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Principles | Nabeel Qureshi 

advice•essay•View Source
Appreciation
8
Importance
7
Date Added
1.24.25
TLDR
A concise, well-communicated, and thoughtful list of hard-won life lessons. (By design, very dense).
2 Cents
REVISIT often! A lot of nuggets. I had it pinned in my browser for quite some time. I want to write one of these myself (maybe starting with tips → principles).
Tags

Some notable ones:

  1. Do things fast. Things don’t actually take much time (as measured by a stopwatch); resistance/procrastination does. “Slow is fake”. If no urgency exists, impose some.
    1. I read this first when in the middle of a sprint and realized this is very true.
  2. Moving fast forces you to strip things down to the bare bones.
    1. Also made me realize I really need to 80/20 more. “Optimizing life is not about optimizing the rounding errors.”
  1. Doing things is energizing, wasting time is depressing. You don’t need that much ‘rest’.
    1. Well put and motivating—even if I do have 80 hour work weeks, they can be energizing! Burnout is the real thing to avoid.
  2. Being able to travel is one of the key ways the modern world is better than the old world. Learn to travel well.
    1. I’ve never viewed traveling like this, but yes.
  3. Form opinions on things and then find the strongest critique of those opinions. Repeat.
  1. Don’t let anyone make you feel small.
  2. Working with people you really respect, and are secretly worried are much better than you and will figure out how dumb you are, is the best.
    1. Vedant put this as “Find people who make you feel like you are afraid of them figuring out how dumb you are, and try to stick with them for as long as possible.” I think these are better (more concrete?) ways of saying “be the dumbest person in the room.”
  1. Ask dumb questions. The people who matter won’t judge you for it, and you’ll learn things as a result. (See: How To Understand Things )
  2. There is some wisdom in “fake it till you make it”.
  1. Think in writing. Write Google Docs, scrawl in notebooks. This extends working memory arbitrarily and allows your thoughts to compound on each other. (”The difference between a Turing machine and a finite state machine is the tape.”)
    1. I didn’t think super hard when I wrote my monthly reflection today, yet I arrived at thoughts I wouldn’t have otherwise had. Same for my daily journal.

Will be coming back to this!