Life advice is useful when it resonates emotionally and logically. It’s useful when it changes your behaviour. It is true that not all life advice is useful over time. What’s useful now may not be useful in 10 years. What was useful 5 years ago, isn’t useful now.

For this reason, periodically assessing the ‘advice you most need to hear’ and keeping that front of mind is pivotal to becoming the highest version of yourself. If you are already performing in alignment with a given set of advice, you don’t need to remind yourself of specific advice.

Right now, these are my most important pieces of advice to self:

• Needing what you want can make you hungrier, more driven, more creative, more passionate. It’s possible to manufacture motivation and stoke desperation.
• We determine our own lives by the meaning we choose to give our past experiences. At any point in time, you can choose to give your past experiences the most positive or goal-directed meaning.
• The world runs on cause and effect. If you don’t have what you want, ask what set of actions someone would need to take to get it.
• The man who works all day has no time to make money (Rockefeller).
• Long-term satisfaction comes from limiting options and leaning into your pathway. Commitment breeds meaning.
• If you fear losing what you have, you don't believe in yourself.
• You prove that you’re ready by starting.
• There are no beliefs, only actions.
• It might not happen on the timeframe you want it to, so loosen your grip, ride the river.
• Most advice is useless and tainted with personal circumstances. Oh, the irony.
• You can’t have non-consensus ideas reading what the consensus reads.
• All of the successful people I know have rearranged their brains to prevail at their chosen goal.
• You are not your thoughts. The day you can observe your thoughts in 3rd person without reacting is the day you are free.
• The more agreeable you are, the less critically you think.
• Status is implied in every single interaction with other people. Be conscious of what your energy and actions portray.
• Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.
• When you expand the time horizon, almost anything is possible. If I told you I was going to build a $1bn company in 1 year, what would you say? What about 5 years? What about 10? What about 50? Anything which is not a law of physics is possible given sufficient knowledge, time, and the right people.
• You can trick yourself into doing almost anything by just treating it as an experiment.
• Never make an ask within 1 year of any new relationship.
• Everything is hard, so you might as well aim insanely high. Do not take a backward step on the level of ambition.
• Behaviour change is never a knowledge problem, it’s an active thought problem.
• Don’t rely on willpower to do the things you know you should be doing. Systemise everything.
• The single biggest unlock for doing anything hard is remembering that you’re going to die.
• Satisfaction does not come from money, rewards, status or praise; it comes from impressing yourself. Mistaking the former for the latter is a source of enormous misery. You impress yourself when you do something you care about that is hard. A good question to ask yourself when deciding what to work on: "What would impress myself the most?"
• The most painful insult is what you believe yet feel ashamed to believe.
• Disregard prescriptions. For every success story, someone has succeeded doing the exact opposite.
• The fastest way to learn is finding someone who’s done it and asking them how.
• Everyone is insecure and suffering in some way. Honing in on the insecurity/suffering is a bridge to deep connections.
• Matching your intentions with your actions is the only way to avoid long-term regret.
• The world is an abundant place.
• Signalling implies the opposite.
• Your intuition is often right if you take the time to listen to it.
• Make a few concentrated bets, rather than diversifying. This applies to everything: investing, work, relationships, reading, etc.