34 Ideas I Was Dead Wrong About
Lessons it took a while to sink in.
Today, we’re diving into some thought-provoking ideas and mental models that shape the choices we make every day. Why do we chase status symbols, How do we fall into shadow careers, what makes us suckers for shortcuts over true purpose and understanding?
As I’m 34, I wrote this to cover 34 of my favourite ideas I’ve thought about this year and would tell to a younger version of myself.
It’s a wide-ranging list.
Where possible, I’ve strung them together in logical sequences to create a sense of journey and progress.
I love hearing these from other people.
I especially loved Kevin Kelly’s, where he also prompted people to spend time coming up with their own ideas.
So here we are.
It’s not the number of books you read but the number you understand
You forget what people say, but remember how they make you feel. It’s the same with books.
Reading a book fast, and rushing to the next one is building a library of book reviews in your mind.
You know how good a book is, but haven’t learnt the principles or practised them.
You retain 10% of what you read, but 90% of what you teach.
Engage with a book by making notes, arguing with the ideas, discussing with others.
Bonus points for writing a summary and teaching it to others.
Are you pursuing a shadow career?
This quote hits:
“Are you getting your Ph.D. in Elizabethan Studies because you’re afraid to write the tragedies and comedies you know you have inside you?
Are you living the drugs-and-booze half of the musician’s life, without actually writing the music?
Are you working in a support capacity for an innovator because you’re afraid to risk being an innovator yourself?” - Steven Pressfield
If you’re dissatisfied with your current life, ask yourself what your current life is a metaphor for.
That metaphor will point you toward your true calling.
You don’t need a side hustle
It might seem like everyone is running a podcast or a newsletter or an Etsy store.
But how many talk of downsides?
"Beware the barrenness of a busy life." - Socrates
Only 9% of side-hustles generate a meaningful income.
Yet 60% result in burnout.
Whatever you do in your free time should be an outlet.
That can be a creative hobby or a sport, but it should be done for the love of doing it rather than an external goal.
There are no shortcuts
"Those who think they have no time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness." – Edward Stanley
Not exercising makes you age faster mentally and physically.
I used to think light sleeping was a superpower, now I think being a good sleeper is a superpower.
Whether you're investing in your health, relationships or trying to make money.
The best results come slowly over time.
You do your best work when you aren’t working
Muscles grow at rest, not during the workout.
Do you give time to let ideas breathe and grow without your vigilance?
Always working and striving for inspiration can prevent good ideas from surfacing.
“The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with only one-seventh of its bulk above water.” - Freud
Having multiple interests, a regular exercise habit and true downtime creates an environment for big ideas and good work to happen.
Ideas are stepping stones
Ideas are cheap and mostly wrong.
But working on them will improve your ability to have and execute ideas.
Treat them as stepping stones to your next thing.
Don’t wait 30 years to finally write your book idea, so you can do it in its perfect form.
Just write the best book you can today, and write another book a few years later.
In 30 years time you will be ten times better at writing books.
It's not about ideas. It's about making ideas happen.
Money is a tool
You can trade money for:
Time of other people
Assets of other people (which they put time into making/accruing).
That’s all it is.
An important thing to answer for yourself:
How much of other people’s time and stuff do you need to live the life you want?
How much of your own time are you willing to spend to get that?
Money transactions are always a trade, and your time isn’t free.
"Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like." – Will Rogers
Life is too short to pursue the wrong things
Money is great but at what cost?
Losing ten years of your life and perhaps missing your kids grow up, or sacrificing your health.
Some things are only worth doing at the right time.
Bumming around hostels in your 40’s or 60’s isn’t fun or cool.
Having a very boring 20s instead of exploring is a high cost to pay.
Make sure you know how to enjoy yourself before you chase money and waste most of it on the wrong things.
Could you have just earned half as much and be in a better position?
"The cost of not following your heart is spending the rest of your life wishing you had." – J. Paul
It doesn’t matter what you do - it’s how you do it
We all had different teachers who taught the same subject.
Yet we might remember one teacher who had a warmth and curiosity that was infectious.
