1. I think the most valuable upskill a highly-ambitious person from my generation can make is understanding the role of dopamine, the receptors, and what causes its release in our brains. Training that to align with our goals is the most important challenge of our time.

  • We have all already started to realize just how harmful smartphones and especially infinite-scrolling apps like TikTok, IG Reels, and YT Shorts are, but they have their benefits and are perhaps the only form of social communities which is a human necessity, for the globally connected world that exists today. Going cold turkey is not a solution.

  • I’ve been learning as much as I can for the past 8 months from Huberman, from my new book, and various other research papers and studies Claude summarizes for me. I cannot stress how incredibly life-changing it has been for me to understand those patterns and easily predict how my body and mind will function in the next few days after I feed it junk (attention-invading content).

2. I have never seen two apparently distinct attributes found more commonly together than ego and insecurity, and likewise on the flip-side, humility and confidence. Intelligent, talented and resourceful people are often detached from this curse, and are nearly always better people to have around simply because their self of identity comes from their own achievements. They realize that shrinking the pie’s size might give them get them a wider slice, but never actually, a greater chunk of pie.

3. Forgiveness, I’m learning, is valuable. I always used to believe in the proportional relation between discipline of training to the exceptionality of outcomes, but funnily, Duolingo over the past year has made me think differently. I think, their forgiveness of inconsistent behaviour over time has made me more disciplined with practice, and overall increased the amount I would have learnt otherwise.

This was empirically reinforced when diving down the rabbit hole of simulation studies around the prisoner’s dilemma. Molander (1985) found that noisy, uncertain environments like the world we find ourselves in need forgiveness. We self-sabotage ourselves by punishing each and every mistake without leaving margin for uncertainty.