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When someone asks me, “s’whattaya do?”, I have a difficult time providing a straight answer. These days, I suppose any of these would be acceptable answers: Software Artisan Philosopher Amateur Blogger Author Investor Entrepreneur Human With Two Dogs Computer Person Techie Nerd Former Lyft Driver Autodidact Potato Farmer Okay, okay, I will stop there.

Most people go through life within a reality distortion field, shaped by the cultural norms and expectations about what is right or good in the world, and the point where those expectations intersect with reality. While everyone likes to pretend they’re authentic, most people spend most of their lives lying to themselves, largely because society forces us to.

Humans have accomplished some remarkable things throughout our history. Today, however, despite all we’ve accomplished, it feels like we’re backsliding while the world burns. We face some enormous challenges, but there’s no evidence of progress aside from some political and corporate greenwashing and virtue-signaling campaigns to keep us all consuming (aka “business as usual”).

When it comes to humans, you can usually answer the “why?” question about behavioural observations by examining the incentives. This is especially true in economics, but also true of nearly everything in life, such as why politicians ignore their constituents or adopt unpopular policies. There’s a popular catchphrase to describe this kind of analysis: “follow the money”.

I’m learning to get better at being bored. In the past, I wouldn’t say I liked boredom. And I still tend to fill my free time more than I should with “activities” when bored. Most of the time, the activities I choose to fill my free time include: reading, writing, taking walks, watching TV or movies (as much as I hate to admit), and occasionally a video game (which is not a passive activity, unlike TV).

People love to argue about the so-called “10x engineer”, which in the techie world refers to a computer person who produces 10x as much value as the average computer person (when discussing people who write software and their corresponding output). I want to correct something. The 10x engineer is a misnomer because it actually should be “The 100x Engineer”.

I’ve never liked the word “invention”; instead, I prefer the term discovery. Nobody has ever invented anything–rather, sometimes we come upon discoveries, and some people are lucky enough to figure out how to get money from them. Whenever I think I’m clever and have somehow come upon a new idea, I have to take a step back and remind myself that nearly everything has already been tried or thought of at some point.

We often must judge others, such as when hiring, choosing who to work with, or selecting friends and mates. I find that there are two attributes most desirable in people I associate with, which are authenticity and smartness. There are two simple heuristics for detecting bullshitters and smart people, which I’ll outline below.

The people I’ve had the worst relationships with in life have generally been those who are highly neurotic. For this post, I’ll define neuroticism as being inconsistent, anxious, aggressive, and overreacting to minor obstacles. Neuroticism is a fantastic tool for damaging any relationship, in either business or personal life. A certain amount of neuroticism is healthy (and normal in many circumstances–although there is no such thing as “normal” when it comes to people and their personalities), but in the modern world where we need not be concerned about getting eaten by tigers so there’s little value in anxiety.

Survivorship bias often gets discussed as a cautionary tale. For example, someone might point out a person’s or company’s success, and another will retort with, “But that’s just survivorship bias!”. People don’t often discuss how to internalize survivorship bias in an actionable way. In other words: if you know that most people who win the lottery in some fashion (whether in business, investing, dating, or even the actual lottery) did so mainly out of luck, it doesn’t answer the question of how we can use this information to our advantage.