Ankit Malik

[Ankit Malik @ankitmalik]

There is no calamity greater than lavish desires.
There is no greater guilt than discontentment.
And there is no greater disaster than greed.

– Lao-tzu

[Electra @Electrarythm]

Dragging yourself to the gym or sitting down to work feels heavy because you are not doing it for the thing itself, but for a payoff that only arrives much later, the weight that comes off in months or the money at the end. And because that payoff sits so far from the minute you are living in, your mind cannot feel it while you struggle, so all it feels is the hard part in front of it.

NLP says the thing stopping you is not your willpower but the meaning your mind long ago stuck onto the activity, filing the gym under "a painful thing I put myself through to earn something later," and for as long as that label sits on it you will keep leaning away.

So the tool is reframing, which works because a frame is just the meaning your mind wraps around something before you have thought about it, the way rain is ruin to someone throwing a party and relief to a farmer watching his field dry, the same rain wrapped in a different meaning. Bandler and Grinder, who built NLP, make this the foundation in Frogs into Princes, that nothing arrives with its meaning already fixed, the meaning is laid over the top by your own mind and so it can be lifted off and another put down in its place.

How you actually do it is you first catch the sentence already running in your head, usually something like "I'll do it tomorrow, I'm too tired today," because as long as you don't notice it, it feels like a simple fact rather than a meaning you can change.

Then you see that the sentence is turning the gym into a price you pay, all the pain in the present and all the reward in a future you cannot feel, then you build a new sentence on purpose that drags the reward out of the future and into the doing itself, something like "I train because training is what someone like me does, and the doing is the reward, not what it buys me later."

The repeating is the part people skip. It feels stupid at first, saying something you don't believe, and most give up right there thinking it proves the thing doesn't work. It doesn't prove anything. You believed the old thought without ever choosing it, just from hearing it in your own head enough times. This is the same, you're just doing on purpose what happened to you by accident. Say the new one when the old one shows up. That's it. Eventually the gym is just a thing you do.

The clearest proof this is how it works is Allen Carr, who used the exact same thing in reverse. In The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, he never tells anyone to fight the craving. He just takes apart what the cigarette means, showing the smoker over and over that it was never actually giving them anything, that the relief they felt was only the craving from the last cigarette ending. And once the cigarette stops meaning relief in their head, the wanting falls away on its own, no willpower needed.

So it is the same thing happening in both cases. Carr took the meaning off a cigarette and the wanting for it went away. You are doing the reverse, putting a meaning onto the gym so the wanting for it shows up.

[Balaji @balajis]

My view is: you’re not actually mad at me, but mad at the situation. I grant that it sucks, but I didn’t cause decades of money printing and the pending sovereign debt crisis, and neither did you.

But in short: if the Mayflower was American, and leaving England to build New England was American, then leaving the dysfunctional old world to build the new is the most American thing you can do.

A longer response follows.

(1) DID THE IRISH AMERICANS BETRAY IRELAND?
First, did the Irish Americans betray Ireland by leaving for America? Why weren’t they loyal to Ireland? Why did they "cut and run"? Why didn’t they stay and fight the Irish Potato Famine?

And the Puritans...did they traduce England by not returning and fighting with the Roundheads? Were the Virginians disloyal to the other side, the Cavaliers? How about the German Americans…how come they left Europe after the Revolutions of 1848?

Point: virtually every single US ethnic group, other than the African Americans and Native Americans, “fled” some issue in the old world. War, civil war, communism, fascism, fundamentalism. The whole point of the New World was to leave behind dysfunctional, bankrupt states…often caught in the throes of endless left-vs-right conflicts.

If almost every single American is descended from someone who left a dysfunctional state, how can it be un-American to leave a dysfunctional state? Why could your ancestors leave dysfunction, why are they free men... but others can’t move, and are locked to the land?

(2) LOYAL TO BLUE OR RED AMERICANS?
Second, if someone tries being loyal to “the American people”, does that mean being loyal to the 75 million Kamala voters, the Blue Americans? Because if you’re loyal to them, you are unfortunately no longer loyal to the Red Americans.

And that’s the rub. Just as Democrats use “democracy” to mean rule by Democrats, and are then stunned that ~50% of democratic votes keep going to Republicans, Republicans keep using “American” to mean Red American, and are then always angry that ~50% of US citizens are Blue Americans.

Today, Gallup reports only 36% of Democrats are “proud to be American”. They are, however, proud to be Democrats. They’re also not posting on X, but rather on Bluesky. The digital secession, the spiritual secession of Democrats away from a “United” States of America has already happened. That’s unfortunately what polarization means.

