A set of quotes and principles that have inspired me and provided guidance on how to navigate the world.

Seminal


Rigorous simplicity costing not less than everything.


“Be guided by beauty. It can be the way a company runs, or the way an experiment comes out, or the way a theorem comes out, but there’s a sense of beauty when something is working well, almost an aesthetic to it.” - Jim Simons


“Obsession is what it comes down to. It is difficult to think without obsession, and it is impossible to create something without a foundation that is rigorous, incontrovertible, and, in fact, to some degree repetitive. Repetition is the ritual of obsession. Repetition is a way to jumpstart the indecision of beginning. To persevere and to begin over and over again is to continue the obsession with work. Work comes out of work. In order to work you must already be working.” - Richard Serra


In the equilibrium: all words go to zero, all wisdom goes to zero, all knowledge goes to zero.


Build positive feedback loops to scale yourself.


Intuition is the gradient to dancing with style. Through intuition, one is able to make informed decisions without falling into the despair of thought. Trust instinct and move quickly. 


Perception is more important than reality.


We are the product of all the we have consumed.


Life is easy if you want it to be.


Only engage in long-term planning if the horizon for long-term planning is shorter than the horizon over which your aesthetics change.


“Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Moderation is for cowards.” Simplify life and pour everything into the pursuit of passions.


When facing a tough decision, minimize the decision cost and the error cost.


“But he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.” - Ken Kesey


Derive satisfaction from doing both the smallest things and the largest things with perfection.


“The connoisseur of camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses. Mere use does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess them in a rare way.” - Susan Sontag


“The way he handled the material comforts that fortune had supplied him in such abundance - without arrogance and without apology. If they were there, he took advantage of them. If not, he didn’t miss them.” - Aurelius 


“Alexander and Caesar and Pompey. Compared with Diogenes, Heraclitus, Socrates? The philosophers knew the what, the why, the how. Their minds were their own. The others? Nothing but anxiety and enslavement.” - Aurelius


“Imagine 99% of your thought process is devoted to protecting your self conceptions and 98% of that is wrong, now you’ve got the math right.” - Jim Keller


Everything is a local maximum.


“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” - Camus


“We live inside a story that the brain tells itself.” - Joscha Bach


“Rational knowledge (reason) negates a meaning of life. If one follows rational knowledge to its end, then the only logically consistent option is suicide. Faith negates reason, and in doing so permits a meaning of life.” - Tolstoy


You spent so long looking forward that you forgot to look up.