The Simple Guy

Boredom as a Filter

Boredom is a filter. Common ideas come before it. Uncommon ideas come after it. Sit with a project long enough to get bored with it, then sit a little more. The most useful insights bubble up after you get bored.

Learning by Teaching

The person who learns the most in any classroom is the teacher.If you really want to learn a topic, then "teach" it. Write a book. Teach a class. Build a product. Start a company.The act of making something will force you to learn more deeply than reading ever will.

Use the Best Idea Now

Use the best idea you have right now. Claiming you need to 'learn more' or 'get your ducks in a row' is just a crutch that prevents you from starting. Education is a lifelong pursuit. You will always need to learn more. It's not a reason to wait.

Courage in Decisions

"In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence." – Ben Horowitz

Sam Altman on Success

1. Compound yourself
Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation. Your rate of learning should always be high.

2. Have almost too much self-belief
Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion. Cultivate this early. As you get more data points that your judgment is good and you can consistently deliver results, trust yourself more.

3. Focus
Focus is a force multiplier on work. Almost everyone I've ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn't matter. Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful.

4. Work hard
You can get to about the 90th percentile in your field by working either smart or hard, which is still a great accomplishment. But getting to the 99th percentile requires both — you will be competing with other very talented people who will have great ideas and be willing to work a lot.

5. Be hard to compete with
Most people understand that companies are more valuable if they are difficult to compete with. This is important, and obviously true. But this holds true for you as an individual as well. If what you do can be done by someone else, it eventually will be, and for less money.

Paul Graham on Hard Problems

Paul Graham makes the counterintuitive recommendation that startups choose to solve hard problems:

“Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way.

What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we'd always take the harder one. Not just because it was more valuable, but because it was harder. We delighted in forcing bigger, slower competitors to follow us over difficult ground. I can remember times when we were just exhausted after wrestling all day with some horrible technical problem. And I'd be delighted, because something that was hard for us would be impossible for our competitors.

This is not just a good way to run a startup. It's what a startup is. Venture capitalists know about this and have a phrase for it: barriers to entry. If you go to a VC with a new idea and ask him to invest in it, one of the first things he'll ask is, how hard would this be for someone else to develop? That is, how much difficult ground have you put between yourself and potential pursuers? And you had better have a convincing explanation of why your technology would be hard to duplicate.

Otherwise as soon as some big company becomes aware of it, they'll make their own, and with their brand name, capital, and distribution clout, they'll take away your market overnight.“

Introduction

These insights come from Pavel Durov’s conversation with Lex Fridman. Known as the founder of Telegram, Pavel has spent his life building tools that protect human communication from surveillance and censorship. For this, he has faced immense pressure from some of the most powerful governments in the world. Yet he remains one of the most principled and fearless people of our time.

“Свобода дороже денег” — “Freedom matters more than money.”

Freedom, Fear, and Living by Principles

Pavel often says the biggest enemies of freedom are fear and greed. His way of overcoming them is simple: imagine the worst thing that can happen, accept it fully, and suddenly there is nothing left to fear. That mindset allows him to stand by his principles, even if it means living a shorter life compared to a longer one spent in slavery.

He treats death with calm rationality. Life begins, and then it ends. There is no such thing as “your death” during your life, because once you die, experience itself stops. So the real question becomes: is it better to live in constant fear of death, or to forget that fear and live freely? At the same time, remembering death makes each day more meaningful.

His health and focus, he says, come from more than two decades of abstaining from alcohol, tobacco, coffee, pills, and drugs. “Short-term pleasure isn’t worth your future.”

Discipline, Focus, and Protecting the Mind

Pavel believes in being contrarian, in setting your own rules. If you fear approaching someone, go and do it until the fear disappears. He has always trusted his instincts to say no when something feels wrong.

Technology is another area where he applies discipline. For him, the phone was never essential. It stayed on airplane mode or mute, because he hated the idea of being disturbed. The principle was clear: define what is important in your own life. Do not let apps, algorithms, or organizations decide what deserves your attention. Opening the phone first thing in the morning, he says, turns you into a creature told what to think for the rest of the day.

Instead, he chooses sleep and reflection. Even when he sets aside 11 or 12 hours, much of the time is not for sleeping but for lying in bed thinking. He never takes sleeping pills. In those quiet hours — late at night or early in the morning — ideas arrive, sometimes brilliant ones. Waking up, showering, and exercising without touching a phone became some of his favorite moments. These routines keep his mind independent and free.

