My 13 Less Common Life Choices and Why They Matter
I’ve made some less common life choices that have allowed me to live a ‘high bandwidth’ life devoid of much regret, and a persistent feeling of being content and ‘successful’ (for some definition of success). I do keep hearing from people around me that the number of things I dabble with is unusual, and that naturally requires an unusual lifestyle. Basically, I try to fill most waking moments with meaningful activities, without burning out. In fact, quite the opposite; keeping busy with meaningful work saves me from burnout. All my life, I’ve picked skills and interests at the intersection of what’s fun for me and what’s impactful.
Since many people have expressed curiosity over how I manage to maintain a high bandwidth life — I thought I’d write a note about this. If you’re considering shaking things up in your life, my choices might give you some ideas.
Specifically on being high bandwidth, in addition to holding pretty intense day jobs and coding for a hobby, I’ve been a screenwriter, a playwright, a director of film and theater, a photographer, a cinematographer, a film and video editor, a singer, an instrumentalist, a sound recorder and mixer, a lighting designer, and so on. And it never stops. This week I bought electronic drums and started practicing, and also started fine tuning a LLaMa model from scratch on my laptop. The learning never stops. And with that, the physical and mental bandwidth needs to keep growing.
My life choices generally reflect the following broad preferences:
- risk-taking over risk-aversion
- valuing time over money
- active participation over passive consumption
- day-to-day happiness over prestige
- growing over saving
- bold+direct+well-meaning comms over careful+fearful
Below (in no particular order) is the list + notes on why they matter:
I set notifications on devices to off by default. Except for emergency contacts, or comms on real-time events, I ‘pull’ all the notifs when I am ready to consume them, giving me more agency over my time.
Time is really precious, and I have a strong desire to take control of my time on this planet. Outside of comms related to an ongoing event or those from a handful of close people, it’s rare for a message to be worth interrupting focused work or creative processes. By limiting all forms of ‘push notifications’ to a bare minimum, and pulling those updates only when I have intentionally made time for them, I’ve managed to create lots of uninterrupted blocks of time. The exception is a very small number of close people who can raise alarms as and when needed. I find that this really makes for many chunks of uninterrupted focus blocks, which in turn contributes to higher quality work and improved mental health.
I multitask whenever I can. Even though the common wisdom is that one can’t multitask, the devil is in the details. I switch between tasks reasonably quickly to allow me to fill down times effectively.
There are numerous ‘experts’ who cite empirical research showing that multi-tasking ‘does not work’, you should only do one thing at a time, etc etc. Particularly fraught are notes that use cognitive limitations of high frequency context switching to demonstrate how ‘multitasking is a myth’. But in my experience, most people that embrace multitasking aren’t doing so at very high switching rates. I just have to pick a comfortable switching rate to allow for sufficient focus on the current task, and develop the skill to ‘push and pop’ context to and from my mental stack. Doing this effectively makes my days far more productive. For example, when I am writing code that requires peer reviews (in small chunks) in order to check in, I usually switch context to another project while waiting for the review. Obviously, this is an easy example, most cases are a bit more complicated, requiring chunking projects into tasks that I can multitask over, and that’s the hard, subjective part of the type of multitasking I’m referring to here.
I’ve not had Cable TV for 12+ years. I use a ‘pull’ mechanism to watch shows and movies whenever I want. Within that, I’ve prioritized content high on learning opportunities such as non-fiction and arthouse cinema.
I found out pretty early that mindlessly surfing TV channels almost always filled up whatever free time I had at hand, but later on I invariably felt shitty about the way the time was spent. At the same time, I found it important to give my brain rest while also learning, albeit at a lower level of stress. So, 12+ years back I became an early adopter of cutting off cable TV and switching to on-demand TV consumption via Roku and other devices. This gave me much more control over my available time, and effectively reduced my TV time without feeling like I lost anything.
I treat reports and superiors as peers; often ignoring org charts, instead basing attention and respect on good behaviors, capabilities, smartness, and track records. I tend to directly communicate with the ‘right’ people on a topic.
I’ve generally found org charts to be given greater value than they deserve. They often come in the way of efficient tactical communication and quick decision-making. The problem is, information flow is less through org charts can often be both lossy and less efficient. Folks climb up the ranks in an org chart (or not) for specific accomplishments; their knowledge, experience, expertise, and decision-making power can sometimes be orthogonal. It’s simply more efficient to communicate in this manner, e.g. if I quickly need a technical answer to a technical question, I would go to the engineer doing the work. If I were to discuss industry-level strategy, I would go to the CEO.
Side note: This can be a slippery slope if done wrong. In particularly, skipping layers up and down can be concerning for those in these intermediate layers, e.g. can be seen as micromanagement. So this has to be done very thoughtfully. What I do is to limit this to tactical things only, and proceed when the pros outweigh the cons.
I don’t read a lot, especially fiction, even though I write a lot of fiction. On non-fiction, I mainly consume book summaries or audiobooks. Conventional wisdom says read a lot but I find the process inefficient.
Expecting efficiency out of most things, I find ‘learning per unit time’ to be too low with full length books (especially fiction) relative to modern learning tools, and the ‘entertainment per unit time’ to be low as well relative to other forms of entertainment. Non-fiction books tend to deliver higher efficiency learning, but can be repetitive in the messages they intend to convert. Furthermore, I find summarizations and audio-books (delivered while I am doing something mostly passive like driving) to be much better at delivering value per unit time.
