrow. Most worry is caused by your mind being unsure whether you’ll take action on addressing it. When worry knows where it lives in the cupboard with a clear time on the calendar, it quietens.

9. You can’t hide from your mind - A monk tells a novice to go to the top of the mountain with one goal: Have no thoughts. The novice follows the monk’s instructions. He spends all day trying to make his mind go blank — and his mind can’t stop racing.

The novice couldn’t find silence, so he walked down the mountain feeling like a failure.

The next day, the monk tells him to go back to the mountain with a different goal: Keep thinking. The novice could think of anything he liked all day long, but couldn’t allow any gaps to occur between thoughts. The novice followed the monk’s instructions. He spent all morning thinking about everything: dwelling on his childhood to the meaning of life. By lunch time, his thoughts began to dry up, and his mind went silent.

The novice couldn’t escape the silence, so he walked down the mountain feeling like a failure.

If you want to increase overthinking, resist it. If you want to decrease overthinking, welcome it.

10. Overthinking is a solvable problem - When someone suggests a limit on human minds, just reply with this photo of Thich Quang Duc meditating in the lotus position after setting himself on fire in protest against the war. He didn’t flinch once. A nuke so strong you have to delete all past assumptions and say "I don't know".

Here’s my updated list of how to spot high agency people:

1. The golden question - Who do you call when stuck in a 3rd world prison cell? That’s the highest agency person you know.

2. Weird teenage hobbies - Teenage years are the hardest time to go against social pressures. If they can go against the crowd as a teenager, they can go against the crowd as an adult.

3. Treadmill energy - If you meet with them when you're tired and defeated, you leave the room ready to run a marathon on a treadmill with max incline.

4. You can never guess their opinion - The boxer who writes poetry. The advertiser obsessed with the history of war. The beauty queen who reads Nietzsche. If their beliefs don't line up with their stereotypes, they've exercised agency.

5. Immigrant mentality - If they've moved from their hometown, that's a good sign. If they've moved from their home country, that's an even greater sign. It takes agency to spot you're in the wrong place, resourcefulness to operationalise a move and a growth mindset to start from zero in a new location.

6. Sends you niche content - A low agency trap is to look at the social engagement of content before deeming its quality. High agency people just look at the content. They spot upcoming trends very early.

7. Mean to your face, nice behind your back - The social incentives are to be nice to people's faces and gossip behind their backs. To do the opposite requires agency because they're swimming against the social tide.

8. Quit something of prestige - The miserable management consultant who breaks free from their golden handcuffs to become a stand-up comedian has to overcome momentum, social shame and sunk cost fallacy. The high agency person lives many lives and isn’t afraid to reinvent themselves — regardless of the perceived social cost.

9. They don’t trust. They verify - A low agency trap is to be hypnotized by groupthink. High agency people refuse to passively download the current thing without first verifying it for themselves:
‍
• “They say” —> Who is they?
• "Science says” —> What is the science? Can I see the primary sources?
• ”Misinformation” —> What is your theory of knowledge? Can you show me your first principles?

10. Self-taught learning machines - Whether it’s learning to play their favourite song on the Saxophone or deconstructing how 3D printers work — they start from zero and use agency to climb up the knowledge ladder. Tesla, Da Vinci and Darwin didn’t ask for permission from institutions to just do things.

11. They question the question - Before rushing to answer your question, they question whether it’s the right question to answer. They know the right answer to the wrong question is worse than no answer to the right question.

12. Non-fungible human - When they die, it doesn’t feel like a typical funeral; it feels more like an extinction event of a unique species. High agency people live like a fingerprint: One in 8.1 billion. Never to be repeated again. They think their own thoughts and act their own actions, regardless of the overton window.

13. Specific questions, rapid action - When they ask for your help, they respect your time by asking specific questions and avoiding vague ones. To show you appreciation for the time given, they follow up in freakish speed with a thank you and evidence of the advice actioned.

14. They pet the elephant in the room - If they sense an elephant in the room, they don’t avoid it. They talk to the elephant, feed it, and ask it why it’s there. They know the elephant in the room gets smaller every time they interact with it. In five minutes, they help shrink an enormous elephant you’ve been avoiding for five years into a cute baby elephant calf you can control.

15. Avoid underthinking and overthinking - Socrates once said: The unexamined life is not worth living. But the overexamined life is not worth living either. The Watts trap: “A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So they lose touch with reality and live in a world of illusions.” The high agency person knows one hour of reflection after ten hours of action is worth more than one hundred hours of rumination without any feedback from reality.

16. An infinite number of reframes - When they can’t bend external atoms in the physical world, they bend the neurons in their head instead. Charlie Munger was an obsessive reader. After a failed surgery, he was left blind in one eye with a strong likelihood of going fully blind. When asked how he would cope not being able to read, he replied in the blink of his one eye: “I’ve always wanted to learn braille.”

One strange realisation as you get older: A lot of the behaviours you were punished for in school are rewarded in adulthood, and a lot of the behaviours you were rewarded for in school are punished in adulthood.

A large part of adulthood isn't learning anything new; it's just unlearning lessons from school, debugging the code the education system has written in your head—line by line, habit by habit, assumption by assumption.

