51. Your body doesn’t belong to you. Your life neither.
The government will put you in prison for putting things inside your body it considers illegal, such as drugs. Suicide is still illegal in many countries.
52. You can’t shower under a waterfall.
I tried.
53. GENAV is real – it’s called the tragedy of the commons.
GENAV means Group Extension Negative Added Value. It’s a term I coined to express the idea that groups lose in quality as they become bigger.
It’s the thesis of the effect known as “the tragedy of the commons”.
54. Specialization is for losers – winners are generalists.
All billionaires and successful entrepreneurs are generalists. They tell you to “specialize” because they need specialized employees to succeed.
Don’t listen to what they say. Watch what they do.
55. Shortcuts are often longer than the long road.
You can’t hack your way to:
- Nutrition
- Sleep
- Friendship
- Exercise
And there is nothing more important than that.
56. Every great moment happens once only.
It’s because surprises and improvisation make the greatest moments. And surprises happen only once.
57. Airplanes teach you life.
“Put on your mask before helping anyone else put theirs on”.
If everyone helped themselves first, the world would be in a much better place than it is now.
58. Real competition isn’t as big as you think.
Your real competitors are the people that want it as bad as you do.
59. Your capacity for learning is the new “job experience”.
Everything changes so fast that experience has become irrelevant. Learning new stuff is the most important skill now.
60. God does not exist, but you should believe in Him.
It helps you be more confident, feel less lonely, and be happier.
61. McDonald’s is the biggest educational institution in the world.
McDonald’s often hires underprivileged people and teaches them how to be nice and polite to customers, how to manage their money well, how to provide value, how to be on time, etc.
And they have almost 2 million employees worldwide!!
62. Kids separated from their mums at an early age end up criminals.
It’s true. There seems to be a bunch of things we don’t know, such as how important it is for newborns to touch the skin of their parents, to smell them and feel their presence, or how traumas are solved when the newborn feels his parents are near.
Furthermore, it seems that kids born through c-sections are in worse health than kids born naturally.
63. You are not your genes.
64. Instinct and intelligence is a zero-sum game.
The more intelligent someone is, the less they will rely on instinct and the opposite. In a way, instinct comes in to fulfill the absence of intelligence. Or intelligence eats instinct away.
65. Meaning of life can be achieved in three different ways: by building something, fighting for something, or taking care of something.
It’s true.
66. People that adopt plants and pets should have babies instead.
67. Having kids is both the most selfish and the most beautiful thing in the world.
It’s selfish because the child will suffer. It’s beautiful because it’s what we’re supposed to do.
68. What people say doesn’t matter. What they do is the only thing that matters.
69. Finding friends is harder as you age.
You make friends with people you share things with. When you’re 5 years old, you have the same experience as the other five years old.
When you’re 25, you have made many more choices that influenced the direction of your life. You have 25-years-old highschool dropouts playing computer games the entire day, just like you have 25-years-old entrepreneurs.
70. Your decisions are the only things that will influence your life.
Reading the book VS watching the movie.
Eating the waffle VS not eating it.
Sticking to your project VS giving up.
71. If the name of the school matters, the studies are BS.
If you have a BSc in math or physics, no one really cares where you got it from.
If you have an MBA, it must be from Harvard or it will be worthless.
This means that the whole MBA discipline is in fact, worthless
72. Being a marketer for a startup in Romania > doing customer support in Switzerland.
Money doesn’t matter. Only what you know and can do does. Seek to acquire as much experience as possible in the beginning. Then use it to make money.
73. Money can both make you a slave or free you from work forever.
74. People that acquired the financial means to retire never retire.
It’s their love of the work that enabled them to acquire the means to retire in the first place.
Ironic, isn’t it?
75. Money flows to those that want to make an impact. It evades those that want to make money.
When you build a worldwide online supermarket, you make an impact. So, you become rich.
76. The more you want/need something, the less likely it is that people will give it to you. And the other way around.
Eg: billionaires eat for free.
77. What people expect out of others is the opposite of what they practice themselves.
The rudest people expect the utmost politeness.
78. No one cares about you…
…until your success starts threatening the self-image of those that compare themselves to you.
If you succeed, stay in the shadow.
79. Suncream likely yields more negative effects than positive ones.
There are three reasons.
The first is that many brands put anti-inflammation medicines in their suncream. You end up with a sunburn, but the anti-inflammation hides it from you and you think you are fine.
