(1) Have infinite fun

Life is too short to be sad. Being sad is also unproductive because it tends to create no movement or change that trends in a good direction. Emotion tends to follow gradient descent: unhappy people tend to continue to be unhappy, and happy people are normally always happy. When you have fun, the positivity radiates outward — it’s contagious and builds a positive reinforcement loop.

There are always down days. But if you can find positivity regardless of the circumstances, your potential is unbounded — your positivity continuously propels you forward. You can’t have unbounded potential without feeling positive yourself, so you have to have fun.

That being said, you choose what fun means and prioritize your life accordingly. You can have fun slacking off or doomscrolling, but none of that is productive. You should carefully define what fun means to you.

(2) Give your all

It’s bad in life to not give your all. One thing I want to minimize in life is regret. To have no regret, it’s better to give all of your energy to the things you do. Identify the important pillars in life and charge forward, whether it be in relationships, in family, in work, or in health.

What this means is to cut out things that are unimportant. It’s easy to have distractions in the daily world. You only have a handful of waking hours that are actually yours to spend, so spend them on a few things, fully.

Principle (2) is easier when (1) is already true, since fun fuels the focus.

(3) Best your own bar

There’s no better way to improve on something than to continuously raise the bar. Ideally, there should always be a constant gap between what you want to be vs what you are now, and more importantly you should be excited to be who you want to be, and that image should be the thing that gets you out of bed.

The consequence of this is often you become harsh on yourself. That’s fine — diamond is formed in the rough — but it matters on how you reinforce yourself to your own bar. I like this idea of “being your own coach”: your coach is harsh on you, but a good coach never puts you down or give up on you, and they find every way possible to keep you on the court. Replicating that sort of inner positive reinforcement keeps you playing for much longer.

There’s a big similarity here to say hitting the gym and/or playing a competitive video game — you’re constantly raising the bar every time you log in to either places, which is why I enjoy doing both of these things.