Action, Energy, and Physical Discipline

Pavel believes energy is born from action, not rest. Worrying changes nothing, but starting something — no matter how small — creates momentum. That first step generates motivation, which grows into inspiration, and eventually into real achievement.

He compares it to going to the gym. On many days, the hardest part is simply starting. But once you push through the reluctance, the workout feels rewarding. The same applies to writing code, drafting a novel, or any creative project: begin with something small, and the ideas will follow.

His own life is proof of this philosophy. Every morning he does 300 push-ups and 300 squats. On top of that, he trains at the gym five or six times a week, spending up to two hours per session. His diet avoids processed sugar, soda, and fast food. Intermittent fasting is part of his routine, sometimes eating only once a day. Pharmaceutical products and pills are avoided entirely.

He also applies discipline to information. Before consuming news, he asks himself: “Who benefits from me reading this?” Most often, the answer is that someone wants to sell a product, push a cause, or drag others into a conflict. He warns against being manipulated into fighting battles that are not your own. The same logic explains why he avoids pornography — calling it a substitute for the real thing that only drains energy and inspiration for a fleeting moment.

Work, Competition, and Scarcity

This philosophy extends into business. From the beginning, Pavel realized that more employees do not mean better results. In fact, large teams often move slower, wasting energy on endless coordination. Worse, people with no real work can spread negativity and disrupt the focus of others. A small, disciplined team achieves far more.

His education in St. Petersburg shaped this mindset. In an experimental class, students had to study multiple languages, math, psychology, and sciences all at once. The workload was overwhelming, but it built resilience and trained the mind to handle complexity. Pavel sees mathematics in particular as essential — a subject that teaches how to break down problems, solve them step by step, and try again when things fail. Those same skills apply directly to programming, business, and leadership.

Competition, he believes, is one of the best ways to drive progress. At Telegram, coding contests are often used to identify talent. Skills are demonstrated directly, not just listed on a résumé. If the results are unclear, another contest can be held, and more data collected. In this way, the best people naturally rise to the top.

Finally, Pavel warns against the dangers of abundance. Humanity evolved to survive scarcity, and unlimited access to food, entertainment, and inherited wealth often destroys motivation. When young people grow proud of their parents’ success rather than their own, they lose the drive to build skills and contribute. Restrictions and discipline, he argues, are what give life meaning.

Naval Ravikant's formulas for Life

Happiness = Health + Wealth + Good Relationships

Health = Exercise + Diet + Sleep

Exercise = High Intensity Resistance Training + Sports + Rest

Diets = Natural Foods+ Intermittent Fasting + Plants

Sleep = No Alarms +7-8 hours+ Circadian rhythms

Wealth = Income + Wealth* ( Return on Investment)

Income = Accountability + Leverage + Specific Knowledge

Accountability = Personal Branding + Personal Platform + Taking Risk?

Leverage = Capital + People + Intellectual Property

specific knowledge = knowing how to do something society cannot yet easily train other people to do

Return on Investment = "Buy and hold" + Valuation + Margin of Safety

How to get Lucky By Sam altman

"Give yourself a lot of shots to get lucky" is even better advices than it appears on the surface. luck isn't an independent variable but increases super-linearly with more surface area- ypu meet more people, make more connections between new ideas, learn pattern etc.

Charlie Munger's Advice to young People

I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines.

They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particulary when you have along run ahead of you.

Tom Brady Quotes

To be successful at anything, the truth is, you don't have to be special. you just have to be what most people aren't: consistent, determined, and willing to work for it. No shortcuts.

How to Truly Begin

“Beginning is half done.” - Aristotle

We are social animals. We follow the herd. We inherit careers, rituals, beliefs and a thousand small habits from those who came before. This is both our strength and our weakness. Strength, because it gives us belonging. Weakness, because it makes starting something new unbearably hard. "This is how it is done here," "This is how my family does it," "This is the safe path." Starting something new feels like stepping off a cliff because the herd tells you cliffs are dangerous. So most people do not start. They repeat.

So the question arises: how do we truly start?

The answer lies in first principles thinking, stripping away assumptions, biases, and inherited beliefs until you see reality as it is. We are biased by friends, by religion, by news, by trends. Strip everything down to first principles. Take any claim, project or rule and ask: what is undeniably true? Peel layers by asking why - five times if you must - until you hit the bedrock. Identify constraints that cannot be broken. Then rebuild up from those facts. Steve Jobs did this with product design: he did not ask how products had always been made. He asked what the user actually needs, removed everything that did not matter, and rebuilt for simplicity. That is starting from first principles.

