Incentives Write Behavior
Trace money, status, fear, and love; they move the pieces. Change incentives, change outcomes.
Before any plan, list the top three incentives at play—and who benefits if you’re wrong.
Twelve Sutras for the Working Polymath
My GPT‑5 Pro Sutras
A pocket manual for compounding craft, candor, and curiosity. Distilled by GPT‑5 Pro from your lived archives—designed to be taped beside the workbench.
Tradeoffs or Fairy Tales
Every “yes” mortgages a “no.” Life is priced in opportunity cost. Pay consciously.
For each decision, write the price next to the payoff. If the price is invisible, you’re self‑deceiving.
Experience Beats Belief
A belief is a poor substitute for an experience. Run the damn experiment.
Design the smallest reversible test that could prove you wrong in 48 hours or less. Then run it.
Compounding Loves Boring
The long game is patience wearing steel toes. Survive first; elegance later.
Protect the habits that compound—sleep, shipping, savings. Guard them like crown jewels.
Stay Long Vol on Life
Small downside, uncapped upside. Be long curiosity and matchsticks; short ego and sunk costs.
Allocate ~20% of resources to high‑variance bets with explicit kill criteria. One win pays for the cemetery.
Rituals Are Steering Wheels
Call it personalized placebo or performance ritual—it bends the nervous system toward action.
Pair a trigger with a short sequence that ends in a concrete step. If it doesn’t move your hands, it’s just incense.
Build on Invariants
Physics, human nature, and math don’t care about your pitch. Anchor there; improvise elsewhere.
List the loads, levers, and limits. Decide once; reuse often.
Outcomes Over Optics
Merit beats slogans. Precision beats performance theatre. Be a working demo.
Swap alignment meetings for a one‑page scorecard: throughput, error rate, cycle time, cash flow.
Ship the Minimum Unreasonable
Release the smallest artifact that makes disbelief expensive to maintain.
Concierge it manually. One paying user beats a thousand nods. If nobody says “holy shit,” kill or mutate.
Candor Before Comfort
Precision is kindness with sharp edges. No ad hominem. No vibes‑only verdicts.
State claim → cite evidence → propose test. Expect shrapnel. Set a better example.
Give Vibes a Vector
Aesthetic without direction is mood lighting. Point it. Measure it.
Encode intentions like JSON: {goal, metric, threshold, by_when, owner}. If it can’t be keyed, it won’t be kept.
Borrow No Suffering
We borrow suffering from futures that never arrive. Choose present tense; let time stitch what magic can’t.
When spiraling, convert dread into a checklist with dates. Action first; story later.