The second reason is that the skin is an organ. It breathes and absorbs what you put on it.
Suncream is full of dangerous chemicals that end up in your body. Some years ago, studies have found these chemicals in breast milk from women that had put on suncream.
The third reason is that the sun is good for you. Wearing suncream may prevent your body from fully experiencing the benefits of sunshine.
To be fair, we don’t exactly know the consequences of putting on suncream. Maybe it’s not as bad as I make it to be.
Ultimately, a piece of cloth remains the best way to protect yourself from the sun.
80. Doctors have no idea what they’re doing.
In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel highlighted that the way we do science is wrong.
Instead of understanding the underlying causes, reactions, and principles of the body, we merely “test and see”.
This is how most medicine is built.
“The patient feels better when I administer medicine A instead of medicine B, so medicine A must work”.
Then we realize medicine A gets you completely addicted.
The reason why so many medical mistakes are made is that doctors are not trained to understand the body. They are trained to fix problems, not to treat the cause of the problem.
81. Young guys don’t seek sex with women for its own sake, but mainly to tell their friends.
The story is much more satisfying than the sex itself.
82. People that assure you they were successful because of “luck and hard work” and not because they were smart…were in fact, definitely smart.
These people usually are 20-year-old founders who grow their business to $100 million in a few months, write a Twitter thread about how they did it, then say something like “wOw tHaT tHrEaD wEnT vIrAl, WhO wOuLd hAvE tHoUgHt?!”.
83. Phrases such as “…and please, don’t hesitate to ask any question” signals it’s better not to ask any question and that if you do, you won’t be able to ask more than three before your interlocutor becomes angry.
84. The only discipline that all successful people share a passion for is history.
If you think someone has potential, ask them if they like history.
85. “Introduction week” is the biggest waste-of-time activity educational institutions have come up with.
It’s mainly a way for older students to find younger students to have sex with.
86. Most industries have sex as their end.
The makeup industry, the clothing industry, the nightclub industry, the concert industry, the bar industry, the gym and fitness industry, the car industry, the healthcare industry, the real estate industry, the tech industry…are all somewhat related to sex.
People’s ultimate purpose when engaging with these industries is to get laid.
The job industry too. No one would become investment bankers if they didn’t think it’d help them get laid.
87. Self-help is how people with no skills make money.
88. Confidence is a temporary state.
It’s not an end-state.
It’s an ongoing feeling that lasts only as long as you are winning. Stop the wins, stop the confidence.
89. When you are looking at people, you are looking at something that they themselves rarely see.
90. The bigger the group, the more extreme Pareto’s Law is.
In a small city, social-economic inequalities are always smaller than in big cities; there is less violence; people are happier; it’s cleaner, etc.
91. Big is almost always bad.
Big companies, big armies, big countries, big people. They’re rarely good.
Genocides and extreme violence will always be more likely to happen in a big country than in a small one.
92. The political left doesn’t like strength; the political right doesn’t like weakness; the extreme left seeks to suppress strength; the extreme right seeks to suppress weakness.
93. A political system can be judged across three variables with two options each: democratic VS authoritarian; capitalist system VS communist system; individualistic VS collective.
Communism is authoritarian, communist, and collective.
Liberalism (European liberalism, which is center-right) is democratic, capitalist, and individualistic.
Fascism is authoritarian, capitalist, and collective.
94. Self-development is what writers write about when they have nothing else to say.
I may be 30% guilty of this.
95. There is enough people for everyone.
There are 105 boys born for 100 girls. The reason for that is that men are more likely to die young than women.
But…5% of men are gay. That means that there 99.75 heterosexual boys born for 100 girls.
In conclusion, enough of everyone for everyone.
96. The logical conclusion of intersectionality is individuality.
Will not explain.
97. UBI (Universal Basic Income) is FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) for lazy people.
98. Bitcoin (and the whole crypto ecosystem) would have remained at the bottom of the Internet if its price hadn’t gone over $1.
Ironically, it was the fiat value of Bitcoin that gave Bitcoin its value. This makes Bitcoin an inherently contradictive object of study.
99. Good weather compels you to have sex.
This is why southern cultures are much more controlling of who dates you than northern cultures, much freer and more relaxed.
If culture did not impose restrictions on sexual activity, everyone would constantly be having sex with everyone else.
