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Text of the page (random words):
o save me from idleness but he does not go all the way ultimately proust locates his salvation in art and in his own memories for him the most sacred thing of all whereas girard like dostoyevsky s heroes found his own salvation in christ photograph of proust on his deathbed by man ray my thanks to tyler cowen henry oliver and jessie li for reading a draft of this piece 372 49 70 share principles nabeel s qureshi jan 12 2025 2 781 52 547 share this was originally a google doc where i gathered hard won life lessons eventually i open sourced it it got a great response including a shoutout from tim ferriss so here it is on substack a cursed fact of the world is that the most important life lessons you learn are the hardest to communicate to others they always sound like clichés in any case these are a few things i ve learned from experience and that i try and keep in mind think about what makes you imbalanced as a personality do things where this gives you an edge once you are ok with people telling you no you can ask for whatever you want make reality say no to you fun is underrated the best and most creative work comes from a root of joy and excitement you can feel this in your body environment matters a lot move to where you flourish maximally put yourself in environments where you have to perform to your utmost if you can get by being average you probably will greek saying a captain only shows during a storm later you ll be nostalgic for right now do things fast things don t actually take much time as measured by a stopwatch resistance procrastination does slow is fake if no urgency exists impose some moving fast forces you to strip things down to the bare bones wealth can be created there is not a fixed amount of it in the world somebody doing well doesn t always come at someone else s expense the world is a museum of passion projects doing as much as you can every day is a form of life extension always be high integrity even when it costs you the shortcuts aren t worth it figure out what your primary focus is and make progress on that every day first thing in the morning no exceptions days with 0 output are the killers tyler cowen pay attention to your production consumption balance if you re only consuming and not producing fix that you don t do anyone any favors by lurking put yourself out there if you don t get a classic book or movie 90 of the time it s your fault it might just not be the right time for you to appreciate that thing if you find yourself dreading mondays quit lean into the good kind of fear pick some kind of fitness athletic activity to get addicted to and get addicted to it for its own sake for me this is running zone 2 cardio is underrated learn how to meditate even if you don t end up doing it regularly the techniques are useful 99 of books resources on this are quite bad i d recommend looking at rob burbea s talks and jhana practice as a way in no matter how bad things seem everything passes you are probably too risk averse write out the worst things that can happen realize they re not that bad then take the leap do a review of your year every year write it out figure out what was good and what was bad use this to make your goals for the next year doing things is energizing wasting time is depressing you don t need that much rest being able to travel is one of the key ways the modern world is better than the old world learn to travel well form opinions on things and then find the strongest critique of those opinions repeat if you really can t disprove something it has a chance of being right fallibilism memorize a few old poems or texts that mean a lot to you at some point in your life work on a startup or at least a thing driven by a small group small group energy is amazing be careful about rationalizing something that does not feel right utilitarians this means you know your triggers what makes you the worst version of yourself figure out what creates enduring value a non exclusive list great cultural artifacts such as books great companies institutions don t let anyone make you feel small working with people you really respect and are secretly worried are much better than you and will figure out how dumb you are is the best aim for chartres christopher alexander when doing something aim to be the best there ever was at it this compensates for your natural bias which is to do something mediocre you have to really aim to be as good as the greats send more cold emails people respond assume everyone s your friend have a lot of crazy experiences in your 20s there are some people who after you talk to them you feel more energized and you want to conquer the world or climb a mountain or something they re rare but they exist go find them and make friends with them move to where the action is agglomeration effects are powerful status is fake and transient just focus on substance and doing valuable work talk about it in public beware the inner ring fallacy ask dumb questions the people who matter won t judge you for it and you ll learn things as a result see how to understand things don t over index on trends just figure out your first principles view of what s actually important for the world and go from there there is some wisdom in fake it till you make it don t slow down as you get older speed up lean into changes be curious about new things most people seem to go the other way be specific understand power laws outlier math rules all stop asking for approval and permission from others school and work trains people to have this mindset instead figure out what you want to do and plant the this is happening flag people will come along for the ride werner herzog to errol morris when it comes to filmmaking money isn t important the intensity of your wishes and faith alone are the deciding factors don t network make friends writing online is great for bringing interesting people your way having a wide network of friends really makes a difference to the opportunities you get and how easy it is to launch your projects figure out what gives you new ideas and make sure you incorporate that into your routine for me this is talking to people tweeting writing in my notebook long conversations with friends especially late night or while walking for other people this is showering baths long walks runs etc make sure you harvest these ideas too i e write them down somewhere so they don t get lost when writing separate the creator and the editor the creator just writes and doesn t worry about quality the goal is words on the page later you can be the editor and shape it into something good be honest about whether something is learning or entertainment real learning is extremely hard and effortful podcasts atlantic articles pop science books anything that s a bit too digestible is more entertainment than real learning any given bet you take is likely to fail success is making lots of bets and trying as hard as possible at each of them p success is higher the more bets you take the better your execution per bet this is also why fast cycle time is so important ravin first articulated this to me think in writing write google docs scrawl in notebooks this extends working memory arbitrarily and allows your thoughts to compound on each other the difference between a turing machine and a finite state machine is the tape once in awhile put away all concepts you read about online and reason up from the base of your