Most problems are simpler than they appear. Complexity often hides laziness or vanity. If something seems impossibly complex, assume a simpler path exists and look for it. Simplicity is the route that survives.

If you want to start and actually finish, you need three real things:

1. Very well defined goals: Not "I want to write a book." That is a wish. Define so precisely that if someone woke you at 3 a.m., you could recite the plan. Example template: outcome (60,000 words finished), deadline (6 months), first milestone (outline and chapter plan in 2 weeks), daily habit (write 500 words before email), acceptance test (a draft where each chapter has a purpose and a call to action). Add metrics and failure conditions. If you cannot describe the first 90 days in exact steps, you do not have a startable goal.
2. Hard work and smart work - both: Hard work is obvious; smart work is missing in most plans. Hard work = focused hours doing the core task. Smart work = deliberate practice, feedback loops, and minimum viable experiments. Break big tasks into repeatable drills. Use Pomodoro blocks. Ship the smallest thing that tests your assumptions - the minimum viable product. Get feedback, iterate, then scale effort. Find people who will tell you what is wrong, not what is flattering. Systems beat inspiration. Automation and routines compound time and attention.
3. Patience - real patience, not wishful thinking: People plan and grind for two weeks, then declare the idea dead. Give any meaningful pursuit margin to breathe. Your rule of thumb: judge after at least 1,000 hours of work. One hour a day for 1,000 days, or three hours a day for a year - you choose the cadence. Skill, network, and judgment compound slowly. Patience is how you survive the valley of bad first drafts, early failures, and noisy feedback.

A practical tool to anchor all of this is a physical to-do list. Get a small diary and a pen. Every morning, write down your top three tasks as bullet points. Do not overfill it. When one is finished, strike it out with a line. This small act compounds into focus and momentum. The diary becomes proof of progress, a record that cannot be scrolled away.

If your task is well defined, starting becomes trivial. Complexity falls away, the first small win lights the next move, and momentum carries you forward. Start small, be ugly, get feedback, repeat.

If you are feeling hesitant, embarrassed, or frustrated at the beginning, remember this:

"Once again, I am deeply disgusted that I must first be bad at something in order to get good at it."

The Paradox of Abundance

For centuries, human progress has been measured by consumption. More calories, more cosmetics, more content. What was once scarcity has become excess. We now drown in food, clothes, and endless streams of media. Ten-minute delivery brings anything to your door. Reels shrink into seconds. Convenience has collapsed patience, and abundance has destroyed attention. We are teaching our minds to live in fragments.

Yet the paradox is clear: the more we consume, the emptier we feel. Every possession adds fragility, every distraction steals focus. We think happiness comes from gathering more, but meaning comes only from creating, giving, and building. Consumption is a sugar high; creation is nourishment. The fewer desires you carry, the freer you are.

The future will not belong to those who consume the most, but to those who need the least. Resilience comes from subtraction, not addition. Less isn’t deprivation - it’s clarity. The less you cling to, the more space you have to think, to create, to live. In a world addicted to more, the rarest luxury is enough.

The Antidote to Stupidity Isn’t Intelligence, It’s Strength

Shane Parrish’s Clear Thinking isn’t about becoming smarter. It’s about escaping stupidity. Most mistakes don’t come from ignorance, but from reacting on autopilot.

We all live under four defaults: emotion, ego, social pressure, and inertia. These instincts once kept us alive, but in modern life they betray us. A single tweet fired off in anger can ruin more than a tiger ever could.

The antidote is strength. Parrish reminds us that cleverness is fragile, but strength endures. Strength comes from four practices:

• Accountability: Ask “What part of this is my responsibility?” The more you own, the faster you grow.
• Self-knowledge: Track when you make your worst decisions, tired, rushed, showing off and redesign your habits.
• Self-control: Build the pause. A deep breath before you reply. A day before you buy. Slowness is power.
• Self-confidence: True confidence is the ability to say, “I was wrong.” Weak minds cling; strong ones update.

Tools that compound: Clear thinking is a discipline, not a gift. Rules, guardrails, and mental models are like weights in the gym. They train your judgment:

• Write personal rules: “I don’t argue after midnight.”
• Design guardrails: no Twitter on the phone, no sugar in the kitchen. Design beats willpower.
• Run pre-mortems: “If this fails, why?” Fix the risks before they break you.
• Think second-order: “And then what?” The first consequence is obvious, the second and third decide your fate.