This Blue/Red conflict is exactly the kind of left-right fight that the Puritans and Cavaliers left behind in the 1600s, and the German Americans left in the 1800s. Just like there is no Korea, only North Korea and South Korea, there is unfortunately no America any more, only Blue America and Red America. And just like the Korean situation led to a Korean diaspora, the American situation is causing an American diaspora.

(3) STAY AND FIGHT, BUT WHO OR WHAT?
Then, if someone was to stay and fight, who do you want them to fight? Perhaps you want them to fight other Americans (namely Blue Americans), in the name of being an American. Or you want them "fight" a ~$175T sovereign debt crisis, which is like fighting a volcanoa, as it's just the largest bill ever due in history, and something even Elon couldn’t put a dent in.

TLDR: you can’t “stay and fight” a sovereign debt crisis. It’s not something you can punch in the nose.

(4) SHOULD INDIAN AMERICANS STAY OR GO?
Also, in case you haven't noticed, half of MAGA is yelling that Indian tech guys should leave the country, or never come, as they'll never be true Americans. Now others are suddenly mad that Indian tech guys are taking them up on it, and leaving America. Meanwhile, far leftists have begun just shooting at tech guys.

This is just a schizo and unstable situation.

(5) LOYALTY TO IDEALS WAS LOYALTY TO AMERICA
I am loyal to capitalism, democracy, free speech, free markets, science, math, wherever they are. I am loyal to peace and trade, small-l libertarianism, privacy, nonviolence, and technological innovation.

I am also loyal to a specific enumerated group of people, the many friends, coworkers, collaborators, and customers who I’ve worked with over the years, both US citizens and non-citizens, from the Stanford and Silicon Valley of a few decades ago.

These were essentially the mainstream American ideals for decades. Millions of Americans still support them. Indeed, millions of Americans think that blood-and-soil nationalism of the kind you implicitly propound is un-American!

(6) BLOOD AND SOIL, BUT WHAT BLOOD?
Finally, and now we really get down to brass tacks: what test do you propose to determine whether someone is a true American, aside from their current paperwork? Because unlike (say) the Japanese, there is no genetic test that correlates close-to-perfectly with US passport ownership.

Therefore, any definition of who’s American *has* to be civic nationalism from a purely operational standpoint, defined at the “software” level (in terms of law) rather than the hardware level (in terms of genetics).

Yet if you try to get N different rightists to define the “is_american” function you’ll get N different definitions, with and without different minority groups. One that went viral recently is the “Grade A American = Mayflower” thing, which is sort of like wokeness in reverse, but for MAGA.

And look: loyalty means symmetry. I am loyal to you if you are loyal to me. But the way you're talking about loyalty translates to servitude. I've been polite, and engaged you in good faith, but we are strangers. Yet you are demanding gratitude and even deference (!) from me, implicitly on racial grounds, because "you didn't build that, someone else made that happen". Moreover, you are doing so by invoking "the people" in a right-coded variation of the way the Soviets invoked "the people."

I'm sorry, that doesn't fly.

Why would anyone be loyal to a MAGA faction that arbitrarily designates countless millions to be Grade B, C, and D? You can't just redefine the social contract overnight, unilaterally, with some tweets, into a retconned blood-and-soil America that the WASPs themselves shut down...and then get extremely mad when others don't buy into it.

We're just going have to renegotiate these kinds of relationships from scratch, with new opt-in communities, where everyone is a grade A citizen. If that means rebuilding New America outside America, just as New England was built outside England, so be it. The next Mayflower is boarding.

[Dan Shipper 📧 @danshipper]

We’ve automated every single thing we can @every with AI agents.

And yet there’s way more human work to do than ever. We’ve gone from 4 -> 30 human employees since GPT-3.

I wrote a report on the structural reasons: how AI makes expert competence cheap, why that drives up demand for experts, and why the dynamic only intensifies as we approach AGI.

After Automation: https://t.co/Lb7SUCduAg

[Ankit Malik @ankitmalik]

@HansAmato Report

[Ankit Malik @ankitmalik]

@PrajwalTomar_ SETUP

[Autism Capital 🧩 @AutismCapital]

Life pro tip: You can now disable Shorts in the YouTube app

Go to settings (the top right gear icon) —> time management —> daily limits —> shorts feed limit —> select 0 minutes.

Boom. Shorts gone.

Hallelujah. Nature has healed. 🙏🏼

[Ankit Malik @ankitmalik]

@felixprehn AI

[Ankit Malik @ankitmalik]

Play the Reverse Uno Card

If you are using AI, it is because it is given you value.

Channelise that value into cash - ideally revenue, semi ideally wages.

Convert that cash to hard assets and an AI portfolio.

AI gets better. Your portfolio gets better.

Welcome to the positive AI spiral.