Whatever you do in life, it is your approach that counts.
We can be too focused on the outcome.
The job, the exam result, the number in the bank, the partner.
What matters is how you show up every day in pursuit of your goals.
That is what will make you happy.
Not the goal itself.
You don’t hike a trail because you want to be at the end. You hike because you want to be hiking.
So take snacks and enjoy the damn view.
Practice the emotions you want to feel
If you don’t practice being calm and content, it’s hard to feel it.
A stressed entrepreneur who is constantly putting out fires every day for years becomes wired for stress.
When they sell their business, they aren’t wired to relax and feel happy.
Don’t get stuck in a cycle of practising a feeling you don’t want in your life.
Gratitude practice creates a 25% increase in happiness
Meditation practice gives a 30% reduction in stress
Practising Self-compassion results in a 40% increase in positive emotional state
Each stat required the word “Practice”
"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." – John Milton
You need to find out who you are
Spending time alone, travel the world, having a high-pressure job and a low-pressure job, be in a life or death situation.
Spend ten days in a meditation retreat - just you battling your own mind.
(They’re free)
Read psychology.
"Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom." – Aristotle
There is not enough information in your genetics to tell you what you are capable of.
You have to find it out yourself.
It takes time to find your voice
You need to achieve a certain level of skill in painting to be able to express yourself in your own style as a painter.
It is the same in writing. It takes time to create the confidence and raw skill to discover/master your own voice.
To get there, it helps to copy others.
A basketball player practices footwork on YouTube, a director copies filming techniques, and a comedian studies joke styles.
Build a foundation first that will evolve into allowing you to express yourself.
Picasso took years to develop the style of “Picasso”
Mr Beast took years to develop the style of “Mr Beast”
Mark Manson took years to develop the writing style of “Mark Manson”
Get your 10,000 hours in.
Don’t worry about being perfect or unique straight away.
Get in the arena.
Discipline is more important than talent
Again, quoting Stephen Pressfield 🫶
“You’re way better if you have giant discipline than giant talent.
Discipline itself and the act of repeatedly showing up builds talent and allows you to create great work.”
Research shows that discipline is a stronger predictor of success than IQ in over 75% of cases.
This is why IQ isn’t everything.
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." – Will Durant
But IQ IS an unfair advantage.
IQ is simply the ability to understand patterns and results.
This means you can learn faster and predict the future better.
Cognitive biases and ego can get in the way and make smart people stupid.
Lack of discipline can block you from ever making the most of your raw intelligence.
However, believing that IQ means nothing is unhelpful and denies reality.
The Worlds most successful leaders of mega-corporations:
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos.
They are all top 1% IQ - possibly top 0.1%
Success building a giant company from nothing requires a gift for understanding the world.
There is no getting around it.
Apply yourself accordingly
Mr Beast (apparently) has an IQ of 111 (top 35% but nowhere near the top 1%)
He only needs to understand YouTube. He put in 80,000 hours understanding YouTube to be the best person at YouTube.
There are fewer balls in the air to make a high retention video than to make mind blowing technology.
So he won through effort.
Understand your own level.
Find games you can win at and apply yourself accordingly.
Bonus
Instead of wanting to be the best at 1 thing, you can be top 10% at three skills.
This results in being the top 0.1% of people at those three skills together.
It is intelligent to make others feel clever
You do not woo people by confusing them with your intelligence.
You impress them by empowering them to understand things no one else can explain to them.
Intelligence isn’t a zero-sum game.
You do not win by being smarter than others.
The human collective is smarter because we have books, the internet, and education systems.
You are smarter because of everything before you.
Making others more intelligent improves the capabilities of the world.
This, in turn, makes you more intelligent.
Think bigger
A lot of us feel like we are moving slowly and blame the world or our lack of opportunities.
This is like driving a car in second gear and blaming the traffic
Mr Beast's success mostly came from thinking bigger.
He gives the example:
A video title of “I spent 50 hours in my backyard” isn’t exciting.
“I survived 50 hours in ketchup” is.
