My Operating Principles
Hyperrealism, focus, the people you have is the life you have, trustworthiness, long-term patience, short-term urgency and more.
In startups people talk about the archi-importance of culture. In its essence, culture is a set of habits group of people does to achieve their goals. Hence, one first must define the goals, and then think about the habits. If goals are what, culture is how, like a big picture heuristics for problem solving.
One way I imagine it, is that goals define a problem to work on, where you have a huge tree of possible things to try, with only a few viable solution-branches. Problem-solving then is how fast you can trim this tree and find viable solutions. Culture (or heuristics) are like garden tools you frequently use to trim the tree. The better the tools, the faster the trimming.
Hence, thinking through what are your big picture heuristics for problem solving seems just as important for a person as for a startup. I decided to give it a try. Only instead of using the word “culture”, I’ll call it “Operating Principles” which is more concrete and action-focused (inspired both by Ray Dalio (better read his old pdf than the book!) and Stripe).
(One way to approach these principles is as the highest variance variables that would explain the difference between achieving and failing at my life goals.)
The curse of this first version is that I really want to get it out, but I don’t want to spend a week on it. So this version is an especially rough draft. I will make a few brief notes for some principles, while mentioning the rest just by name. In the long-run, expect each principles and each mental model to have an essay of their own. (And certainly much better writing!)
1. Hyperrealism.
Hyperrealism is devotion to seeing reality as clearly as possible. It is the pursuit of truth, not what you hope it to be. This is the first and foremost principle, without it, all other principles are meaningless.
Surprisingly, I found pain to be the main feature of hyperrealism. Hard to tell why, but it literally hurts you to kill ideas you have held for years when you realize they are false. Hyperrealism is very, very, very hard, yet its returns are insane (very intentional word choice). I’m nowhere near its mastery and obviously it is an endless battle (thanks to Popper’s epistemology, aka just fallibilism).
When Charlie talked about incentives, he said something along the lines of: “All my life I have been in the top 5% cohort understanding its importance, and yet all my life I have underappreciated it”. This is exactly how I feel about hyperrealism.
Hyperrealism is an umbrella word for many other ideas, like fallibilism, honesty, experimentation and so on. I will expand on them in future versions.
2. Focus.
Focus is doing the most important thing, one at a time, with full attention.
First you need to understand what is the most important thing: What are your goals? What life do you want to live the most?
Then you need to cut off anything that isn’t it, and live just that. The opportunity cost of living the life you want the most is high, there are second best and third best options. And these options are pretty good, you will want to do them.
But this is the essence of focus: you cannot allow your lesser desires to overtake achieving your main one. (You can do anything you want, but not everything you want...)
Just as with hyperrealism, focus’ main feature is pain. Focus is very, very, very hard, yet its returns are insane. To be precise, its return is that you’ll have the life you wanted the most.
Just as with hyperrealism, there are many parts to focus and I’ll expand on them in future versions.
3. The people you have, is the life you have.
Vinod coined: “The team you build, is the company you build.”. Keith repeats it like a mantra 20 times a day, stressing that nothing else matters if you have a poor team. I think the same principle is true for your life, so I propose a remix: “The people you have, is the life you have.”
It is not just that you will be a better person, you will have more meaningful, longer relationships, you will be healthier, but also that the quality of people you surround yourself with will largely determine what you achieve. Regarding the over-used cliched idea of: “You are the average of 5 people you spend most of your time with (including parasocial ones!).” I come back to Munger: “All my life I have been in the top 5% cohort understanding its importance, and yet all my life I have underappreciated it”.
I will write much more in future versions, but let me leave you with what I found to be one of the best predictive traits for the people I want to have in my life: Do they have the means of error-correction? In all relationships (even between Pope and God) eventually conflicts arise. Only if both people have means of error-correction can you effectively solve them and build enriching decade-long relationships. (Moreover, with means of error-correction the person is not freezed in time, you’re getting not only what they are now, but what they will be with decades of improvement.)
4. Trustworthiness.
If the people you have is the life you have, then the question becomes: How to assemble around myself higher-quality (more aligned etc.) people? Thinking about it, trustworthiness is the highest predictive variable.