Parrish’s warning is clear: the extraordinary is just the ordinary, managed wisely. In a world run by defaults, the question is simple.

Are you living by choice, or by default?

Algorithms as Gods, Influencers as Priests, Likes as Prayers

“Man is a religious animal.” Pascal wrote that centuries ago. The form has changed, but the instinct remains.

Religion once offered meaning, community, and ritual. Social media offers the same, only faster and cheaper. The church has been replaced by the platform. The priest by the influencer. The scripture by the feed.

Algorithms are treated like gods. They are invisible, all-powerful, and unpredictable. They decide what we see, what goes viral, who gets rewarded. Their commandments are engagement and outrage. As Dostoevsky warned, “If God is dead, everything is permitted.” The algorithm has no ethics, only incentives.

Likes are the new prayers. They do not change reality, but they create belonging. Enough likes and you feel chosen. Too few and you feel abandoned.

Five years ago, social media was entertainment. Ten years ago, it was curiosity. Today, it is infrastructure. It shapes elections, markets, even wars. The digital crowd is no longer background noise; it is the battlefield.

The economics of this new religion are brutal. Attention is currency, and the market never sleeps. Unlike faith, where devotion could be private, online devotion must be visible. If you do not post, you do not exist.

The side effects are obvious. Rising anxiety. Shallow debates. Polarized societies. A generation raised on dopamine spikes instead of deep thought. We are witnessing not the wisdom of crowds but the hysteria of mobs.

Yet every religion produces its rebels. The early adopters of silence, digital minimalists and offline thinkers, look like heretics now but will be seen as saints later.

The future will not be about choosing between God and no God. It will be about choosing between algorithmic faith and human freedom.

So here is the question: if social media is the new religion, do you want to live as a believer, a priest, or an apostate?

The Global Circus: Are We Being Governed by Fools?

How can we truly measure whether humanity is progressing in wisdom or regressing? While IQ scores might fluctuate and access to information is at an all-time high, one of the most revealing metrics may be the leaders we choose and the environments they create.

We live in an age where information is infinite, intelligence is automated, and machines can answer questions in seconds. By all logic, we should be smarter than ever. Instead, many have traded deep thinking for endless scrolling, consuming reels, memes, and bite-sized outrage, outsourcing judgment to algorithms and AI. The result: a public less curious, less informed, and more vulnerable to emotional manipulation. That vulnerability shows up at the ballot box.

In the United States, voters elevated Donald Trump - a leader whose term was defined by erratic decisions, bizarre proposals like buying Greenland or merging Canada, and a focus on personal gain over public service. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has ruled for decades, waging war in Ukraine while tightening his grip on power. In China, Xi Jinping dismantled term limits, silenced critics, and expanded mass surveillance, even as the economy falters. Around the world, the pattern repeats. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán erodes democracy; Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan blames interest rates for inflation, wrecking the currency. The UK briefly installed a prime minister whose economic plan imploded in 49 days. Italy can’t hold on to leaders long enough to ensure stability. Corruption and dysfunction fuel global unrest from Mongolia’s youth-led protests to Japan’s political scandals, Brazil’s graft cases, and France’s paralyzing strikes. This isn’t just about bad politicians.

It’s about a distracted, dopamine-chasing society that no longer demands competence. When people stop questioning, stop learning, and let algorithms do their thinking, they become easy prey for strongmen, populists, and con artists. We’re not just electing worse leaders, we’re creating the conditions for them to thrive. In the age of AI, the real danger isn’t that machines will outsmart us. It’s that we’ll stop trying to be smart at all.

Charlie Munger said we need a latticework of mental models. The beauty of science is that it gives us patterns that don’t just stay in textbooks. They spill over into daily life, career, and relationships. Here are a few science-based models you can lean on in real decision making.

1. Entropy

Left on its own, everything drifts toward disorder. Your room, your body, your projects—they don’t maintain themselves. Entropy is why maintenance is not optional. If you don’t actively put in energy, decay takes over. This explains why gym habits slip, codebases rot, and relationships fade. The lesson is simple: if something matters, schedule the upkeep. Don’t wait for collapse to remind you that order isn’t free.

2. Critical Mass

Big shifts often feel sudden, but they’re the result of small pushes stacking up. A nuclear reaction doesn’t happen until enough fuel is gathered, and then it looks like magic. Building an audience, forming a habit, or launching a product works the same way. At first you see nothing, then suddenly you see everything. Most people quit before hitting that invisible threshold. Keep going, your critical mass might be closer than you think.

