What I Learned About Life

This post is inspired by Naval Ravikant, whose words enlightened me during one of the most uncertain times in my life. Below I share a few insights I learned about life, hopefully they will help you navigate through moments of doubt and uncertainty, as they have for me.

1. How to spend your time

My grandmother passed away last month, and her loss brought moments of clarity to my life. It forced me to reflect on how I ended up where I am today.

The concept of opportunity cost became substantiated: instead of spending the last two months joining arbitrary school clubs or working on research that sounded impressive but didn’t align with my true passions, I could have been with someone I deeply loved—spending time with her and being present for her final moments.

In that period of doubt, two mental frameworks helped me bring clarity to future guidance on what to spend my time on.

1. For every significant time commitment, ask yourself this: "Would I still spend time on this if I couldn’t tell anyone about it?"

2. Desire is pain. Desire is a contract you sign with yourself that you won't be happy until you complete it.

1.1 What to spend your time on?

We've all heard the famous quote by Steve Jobs: "Live every day as if it's your last." Personally, I find that hard to follow. If today were my last day on earth, I would genuinely fly to Bali, spend all my money, and have a blast while I can.

A more practical version of this guiding principle would be:

"Would I still spend time on this if I couldn't tell anyone about it?"

Life is too short to be spent on something you don't really care for. Unfortunately, a lot of things in life fall in the middle of the love-hate spectrum: you don't love doing them, you don't hate doing them, and it seems reasonable for you to do them for the sake of your resume, good grades, networking, prestige, or strategic reasons in your plan. For instance, doing a "prestigious" internship because your peers are also doing it.

Unfortunately, when I look back at my life, and as I asked other peers at my age, most people spend 80% of their time on something that falls into the middle of the love-hate spectrum. This is the most dangerous trap for anyone's time, as you would easily avoid things you hate, but it's incredibly difficult to avoid things you neither hate nor love.

We are most honest with ourselves in moments of solitude, when it's just you alone spending time on whatever you told others you loved, whether that be oil painting, coding the next AI project, or learning game theory. You 100% know if you love it or not.

By asking this question about every significant time commitment, you can truly identify things you love and avoid squandering time on things you don't love.

1.2 Understanding desire and purpose

Desire is pain. Desire is a contract you sign with yourself that you won't be happy until you complete it. - Naval Ravikant

Imagine if your desire is to be an Olympic swimmer. It would be easier if you love swimming, but it takes a lot of pain and suffering for anyone to become an Olympic medalist: 6 hours of daily swimming practice, daily gym sessions, and an incredibly disciplined diet.

Desire makes you willing to suffer for things you dislike. My desire to attend a good college made me suffer in high school. I led a really interesting startup that I absolutely enjoyed, but I also suffered through maintaining grades, acing the SAT, and writing personal statements that I hated. In order to reach a desire, a goal of yours, you have to go through both things you absolutely love and things you don't really enjoy.

Is desire bad? Not at all. Desire gives us purpose, but it’s crucial to focus on one or two at a time. As life evolves, our desires can change, but pursuing too many at once leads to stress and anxiety. Achieving even one ambitious goal is challenging—spreading yourself thin only makes it harder. Remember, when the contract of desire isn't completed, you will continue to go through the hardship and pain for it.

How to choose that one or two desires? In other words, how to choose your purpose in life? Apply the first question: Would I still work on achieving this desire of mine if I cannot tell anyone about it?

Overall, at any point in your life when you feel like you are suffering and unhappy, list all of the desires you have at that moment, identify which desire is causing you the suffering, and apply the first question to determine whether this desire is really what you want, instead of what your parents want, what your peers are doing, or what societal pressure is projecting on you. By doing so, you will end up understanding the cause of your suffering, or realizing you are suffering for something you don't truly want and walking away from it. Either way, you leave yourself with inner peace and clarity.

2. Optimize for the long term, instead of optimizing for the short term

Chasing the "seemingly best things your peers think" at every stage of your life will end up with the most average outcome in the long run, as the average of everyone is absolute average.

As a victim of that, I chased the "best things" my peers thought would be at every stage of my life. I aced every exam and graduated as Valedictorian at that point in time, as getting good grades seemed like the best thing a person could chase during school. Later in high school, I chased the most common thing everyone chases in high school: getting into a "prestigious" college. When you actually get to college, you realize that colleges aren't the final stop in the chase; there will be always be the next "best" thing, whether that be law school, consulting, finance, etc.

The reality is, there will always be the next hoop to jump through. People who have been optimizing in the short term, that is, not really understanding what they want nor having the courage to deviate from the traditional path, are trained lions that keep getting better at jumping hoops. Yet, having a goal at heart inevitably means deviating from the average path. If you find yourself going after the exact things your peers think about and want, you are not thinking independently.

As Jack Raines have written, to most people in corporate America, the biggest risk is that they do nothing with their lives. Getting good grades in school, attending a good college, working at an office job for 10 years, only to realize at 35-40 that they have spent their entire lives living someone else's life.

What one should really do, is to optimize for the long term, even if it means deviation from the "best result" in the short term.

I've had the fortune to meet with Carol Bellamy, the former president of the Peace Corps and UNICEF, at the UN. After she graduated from college, instead of going to Goldman Sachs, she decided to volunteer in Guatemala for 3 years with the Peace Corps. The rest of her career involved her trying to run for mayor of New York City, for which she quit her job twice but never really succeeded. At last, when Bill Clinton took the presidency, she was appointed as the President of the Peace Corps, given her in-person volunteering experience with the Peace Corps. Her seemingly deviation from the "optimized" path in the short term, instead following a more courageous decision, has given her the opportunity to achieve something much greater later in life.