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Most of us experience life through the lens of social expectations—the generally accepted norms and implicit guidelines about appropriate behavior in various contexts. These expectations create an interesting intersection between societal ideals and our lived experience. While many aspire to authentic self-expression, maintaining complete authenticity presents genuine challenges in a world that often incentivizes strategic self-presentation. Professional networking platforms exemplify this dynamic, creating environments where career advancement naturally encourages highlighting accomplishments and capabilities in ways that may sometimes diverge from more nuanced self-perception.

Humans have accomplished remarkable things throughout our history. Yet today, despite these achievements, we appear to be backsliding while the world burns. We face enormous challenges with little evidence of meaningful progress beyond political and corporate greenwashing campaigns designed to keep consumption—“business as usual”—humming along. Van Gogh’s Starry Night

When examining human behavior, you can usually answer the “why?” behind most phenomena by analyzing incentives. This principle applies universally—from economics to politics, where elected officials often prioritize certain interests over broader constituent needs. There’s a reason the phrase “follow the money” has become ubiquitous. Many people skip the step of examining incentive structures, then express confusion when others act in ways that seem counterintuitive. Yet once you look at the underlying incentives, motivations typically become clear. Most of the dysfunction we see in modern capitalism can be traced to poorly designed incentive systems.

I’m learning to get better at being bored. There have been times when I actively avoided boredom, in particular in my childhood I thought of boredom as a bad thing. I still tend to fill free time with “activities” more than I should. My go-to boredom fillers include reading, writing, taking walks, watching TV or movies (as much as I hate to admit it), and occasionally a video game (which, unlike TV, requires some degree of active participation).

In the Linux kernel project, Linus Torvalds has made over 70,000 commits since 19911. That’s an average of over 2,000 commits per year, or about 6 commits per day, every day, for 30 years. Meanwhile, the average contributor makes fewer than 10 commits total. This isn’t an anomaly—it’s a pattern we see across the entire software industry.

I’ve never liked the word “invention”; instead, I prefer the term discovery. Nobody has ever truly invented anything—rather, we come upon discoveries, and some people are fortunate enough to figure out how to monetize them. Every time I think I’ve had a brilliant, original insight, a quick internet search reveals dozens of people who’ve already explored the same concept, often more thoroughly than I have. It’s a humbling experience that repeats itself with remarkable consistency.

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

The most challenging relationships I’ve experienced, both personal and professional, have involved highly neurotic individuals. By neuroticism, I mean a tendency toward emotional instability—characterized by inconsistency, excessive anxiety, disproportionate reactions to minor issues, and sometimes aggressive responses to everyday stressors. Understanding Neuroticism # Neuroticism exists on a spectrum. A moderate level of concern about potential problems can be productive—it helps us prepare and plan. But when these feelings become overwhelming or trigger reactions that damage relationships, they cross into problematic territory.

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!” What’s rarely discussed is how to internalize survivorship bias in an actionable way. If you know that most success stories (whether in business, investing, dating, or even the actual lottery) are primarily the result of luck rather than skill, how can you use this information to your advantage?

In Daniel Kahneman’s influential book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he presents a compelling model of how our minds work: we have two distinct systems for thinking. System 1 operates automatically, quickly, with little effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to effortful mental activities, including complex computations and deliberate choice-making.