Why a Living Manifesto
A manifesto is not a set of rules carved into stone. It is a working agreement between the person I am today and the person I am trying to become. Calling it "living" is intentional: the principles below get updated when life shows me a better answer, and frozen when I notice I am tempted to bend them in the moment.
Without one, every decision becomes a fresh negotiation. With one, the hard choices are mostly made in advance and the day gets quieter. This is the operating system I return to when life pulls in too many directions.
What I Optimize For
Long horizon over short reward. Health, relationships, judgment, craft, and reputation compound; status games, novelty, and noise do not. When two paths conflict, I pick the one that still looks right ten years from now.
The default question is not "what do I want today" but "what would the version of me I respect in ten years thank me for doing today."
- Compounders: sleep, training, deep relationships, deep work, deep reading, hard skills, savings, integrity.
- Non-compounders: outrage, gossip, status anxiety, doomscrolling, optionality without action, busywork, low-stakes opinions held loudly.
How I Spend Time
Time is the only resource I cannot earn back. The calendar is the truest statement of what I actually believe — louder than any goal document. If something matters, it gets a block. If it does not, it does not get a "maybe."
- Mornings are for the work only I can do — writing, building, thinking. No meetings, no inbox, no noise.
- Deep work in long blocks. Shallow work batched. The day has a shape, not a stream.
- One real day off per week, fully off — phone away, calendar empty. Rest is part of the system, not a reward for finishing it.
- Default to "no." A yes is a tax on every future hour.
How I Choose Work
I pick problems that are useful, interesting, and just slightly out of reach. Useful keeps me honest. Interesting keeps me going. Slightly out of reach keeps me growing. If only one of the three is true, I am usually wasting time.
- Work on things that are hard to fake. Code that runs, words that ship, products that get used, results you can point at.
- Prefer one bet I will defend in public over five hedged ones I would not.
- Finish. A shipped 80 beats an imagined 100 every time.
- Tighten the loop between idea and feedback. The faster the loop, the faster I learn.
How I Treat My Body
The body is the substrate everything else runs on. There is no career, relationship, or idea that survives chronic neglect of sleep, food, and movement. I treat health as the foundational input, not an optional upgrade.
- Sleep is sacred. Eight hours is not a luxury; it is the price of being good at anything else.
- Train hard, daily. Strength, conditioning, mobility, and time outside.
- Eat real food, mostly the same things, mostly cooked at home.
- Sunlight early, screens late off, alcohol rare.
How I Treat People
Direct, generous, and slow to judge. I assume good intent until evidence forces an update. I would rather be the person who said the hard, useful thing kindly than the polite person who said nothing.
- Show up on time, follow through, and answer the message.
- Praise specifically, criticize privately, and never in writing what I would not say in person.
- Invest in a small number of deep relationships rather than a wide net of shallow ones.
- Make introductions, share resources, and pay tuition forward. The network is not a portfolio; it is a community.
How I Think
The goal is calibrated belief, not certainty. I want my confidence to match the evidence — no higher, no lower. Strong opinions, weakly held. Update fast when reality disagrees.
- Think from first principles when the cost of being wrong is high; use heuristics when it is not.
- Write to think. If I cannot put it on the page, I do not actually understand it.
- Steelman the other side before arguing. If I cannot, I have not earned my opinion.
- Distinguish what I believe, what I have observed, and what I have only read. They are not the same.
How I Handle Money
Money is a tool for time, optionality, and generosity — not a scoreboard. The aim is enough to choose freely and give freely, not infinite accumulation.
- Spend on assets, experiences, and the people closest to me. Be tight on status objects.
- Live below my means by a real margin, not a rounding error.
- Keep a long runway. Optionality is the dividend on discipline.
- Give early and quietly.
How I Handle Failure
Mistakes are tuition, not identity. I name what went wrong, write down what I would do differently, and move. Self-pity is expensive and never compounds.
- Separate the decision from the outcome. Good processes still produce bad results sometimes; that does not make the process wrong.
- Write a short post-mortem when something matters. Read it before the next attempt.
- Apologize quickly, specifically, and without conditions when I owe one.
- Recover in days, not weeks. The next rep starts now.
How I Learn
Learning is not consumption; it is conversion. Inputs only count when they change how I act. The metric is behavior, not bookmarks.
- Read with a notebook. If it is not worth a note, it is not worth the time.
- One book at a time, one project at a time, one big question at a time.
- Teach what I learn. If I cannot explain it simply, I do not own it.
- Choose teachers by the lives they actually live, not their follower counts.
How I Build Identity
Identity is downstream of repeated action. I become whoever I practice being. So I am careful about the practice — and skeptical of any label I have not earned through the boring work behind it.
- I am the person who shows up, not the person who plans to.
- Hold beliefs lightly; hold values tightly.
- Earn titles before claiming them.
