On comitting to things
Veer Hitesh Patel, 20 Jan. 2025
A problem I faced for many years in life was committing to one thing, or at least, finding something to commit too. I thought of it as a complex optimization problem. How to optimize for career (skill which increases your market value), interest, specific life circumstances all at once?
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I then learned that it is the skills and habits you invest in today which might save your life in thirty years. Invest in the processes, do not think about the goals too much, the results will follow.
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Generally, I believe that for some people, notably the ground-up thinker, investing time in studying abstract ideas is the highest return on investment. It equips you with the skills needed to learn any related skill in the future, without losing any foundational skills, just because certain thought processes are so well ingrained within you. For example, I was writing code before, just to question how the code was written, why I was writing it the way I was. This could naturally lead onto reading about various programming paradigms. And then generally onto the study of computer science and mathematics.
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Notice how by taking this step, you can expand your generalist knowledge so you can increase the number of scenarios you can tackle. Keep on climbing the ladder of abstraction and generalization until you know what the best decision to make is, at any given time, in any situation.
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You can learn the product rule for two functions, three functions, but if you just learn and understand the product rule for n functions in one go, you will never not be able to compute the product rule for any function.
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Invest in mathematics and philosophy, if you are the ground-up thinker. Everything that modern day white-collar work demands you to do is just some mere application or specific case, one might say, of these studies.
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