5. Take simplicity as a maxim. A useless piece of work that is simple will be empty. So, a non-empty piece of work that is simple will be useful. “There is life in a pray without paraphernalia.” Most people don’t waste their time by sitting doing nothing. Instead, they have a convoluted behavior that leads them to do non-simple useless things such as reading the news or running from one place to the other.

4. One form of freedom is when you are able to accelerate and stop. Most ambitious people were prevented from accelerating in high school. They didn’t have enough freedom. Then I went to college and started to accelerate a lot, only to realize I was doing many things but none in an excellent way. Because of the grades, I couldn’t stop. I didn’t have enough freedom.

3. I observe the teaching assistant giving a very energetic lecture with the ten minutes that the professor left to him. It will be the only thing I’ll remember from that lecture. What does he do to be so energetic? What happened after class has the answer. I went to ask a question, and he was erasing the whiteboard with the same energy as he was giving the lecture. He was focused on erasing for the class that was going to come. He didn’t answer my question at the moment and asked me to wait until he erases the whiteboard. To me, all of this means he has a very high sense of duty, and this doesn’t come from trying to please a particular student or the professor. He just strongly feels he has to do the correct thing. The smartest is beaten by the just smart if the latter has an extreme sense of duty. And you can cultivate your sense of duty.

3′. I observe that upon realizing that you are among the best in a field, you will tend to work harder. Similarly, physically attractive people tend to dress better. But this doesn’t make sense. Regardless of how attractive I am, I should do my best at dressing! This ‘composed relative advantage’ is not the same as working harder because of being close to a discovery, since in that case you may work more this month and less the next one or you may just be excited by the result. Instead, it seems related to (a) validation and (b) sense of duty. For (a), when presented with two options, we tend to have more doubts the more similar they are. So, doing well in one makes us less doubtful and just follow it. World class people say more often than average people that they chose the field they are at because they sucked at every other field. It was impossible for them to get distracted in backup plans. Marginal reward from focus is exponential since you are moving away from the mean of a Gaussian distribution. Hardy claimed that to do good mathematics you usually have to overestimate the importance of your field, which brings us to (b). Ramanujan believed he was sent by the Gods to do mathematics. Since we live around many more people than in a primitive environment, we tend to underestimate the impact of our work [1]. TBC

[1] Unless we fall into group think/social media sects.

2. I noticed I tend to assume that two people are equally ambitious if I meet the two at the same time and they are good friends with each other. This bias tends to stick for a long time. This relates to: “People can become formidable, but it’s hard to predict who.” Though that quote tells us that the bias is not actually a bias, it is an example of the quote.

1. I see a correlation between how seriously people play soccer and how good they are at it. Regardless of how good I am at something, I should take it as seriously as possible.

0. If you don’t feel like doing your intellectual job while standing up, then think about what you are doing. It might be too boring or you might be too tired.

-1. Clicking a link changes all the context immediately. Paul Graham says “is there any kind of work I would prefer to do for an hour than being wondering in Rome or having sex? No.” And links are testing (and using) that discipline all the time. This illustrates a general point: for deep work, it’s not enough to put lots of effort on avoiding the current temptations to get distracted. You also have to be in environments with less distractions.

-2. Learning is not just receiving content. You have to reflect on it. During the last term of my undegrad, I was sick for two weeks. There I came up with very good ideas about life, but I wasn’t experiencing the life I was reflecting about. I was isolating (no input!). Similarly for math.

-3. I heard Napoleon was proud of not reading letters for a month and realizing that half of the issues resolved on their own. Also, you hear mathematicians saying, this approach had too many details, and since I am lazy I solved the problem in other, more elegant way. I don’t think either Napoleon or these mathematicians are actually lazy. It takes effort to not read your email, or to come up with a more elegant approach. But I don’t think we have a word for this concept. They are delaying gratification with the goal of minimizing work in the long-term.

-4. Teaching should be a response to the student failing on understanding the concept. From this perspective, exams on the first day of classes make sense. It is about your background: teaching english to the spanish speaking is different than to the german speaking. This is one main difference between books and mentors.