[Nishaant Bhardwaj @Nishant_Bliss]

The AI Cycle You’re Proudly Funding, Exclusively Thought and Written! 😂

You pay to use AI.

AI company collects your payment.

They use that money to buy more GPUs and servers (basically steroids for AI).

Now AI becomes faster, smarter, and better at what it does.

Then, the same company sells you an even “smarter” AI tool and you pay again, happily.

Their profits shoot up, investors celebrate, and that company builds even more powerful AI.

Soon, that AI can even replace you at your job.

But guess what? You’re still using it, helping it improve further!

So the more you use AI, the more it learns, the richer it gets, and the closer it comes to becoming your boss.

It’s a perfect loop, fueled by your curiosity, subscription, and GPU bills.

You’re not just using AI, you’re literally funding your own layoff.

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

If you want to increase your surface area for luck, focus on producing proof of work. You will make yourself a bigger target for luck.

[rego • @regothetrader]

Losing money is one thing. It is everywhere and in abundance. It comes and goes.

Nothing to stress about.

Your time? That’s another story. It is something you won’t ever get back.

Value your time. Nothing will replace it. Evaluate who you choose to spend it with. There are bad actors everywhere.

Every second you spend doing nothing is a disservice to yourself. Value things in terms of your time and watch your whole life change.

[David Brickell @davidbrickell80]

I’ve made so many mistakes in my life

Be it in investing, in business, in my relationships

…and for a while, would carry around the regret and guilt of those decisions

“If only this, if only that”

I’ve found it really helpful to develop the infinite mindset

This is just a continuous race with no end line

There’s no winners or losers in this life

Just times we’re ahead, times we’re behind

It’s an iterative process and each failure, each mistake is feedback to allow us to make the next best decision, the next best move, the next best trade

Learning to forgive myself for the mistakes and truly let them go, keeping only the lessons learned has been such an impactful habit to develop

It frees up so much mind space and creative energy

We only have have this moment of now and we can only make the best decisions we can make with the knowledge we have now to create a better today and a better tomorrow

So forgive yourself for the mistakes, learn the lessons and make the next best play to make tomorrow a better day than today

[Tai Lopez @tailopez]

Ten bad years can be erased by two focused ones. Momentum erases mistakes faster than regret ever will.

[Joel @joelholzx]

Your anxiety and depression get worse the less you act on your ideas.

Mental illness is metabolic stagnation—energy that wants to move through you but can’t.

Every idea that lights you up is your brain is trying to tell you "there's something here worth moving toward."

When you ignore that signal, when you postpone or overthink, the energy behind that idea has nowhere to go. So it turns inward and builds pressure.

Over time your nervous system adapts to that stagnation. Dopamine decreases and cortisol increases. Your body starts believing that staying stuck = safety.

And the longer you suppress your creative ideas and insights, the more restless, emotional, and ADHD you’ll feel. The mind becomes scattered because the energy meant for creation gets trapped inside it.

Eventually you realise your ideas aren’t random. They’re precise instructions from your intuition, each one designed to grow you into the next version of yourself.

When you act on them, you let your higher self move through your body. You literally feel lighter day to day.

So the next time you get an idea and it feels good, trust it. Because action is how you metabolise inspiration. This is how you dissolve negative thinking and self doubt.

Have the courage to let what needs to come out of you, finally come out.

[Finance Guy @GuyTalksFinance]

There’s 0% chance the government pays off the national debt.

There’s 100% chance the debt overload causes Bitcoin and Gold to go higher and higher.

[Tim Denning @Tim_Denning]

The #1 sign you’re winning in life:

No one understands what the hell you do for a living.

[goodalexander @goodalexander]

I think you need to barbell modern technology

you should pretty much be using AI constantly while working

and then when you're not working you should be writing on physical paper and reading physical books or doing stuff outside

[Route 2 FI @Route2FI]

When your life is nearing its end, you’d give up every dollar just to live one more day, the same kind of day you’re taking for granted right now.

Let this be your reminder: it’s okay to step away from the charts this summer and invest your time in memories that last.

[mahlen @mahlenr]

crazy how messing up your sleep can throw you into an state where you feel depressed and tired and irritable and your perception of everything becomes horribly skewed. And it will feel very real with no indication that it’s temporary.

And then you’ll get a good nights sleep and wake up and go about your day and none of those things will feel true anymore.

[Kieran Drew @ItsKieranDrew]

One of the best decisions I've made is to stop looking at life through the lens of win and lose.

Instead, I focus on:

• Improving my character
• Improving at my craft
• Pursuing my curiosity
• Being a good friend
• Helping people win

Much more enjoyable way to live.

[goodalexander @goodalexander]

Winning is often just:
- more gym
- enough sleep
- good food
- less phone
- having a purpose