#10.3 - Practical advice for maximizing the value of your life
Parts one and two, available now
For all of its errors and misreadings, this response notes that Hägglund “doesn’t distinguish between better and worse ways of spending one’s free time”, and that it’s unclear why “a commitment to having a better car than my neighbor isn’t a good commitment.”
In service of making this distinguishment, I claim without justification:
You have an obligation to structure your days in order to maximize the value of your life
The marginal value of your attention is the marginal value of your life
To maximize the value of your attention is to maximize the quantity and quality of your attention, and to devote your attention towards maximally meaningful ends
Devoting your focused attention towards meaningful ends constitutes your work
Devoting your focused attention towards maximally meaningful ends constitutes your life’s work, the “lifelong quest to build something for others that expresses who you are”
Given that the above is true, the following advice applies. I am probably regurgitating a fair bit from Paul Graham (1, 2, 3) or Gena Gorlin (1, 2, 3, 4). Remember to marginally apply any maximally written advice, and to ignore all unsolicited advice:
Accept that you will die. Accept that your act of living entails your fact of death. You must see the end of your life plainly and clearly to motivate yourself to create value from the experience you’re given. From dust to dust: your life belongs to the earth and to the future. Your death is only the end if you assume the story is about you.
Your fact of death makes your attention scarce, in its totality and in any given moment. It is also the only thing you irreducibly have. You can be stranded in a desert, naked, dehydrated, starving, yet you will have your attention. Because of this, your attention is inherently valuable. Facebook would not exist and marveling at sunsets would be unintelligible if your attention wasn’t inherently valuable. But the inherent value of your attention does not excuse you from harnessing the marginal quality of your focused attention. Your effort is valuable, it is the value you inject into the world.
Maximize the value of your life by maximizing the value of your minutes. Maximize the value of your minutes by maximizing the quantity and quality of your focused attention. Use your focused attention well by maximizing the value of the ends you direct your attention towards.
Dedicate your time towards passionate and purposeful projects: projects for the benefit of others that express who you are. Find and embrace your life’s work. These are the projects which are worth the effort of your creation, your pains and struggles, your blood sweat and tears. Dedicate your waking hours to them and don’t think of anything else.
The wheel of fortune, a carousel of futures. Be careful and be clear about the difference between hope and expectation, the realm of imagination and the realm of reality. Your plans and dreams are only for this current moment. They endure a constant cycle of death and rebirth, your perpetual reaffirmation of your faith that the future you hope will become real also remains possible.
For all of your dreams, all of your goals and plans, all of it boils down to what you are doing now, and what you will be doing next. That’s all there is. What you’ll do later is a figment of your imagination which never arrives.
Push your limits until you find them, then do what you need to sustain yourself there. Go to bed only when you’re exhausted. Work as much as you can every given day, but never a minute more. Accept that your brain will sometimes go on strike, and you can do nothing to control it. Design and implement daily practices and weekly patterns which help you maximize the value of each given day. These patterns and practices are those of maintaining your physical, mental, and emotional health. But directing your attention towards meaningful ends beyond yourself is much more important than optimizing your ice bath routine or taking the right bouquet of supplements.
Do nothing more often than you think, for longer than feels comfortable. If you are motivated and working on something important, you will do nothing more often than you would like. Let it be what it is. Let your fields lie fallow. “Big ideas come from the unconscious,” David Ogilvy said. “Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process.” Build walking breaks into your day if you can. Try to think about nothing in particular until nothing particularly important comes to mind. After a while things will start to make sense again. Look at your surroundings, then on the way back look again. It will be different the second time, but you won’t notice anything unless you look.
Slow is fast and less is more. Take the time to pay attention to that which deserves it. Do one thing at a time and take as long as you need. You can do more by slowing down and doing less. This is because attention is real and time is fake: days can pass in a moment and moments can infinitely expand.
Your brain can go faster than you think if only you’d let it. If you listen to podcasts or audiobooks, listen as fast as you can manage. Otherwise you aren’t maximizing the quality of your attention. Understand what’s being said in full detail and understand every implication and consequence too. But be willing to go back and relisten to important parts. You aren’t maximizing the quality of your attention either if you don’t. Apply this in general to everything you read, as well as every conversation.
Your life’s work doesn’t have to be world-changing to be meaningful. It’s better to aspire towards ordinary ends and embrace the mundanity of your life than to aspire to nothing at all. Alternatively, set your aspirations so high that you have no chance of meeting them in this lifetime. If you do, you’ll never run out of meaningful things to do. What you do is up to you.
Quit your job. Only spend your time on projects which are maximally purposeful and passionate for you. Set the conditions which allow you to focus on your minutes without needing to think at all about the orientation of your days. If you are working on projects which are not maximally purposeful and passionate, dedicate your time to making intentional changes in your life such that you are. This means using your time first to figure out what those intentional changes are.
Don’t hold onto dead dreams. It will rot your soul. It will turn your happiness to dust and choke you. Don’t convince yourself that because your life ought to be meaningful that therefore it is, or that because you ought to be happy that therefore you are. Making large intentional changes to your life is unbearably painful because it amounts to spiritual suicide. It will feel like killing yourself because it is. You must kill your spirit, the commitments to finite, fragile ends which heretofore have sustained you, so that it may be born again.
Beware of starving to death in the crotch of a fig tree. If you don’t know what purposeful projects you are passionate about, put your time towards figuring it out. Try something, anything. Pick a purpose before the occasion passes you by. If you don’t, you don’t value your life at all.
Work with other people. The value of your focused attention scales infinitely when you collaborate and coordinate your efforts with others. This means that the organization you work within strongly influences the value of your time and attention. Only work within organizations which align you towards always and only ever doing good. Everything about an organization imposes an incentive on you: what’s being sold and how it’s priced; feedback and review processes; organizational structures; communication, decision making, and planning practices. Incentives matter because they shape your collective behavior in a collective and unconscious way, and irrevocably push you down paths you might not want, in ways you cannot realize.
It is impossible to fully close the gap between how you and how someone else perceives the world. Do your part by being relentlessly truth oriented, honest, candid, clear, and concise. Know the difference between rhetorical and logical arguments, between speaking to be heard and speaking to be understood. Say what you mean and mean what you say. Don’t let your words get in the way of your meaning. Use simple words and short sentences. As a corollary: understanding what someone else says is a matter of interpreting the subtlety of what the other person is saying and the way they’re saying it, which is also what they’re not saying and the ways that they aren’t saying it.
Do well by doing good. Remember that money will always flow in the opposite direction of value. Remember that others will pay you because they do not have the time, will, or expertise. This always involves unexciting work that they are unable or unwilling to do: otherwise, they would do it themselves. Money will come if you focus on delivering value: be minimally extractive, maximize your positive externalities, give freely.