experience and what you ve seen and done e g what were some of the best decisions you made the worst why can you apply those lessons now etc 80 utilitarian 15 deontologist 5 virtue ethics most intelligent people want status prestige wealth and the like even the ones who claim not to genius is a distinct category to intelligence and geniuses are motivated by entirely different things and are socially strange and often selfish people ayn rand is a bad writer but is one of the very few people who grokked this and made it explicit scrolling and reading too much drowns out your inner voice be very suspicious of a priori arguments on empirical matters e g ai will certainly kill everyone they re usually wrong no matter how convincing reality is endlessly surprising cf knightian uncertainty there s a lot of alpha in being willing to do menial work take notes send out agendas order pizza manually inspect raw data whatever beware over delegation and being too far from the details one key to effective negotiation is to have multiple options and be ok with it not working out even if you really need the thing it s never your only choice reframe and create alternative options until you have multiple outcomes you re ok with see batna luck isn t a constant it increases with surface area be in the right places have lots of conversations put yourself out there ask for what you want and be optimistic and positive see 52 the most valuable feedback usually hurts a lot if you want to think originally and differently seek uncorrelated inputs read minor works older things obscure journals thanks for reading nabeel s qureshi subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work subscribe 2 781 52 547 share reflections on palantir a retrospective of an eight year stint nabeel s qureshi oct 15 2024 1 363 48 191 share palantir is hot now the company recently joined the s p 500 the stock is on a tear and the company is nearing a 100bn market cap vcs chase ex palantir founders asking to invest for long time employees and alumni of the company this feels deeply weird during the 2016 2020 era especially telling people you worked at palantir was unpopular the company was seen as spy tech nsa surveillance or worse there were regular protests outside the office even among people who didn t have a problem with it morally the company was dismissed as a consulting company masquerading as software or at best a sophisticated form of talent arbitrage i left last year but never wrote publicly about what i learned there there s also just a lot about the company people don t understand so this is my effort to explain some of that as someone who worked there for eight years note i m writing this in my personal capacity and don t have a formal relationship with the company anymore i m long pltr 1 why i joined i joined in summer 2015 initially in the newly opened london office before moving to silicon valley and finally dc as a forward deployed engineer for context the company was around 1500 people at the time it had offices in palo alto hq nyc london and a few other places it s now 4000 or so people and headquartered in denver why did i join first i wanted to work in difficult industries on real meaningful problems my area of interest for personal reasons was healthcare and bio which the company had a nascent presence in the company was talking about working in industries like healthcare aerospace manufacturing cybersecurity and other industries that i felt were very important but that most people were not at the time working on at the time the hot things were social networks facebook linkedin quora etc and other miscellaneous consumer apps dropbox uber airbnb but very few companies were tackling what felt like the real thorny parts of the economy if you wanted to work on these harder areas of the economy but also wanted a silicon valley work culture palantir was basically your only option for awhile my goal was to start a company but i wanted 1 to go deep in one of these industries for a while first and learn real things about it 2 to work for a us company and get a green card that way palantir offered both that made it an easy choice second talent density i talked to some of the early people who started the healthcare vertical nick perry lekan wang and andrew girvin and was extremely impressed i then interviewed with a bunch of the early business operations and strategy folks and came away even more impressed these were seriously intense competitive people who wanted to win true believers weird fascinating people who read philosophy in their spare time went on weird diets and did 100 mile bike rides for fun this it turned out was an inheritance from the paypal mafia yishan wong who was early at paypal wrote about the importance of intensity in general as i begin to survey more startups i find that the talent level at paypal is not uncommon for a silicon valley startup but the differentiating factor may have been the level of intensity from the top both peter thiel and max levchin were extremely intense people hyper competitive hard working and unwilling to accept defeat i think this sort of leadership is what pushes the standard talented team to be able to do great things and subsequently contributes to producing a wellspring of later achievements palantir was an unusually intense and weird place i remember my first time i talked to stephen cohen he had the a c in his office set at 60 several weird looking devices for minimizing co2 content in the room and had a giant pile of ice in a cup throughout the conversation he kept chewing pieces of ice apparently there are cognitive benefits to this i also interviewed with the ceo alex karp and talked to other members of the leadership team i probably don t need to convince you that karp is weird just watch an interview with him i can t say what karp and i talked about but he gives a good flavor for his style in a 2012 interview i like to meet candidates with no data about them no résumé no preliminary discussions or job description just the candidate and me in a room i ask a fairly random question one that is orthogonal to anything they would be doing at palantir i then watch how they disaggregate the question if they appreciate how many different ways there are to see the same thing i like to keep interviews short about 10 minutes otherwise people move into their learned responses and you don t get a sense of who they really are my interviews were often not about work or software at all one of my interviews we just spent an hour talking about wittgenstein note that both peter thiel and alex karp were philosophy grads thiel s lecture notes had come out not long before https blakemasters tumblr com peter thiels cs183 startup and they discussed shakespeare tolstoy girard then unknown now a cliché and more the combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me it s still hard to find today in fact many people have copied the hardcore working culture and the this is the marines vibe but few have the intellectual atmosphere the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas this is hard to larp your founders and early employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectual thinkers the main companies that come to mind which have nailed this combination today are openai and anthropic it s no surprise they re talent magnets 1 2 forward deployed when i joined palantir was divided up into two types of engineers engineers who work with customers sometimes known as fdes fo...