47 · Twenty Minutes of Silence

Cut music. The upside of hyper-manic states is marginal, and pure focus within silence is something that needs to be trained. You need to learn to work with no music at all. Pure silence. Flow with music, operating in system one, is for putting the reps in. For system two you need to operate in pure silence with the same intensity. Intense work does not mean emotional volatility — it's the opposite. This might literally be the one thing that moves you to the next phase. You have everything except emotional control. Regulate it.

If you want to work at the level your maths and coding demand, this must be learned: deep cognitive work in silence. A vast majority of people need constant auditory stimulation to focus — me included. Carve out time to train it: one session of deep work without music, starting at twenty minutes a day, adding ten minutes daily. Too petty to start, embarrassing even — what is twenty minutes of silence going to do for me? Try it. Compounding is terrifyingly powerful.

Remove the root causes of emotional volatility. Music is one massive one — it conjures shallow emotions that keep you from going deeper into yourself. Brown noise and consistent work on what must be done, period.

Lean deeply into thinking slowly. It feels awkward and novel, which is exactly why you should do it. System two is essential for 99% of the work you're trying to do right now.

In fact, the ability to maintain pure voidness of emotion is a skill in this phase of boredom. There is already too much going on in your life; even the smallest emotional amplitude is prone to amplification, sending everything crashing. Putnam, IMC, the physics competitions, the quant bootcamp, learning AI agents, building the SaaS, working jobs, reading, research, A-levels, staying current on fintech from a16z and YC — you can't do all this without stoic voidness. Even willpower and drive are distractions here. Zero emotion; everything channelled into the work itself. Yes, it's boring, and yes, it's hard — that's why it's needed.

Something about finishing what we started is so powerful. The logical-sounding thought — "we can come back and do it later" — makes us give up amid the pressure, and ironically we never come back; starting again from scratch is harder than pushing through with dying momentum and dragging the work across the finish line. The most important work will always look like diminishing returns to your own eyes. Finish anyway.

Whatever it takes to keep the engine hot: 3 Alpha-GPC, L-theanine, Dentyne Ice, vitamin D, zinc and magnesium, Burst Bees, mint sprays, Thai yadoms, omega-3, electrolytes, creatine, ten-plus supplements a day, endless black coffee, cans of Red Bull and Monster, triple monitors — anything that keeps it going. Everyone has their weird thing; mine is brain supplements, because my thought process and decision-making are that critical to me. Bacopa monnieri, lion's mane, vitamin B, double omega-3, double Alpha-GPC.

And — the counterweight, because both are true: you're not an animal, but you're also not a machine. Some nights, don't go to bed with fuel in the tank; push into the point of exhaustion and extract everything. Other phases, respect the fatigue — you can see it without identifying with it. The greats work ugly: totally broken, pushing the flesh to the extreme, then recovering hard. HIIT for the body; HIIT for the mind. Two hours of full focus, then nothing — the off button — then back in the lab.