110 · Loose Change

Maybe modelling in the UK. Maybe a working holiday in Australia. Maybe — it's a good word for holding onto the random speculations that manifest in the mind. Peterson's perspective is true: most ideas are stupid, but one idea will be the one that moves the needle.

There's a guy who comes to my English class named Glory. His English is bafflingly rough, he works at McDonald's, toiling through physical labour — and he has a dream of Australia, flights already booked. Imagine being scared to take initiative when he'll come back in six months far better at English than you, simply because he had the audacity to go.

Damn, I feel emotionally confused about the new manager at work. Just know that these pass — it's turbulence. Tell yourself, whenever you feel a pull away from the vision: this is just noise. Don't lose a billion-dollar startup over a crush. Lock in, twin.

Once something is yours, live it out. Beat the living daylights out of it. Don't be precious — "what if I scratch it" is no way to own anything. Own it.

A software app that has a clothing brand and great merchandise. World rank in Clash Royale — a goal worth pursuing. Once life settles at Cambridge, I want to lean into Sudoku, chess, checkers, poker, Rubik's cubes, Uno, card magic, board games, speed cubes — cognitive brain teasers, and probably the reason it was always maths and physics. And DIY circuits — THE thing I want to start the moment there's breathing room. These aren't deviations; they're the same vectors with different physical manifestations.

A reference letter from the professor who hosts the Putnam in Manitoba, saying something like: he is the single most powerful force I have seen in preparing for the Putnam; he took gold at the IMC; he will represent the University of Manitoba; past experience includes the Korean Mathematical Olympiad and a bronze at the Seoul National University of Education competition; he achieved a 9.0 TMUA. Of course we polish it. But the point: build the relationships that make such letters natural.

You have to cut porn. Lust is a dangerous thing — it can wreck an entire life. The greatest kings fell to it, and it's a never-ending downward spiral where every piece of hard work crumbles at once. Call out to Jesus right before the moment of sin. This is a vow, not a preference.

Everything you learn right now — assume the people you're up against learned it decades ago, that the provider of the resource and a huge global talent pool already know it. That radical paranoia is the correct calibration. And its twin: you are quite along the timeline of Feynman, who took his Putnam fellowship at 21.

It is never a loss to spend $5k going to San Francisco, winning a hackathon, taking a prize, and coming home net zero. You gained the world. Have some gratitude — there are people preparing for years for opportunities that sit within your reach.

The eighteen-hour breakdown, when it's a build day: twelve hours coding and building, four hours sales and calls, two hours learning. Focus is a lie anyway — the brain is a massively parallel distributed system, millions of neurons firing simultaneously; you can run a hundred businesses, manage hundreds of millions, hold fifty hobbies. What kind of computer does that? One biological system, unfathomable orchestration.

I was talking to my store manager about front-end and back-end programming — there are threads to pull everywhere, even at the counter. Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill — excited for this read; trying to read more of the classic economic works rather than self-help, understanding policy and how an economy actually operates. Trigger conditions — the phrase for this entire phase: setting conditions extracted from pattern recognition, in maths, in physics, in trading, in life. And even the most powerful men on every podcast carry manifestations of fear and uncertainty — which gave me the conviction to stay authentic about mine. They are universal for anybody attempting the manifestation of anomalous outcomes.

You're too slow in execution — it has to be a straight laser, a bullet that penetrates. If you are not feeling uncomfortable, stressed, overwhelmed by your own velocity, you are not getting greater. The almost perfectly automated work ethic of the greatest people is astounding: even the intensity becomes part of their norm — a system that flows on its own. That's the destination: not a man forcing himself forward, but a man whose forward is the default.