Stable Marrige Problem In this post, I hope to show you an example of why you shouldn’t just let life happen to you and why you should be as proactive as possible. There’s a math problem called the stable marriage problem. As stated on Wikipedia: Given n men and n women, where each person has ranked all members of the opposite sex in order of preference, marry the men and women together such that there are no two people of opposite sex who would both rather have each other than their current partners....

Kobe is legendary for working hard and was one of the best ballers in history. Elon Musk is known for working hard and is the world’s richest man. It’s very tempting to draw the connection that working hard is a necessary and sufficient condition for success. Alas, if working hard is all that’s needed to win, everyone would win. Someone could work 10X hours the next person and earn half as much....

When I was an emo teenager, I thought that optimism was the same as naivete. It is not. Being naive means ignoring facts and making foolish decisions. Being optimistic means being hopeful for good results despite knowing that challenges exist. Naivete results from a lack of experience. Optimism results from having tons of experience. Many folks are pessimists so they can protect themselves from disappointment when things go wrong. This is a fool’s errand and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy....

In the Top 5 Regrests Of The Dying, one of the most common regrets of the dying is: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. The wiki article also states: A 2018 study reached similar conclusions, finding that people were more likely to express “ideal-related regrets”, such as failing to follow their dreams and live up to their full potential....

I Lose At Everything I Do As a child, I was accomplished in school. This gave me the false confidence that I’d be good at “real life” and doing “business” and “making money” as well. Excelling in school is different than excelling IRL. Reason’s because our education is a laid out track with linear progression, and you’re told exactly what to do. Real life is hard, complicated, and has many surprises....

You watch these 15-second Tik Tok clips and influencers give you some shallow advice. Some say to double-down and focus on your strengths only; some say you should diversify and ‘taste’ as much as you can. Black and white advice is bad because everyone’s situation is different. Should an 18-year old decide what he’ll do for the rest of his life and “specialize”? I don’t think so. Should a 58-year old man who’s suffered Shiny Object Syndrome keep looking to find his ‘passion’ for the next 20 years?...

What Is First Principles Thinking First principles thinking is when you think about a problem with almost no assumptions. The only assumptions you’d make are provable concepts, like basic physics. This is tiresome because almost everything would be “derived from scratch.” But at the same time, it unleashes infinite creativity because you’re not putting artificial constraints to the problem. With your mind as a blank slate, anything is possible. What was previously “unsolvable” with artificial constraints is now solvable....

Murphy’s Law says: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” This isn’t a pessimistic statement, but rather an observation of reality. By definition, if something can go wrong, but does not go wrong, that’s called luck. Thus, for you to build a business without running into Murphy’s Law would mean you’re exceptionally lucky. Conversely, when everything’s going wrong for you, you’re not experiencing bad luck; you’re experience an average amount of luck....

Passive income is a myth. It does not exist. There are 2 reasons for this. Reason 1: Everything Takes Nonzero Energy Building a passive income stream takes herculean effort in general, and isn’t as ‘easy’ as you think. If it were, then everybody would be doing it and by definition the “passive” income opportunity would be gone. So, say you spend 500 hours building a passive income stream that eventually pays you $50,000....

I’ve invested in suspicious opportunities before (turned out to be a Ponzi) because someone “successful” recommended me it. I’ve partnered with bad businesses partners before where I did most of the work and/or put in most of the money. As such, I’ve compiled a short list of criteria you should use to vet business partners (subject to be more strict based on future experiences). Criteria For Business Partners First and foremost, even if someone meets all the criteria below if your gut feel is not a “HELL YES”, then it’s a “HELL NO....

A week ago, a guy in a gas mask threw a couple of smoke grenades in a crowded NYC subway car and shot 10 people. This happened in a neighborhood called sunset park, where Wikipedia says: In 2018, an estimated 29% of Sunset Park residents lived in poverty, compared to 21% in all of Brooklyn and 20% in all of New York City. Given the increase in crime and their increased publicity, it’s rational for any NYC resident to simply take a rideshare/taxi instead of the subway just to save a few bucks....

My girlfriend and I are traveling across Europe currently for a month. We’re eating and drinking, happy as ever in the beautiful European summer heat. We’re healthy and our household income is more than half a mil a year. I was posed the question: Do you ever kick back, relax and realize you “made it” in life? Out on vacation w/ GF in europe, basking in the sun, eating good food drinking high quality alcoholic beverages?...

You should never listen to anyone except yourself. Blindly trusting people, especially for financial decisions almost always leads to disaster. In fact, for things related to money, you should just ask people about where to get information, as opposed to what the information is. For example, instead of asking your friend what are good stock picks, you might ask where are sources to learn more about stocks. Then do your own diligence from there....

As mentioned in the previous post, nobody really cares when you complain. People have their own thing going on. Further, nobody truly cares about your problems; they’ve got problems of their own. You’re a CEO of a company? Great. Your employees don’t care about your vision, or how you or the business is doing. They care about being paid and getting raises and promotions for a minimal amount of effort....

As I write this, my TAP Portugal flight for 8:15 AM was cancelled. Slept at 1AM and woke up at 5AM to catch this flight. They didn’t send an email about the cancellation, so we found out only when we got there. We then went to the counter to ask about this and they told us that we changed our seat (we didn’t) – as if that was the reason the entire flight was cancelled (we didn’t the flight)....

There are 2 categories of things in life: Things you can control, and Things you can’t control. For the latter, just accept the situation and move on. Think: how does worrying about events you cannot control productive? It’s not. Too many of us worry about things we can’t control: how other people think of us, the outcome of some interview, and other things that’s already happened. Conversely, not enough of us worry about things we can control....

The 3 Big Things We All Want Wealth Health Happiness We want wealth so we can spend money on things and live a life of abundance. We want health because being unhealthy is a bad quality of life. And we want to be happy because why live a miserable life? What Order Of These Things Should You Focus On? I hypothesize that you should focus on these things, in this order:...

In The Grand Scheme Of Things… Consider the following: There are about 1e25 planets in the observable universe. And about 70 quintillion estimated in the universe in total. The Earth is about 4.543 billion years old. The Universe is about 13.8 billion years old. Homo Sapiens have existed for around 200,000 years. Suppose you’re Elon Musk and let’s say you hypothetically extend the human race to have another 2 million years before extinction....

3 weeks ago, I was watching my favorite Youtube (Mark Wiens) eat in Lisbon as part of my travel research. Going to Portugal, it’s important to me to eat authentic food. I feel like I’m absorbing the culture better if “I eat what the locals eat.” So when Mark Wiens couldn’t find an authentic Portuguese restaurant and had to end up in an Indian place to eat samosas and curry, I laughed my ass off....

In Portugal and discovered a very tasty snack called Ovos Moles. It’s basically a sweet concoction of an egg yolk that’s wrapped into a pastry and looks like this: I like it because it’s not too sweet and it’s quite yolky. If you like the taste of egg yolks, you’d love this snack. Anyway, we bought a pack of 10 because it’s cheap (only 6€, whereas buying each one individually is 1€ each)....