Trustworthiness is not only useful for befriending better people, it is essential in achieving anything of size in life. Why? Because whatever your goals, likely you cannot achieve them purely on your own. You will likely need to work with others, be entrusted with their time, resources and so on.
And the single trait that will determine how well you can do that is how trustworthy you are. However smart, charming, persistence, relentless you are, you will not achieve a lot without trustworthiness. As without trustworthiness all the leverage you have are your own resources.
With defining trustworthiness I like to deconstruct it into three parts:
Honesty ‒ devotion to truth and its transmission.
Reliability ‒ doing what you said you’re going to do.
Stewardship ‒ be able to optimize for the shared goals of the entrusted group, not just your own.
(Also responsiveness? wip for next versions)
All of these parts are essential, but stewardship is especially. The highest trusted people are able to forego their personal immediate benefit for the good of all in the long-run. It is actually in their best interest if they want to play repeated games (aka infinite games), they just need long-term attention span.
5. Long-term patience, short-term urgency.
Both of these ideas are so important that I was thinking of splitting them into two to stress them enough, the only thing that holds me is that “Long-term patience, short-term urgency.” sounds incredibly well.
Long-term patience is important because of compounding.
Short-term urgency because of how fast you compound.
If I had to pick only one between consistency and intensity I would always go for consistency. It’s just math: the intensity of how much you can get done in a day is pretty limited, even if you don’t sleep and work 24 hours. Yet, at a reasonable pace for a decade you can get incredibly far.
You just get more done even with a 955 schedule across 3 years than 997 across one year. That is not to say you shouldn’t try to compound as fast as possible. It is just that there’s a limited return to how much you can compound in a day, and once you reach reasonable speed remember that consistency matters more.
Doing important work is clearly a marathon, not a sprint. It doesn’t matter how much you have worked a day if you burnout in 2 years, you just didn’t get enough time to get to the frontier and produce excellent work.
6. Relentless perseverance.
7. Consistent excellence.
8. Efficiency: frugality in inputs and steps, with speed on top.
Fundamentally, productivity (or achieving goals) can be seen as a computation: You have inputs, you transform them in some way and produce outputs.
The more skilled person is, the more intelligent transformations they can do to produce desired outputs out less and less inputs.
We can define it as efficiency: you’re frugal with inputs, you’re frugal with steps (transformations), and the “computation runtime” is fast.
9. Continuous improvement.
10. High agency: self-belief, boldness and willfulness.
This principle has especial problems with getting a proper name. It came pretty naturally to me after reading David Deutsch, only retrospectively I realized its importance.
Basically, you don’t wait for people to give you permission to do something, you just do it.
You think what is the fastest way to get to your goal and you do it.
For example, want to learn coding? Instead of getting a 4-year, 200k costing CS degree after which you still can’t do an advanced website, just learn it on your own, and learn exactly the part you’re interested.
11. Written culture.
To quote Joan Didion: “I Don’t Know What I Think Until I Write It Down”
When you put your thoughts in a long-form writing you can better see the logical gaps it has. It is like putting a lamp on some of your ideas and properly examining them. You also learn to explain yourself.
An unexamined life is not worth living. So you want to live an examined life, my guess is that writing down your most important decisions (like your goals and culture!) is the best way to do that.
12. 30,000 days.
Unless we solve longevity, and unless you like motorcycles, this is +- the number of days you’ll live.
Remember your mortality, not because death brings meaning, but because death brings urgency.
13. Freedom.
I found this to be the most important principle for good group interactions.
It is not only that freedom is a good way to treat others, it is that by the most lucky circumstance of our universe it is one of the best way to make everyone richer.
And to top off the “rough draftness” of this version let me dump some of the mental models I found useful:
Every adversity is an opportunity.
Waste no day. Every Second Counts.
Disagree and commit.
Rep-Rest.
Problem Solving: Goal, Breakpoints, Guessed Solutions.
Cheapest Decisive Test, Main Risks, Bottlenecks.
Learning is changing behavior, not memorizing information.
Project Betting, Project Scoping.
Sleep on a win, wake up with a loss..
Figuring out where really smart people are and joining them.
Delete, Delete, Delete, Delete, No Part Is The Best Part.
Meaningful Differentiation.