Underrated Advice

I think most pieces of advice are either too general or cliche. They are quite natural to understand, and even without explicitly coming along the piece of advice, we find ourselves following it. If I was ever asked to give advice, this is probably what I would say instead of the usual things:

Life

• It’s almost always better to spend money and have a good experience than the opposite.
• General advice is just that: general. The best advice is it depends.
  • You will notice that most cliches also have an exact opposite cliche going around. Eg:
    • “Everything happens for a reason” and “Be a trailblazer and forge your own path”.
    • “It’s the journey, not the destination” and “set your goals high, and don’t stop till you get there”
• Negativity propagates aggressively. If you choose to be negative about something to others, be damn sure you are right.
  • Typically it’s good to have close friends to be able to discuss these things, but it is a mistake to air out your internal thinking to everyone you know.

Skills

• Push yourself to do everything faster; practise increasing sheer throughput
  • You must be cognizant of this at all times. When working or thinking, it seems that we have a natural coasting pace, even when we are in flow. When I was young, I felt like I was really skilled in math, coding, etc. Even when I “coasted”, I excelled past my peers, but as I go through university, this is becoming less of a case. After all, my peers and I are going through the same courses with the same schedule—by the end of this, why should I have any more skill than them? In The Fullness of Time, your peers will have the same knowledge as you, and thus speed ends up being the real differentiator of ability.
• Specifically for school: prioritize all of your interests over school.
  • Learning is weird in that you are never truly done. You could do thousands of math problems and still feel like you need to do some more. School ends up expanding to take up whatever time you give it because it is so entrenched in the lives of students.
• It’s easy to get lost in the “regular methodologies”. They are regular for a reason (inefficient). For example, I think most people run through the motions of doing practice from scratch, but once you understand the base methodologies (writing code, integrating) all that is important is checking your strategy from the start
  • The key here is to ensure that you won’t struggle from mental “compilation errors”