The Perfect Plan

Foreword

I was met with the ultimatum of going to Japan or staying in my hometown in Australia to focus so astronomically hard that I learned mathematics within a year to start working on robotics and AI. I reflected on my previous experiences moving to different countries and how I felt during those times, often wondering how much better off I’d be if I remained home. Meeting people that have inspired new ways of thought was the biggest upside. Creating unnecessary time tradeoffs was not though. This article breaks down the logic behind my thinking of passing on the opportunity of moving to Japan to fully commit to learning. Hopefully, you find some value in this.

Home Base

The biggest misconception I had about the world is that you need to be in a specific country to meet people and form connections. Where this one place will magically solve your problems. This is far from the truth.

We live in the phenomenal age of information, thanks to Claude Shannon. We can speak to anyone, anywhere at any time. It’s merely a matter of how do you discover these connections?. It’s no longer a game of meeting them in person to establish a valuable connection. You can be best friends with someone in an opposite time zone from you, a 20-hour flight away.

I’m living fucking proof of this.

I have lived in Melbourne Australia for all my life, a minimum of 10 hours to Japan, 20 hours to USA and EU, and yet, I’ve managed to befriend people ranging from a decade in USA defence to billionaires that own parts of entire countries, CEOs getting invited to be with the most powerful people in the world, government officials of foreign countries, polymaths, successful HFT firm owners, ivy league graduates from MIT and Harvard, and the list continues to grow. 99% of these people have never seen my face, known my government name, or heard my voice (unless through my podcast).

You don’t fucking need to be anywhere 24/7 anymore, its not the 1980s. Even for the argument of meeting the best physicists in Germany you no longer need to be there IRL. Email is perfectly fine. Gilbert Strang replied to me relatively quickly after a quick email. You can be buttfuck nowhere in a snow forest in Norway and have the world in the palm of your hands. Don’t get me wrong though, the ability to spontaneously fly to see people sub x hrs is extremely valuable. HOWEVER, the counterargument is, that if you’re that important to them, they will wait for your arrival.

Cultivating Immersion

I must echo, to capitalise on immersion your mind must be constantly thinking of the thing. From every waking moment to trying to dream of the thing. You have to live and breathe this thing. It should be so ingrained in your mind that in every instance of consciousness, it’s in the back of your mind, nagging you to give it attention.

Moving countries, especially one with a foreign language as the main, with no English, takes this away from you. You need to learn how to “live” again. A distraction from the goal of being ever consumed with thought. You’ll have pointless agendas of being able to communicate again, learning the way of the land, blending in, how shit works, etc. These ultimately take away precious time from building the compounding momentum of creativity.

If you casually/part-time take on learning this new place that is a distraction. You’ll have to invest n hours into everything, thus n hours deducted from investing in the important things, that push the needle forward. To regain momentum is difficult. This is why living alone in a forest with no stupid paper requirements, i.e., for a visa, is such a powerful way to surround yourself with everything that is you. You draw inspiration from the constellation sparking up the void of the sky, observing ant armies crawl up trees under the feet of a swarm of birds hunting for the next insect, thinking deeply of everything and interlinking them to your goal — for everything is related, you merely have to bridge them.

Distractions must be eliminated. Steve Jobs had the great idea of wearing the same thing every day, eliminating the mental overhead by automating the daily thought of “What should I wear today”. You must apply this philosophy to everything. If you even think about such a mundane task that doesn’t improve your mental state then it must be eliminated. It’ll reoccur recursively until you snap. Cut the head off early before it grows up to bite you.

Decision Costs

You may rebuttal and say: “But this city will give me new insight into x”, which might be entirely true! However, to reap those rewards you must pay the cost of distraction each day at n moments, drawing from your snowballing momentum for m days of the year until you are competent enough to just exist without thinking. Is that time tradeoff worth it? You decide.

Another point to consider is the opportunity cost and time sensitivity of investing in another thing that provides no exponential ROI. Sure, learning Japanese may be incredibly valuable to meet officials and enablers who only speak the language but unless you have that opportunity it will never be as important as using that time to double down on learning the language of mathematics, something that is guaranteed to provide a life-changing ROI, over a probability n/m to provide x% of life-changing ROI. Each decision is an investment and the consequences of said decision are followed. Some are hidden without further investigation before sudden uncovering. You may realise when it’s too late and revert to old superior ways of life.

Flow State

To conclude this I’ll give my philosophy I’ve ducktaped together over the past two years from moving countries twice and potentially a third, to Japan a non-English speaking country. To drive creativity you must be comfortable. You must have fun, for fun is the brain having no restraints of thought. And with no restraints you may explore anything without fear of failure, or wrongful thinking, enabling your mind to walk along the cables of the unknown with no harness. It runs with no worry of mistepping and occasionally it finds itself on new unexplored land by any mind, where you can note down and build on top of to invent the next technological advancement that with alter the lives of trillions to come.

Environment

If you’re not happy with your environment, change it as much as you can. If that doesn’t work, MOVE, or discover new cafes, libraries, and environments externally to your home. If the external is solved, your internal mind is what is wrong. Reflect, observe and change. You’re not bound to your reality. Work on yourself. Nothing external, no money, people, materials, knowledge, love, anything will ever change how you think when you’re by yourself when you wake up in the morning, alone. Conquer your mind before anything else. This should be the priority. Not chasing a new environment and hotwiring your primate dopamine systems to feel a temporary high to escape your shattered internal state. Fight your boss head-on every single day consciously and be aware of when you’re not acting correctly. You will feel more at home when your mind is right, for it follows you to every inch of this world and beyond.

