The first step is often the hardest step. It’s easy to procrastinate, to get stuck, to feel overwhelmed, and to do nothing while feeling constant guilt. This post is about my toolkit for getting past this| Neel Nanda
A concrete, actionable approach to being more empathetic and better at communicating| Neel Nanda
Why optimisation is the correct action by definition, and responses to common objections and mistakes| Neel Nanda
An incredibly useful way to improve the way that I’m living my life is to run experiments on myself. Where by “experiment”, I mean to explicitly change something about how I live my life, follow this plan for some period of time, and then explicitly track how it went, and what I learned from this. F| Neel Nanda
A common trap, especially for quantitatively minded people, is to ignore your emotions and intuitions as “irrational”. I outline why I think this is a clear error, and how I try to balance between listening to my emotions and not letting them hold me back| Neel Nanda
How I think about truth-seeking and why it’s important to me| Neel Nanda
I’m currently in the middle of a virtual conference , so one thing heavily on my mind is how to get the most out of talking to people who know more than me. How to get as much information as I can, how to get it efficiently, and how to ensure I actually understand it and retain it! I think this is| Neel Nanda
How to look at problems in your life, overcome helplessness, and see them as things to be solved| Neel Nanda
On the mindset of “thinking in systems” as a way to solve personal problems, and structuring my life so I do the right things with the minimal use of willpower.| Neel Nanda
A lot of my problems boil down to an attachment to safe options, and a desire to not put myself out there. I try to dissect where this error comes from, and propose concrete actions to overcome it.| Neel Nanda
Why and how you should optimise for being a nicer person| Neel Nanda
Why prioritisation is incredibly important, and how to get started on figuring out your goals| Neel Nanda
On intrinsic motivation, and how to feel it more often| Neel Nanda
Outlining a common failure mode, where people focus on investing effort, rather than achieving results| Neel Nanda
On overcoming procrastination and paralysis, and making it part of your identity that you take opportunity| Neel Nanda
On the importance of Slack - the freedom and spare capacity left on your life. How to guard and protect your Slack, notice the bottlenecks which bleed away your Slack, notice the drive to optimise that pushes you beyond your limits, and how to channel these insights having the freedom to be excited,| Neel Nanda