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the pursuit of intentionality

01 Jun, 2024

for first 10 years of life, we should spend maximum time & money on understanding self, markets, people & the world around. select the handful of beliefs, people & battles you want to fight, a little more intentionally.

don't ease the continuous yearn to discover the intersection of what you're good at --> what we love --> & being in it's top %ile.

have a macro-cosmic perspective towards decisions you take. fucking around & finding out is a horrible strategy if you don't self reflect aggressively & iterate. chasing variety can often curse you with shallow insights & results. across a broad spectrum, the best people i know, have intentionally spent hours self reflecting, chasing depth, iterating & finding joy. they often:

a) try a lot of things (for more than 3 months, minimum) b) have a clear why (to help stay consistent) c) eliminate what they don't enjoy d) spend the next 5 yrs becoming great at what they end up enjoying

step 2 is hard, but having a why helps you commit for 10 yrs. it's hard when you don't have a convincing reason to show up each day. being content has an eerily high co-relation with what occupies your brain for 12 hrs every day. that's half your life.

and when we do arrive on step 4, most of us will never be good at what we like at first - actions & results will build confidence. there's a reason why the cliche "action > words", is a cliche. we will always look stupid when we try something new. no matter how good you're at X, you're going to suck ass at Y (more often than not)

and that, is how you bring naval's "The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life" to reality