I outline my favourite life advice, where I have heard it, and what it means to me.

Everything in moderation, including moderation. ¹

The first part is fairly self-explanatory. The second part says to moderate the moderation. In other words, on occasion, it is ok to indulge. After all, some of the best moments in life come from indulgence. Don’t be the person who is always moderating, or you will miss out on 100% of those moments.

This reminds me of a paradigm in Computation called Reinforcement Learning (RL), where learning is maximized by balancing existing knowledge, with occasional spurts of exploration. Without exploration, we find that we are generally unlikely to end up at an optimal solution, thus showing us its importance.

If the objective of life is to attain long-term (cumulative) happiness, then we can say that moderation is the current knowledge, and occasional indulgence are the spurts of exploration, and both must be balanced in order to maximize our objective.

Chew your food. Well. ²

This one is quite underrated. We all know that our digestion health is such a large contributor to our overall well-being. Yet we religiously neglect the first step of the process - chewing.

I specifically recall my grandpa saying “chew it until it becomes a paste”. Gross but effective. No matter what your diet is composed of, its not debatable that chewing better will only ever help your digestion, never harm.

Another benefit? Sitting down and consciously chewing requires time and effort. If you aren’t doing it, maybe its a sign that you are rushing. Why are you rushing? Maybe its time to re-evaluate some things in your life.

Don’t worry so much about budgeting, focus on earning more. ³

This one is somewhat controversial. I think this stems from the notion that there is a hard limit to how much you can restrict your spending to - $0. But no limit to how much you can earn. So why not focus on that?

I think this is largely a time-management principle. Maybe you’ve heard the idiom “penny wise, and pound foolish”. If money is the penny, then your time is the pound. Don’t be foolish with your time.

People often will go out of their way believing they are saving a certain amount of money but hardly ever factor in the value of the time spent saving that amount. And more often than not, that time is spent doing something that is not enjoyable.

That same time could’ve been spent on trying to earn more money than what was saved or at the very least doing something actually enjoyable.

Never work for someone who you don’t want to become. ⁴

This one has helped me substantially in my career. More important than finding the right role/career is finding the right mentor. I’ve personally switched roles based on this advice, and I can attribute most my success as a direct result of this.

We tend to emulate people that we are influenced by. By working for such a manager, you are setting yourself up to emulate someone you look up to - which is a great thing! I also consider this one of the few advantages of being an employee rather than an owner. Don’t waste it!