Note on Advice

Most of the advice I get is rarely worth listening to. It's either people thinking they have figured it out and think they're right (most of the time they are not), or it's mostly insults dressed up as "life advice". I hate to say this but old people do this on a daily basis¹.

There's an easy way to tell the two apart: ask them why. Real advice comes with a reason that fits your situation. An insult comes back as "because I said so" or "because that's how everyone does it", which is just their feelings talking.

Most people's advice conflicts with other people's, and it all cancels out. What I like to do is find people that are the most similar to me. Still get advice from other people as well; but if their words conflict with people that you are similar to, you need to set them lower in the list instead of replacing it as a newer one every time, at least for life advice.

For me, that's people like Roy Lee and Sam Altman. Roy is Korean, was never a model student, and got the whole internet talking about something he built, which is exactly the part I'm still learning. Altman saw AI early and kept going despite years of criticism. When their advice clashes with a random adult's, theirs clearly wins.

In the cases in which it isn't life advice, you still need to look around, see what situation you or your thing is in, (e.g., business), then go through the same process again.

I listen to Stanford's machine learning lectures and study the maths required for it, at a much younger age than most people who take the lecture, but I still get criticized for it constantly. My parents really don't want the best version of me that I can think of and am aiming for. They want me to follow the "hardened path"² so they can look successful through me.

To be clear, none of this means ignoring criticism. Harsh feedback on my actual work, like a broken feature or a weak argument, is different. I want that as much as I can get. What I ignore is the generic "just study" from people who never asked what I'm building.

I built this today while writing this: https://siwoo.lol/motivation. I really hope you enjoy it. Watch these at your lowest points, when you get that kind of "life advice", and whenever there are non-believers around.