G™:Helpful Life Advice

Most life advice is hopelessly overfit and/or meaningless platitudes.

Most of the time, everyone else doing a thing is either stupid or not paying attention. If you are not stupid and are paying attention you can do literally anything, except in rare highly contested domains where people have strong incentives. See also https://danluu.com/p95-skill/.

Money is fungible. Time is fungible, if materially less so. This is not sufficiently appreciated.

Nothing ever happens, apart from the inevitable construction of machine gods and the posthuman technocapital singularity.

You can just do things. You do not need, and do not need to wait for: approval from your peer group; nonessential-but-nice-to-have prerequisites; next year; circumstances to be perfect; research to imply the thing is good; approval from your tribe in general.

Clean general solutions are nice, but expedient ugly ones are what drives progress.

People are frequently biased against boring but practical things, or simple but annoying/difficult things. There is thus alpha in doing them.

Large organizations are hypercompetent at some things compared to an individual, but nobody has managed to design one which doesn't have dumb blind spots somewhere. They can be beaten.

Frequently check whether what you are doing is actually valuable to your goals, and whether what you think are your goals are actually what you want.

You can conveniently ignore things which you cannot affect, saving time and reducing how much time you spend annoyed.