Michael Ng

🇨🇦🇭🇰

[Michael Ng @miiichaelng]

oh i stumbled upon people playing music, a graveyard, people arguing

things that made is special are nothing THAT unique to where im travelling, other than the language they were using to sing songs, write memorials, and yell at each other (with very similar body language)

[Michael Ng @miiichaelng]

finding it hard to express the joy I get from randomly walking around a city while travelling

“what did you do there? what attractions do they have? whats their speciality?”

answers to those questions make the experience itself feel lacklustre

[Michael Ng @miiichaelng]

another way of putting it: answering projects the experience to a lower dimension

and i dont like to do that

[Michael Ng @miiichaelng]

how you get there matters a lot

the only thing that matters

path dependence

[Michael Ng @miiichaelng]

can't unlearn it by someone telling you so and so*

but you can discover the quirks yourself and if it clicks it clicks

[Michael Ng @miiichaelng]

a feature of boredom is that you can’t unlearn it

someone can tell you why something is important, e.g. for career or school. But if it’s boring, hearing 'you shouldn’t be bored' wouldn't change a thing

a (great) corollary of that is you'll develop authenticity

[Jayant Golchhā « 高智仁 » @golchha_J]

@TheAntiMarsClub @nntaleb "... boredom as a naturalistic b**t detector. If something is boring, it is therefore nonrelevant and alienating. Many who don't get it are trapped into modernism." - @nntaleb

[Michael Ng @miiichaelng]

@brianluidog fried squid!

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Separate from people who are easily offended by offending them early.

[Sara Hooker @sarahookr]

Choose problems and people, not brands or timelines.

[Ronit Pereira @CAronitpereira]

“The secret to life is so simple. You don’t have a lot of envy, you don’t have a lot of resentment, you stay cheerful despite your troubles. All these are simple rules.”

“And I was 7 years old when I figured this out.”

- Charlie Munger. 2019

[moneyfetishist @moneyfetishist]

spent the last few hours answering questions from strangers on the internet while sitting on a plane and the thing that keeps striking me is how similar every question sounds once you strip away the context

the BB analyst making $200K wants to know if his life has meaning. the 20-year-old in a frat wants to know if he is on the right path. the guy running a $15M environmental services company cannot sleep because his leverage ratio scares him even though his covenants are fine. the first-year law student wants someone to tell him the career pivot will work out. the immigrant who got laid off wants to know he is not falling behind permanently

the details are different. the feeling underneath is identical. am I going to be okay

we pretend that money and status and titles fix this. they do not. I sit in rooms with people who control nine-figure portfolios and they are nervous about the same things as everyone else. they just have more expensive language for it. the fund manager calls it "risk management." the analyst calls it "career strategy." the 20-year-old calls it "figuring out my path." same anxiety wearing different suits

I watched a grown man worth more than most people will earn in ten lifetimes throw a tantrum in a conference room because someone questioned his assumption in a model. not his competence. not his track record. an assumption in a spreadsheet. a cell in Excel. he turned red and raised his voice because for 15 seconds he felt like he might be wrong about something and his entire identity could not absorb that possibility

that is not a professional disagreement. that is a kid on a playground who got told he is not the fastest runner

Schopenhauer wrote that humans are not rational beings who occasionally feel emotions. we are emotional beings who occasionally think rationally. the rationality is the exception. the feeling is the baseline. every framework we build in finance and in business and in life is an attempt to impose order on a brain that is fundamentally running on fear and desire and the need to be seen as competent by other people who are also running on fear and desire

the most dangerous version of this is the person who thinks they have outgrown it. the one who believes that enough success or enough money or enough status has made them rational. that person is not more rational. they are less accountable. nobody around them pushes back anymore so the irrational impulses go unchecked and get rebranded as conviction and vision and leadership

the best operators I know are the ones who understand that they are still unreasonable kids underneath everything. they lose their temper over small things. they take criticism personally even when it is constructive. they make emotional decisions and reverse-engineer a logical justification after the fact. the difference is they know they do this. they have systems to catch it. they hire people who are allowed to tell them when they are being stupid. they build in a 24-hour delay before any decision made while angry

the worst operators are the ones who think they have evolved past it. they confuse pattern recognition with wisdom. they confuse wealth with emotional maturity. they confuse the silence of the people around them with agreement when it is actually just fear

Nietzsche said that the most common form of human stupidity is forgetting what one is trying to do. I think the more common form is forgetting what one is. which is a complicated animal that learned to use spreadsheets but never stopped being afraid of the dark

none of us outgrow being unreasonable. the question is whether we build a life that accounts for it or one that pretends it does not exist

thanks for the questions today. you are all going to be fine. even the ones who do not feel like it right now

[Fahd Ananta @fahdananta]

When people are intellectually dishonest, the red flag isn’t that they’re lying to you, it’s that they’re lying to themselves

[Jack Moses ∞ @jackmoses777]

The secret of life is to approach it playfully.

Everything can be approached with a sense of lightness, joy, and ease.

Doesn't matter what you're doing. Working at a cafe. Meeting someone new. Going out to dinner. Taking a work call. Writing a tweet. Going on a crazy travel adventure.

The illusion is that things are meant to be taken seriously.

This morning, I caught myself racing against time.

I had a friend arriving in Thailand.

I wanted to work out, jump in the ocean, and get coffee before he got here.

I was stressed and tense — battling against reality instead of flowing with it.

But everything changed with one mindset shift.

It's what I have tattooed on my arm:

"It's all play."

I decided to see the entire situation as a scene out of a movie to experience — rather than something to control and fight.

Ripping my motorbike through town, jumping in the ocean, and grabbing a cappuccino became an electric experience to enjoy rather than something to rush through.

My friend arrived, and the rest of the day flowed magically because my vibrational state shifted from tension to flow.

So whenever you're rushing, tense, or way too serious — a red flag should go up in your mind.

Life is not meant to be taken so seriously.

Reality is not meant to be controlled and fought against.

This is meant to be a game, a movie, an exploration in consciousness, and a journey your soul chose to experience through the character of you.

Sink into that state of awareness and watch your life play out more magically than you could have ever controlled from a tense, rigid mind.

It's all play.

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

There is a specific kind of intelligence that is almost never celebrated but is consistently effective: the intelligence that recognizes when the game being played is not the game worth playing.

[Ava @noampomsky]

So much dating advice is downstream of faking security and I genuinely think that effort is better put into actually becoming secure. Like it doesn't matter if you double text or not what truly matters is if you like yourself, and people can tell when you don't

[Nathan @OIuwatosin]

One thing I love about traveling, is that it breaks the illusion that your current life is the only possible one.

[Michael Ng @miiichaelng]

Is there a name to this style of editing? Reminds me of Bugonia

[Exec Sum @exec_sum]

The @tryramp team is hosting a Super Bowl tailgate in SF tomorrow with everyone showing up dressed like Brian Baumgartner.

There are currently over 3,000 RSVPs and a crazy waitlist.

[Celestara @celestaracosmos]

Be careful with the idea that ‘everyone is replaceable.’ Some people are truly one of a kind. If you lose them, life won’t hand you another version you don’t meet certain souls twice.

[taoki @justalexoki]

this is still the best grief advice I've ever read