For well-intentioned thoughts, I don’t hesitate to speak candidly.
This is a controversial topic, but I generally find most value in talking directly and candidly rather than beating around the bush, sugar-coating things , compliment sandwiching, being toxically positive, etc. That does not mean being a jerk, being rude, or being hurtful. It simply means speaking without fear and in a way that is actionable and clearly understood . The opposite is very common — folks tend not to put themselves in uncomfortable situations, so they end up playing it safe, avoid tough conversations, and so on. Take LinkedIn- over the last 1–2 years I’ve received 50+ private chat messages commending me for being bold. That’s when I realized I was in the minority, especially on this platform.
Side note: It’s not too hard to be bold, but certain preconditions have to be met to avoid stupidity. I’ll write about this in detail in a dedicated note.
When I write publicly, I don’t obsess over being judged.
Likewise, I don’t worry too much about being judged, being called a wannabe influencer, my writings criticized and being called ‘cringey’ etc. Even statistically speaking, say my writing is distributed to 100K+ people (common), and say 95% of the readers like what I wrote (never happens). It still means there are over 5,000 readers who dislike what I wrote; a small subset of them will write something off-putting or hurtful as a comment, and not always with the healthiest of intentions. It is inevitable. Not only will the percent never ever go to 100% for my writings, it’s probably far lower — likely 50% or lower. So instead of obsessing over judgement, I focus on just making the writings net positive — more good than harm — and that’s a good goal for most public actions. If I were to be fearful of being judged or getting negative reactions, I’d never end up posting anything.
I’ve not been aggressive with seeking feedback nor giving feedback.
As much as people claim feedback is a gift, far too often feedback is colored by context. Lack of broad understanding, vested interest, conflict of interest, and even jealousy can make it difficult to separate out accurate, well-intentioned, actionable feedback from the end product of complex emotions. Therefore, I prefer to give and get high quality feedback where I have a good sense of the context, or with a very small set of folks with deep mutual trust. And I spend energy expanding out that set slowly and carefully. For example, someone who is about the leave the company often has little vested interest remaining and therefore tends to give unadulterated, well-meaning feedback. By contrast, the same can’t be expected from someone seeking your feedback for their own promo case.
With time, I’ve increasingly prioritized time over money. On money, I’ve focused less on saving, more on earning.
Over the years, I’ve genuinely felt a reduction in the value of unit money, and an increase in the value of unit time. As we race towards our end, savings tend to grow, but time becomes increasingly scarce. For that reason, the utility of money diminishes over time — without good health and ample time, what would I spend the money on? A simple example of this is my framework for deciding how much time to spend in pursuit of money-saving activities. If it will take me an hour to find an old coupon that can save me $5 on a purchase, it’s most likely not worth pursuing.
I pursue art and writing with as much sincerity as my day job. Though much smaller in magnitude, my music makes money on Spotify and Apple Music, short films earn from Prime Video, and writings earn from Medium and Substack.
Work and life are full of disappointments beyond our control. One way I shield myself from this is to have multiple different serious pursuits, that way I can keep calm and temporarily shift my focus between those pursuits in order to maintain sanity while things aren’t ideal on some fronts. It’s like having a platter of a variety of food, all equally interesting; if something isn’t working out for the taste buds, I can conveniently switch to something else. So I pursue all my serious passions as if they were professions, and even make passive income from them. They act as additional sources of joy, sorrow, and distraction in general.
Side note: It’s tough to make a living from art. The shape of the exponential distribution of wealth, as controlled by the λ parameter, looks very different for tech vs. art, i.e. a very small set of artists making a very big percentage of the total bounty. It’s far more risky to live off of art unless you are in the top of the top talent. Instead, if one can money from tech or business or something more traditional, art can be a side hustle that nicely supplements your income, while also giving you additional sources of joy, sorrow, and distraction.
With real-time communication, I comfortable switch between Nerdy and Social depending on who I am talking to, my read of their comfort zone, what the context is, and so on. Labels like nerdy and social needn’t be rigid.
In pop culture, people are either portrayed as social butterflies or nerds. Outside of superhero characters, I rarely ever see potrayals that nicely blend these states of being. In reality, most people are a mix; I personally feel the need to switch between these two depending on who I am talking to, how I am reading them at the present moment, what might make the communication most effective, etc. This is a useful tactic for the growth of both career and social capital, but it does require some practice in getting good at it, particularly in reading the people you are surrounded by.
Instead of spending time ‘networking’ with people, I spend most of my time and energy doing good work, and being noticed that way.
To slightly counter the previous point, while communicating effectively is super valuable, for engineers, networking events have rarely lived up to their promise. Instead, I’ve often found the best engineers and their work discussed in their absence, even celebrated. So I find that the best kind of networking for engineers is the kind where your work and your strengths ‘network’ on your behalf while you focus on doing the actual work.
When choosing jobs and projects, I prioritize day-to-day happiness and learning opportunities over prestige.
Many times in my career, I’ve been at crossroads trying to decide between companies and projects that trade off intrinsic factors like day-to-day happiness against extrinsic factors like prestige and trends. For example, I made AI/ML my career well before they rose in popularity because I really working at the intersection of probability, statistics, and CS, and never really felt the need to jump to Crypto or AR/VR while those trended.
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