Becoming Great

Becoming Great

This post should have appeared around ~5 months ago, but decided to test the things that I will explain here in order to see their ROI.

Accelerating (verb): achieving a high number of consecutive net positive days to leverage the power of compounding for personal growth.

A net positive day is when your constructive actions outweigh any negative thoughts or behaviors. To achieve this, focus on four key areas of your life:

  • Mind
  • Body
  • Spirit
  • Financial

Mind

To cultivate mental growth and resilience, aim to master your mind through disciplined actions, meditation, and a strong mind-body connection.

  1. Challenge Your Brain by learning something new every day, whether it's a fact, skill, or a hobby. If you don't like something, outgrow the mind and do it, leave the comfort zone. (You don't need to change radically, but start with small steps).

  2. Read Regularly, this is the gym-equivalent for the brain. Start with topics you enjoy and gradually expand your interests.

  3. Become a better problem solver. Life is a series of problems to solve. Expose yourself to various challenges and increase their complexity over time. This approach is well-known in mathematics and other analytical fields.

Stealing a quote from Karpathy:

the general point is that you have to recognize that you are dumb, accept it, come to terms with it, and forgive yourself. only then can you trick yourself into becoming smarter.

  1. Also, try to limit screen time, or put a noise filter on at all times. This means to get rid off news, social media completely. It just adds unnecessary mental chatter, your mind should focus on what's on your life. Our minds are over-stimulated, so we need to calm them down a bit. Here's, again, another quote from Karpathy:

    Returning from an experimental ~2 week detox from the internet. Main takeaway is that I didn't realize how unsettled the mind can get when over-stimulating on problems/information (like a stirred liquid), and ~2 weeks is enough to settle into a lot more zen state.

  2. Practice meditation every day. This enhances focus, reduces stress, and improve overall mental well-being.

  3. Allocate time for deep, focused work without interruptions. This state of concentration leads to higher productivity and better outcomes.

Body

Without body health, nothing from this list matters. No one wants to do anything when he's sick, right?

Solution is to take a precaution, and stay in shape, bare minimum.

Then, be very objective, if you can't ask a friend, if he's not objective, ask a random stranger: what are my shortcomings? Focus on those. In my case I was underweight by a lot and thought that "that's how my metabolism is", which is, in fact, true - but that does not mean that you cannot do anything against that. Go on a calorie surplus, do weight lifting or calisthenics and you're good. You can do your own scenario depending on your situation. Reality is that nobody is perfect, but we can tend asymptotically towards greatness.

  1. Put a goal depending on your state, and show up daily
  • no matter how big / small it is, if you really put your mind power that you build before into this, you're going to achieve it 100%
    • train hard

  1. Daily Sunlight and Steps: Get sunlight daily and aim for at least 6,000 steps each day.

  2. Maintain good hygiene and address any physical imperfections like acne or asymmetry.

    • naturally, we're attracted to beautiful people because it's a sign of great health, and personal respect
    • again, see any shortcomings, and try to fix them (facial asymmetry, acne, etc.)

  3. Healthy Diet: Eliminate toxic snacks and fast food. Opt for fresh, whole foods. Prioritize fruits, vegetables, and high-quality meats.

  4. Sleep is maybe one of the most important factors, and I could include it to all categories.

    • sleep for 7:30h, or 9hr (bc. 90min cycles)
    • wake up, and go to sleep at the same time each day, no matter the day
    • sleep in a colder environment
    • before sleep (T-1 hours) remove phone completely, and instead read a book, and before meditate, you'll sleep like a baby
    • don't eat T-3 hours before bed

  5. Stay Hydrated: Drink 2.5-3 liters of water daily.

Spirit

This could be different from person to person, but at least try to be grateful for anything that you have. You could always give a contra-example of what you have, so remember to be happy and aknowledge that you're priviliged in any way (small or very big).

Try to keep a positive attitiude, and filter out bad stuff around you, it is only going to hurt your mind.

Pray, if you want to be ordinary, it's ok to just stay as you are, but if you want to be extra-ordinary, you need an anchor, and a guiding hand for you to go forward. (quote adapted from Steve Harvey).

I would put social connections to the spirit section as well, because we, at the end of the day are social creatures, and socializing fuels our internal spirit. Each person has a different configuration for the social-o-meter, but try to not be surrounded by 4 walls all week, and instead see some friends, maybe message some old colleagues and catch up. Opposingly, try to also have some alone time, in your own thoughts, and not be surrounded by other people all the time. Quote from Naval:

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Financial

Anyone who says that money does not buy happiness is. A liar. Money, alone, does indeed not bring happiness, but it brings stability, well-being, and with well thought decisions, you're "set for life".

The gist of it is that in order to also be fulfilled, and to create some kind of dent in the world, you need to solve some real problems. This is the BSC of entrepreneurship. Try to solve a problem (ideally that a lot of people, including you, have), and try to scale the solution as big as you can.

If you're working in a 9-5, pick a company that does a dent in the world. Don't work for huge companies, with internal structures similar to binary trees of more than 10 levels, that build let's say a worse Gmail. Pick a company with a vision that excites you, where you also learn from cracked engineers / people, and form good friendships.

If you're working solo, look out for problems in your daily life, start small and expand on the validated solution. More into this you can find from people like Levelsio.

Ending words

This was just the tip of the iceberg; you could explore depth-wise all of those ideas much, much further, but that's left to the reader.

This was just an overview to what I've already implemented in 2022, left some in 2023, and then combined all back into 2024, which has been a wonderful year so far.

Lock in.

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