Decision ROI

Invest in yourself, a guaranteed win, over the hopeful dream of a probabilistic unknown under the influence of extreme long-term dedicated action. Life is a game of accumulated bets. Decide to make the correct ones. But what if you’re met with a multitude of difficult decisions? Easy.

Ask yourself**, “What will get me closer to my goal immediately, in 6 months and 5-10 years?“.**

Weigh up the ROI of each decision. The cost associations with them and be responsible for your choices. Own them to the fullest. Commit to whatever it is you do. If you don’t think you can never take the option, for you will wash away when the storm comes crashing. You must accept the painful suffering of both the known and unknown of the decision. It’s okay to reassess, but willfully ignoring potential pitfalls is self-sabotage.

Pursue Vs Plan

I’m a very analytical systematic thinker. When I want something I create a plan to get there. But there comes a point where this becomes detrimental. When you spend more time planning than executing the plan you have your priorities mixed up. The objective should be to make a rough plan of what to do and begin doing it, as you learn more about the thing you’re doing update your plan bc you will have uncovered new information that will guide you better than the original plan ever would.

Actions reveal the unknown unknowns, the things you never knew existed. And so, how could you ever make a perfect plan when you don’t have the full picture? It’s impossible. You must begin to paint and change as you see the image being formed. You’ll realise one part is on the verge of making the painting look indistinguishable from the objective and you must adjust or you continue going down the wrong route and end up tracing back to the right route regardless, when you learn it wasn’t as useful as you thought. Flexibility with the plan is extremely important bc new information arises instantly after action, whether positive or negative. Hone in your global goal but adjust the local turns to get to the end destination.

Unknown unknowns are revealed by trial-and-erroring because the errors demystify the fog of the black box of knowledge. Each step unlocks new routes that were never even conceived as something that exists. Therefore, optimise for unlocking as many unknown unknowns as fast as possible and with as big of leaps as possible.

You take one step, learn a bit, find out there are different pathways to traverse and put on your hiking shoes. It gets easier though. You write down in your notepad each observation, no matter how unimportant, bc you’ll look back with your future experienced mind and snap into the old thoughts with a new perspective and uncover the untouched gold. It’s like watching a movie playing a game or reading a book the 2nd or 3rd time after some years. You begin to get a newfound understanding of what it all means because your perception has changed. This change comes from experience. Without encountering new stimuli you will never adapt and grow. This is why sticking around the same environment for so long is self-constraining because you’re never able to break free of caged thinking unless there is a change of those in the environment or the environment itself (e.g., a school).

Calculated Bet On Yourself

Everything will be worthwhile when taking the long-game perspective. That job you quit will be the best decision you could ever make bc without quitting you would be n years behind what you could have been. Quitting is acceptance of taking the guaranteed win bet on yourself over coping to be happy after you reach x prestige or status and y money. Think about it like this: when you remove money from the equation what would you do? Great. Now you’ll eventually earn that money through your job and quit to do the thing you wanted to do bc you have the money.

Right.

But, you can calculate your minimum amount of money required as a runway to break into the thing you want to do, commit fully to do it for n years and begin making money there. Now you’ve solved your money problem AND you are doing the thing you want, skipping the wasting away of your drive, extinguishing the flame, from your 9-5, that is not guaranteed to give you fulfilment in any category. Why is betting on yourself guaranteed? Bc all you have to do is simply not quit. WOW! SHOCKING NEWS! You are the dictator of your own life. Whatever you say goes. You determine everything that happens. Whereas with your job, someone else does :) Good risk management, right? Relying on someone else to dictate your future for you.

Take the risk bc ultimately, it’s not even a risk…

You determine your rate of success by how much work you put in. You make a plan. Wake up every day and do x, y, and z and then optimise for how consistent you can be. Once you get habits up you can modify them slightly to see different results. Very systematically guaranteed to win. Something doesn’t work? Change it. But only after you’ve given it a really good shot for a month. Some things take time to manifest visual results. Remember, the measure of genius is determined only by success. You might be a genius in the making. Give yourself time. Fuck what anyone thinks, says or does. They are simply hostile NPCs in your game of life. Go out there and eat the world, anon-kun.

End

I also think we put too much pressure on ourselves to be “successful”. I did. Over time I realised the definition of success is to get what you want, in all fields of life. Living how you want to live is success. Are you happy every day and want to be awake? Does sleep become something you don’t look forward to because you’re no longer experiencing the world? This is the best way to measure success. So you let yourself feel, listen to those songs and dance in the kitchen, stare into the chaotic waves of the ocean until the stars light up the sky, be in solitude and be with yourself. Things emerge when the habits are set in place. Remember, life is one long marathon but time goes by quickly.

Just today I was looking at my old photos that were 8 years ago. God. I remember it like it was yesterday. Optimise for making memories because they are the only things that truly matter. Exploring the galaxy is an experience just as much as making dinner with a friend. Never stop being open. Everything ends in due time. Those sad emotions, guilt, happiness, loneliness, it goes on. You can always simply stop feeling a way by getting up and leaving. Leave the feeling, the environment, the people, the association. You are not confined to anything. You can be anyone. You’ll be okay. Look up more often. There’s more to see aside from the ground!

I wish you well, anon. Godspeed.