🌱 don't waste your life
A friend recently asked me, "Do you have a guiding principle for your life?"
It's hard to pick one thing that I believe in as my North Star. But after a little thinking, I settled on this one: Don't waste your life.
A life well lived is one that is not wasted. Which means that there are many wrong ways to live your life, but also plenty of right ones. For instance:
- Open a cafe, raise a goose, and fly planes
- Become an engineer working on Important Problems
- Be a great parent and a great friend
- Be a teacher, mentor, or educator
- Ideally, do some combination of the above
When I think of a life not wasted, I think about constantly trying to become an excellent person—whatever that means. I think of experimenting with silly ideas and building things. I think of taking care of the people around me and doing "good" (defined in some reasonable way) for other people. I think of continuously learning something and doing Hard Things from time to time. Notably, I do not think of getting an absurdly high-paying job or becoming the world's best at something.
It's so easy to live on autopilot and go through years of your life—only to realize that you haven't done the things you actually want to. The action space of your life is huge, but your actions tend to converge around whatever your peers do. So you're artificially constraining yourself to a subset of the action space.
So, to start exploring, we need to ask ourselves questions like:
- "What would you do right now if you didn't have to worry about money, time, or what others thought about you?"
- "What would you do/try/or experiment with if you knew you couldn't fail?"
- "What would you do/try/experiment with even if you knew that you would fail?"
What are your responses? They might surprise you.
Maybe you want to quit your job and start a cafe. Work abroad for a few months while building a startup. Go to grad school and become a teaching professor. Or maybe you realize you've been doing it right this whole time.
It doesn't matter exactly what you do. But whatever it is, do it with intention.