Both take as long to film and one has a little more set up but is radically more clickable.
Many people start a substack, business or project with a very beige idea.
An app with a slight feature change or a podcast interviewing anyone over coffee.
Do something that no one else is doing, that is noteworthy.
Set a higher bar for yourself.
What would be worth pursuing for 10 years?
"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." – John A. Shedd
No one thinks about you, as much as you do
Much as we think people care about the ketchup stain on our trousers.
No one notices.
"You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do." – Eleanor Roosevelt
This is also why we think recording a conversation over coffee for a podcast is interesting when in reality, no one will listen.
We forget that everyone is too lost in their own world to care that much about ours.
—
This is also a freeing realisation to get way less annoyed by other people.
Make your story interesting
If each day of your life is a page in a book - you are the only person who reads every page.
You may as well do some crazy things.
Cycle across a continent instead of another package holiday.
Write a book instead of sporadic blogging or worse, just watching TikTok.
"If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re too small." – Richard Branson
Use First Principles
I know it’s spoken about a lot, but don’t let ideas in your head of what’s possible break the rules of physics.
No law in the Universe says you can’t give a banger speech or that every partner you have will be toxic.
There will be things in your society or field that have always been done in one way.
It doesn’t mean you can’t do something different.
78% of successful innovators attribute their breakthroughs to questioning assumptions and rethinking traditional approaches.
As an example:
I have a totally weird outro on my podcast.
I whisper funny ideas like I’m behind your shoulder. I recorded myself shouting motivation quotes from the room next door. I have silent pauses for the listener to reflect.
Things I’ve never heard on a podcast.
I also actively tell people not to listen to more podcasts, which is an interesting choice as a podcaster.
But there is no reason I can’t put any audio I dream of into an audio file.
A podcast is just an audio file - there are no rules on what can or can’t be done beyond that.
Learn from others
Smart people learn from the mistakes of others. Dumb people make their own mistakes from scratch.
Read books, and engage with your peers.
Where relevant, using a coach can result in 50% faster personal growth.
Don’t think you won’t experience the same problems other people have.
You probably aren’t smarter or more organised than them.
Too much of anything is bad
Fish and chips or a BigMac are great, but 5 days in a row, it’s really bad.
Yet you’re favourite cereal every day for breakfast is mostly fine, but it’s nice to take a break now and then.
People can be like food.
Some humans you only want in occasional bursts - like fish and chips.
Even people you love to spend loads of time with - it’s worth taking a break from them now and then.
If you travel or live with someone every day, it can amplify little things about them that are annoying.
Yet, an afternoon apart to go hiking or look around a museum.
Not only do you have the chance to miss them, but you might find yourself wishing you could tell them a thought as it springs up.
Society as we know it is an accident
What we live in is not a finely crafted end goal of an intelligent evolution process.
It is a series of accidents that, in the long term travel in a better direction.
Evolution is the process of genetic accidents (mutations) that happen to have a benefit.
Studies show that 85% of modern inventions were accidental discoveries or unintentional consequences.
In fact, the world is pretty random
Think about all your projects.
The last 5-10% or maybe even 50% of the project was likely rushed together at the last minute.
A lot of what you see in the world was thrown together in a burst of rushed activity to meet a deadline.
Governments and businesses. Half their projects are the result of individuals taping things together last minute.
You can take the world less seriously when you consider how much of it was made up by someone in a rush.
North Korea is an incredibly misunderstood place
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge.”
We think every human must be living a terrible existence due to the lack of human rights.
But we have a fixed definition of freedom.
North Korea is different:
There is no advertising anywhere infecting your mind that you are not enough until you buy the deodorant, or the car, or the holiday.
There is no journalism bombarding you with how the entire world (and especially your own country) is going to hell.
There is no freedom of political speech, but there is a defined path you can follow, which you can walk with peace.
They live in a country where their version of Jesus is alive and breathing.
Question and find flaws in things you take for granted
It’s good to question a book you think is brilliant or a teacher you feel is always right.
Things you readily accept are a weak point.
Similarly, it’s wise to be able to find the positives in the things you are against.