3. Feedback Loops

Biology runs on feedback. Some loops stabilize you, like how your body regulates temperature, while others amplify until they spiral out of control. Life is no different. Social media outrage is a runaway loop. A nightly journaling routine can be a stabilizing one. Recognizing which loops you’re in is half the game. If a loop keeps dragging you in the wrong direction, cut it early. If it’s healthy, reinforce it until it becomes automatic.

4. Limiting Factor

In chemistry, reactions stop not because of abundance but because one ingredient runs out. That’s the limiting reagent. In real life, growth is also constrained by the rarest input. A business might have funding but no skilled engineers. A student might have motivation but no clear study plan. Instead of trying to optimize everything, find your bottleneck. Fix that first, because until you do, nothing else moves forward.

5. Inertia

Physics teaches that objects at rest stay at rest, and objects in motion keep going. Humans aren’t much different. Starting a project is often harder than doing the project. But once you’re in motion, momentum carries you. That’s why the hardest part of going to the gym is putting on your shoes. Lower the barrier to starting and you’ll beat inertia. The trick isn’t willpower, it’s designing tiny starts that make momentum inevitable.

6. Natural Selection

Biology reminds us that only what works survives. Nature discards the inefficient, and so does the world. Careers, businesses, and even personal habits face the same filter. The ideas that adapt stick around, the rest fade. Instead of resisting change, evolve with it. Test small variations, keep what works, and let the rest die quietly. Survival, whether in ecosystems or economies, belongs to those who can learn and adjust fastest.

If you’ve ever heard Charlie Munger talk about decision-making, you’ll know he insists on building a “latticework of mental models.” One of the richest sources of these models is math—not the abstract equations you struggled with in school, but the patterns of growth, risk, and reality checks that quietly shape everything in daily life. In this post, we’ll look at a handful of math models you can actually use—and how they show up in real-world choices.

1. Compounding — The Quiet Superpower

Compounding is exponential growth in action. Money, habits, and even knowledge all compound. If you invest ₹10,000 at 12%, it doubles in about six years (rule of 72). If you learn one new coding skill every week, in a year you’re not just 52 steps ahead—you’re connecting skills, multiplying your options.

Real-life use: Start early, stay consistent, and avoid interruptions. A gym habit, a savings account, or a daily journal all get dramatically easier to maintain if you give them time to compound.

2. Power Laws — Focus on the Vital Few

The 80/20 rule is a power law in disguise: 20% of inputs often drive 80% of results. In business, a few customers often bring in most of the revenue. In studying, a few chapters carry most of the test weight.

Real-life use: Ask, What are the few things that really matter? Cut the trivial many. Spend 80% of your effort on the 20% of tasks that actually move the needle.

3. Regression to the Mean — Don’t Get Fooled by Extremes

When something swings to an extreme - an unusually good exam score, a lucky stock pick—it usually drifts back toward average next time. People often mistake extremes for new norms.

Real-life use: Don’t over-celebrate one win or despair over one failure. Look for trends, not outliers. That coding bug that mysteriously fixed itself? Don’t assume you’ve leveled up permanently—verify it.

4. Base Rates — Start With What Usually Happens

Before making a prediction, ask: what happens on average in similar situations? If most startups fail within 5 years, that’s your base rate. If 70% of job applicants don’t hear back, that’s the reality you start with.

Real-life use: Before betting on exceptions (“This stock will triple!”), ground yourself in the norm. If the base rate is against you, you need extraordinary evidence or a smarter plan.

5. Expected Value — Thinking in Probabilities

Not all wins and losses are equal. Expected Value (EV) = probability × payoff. A 10% chance of winning ₹10,000 is worth ₹1,000 in expectation. A guaranteed ₹900 may be better, depending on your risk appetite.

Real-life use: Apply EV thinking to career moves, not just gambling. A risky project with 30% chance of big rewards might still beat a “safe” option, if failure won’t ruin you.

6. Sensitivity Analysis — What Really Moves the Needle?

Change one variable at a time and see how the outcome shifts. In financial models, it’s interest rates or customer growth. In coding, it’s usually one performance bottleneck.

Real-life use: Don’t tweak everything at once. When debugging, change one input, test, then note the effect. Same with habits—if you want to sleep better, change caffeine first before overhauling your whole routine.