I don’t mind if my legacy is accurate or inaccurate, as long as I die feeling I’ve done the right thing for the future of Consciousness.2
LIVING A PURPOSEFUL LIFE
You can choose to be not ordinary. You can choose not to conform to the conventions taught by your parents. It’s possible for ordinary people to choose to be extraordinary.3
Don’t aspire to glory; aspire to work.4
The measure of success in my life is: “How many useful things can I get done?”
On a day-to-day basis, I wake up in the morning and ask, “How can I be useful today?”
I want to maximize my utility. It’s difficult to be useful at scale.5
I can’t always get it right, but I aspire to make our future good. Sometimes I make mistakes. But, I try to take the set of actions most likely to improve the probability that the future will be good.6
Try to be useful. Do useful things for your fellow human beings and the world. It’s hard to be useful, to contribute more than you consume. Can you have a positive net contribution to society? Aim for that.7
I have a lot of respect for someone who puts in an honest day’s work to do useful things. I admire anyone making a positive contribution to humanity. Whether that is in farming, technology, entertainment, or whatever else. To anyone useful to the rest of humanity: I admire you greatly.8
Q: How do you know if you’re helping?
I think about it mathematically. How many people you helped, multiplied by how much help you provided each person, on average. How many people you helped, and how much—that’s the total utility (usefulness)9. It’s almost like the physics definition of true work. If you aspire to do true work, your probability of success is much higher.10
For any product you’re trying to create, ask yourself the utility improvement compared to the current state of the art, multiplied by how many people it would affect.
Building something that makes a big difference to a small number of people is just as great as something that makes a small difference for a vast number of people. Mathematically, the total positive impact would be roughly similar for those two things. It’s about trying to be useful.11
This is the mathematical first principles perspective—utility and numbers. Is some simple app really making people’s lives better? If it’s affecting a lot of people positively, even in a small way, then yes, that is good.12
Not every product needs to change the world. Many people do lots of useful things. Just ask yourself, is what I’m doing as useful as it could be? The goal of an organization should be usefulness to society. Not every product will change the world, but if it’s making people’s lives better, that’s great.13
This is the same advice I give to my own children: “Follow your heart in terms of what you find interesting or fulfilling to do.”14 I hope they will work extremely hard and become productive contributors to society. I’m also hopeful they will do things like engineering, writing books, or just in some way, adding more than they take from the world.15
A useful life is worth having lived.16