A common failure mode in my life is analysis paralysis. I want to get something right , so I obsess over the small details, perfect it, without noticing how much it costs me. The insight of this post is that the best solution is the thing you actually do .| Neel Nanda
A retrospective on my month of daily blogging, what I’ve gotten out of it, why you should do a daily writing project, and advice for doing this well.| Neel Nanda
In many important areas of life, I want to persevere through many failures for a few big successes. As a highly anxious person, this is hard! I instead focus on whether I made a good bet, not whether it failed.| Neel Nanda
On agency - the mindset of being able to look past defaults and constraints, and find ways to take action to achieve your goals. Examining what’s holding you back, understanding what agency feels like, and concrete advice on how to cultivate it.| Neel Nanda
One of the most valuable experiments I ever ran was intentionally practicing the skill of making close friends, and this directly led to most of my friends today. This post is the story of that experiment, and distills the lessons learned| Neel Nanda
One of my favourite mental tricks is reframing a question so that I pretend I already know the answer, and letting my intuition fill in the blanks. I find that this is useful nearly everywhere, and outline what the insight is and a bunch of examples| Neel Nanda
A common failure mode with problems in your life is to feel helplessness. To feel stuck, and overwhelmed, to flinch away from the idea that you can do anything about it. In this post I argue for why this is often wrong, and what you can do about it.| 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
An experimental post, where I try to dig into the parts of life that most spark fulfilment and joy for me, finding examples, ways of maximising for this, and trying to analyse way. Warning: Far more narcissistic and introspective than a normal post!| Neel Nanda
A common failure mode is to consistently set your standards for yourself too high, and to always feel guilty for falling short. I diagnose why I think this is a major problem, and outline some of my tools for overcoming this| Neel Nanda