Here’s a list of behaviours punished in school — but rewarded in adulthood:

1. Questioning the highest status person in the room - At school, it’s easy to see your teachers as gods that can’t be questioned. That’s the default assumption the school whispers to you: teachers are the highest-status people in the room. One of the biggest red pill moments comes in your early 20s. A person you know who is lost and confused says to you: “I’m unsure what to do with my life, so I’m going to become a teacher. It’s got great holidays!” You then do the mental maths: “What % of the teachers I put on pedestals at school were just lost people figuring things out?!”. And the same is true now: “What % of people I’m putting on pedestals now are just grown-up children figuring things out?”

2. Copying people - When I was 12, I handed in my dad’s university dissertation as my computer science homework. I was put in detention for copying. In adulthood, if you copy a successful playbook, you’re labelled a “successful franchisee owner”. The global franchise market is worth over $1 trillion annually. Reality rewards finding the smartest kid in the class and stealing every bit of knowledge they have.

3. Hardcore nerdiness - If you had a hardcore nerdy obsession at school, you’re a bully’s dream. And if your interests are outside the curriculum, you’re a teacher’s nightmare. In adulthood, it’s impossible to find someone at the top 1% of their field who doesn’t have a hardcore nerdy obsession with it. Society no longer laughs at you or throws you out of class; they pay you buckets of cash to be a hardcore nerd.

4. Touching reality - The rewards in school are for your theoretical knowledge. The teacher will have a smile on their face if you write a 2,000-word essay of a SWOT analysis of Coca-Cola’s business, but if the same teacher caught you turning $50 of Coca-Cola cans into $200 of profit at lunchtime, they will have a frown on their face. “In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is!” - Yogi Berra

5. Losing popularity contests - School reinforces the mimetic desire to win popularity contests. In adulthood, you gradually realise the whole game was a facade. If you win, people resent you and want to tear you down. And if you lose, nobody is thinking about you -- most people are too busy worrying about what you were thinking of them to have an opinion of you.

And then you die.

And then they all die.

6. Staring out of windows doing nothing - You’ve finished your work? We don’t want you staring out the window, daydreaming. Don’t worry, we’ve got more work for you. It never ends. And there’s work for when you get home. If you carry this addiction to busyness into adulthood, you end up in the Tversky trap: “Some people waste years because they can’t waste hours”. The most prolific people I know and have read about spend a lot of time doing what appears like nothing: taking walks, meditating, laying on the sofa, staring at the ceiling.

7. Rejecting normality - If you have a weird accent, fashion sense or worldviews, you’ll be isolated from the group. As you grow old, this flips: nobody remembers any of your normal behaviours. If you study the biographies of the greats or attend the funerals of people you care about, the normal rational behaviour is never mentioned. It’s the times they broke out of the median distribution of human behaviour that they tell stories about. In adulthood, you painfully realise that if you want weird outputs, you’ll need weird inputs.

8. Creating your own time zone - School doesn’t care if you get your best work done from 5am to 9am, or 10pm to 3am. You must comply with the agreed schedule. Some people go their entire lives never aligning with their unique biological clock because of the school bell that still exists in their head. The most productive adults ignore society’s clock and create their own time zones.

9. Never ask for permission to visit the bathroom - If you want to go to the toilet, you must ask. You must not release your bladder without permission. Or else.

In adulthood, you can now go to the bathroom as you please, but this concept of waiting for permission from a status figure still exists.

The bathroom is less physical and more metaphorical: Waiting for permission to ask her out, waiting for permission to quit the job, waiting for permission to leave your hometown, waiting for permission to take Roy off the grid.

Meanwhile, 70 years later, when the same children have grey hair and wrinkles, they lament wasting their lives waiting for permission.

If you look closely, all the top 5 regrets of the dying are caused by waiting for permission. They were waiting for someone to give them permission to visit the bathroom:

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

10. Exiting your age lane - School and college create age lanes. Most of your friends are the same age as you, and you rarely leave these lanes. Some of these relationships become intense mimetic rivalries and zero-sum games. Through contrasting their life to yours, your victories feel like defeats to them, and your defeats feel like victories to them. This is an unfortunate feature in the human operating system.

In the real world outside of school, if you get friends who are significantly older than you, there's less mimetic competition. Just decades of wisdom they love to share. They’ve completed their mimetic games and now want to help people who remind them of their younger selves. This was normal for most of your ancestors.

11. Hunting like an eagle - "One should not read like a dog obeying its master, but like an eagle hunting its prey" - Dee Hock. Whenever I would start a book, article or podcast -- the school teacher still lived in my head.

Decades after leaving school, whenever I opened a book or started a podcast, there he was—demanding I consume at the set pace, forbidding me to skip ahead to what matters. I was taught to learn like a dog. Obedient. Patient. Grateful for scraps. I built up a resentment for learning.

If you want to re-find your love for learning, learn like an eagle hunting its prey. Build your own curriculum. Get what is useful. Move on when it's boring. You're not there to serve the teacher. The teacher is there to serve you.

This was my first post on Substack. I’ll be using the platform to test ideas for V2 of highagency.com. Please subscribe and share if you enjoyed it.

Let me know which idea you enjoyed the most.

Special thank you to two of my favourite people on the planet: Harry Dry and Billy Oppenheimer for giving feedback.