why?

  2. 6 minutes

I spent a significant amount of time thinking about this annoying word in the context of my work & life. In this why? I want to share a few of my notes. Maybe you find something useful in my brain soup.

finding happiness

The most privileged answer & the one I am going to give you is to focus on all of these factors at the same time.

  • family
  • health
  • money
  • travel across the world and your mind
  • deeply inspire others
  • make the world a better place

Ideally, from the moment you wake up you should work towards maximising atleast one of these buckets while maintaining (not deteriorating) the other buckets. Sometimes doing this is impossible, but the best forcing function I could leave you with is – look at your happiness as a multiplication of these factors and not addition. When a single factor approaches zero, you start becoming extremely unhappy and it doesn’t really matter how good the other factors are at that point.

strive for greatness

Being able to inspire others is significantly harder than every other factor on my list. Most people that were told what to do, told what to study, got a boring job, do the bare minimum & survive are extremely unhappy individuals. They are usually the ones complaining about the “system” or putting down other peoples achievements. They do not realize that being rich, being the child of someone famous, being attractive, living in a rich country isn’t going to make it easier to inspire others. In fact it makes it harder, which in turn makes it a lot harder to be happy.

Anyway, the bottom line is, to inspire and be great at something that it takes:

  1. ~10k hours to earn your seat to play at the table of life
  2. ~20k hours start becoming good at something
  3. ~30k hours are likely one of the greats in your community & if you are lucky the world
  4. ~50k+ hours to be remembered and echoes across generations

In the context of family and friends, being able to inspire others is function of quality time spent, understanding their situations, being there for them when they are going through a rough time and being open & honest about everything. My parents inspire me. They achieved greatness and made it look easy for me.

it’s all intertwined anyway

Coming back to work and money. Hopefully, by the time you are in your early 20s you have already put in atleast 10k hours practicing a skill that the world really needs. This is roughly 4 years. PLEASE do not confuse this with 4 years of “job experience”. I’m talking about hours spent trying to get good at a skill & during which you are actively looking to improve and finding your mistakes etc. Don’t lie to yourself.

Somewhere around 10k-20k hours – acquiring money & your ability to experience and travel the world becomes so much easier and they will give you diminishing amounts of joy and happiness. When you stop looking at prices of things that you do in your daily life, like buying a drink, groceries, shopping, going for concerts, travelling etc. you can start focusing on the other factors of your life.The momentum starts to feel incredible, but this is also where my wisdom runs dry. I’m not really sure what happens next.

finding inspiration

The backstory is the inspiration. I still remember the spark that got me into Robotics and AI it wasn’t a lecture or a lab, As a kid, when my parents brought home a computer in late 90s. I was so hooked with how things move or something like Can machines think? 🤖 proposed by Alan Turing. That insatiable curiosity has now evolved into a mission: to build intelligent systems that can reason, plan and collaborate and become superhuman.

When I watch a Casey Neistat video, I feel inspired. Not necessarily from the video but by virtue of knowing that Casey moved to NYC with a camera, no money and a dream. Made a new video every single day for 800 days straight, no holidays. Did all of this while having a wife and a kid & never made excuses or when I learnt that Claude Monet made 2500 art pieces (the link has so many images it hangs my browser sometimes) and averaged around 36 (official) paintings a year (3 a month) for 70 years. Think about how many practice runs and hours he must have put in.

when John Carmack made ~32 games in the span of 23 years between 1989-2012 including bangers like DOOM and Quake. The SpaceX team launching 457 rockets since 2010, 300 of them in the last 2 years. That’s almost one launch every 2 days. The entire team is maximizing out their “make the world a better place” & “deeply inspire others” factors every single day.

I could honestly keep going, but there is one common domination between every single person that inspires me. They were vocal about or documented their backstory, they were consistent, and produced more work than most humans do.

how do i know what to work on

My favorite mental framework is – think about making money like hitting the gym. If you are aspiring artist, you being a barista from 9am-5pm is like you hitting the gym but for the bank. It’s not who you are, it’s just a way for you to put food on the table. You are an artist. An artist that works from 5pm-12am 😁

If you are lucky, you make money while doing what you love. Or even luckier you make money while doing what you love while make the world a better place.

Don’t let money guide you, instead do whatever you feel like and find a way to put food on the table on the side (yes it’s on the side even if you work 8 hours a day at the grocery store).

make life more meaningful & focus on why’s?

My way of taking is, laziness leads to sadness. Don’t be lazy, put in the work, make meaningful connections and always be on the lookout for inspiration. Need ideas?

  1. Do NOT scroll tiktok or instagram. It’s an art form that lacks nuance. I think it needs a few more decades of iteration before people figure out short form content
  2. Call your mom
  3. Invite your friends over for dinner this Sunday
  4. Spend the next 15 hours producing quality work, lock in