Some advice, I’ll update this occasionally. Note that I think most advice applies to everyone. Some people say all advice is bad, to them I say this isn’t advice despite being titled advice, and is instead just reminders of obvious facts about the world.
General
- I think you should spend your time creating stuff with others. See this post
- Cold email. it’s not too hard to find most people’s emails, or other ways of emailing them. Follow up with them a few days afterwards if they don’t respond.
- If you primarily want to do good in the world, read Sophie’s post.
- Do things that compound, pick one habit at a time and do it well, then move to the next habit. Some ideas for habits you may want to pick up: Anki, gym, run, call a random friend, reflect, journal, write.
- Read with the intent of talking with the author. (stolen from X)
- Maybe read:
Maybe read this block of text from a podcast I enjoyed:
Dwarkesh Patel 01:37:34
There’s a head strongness but another theme that jumped out was the ability to step back, you were talking about this earlier. The ability to step back from your sunk costs and go in a different direction is in a weird sense the opposite of that, but also a crucial step. I know 21 year olds or 19 year olds who are like “this is not a thing I’ve specialized in” or “I didn’t major in this.” I’m like,
“dude, motherfucker, you’re 19! You can definitely do this.” Whereas you’re switching in the middle of grad school or something like that.Trenton Bricken 01:38:04
I think it’s, “strong ideas loosely held” and being able to just pinball in different directions. The headstrongness I think relates a little bit to the fast feedback loops or agency in so much as I just don’t get blocked very often. If I’m trying to write some code and something isn’t working, even if it’s in another part of the code base, I’ll often just go in and fix that thing or at least hack it together to be able to get results. And I’ve seen other people where they’re just like, “help I can’t,” and it’s,”no, that’s not a good enough excuse. Go all the way down.”
Dwarkesh Patel 01:38:36
I’ve definitely heard people in management type positions talk about the lack of such people, where they will check in on somebody a month after they gave them a test, or a week after they gave them a test, and then ask, “how is it going?” And they say, “well, we need to do this thing, which requires lawyers because it requires talking about this regulation.” And then it’s like, “how’s that going?” And they’re like, “we need lawyers.” And I’m like, “why didn’t you get lawyers?”
Sholto Douglas 01:39:02
I think that’s arguably the most important quality in almost anything. It’s just pursuing it to the end of the earth. Whatever you need to do to make it happen, you’ll make it happen.
Dwarkesh Patel 01:39:11
“If you do everything, you’ll win.”
Sholto Douglas 01:39:12
Exactly. I think from my side that quality has definitely been important: agency and work. There are thousands, probably tens of thousands of engineers, at Google who are basically equivalent in software engineering ability. Let’s say if you gave us a very well-defined task, then we’d probably do it with equivalent value. Maybe a bunch of them would do it a lot better than me in all likelihood.
But one of the reasons I’ve been impactful so far is I’ve been very good at picking extremely high-leverage problems. I mean problems that haven’t been particularly well-solved so far, but perhaps as a result of frustrating structural factors like the ones that you pointed out in that scenario before, where they’re like, “we can’t do X because this team won’t do Y.” Well, I’m just going to vertically solve the entire thing. And that turns out to be remarkably effective. If I think there is something correct, something that needs to happen, I’m also very comfortable with making that argument and continuing to make that argument at escalating levels of criticality until that thing gets solved.
I think a lot of this agentic behavior comes in part from my time there. You go into organizations and you see how impactful just not taking no for an answer is. You would be surprised at the kind of stuff where, because no one quite cares enough, things just don’t happen. No one’s willing to take direct responsibility. Directly responsible individuals are ridiculously important and some people just don’t care as much about timelines. So much of the value that an organization like McKinsey provides, is hiring people who you were otherwise unable to hire, for a short window of time where they can just push through problems.
I think people underappreciate this. So at least some of this attitude of “hold up, I’m going to become the directly responsible individual for this because no one’s taking appropriate responsibility. I’m going to care a hell of a lot about this. And I’m going to go to the end of the earth to make sure it gets done,” comes from that time.
Trenton Bricken 02:01:29
I guess the only thing I would add to this, or to the headstrong context, is this line: “the system is not your friend.” It’s not necessarily actively against you or your sworn enemy. It’s just not looking out for you. So that’s where a lot of the proactiveness comes in. There are no adults in the room and you have to come to some decision for what you want your life to look like and execute on it. And hopefully you can then update later, if you’re too headstrong in the wrong way. But I think you almost have to just charge at certain things to get much of anything done, to not be swept up in the tide of whatever the expectations are.
Sholto Douglas 02:02:11
There’s one final thing I want to add. We talked a lot about agency and this kind of stuff.
But I think surprisingly enough, one of the most important things is just caring an unbelievable amount. When you care an unbelievable amount, you check all the details and you have this understanding of what could have gone wrong. It just matters more than you think. People end up not caring or not caring enough.
There’s this LeBron quote where he talks about how before he started in the league he was worried that everyone being incredibly good. He gets there and then he realizes that actually, once people hit financial stability, they relax a bit and he realizes, “oh, this is going to be easy.”
I don’t think that’s quite true because I think in AI research most people actually care quite deeply. But there’s caring about your problem and there’s also just caring about the entire stack and everything that goes up and down, going explicitly and fixing things that aren’t your responsibility to fix because overall it makes the stack better.
More college-specific
(But again, I think most advice applies to everyone)
- College is a great time to make a wide wide range of friends. I don’t think I did this that well, because I didn’t try.
- The primary indicator (by far) for whether you should take a course is how good you think the prof is, how much you’d enjoy talking to them and learning from them, etc.
- Read Euan’s advice now and when you get far enough that you’re thinking about job-related things, read it again.
- Find good mentors and be a good mentee (I was bad at the latter, and still don’t know how to do it well yet, but you can probably look it up or actually just ask someone smarter than me).