My principles of effectiveness

I am effective and here is how.

I am motivated

The source of my motivation is my impending death. I want to die feeling I have achieved enough.

Death works well as a motivator for me because it forces me to be realistic. If I am unrealistic about what I can achieve in my life then I will certainly feel that I underachieved as I die. But I also should be ambitious. How different am I from the greatest achievers in history? Is there anything stopping me from making billions of people’s lives better? It is a fine balance to be realistic about what I can achieve in my lifetime, but that is the only way I can die feeling I have achieved enough.

I allocate my time carefully

It is overwhelming to make billions of people’s lives better and there is no reason to start with such an unreasonable goal. If I can make one person’s life better today, two lives better tomorrow, four lives better the day after, and so on, I will make two billion lives better in a month. The hard part isn’t making a billion lives better, it is making twice as many lives better today as yesterday. And then making it repeatable.

I draw a boundary between improvement and execution. I can spend my effort on increasing the number of lives I can make better in a day. Or I can spend my day making lives better. I would like to do both at the same time, but that would be inefficient. So I must choose how much time to spend on improvement and how much to spend on execution.

If I knew the date and time of my death I could perfectly allocate my time between improvement and execution to maximize my impact. But since I can die at any time, I need to bias myself towards execution. This bias gives me a chance of achieving enough even if something unexpected impacts my output.

I am principled

As my effectiveness increases and my trajectory becomes exponential I am aware that the potential good I can do in the world increases at the same rate as the potential harm I can do in the world.

Principles guide me toward doing good and away from causing harm. Currently I have only one principle: to be a good person.

I make goals

My principles help me to create goals. They tell me how to choose where to go, but I still have options.

Goals keep me moving forward. I break goals into small pieces and track my progress. A goal is good if it helps me stay motivated and take action. A goal is bad if it confuses me or overwhelms me.

I identify obstacles

I have a heuristic for determining if something is an obstacle:

1. I evaluate how much harder that thing makes achieving my goal
2. I wait a bit
3. I reevaluate how much harder that thing makes achieving my goal

If the difficulty has increased since the initial evaluation then it is probably an obstacle. If the difficulty has decreased or stayed at the same level it is probably not an obstacle.

The key insight of this heuristic is that obstacles typically become more difficult to overcome over time. If something becomes easier to overcome as time passes, it is probably not an obstacle at all.

Overcoming obstacles is hard and it is a big waste of time and energy to overcome non-obstacles. I carefully evaluate potential obstacles to conserve my time and energy.

I am aggressively proactivity

Once I identify an obstacle I begin problem solving. I do not doubt, hesitate, or procrastinate. The longer I wait to overcome an obstacle, the greater risk I am allowing the obstacle to create. My goals are too important to allow any additional risk.

I ask for help

I need help when I reach an obstacle I cannot overcome alone. People like to help. But it is important to create the best opportunities for others to help. That way they will enjoy helping and want to do it more.

Before I ask for help I attempt to avoid the obstacle. Then I try multiple ways of overcoming it. When I have exhausted my options I reach out for help. In that request for help I include my attempts to avoid and overcome the obstacle. That information is useful to the helper because it tells them more about the situation and it gives them confidence that their help will be useful.

I accept the right failures

I set ambitious goals and I fail. Failure is fine the first time, but I refuse to repeat failures.

I want to make bigger and bigger failures. If all I can do is fail bigger than anyone has before then that is enough.