It’s weird for a Westerner to wrap their mind around North Korea (or even China).
Yet there is a lot of freedom when:
You don’t have FOMO and anxiety for the bajillion things you aren’t doing.
You are at peace with your life choices.
The only politicised opinions are actually about politics. When the car you drive, the food you eat, and the clothes you wear don’t offend someone.
Right now, my saying there could be good things to consider about North Korea is probably offending someone…
I should state - I don’t agree with their methodology or advocate for North Korean principles towards human rights in the slightest.
But it was the most upside-down place I’ve ever been to in terms of mind-boggling values that still allow for humans to build a life in.
Build your own beliefs
Don’t trust the news or a favourite influencer, blogger or podcaster as a source of information.
Learn to identify your beliefs that come from society and those around you.
Don’t get caught up in an ideology of isms.
Sure some of them have good aspects.
Any ideology has a level of inflexibility and relies on you conforming to opinions to make decisions about you're feelings.
"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." – Buddha
Questioning societal norms helps you develop a stronger sense of identity and who you are.
Keep your identity small
Being too caught up in who you are can stop you from being who you could be.
Politics and religion are minefields to discuss because they engage people's identities.
Some people get offended by their time being wasted or by mediocre coffee.
When it ruins your day being told your writing could be better, it’s your fault.
“If people can't think clearly about something that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible” - Paul Graham
Biases boil down to a consistent belief system
We have a generic confirmation bias.
We are less concerned with verifying the accuracy of our existing beliefs than we’d think
Instead, we subconsciously seek to maintain and strengthen them, regardless of what those beliefs are.
A small set of beliefs is enough to support many biases.
We each cling to 6 core beliefs that create our biases:
My experience is a reasonable reference
I make correct assessments of the world
I am good
My group is a reasonable reference
My group (members) is (are) good
People’s attributes (not context) shape outcomes
Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in." – Isaac Asimov
Following this - everyone believes I am good
Most actions of others are understandable if you were in their position with their experiences.
Arguments and conflicts are often not because one side is bad, but because both sides misunderstand each other.
We can improve our understanding of others by 40% with a simple trick.
Consider that people have positive intentions or a reason behind their actions.
It’s easy to call narcissists evil instead of scared and needing help.
Life is contrasts
If you had nothing to do for a day, that would be nice.
Yet for a year, it would be boring as hell.
You need to work to enjoy rest.
You need to be hungry to enjoy food.
"Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.”
Many things are trades.
Often, our disasters make the funniest stories and our favourite memories.
Instead of rushing to avoid the difficulty, invite it in.
Realise the beauty within it and the contrast it adds to your life.
Anger is a mostly useless emotion
When you suffer an injustice, it feels like your responsibility to be angry.
Holding anger is like holding a hot coal, because revenge is a myth.
"For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.”
In the 1970’s, a man called Kirsch was cheated in a business deal.
He spent the next decade trying to sue anyone involved and in the process drained all his finances, lost his job and estranged his family.
A much higher cost than the initial business loss. His ruin was entirely self-inflicted.
Camera angles and stories
If you watch novice YouTube videos of a hike, the video is constantly a panoramic sweep, showing you new things every shot.
These are terrible to watch.
Casey Neistat has a rule that 9 out of 10 shots must be completely still.
It’s better to let the clouds swirl or a bird fly through.
Weirdly, it captures the spirit of a place better and makes the viewer feel closer than a series of 360 spinning shots to try and show everything.
When writing, we often want to make several points to show everything there is to know.
It can be better to focus on a single story in depth. The reader will relate better and extrapolate.
When we often want to convey everything, we actually get less across.
The big things are the big things - but so are the small things
What you do, where you live, and who your partner is.
These are the big things in life that are so so important.
They determine the quality of your life.
But so do the little things:
How you perceive threat and safety
The tone of your voice
What do you think about when your mind is free?
Life is short, you can spend it thinking about ideas that stress you out or looking at the world positively or curiously.
Hopefully, some of these ideas will help you digest what life means to you and what you want it to be.