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In particular, try to go deep on multiple things. (To varying degrees, I tried to go deep on languages, programming, writing, physics, math. Some of those stuck more than others.) One of the main things you should try to achieve by age 20 is some sense for which kinds of things you enjoy doing. This probably won't change a lot throughout your life and so you should try to discover the shape of that space as quickly as you can.

A related helpful thinking technique is putting bounds on things: “well, it’s not as high as X, and it’s not as low as Y, so given that it’s somewhere in between those numbers we can assume it’s roughly Z”. For example, if I ask you when strong human level AGI will come about, you might experience some mental paralysis, or just answer honestly that you don’t know. But you do have some intuitions here, which this exercise draws out: you’d be very surprised if it came about next month, and you’d probably also be surprised if humanity hadn’t invented it by 2150, say, so you can at least conclude that your model of the world predicts that it’s likely to fall somewhere in between next month and 2150. Well, that’s already a surprising conclusion! It implies that your grandkids will probably see AGI. Not so far away, is it?

Write regularly, and learn to ‘think in writing’. This is true for literally everyone, regardless of whether you want to be a writer or not, whether you want to publish or not. Just have a Google Doc in which you add a page a day of whatever’s on your mind. This has a million benefits, but a simple one is just clearing your cache: if you don’t do this, your brain sort of gets clogged by all the things you have on your mind, whereas if you ‘empty’ your brain onto a page that creates room for new thoughts.

Having simple rules for your company will clean a lot of things up.

Let's talk a little more about the complicated business of figuring out what to work on. The main reason it's hard is that you can't tell what most kinds of work are like except by doing them. Which means the four steps overlap: you may have to work at something for years before you know how much you like it or how good you are at it. And in the meantime you're not doing, and thus not learning about, most other kinds of work. So in the worst case you choose late based on very incomplete information. The nature of ambition exacerbates this problem. Ambition comes in two forms, one that precedes interest in the subject and one that grows out of it. Most people who do great work have a mix, and the more you have of the former, the harder it will be to decide what to do.

[Why are operation reviews important for junior and senior managers?] The junior person will benefit from the comments, criticisms, and suggestions of the senior manager, who in turn will get a different feel for problems from people familiar with their details.

Whenever there are problems to solve, don’t just meet with your managers. Do a skip level, where you meet with the level right below your managers.

Before you try to go hire other people, you need to actually do it. You need to actually taste it. You need to have your own perspective on it.

A players hire A players, B players hire lots of C players.

In planning the Moravian campaign, the Emperor understood that the Russians, since they lacked a first rate general, would think that the line of retreat of the French army was anchored on Vienna. Consequently, they had to attach great importance to cutting the Vienna road, whereas in fact, throughout the whole Moravian campaign, the French line of retreat was never intended to bear on Vienna. This single circumstance falsified all the enemy’s calculations and was bound to make him decide on movements which led to his annihilation.