- The private self should match the public one. Anything else is a leak waiting to happen.
What I Refuse
A short list of things I will not let in, no matter how convenient.
- Cynicism — it is a cheap costume for cowardice.
- Vague ambition — goals that cannot be measured cannot be missed.
- Performance dressed up as work — busywork in a nice outfit is still busywork.
- Small lies told to keep the peace — they compound the wrong direction.
- Outrage as a personality — it is the loudest empty room I know.
- Optionality as procrastination — at some point you have to choose.
Defaults I Try to Live
The day-to-day defaults that, when I follow them, almost always make my year better.
- Walk every day. Lift four times a week. Sweat at least once.
- Phone out of the bedroom. Read before bed.
- Write something every weekday, even badly.
- Weekly review on Sunday. Quarterly review on a long walk.
- Travel slow when I can; live local when I cannot.
- Cook more than I order. Host more than I am hosted.
How This Page Stays Honest
This is a living document. Some lines here will look naive in a year; some will look obvious. Both are fine. The point is not to be right forever — it is to be slightly more right than last quarter and to leave a paper trail of how I got there.
If you catch a contradiction between what I write here and how I actually live, the writing is wrong, not my behavior. Tell me. I would rather update the page than the story I tell myself.
North Star
Personal mission: to build things that matter, learn continuously, and help others think better about their lives and decisions.
Below is the longer-form north star — what I stand for, what I reject, the values I lean on, and the life areas I am trying to do well in.
What I Stand For
I Believe
- Ownership over entitlement. Nobody owes you anything. The quality of your life is your responsibility. Build your own leverage, earn your own seat.
- Thinking from first principles. Most people inherit their opinions. Strip problems down to what's actually true, then reason up from there.
- Compounding is the eighth wonder of the world. Skills, relationships, capital, reputation — the ones who win are the ones who stay consistent long enough for compounding to kick in.
- Action beats analysis. A good plan executed today beats a perfect plan executed never. Ship it, learn, iterate. Momentum creates clarity.
- Deep work over busywork. Most people confuse motion with progress. An hour of focused thinking creates more value than a week of meetings.
- Skin in the game. Don't trust anyone who doesn't eat their own cooking. Advisors, investors, partners — alignment comes from shared risk.
- Saying no is a superpower. Every yes is a no to something else. Protect your time and attention like they're your most valuable assets — because they are.
- Health is the foundation. You can't think clearly, build ambitiously, or show up for the people you love if you're running on empty. Sleep, move, eat well. Everything else sits on top of this.
I Reject
- Playing status games. Chasing titles, logos, and social signals is a hamster wheel. I'd rather be rich and anonymous than broke and famous.
- Borrowed opinions. Repeating what someone else said without doing the work to understand it yourself is intellectual laziness. Think for yourself or don't speak on it.
- Complexity as a proxy for intelligence. If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. Simplicity on the other side of complexity is where mastery lives.
- Short-termism. Quarterly thinking, overnight success fantasies, get-rich-quick schemes. The best things take years. Be patient enough to let them.
- Comfort as a life strategy. Growth happens at the edge of discomfort. If everything feels easy, you're probably not learning anything.
- Zero-sum thinking. The world isn't a fixed pie. Create value instead of fighting over scraps. The best deals are the ones where everyone wins.
- Credentials over competence. I care about what you can do, not what's written on your diploma. Show me the work.
- Consensus as a compass. If everyone agrees with your plan, it's probably not ambitious enough. The best opportunities look like bad ideas to most people.
Core Values
- Intellectual honesty. Seek truth over comfort. Change your mind when the evidence demands it.
- Long-term thinking. Make decisions that optimize for decades, not days. Compound interest applies to everything.
- Continuous learning. Stay curious. Read obsessively. Expose yourself to diverse ideas and perspectives.
- Bias for action. Done is better than perfect. Learn by doing. Ship, iterate, improve.
Life Areas
- Work & career. Build something meaningful at the intersection of finance, technology, and real estate. Create value through deep understanding, not just participation. Own equity in businesses that align with my values.
- Relationships. Surround myself with people who challenge me intellectually and support me personally. Maintain deep friendships over broad networks. Be present with family.
- Learning & growth. Read widely across disciplines. Write to clarify thinking. Travel to expand perspective. Never stop being a student of life, business, and human nature.
- Health & vitality. Maintain energy and health as the foundation for everything else. Prioritize sleep, movement, and stress management. Optimize for longevity and sustained performance.
Mental Models I Return To
The frameworks I lean on when making decisions or thinking through problems: first principles, second-order effects, inversion, circle of competence, opportunity cost, margin of safety, via negativa, skin in the game.
Words to Live By
"The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Where to Go Next
Field Notes is where these principles meet real weeks, real friction, and real updates. The Health page goes deeper on the body side. About explains why this whole site exists in the first place.