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+---
+draft: False
+date: 2024-06-01
+slug: advice-to-young-people
+tags:
+  - personal
+authors:
+  - jxnl
+---
+
+# Advice to Young People
+
+I'm not qualified to give advice, but enough people asked me to write this, so here it is. If you want to know who I am and why I'm writing this, check out [blog/whoami](./whoami.md) or my [resume](https://jxnl.co) or my [twitter](https://twitter.com/jxnlco). Also, note that this was written in 40 minutes. It's a work in progress.
+
+## How to Get a Job
+
+I've never gotten a job by applying to it. It's always been referrals or someone reaching out to me. So honestly, my resume is shit compared to my peers. I'm terrible at interviewing, and I've never done leetcode. This is not a brag; it's just not my style. Am I a nepo baby? I don't know. Was I a morale hire? I'm pretty disagreeable. Was it merit? Also not sure.
+
+### Merit
+
+Very few people get a job on merit alone. You have to be a big fish in a big pond. That's like IOI, top 1% in your class, etc. That's just... Sort by grades and interview? That's hard. You literally have to be the best.
+
+### High Agency
+
+When I hire now, I just want to know you're capable of having agency in your own life. So many times people DM me with 'hey man, how can I help you?' First of all, what the fuck? I have so many links to things I want help with.
+
+- [Contributing to jxnl/instructor](https://jxnl.github.io/instructor/contributing/)
+- [Contributing to jxnl/instructor-js](https://instructor-ai.github.io/instructor-js/contributing/)
+- [Issues of jxnl/instructor](https://github.com/jxnl/instructor/issues)
+- [Issues of jxnl/instructor-js](https://github.com/instructor-ai/instructor/issues)
+
+There have been many times people will DM me offering to help while I am writing a blog post. I'll link the blog PR and say 'let me know what you think'. No comments, and then I get ghosted?
+
+!!! note "How to Reach Out"
+
+    Most of you suck at reaching out too. Some people email me 6-paragraph essays, about the time they saved a cat from a tree.
+    Do not send me anything longer than you'd send a crush.
+
+    I find the most effective way to get someone's attention is to simply give. Also just like dating. Hey I saw that you read this book on your website, i think you'd like this book too its pretty short etc etc. Oh I noticed some tests were failing in your repo, I fixed them for you. Hey! I've added some examples to the code base, do you have any feedback?
+
+    Theres so many little ways to get people's attention that isn't self centered. I do this with my consulting too. First call, my only goal is to tell you everything I think could help your business. I don't care if you hire me or not. I just want to help. And turns out... This leads me to the next part.
+
+### Be the Plumber
+
+When my toilet is overflowing with shit and my wife is about to come home in 2 hours, and I find a plumber, the plumber does not go, "OMG, thank you for this opportunity." They are past that. They know that you're in a pinch, and they know that what they have is valuable. They know they are here to solve MY problem. Hiring is the same way. This is why people want to hire senior folks because there's some trust.
+
+![](https://media1.tenor.com/m/w40BOCxtrpUAAAAC/30rock-kenneth.gif)
+
+But ultimately, you have to understand that unless there's some tremendous tax break and positive EV, the people who are hiring NEED HELP. Your job is to help them solve the problem or find the problem to solve. You're here to solve my problem; you're not here to collect charity work.
+
+### Be Someone People Want to Work With
+
+If your metric for working somewhere is being someone people want to work with, it turns out skill is not the highest metric. I've seen people get hired because they're fun to be around. If you want to be the smartest person, then yeah, good grades and being the smartest person in the room is a good metric. But if you want to get a job, "man, you're great to be around" is a very strong metric. This is obviously conditional on skill, and you should obviously focus on skills acquisition.
+
+### Imposter Syndrome
+
+If I hired you, don't insult me by having imposter syndrome. I hired you because I think you can solve my problem. I didn't hire you to compare you to other plumbers (I might), but at the end of the day, you must just think I have shit taste and that you've somehow tricked me into thinking you're good when you're an imposter? Right?
+
+If you don't believe in yourself, believe in me that believes in you.
+
+![](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/44/b5/fa/44b5fa64e1e0cdeaa61829443da6df41.gif)
+
+## How to Be Good at Many Things
+
+I think too many people reading this are mostly pursuing intellectual activities, but I'm mostly gonna focus on using analogies of personal physical fitness to describe how I think about this kind of stuff. In the beginning, you're gonna have a noob gains, just an act of practicing is going to be enough to make improvements. You're gonna be so weak and out of shape that if you wait, it's gonna be cardio, and if you run, you're gonna get stronger. And it's gonna be months or years of seeing progress just by showing up every day and doing anything. You're just gonna be making progress. Maybe you're also "gifted" and so things come easier to you, but there's gonna be a time when things change.
+
+### How to deal with feeling like you dont know anything and dont have time
+
+I don't have any advice for this I think the question really is is that what you want? Do you want to spend all your time to feel like you don't know anything to feel like you don't have any time? I personally accepted that and accept that everything is my choice. In a very Sartre, existentialist sense. I am choosing to spend time doing other things like enjoying my life. I am choosing not to know, because the knowing comes at a cost that I do not want to pay
+
+- **Existential Despair**: A feeling of hopelessness rooted in the existentialist belief that life lacks inherent meaning. This despair arises from the realization of one's absolute freedom and the responsibility for creating one's own essence and purpose.
+
+- **Anguish**: In existentialism, anguish is the emotional response to recognizing the vastness of one's freedom and the accompanying responsibility for one's actions. It involves the realization that each decision shapes one's essence and affects others, leading to a deep sense of moral responsibility.
+
+### Cost of Being a Champion
+
+The story I tell myself is one where Travis Stevens talks about what it takes to be a judo champion. Something along the lines of "You think you want to be a champion until you meet someone who truly knows they want to be a champion." Replace "champion" with "comedian," "boxer," "founder," and so on.
+
+Do you realize what it takes to be a judo champion? You need to sacrifice relationships, break some fingers, go through an ACL tear, and even get a concussion before fighting for the Olympics. You have to endure injuries and wonder if your career is over. You have to get the flu right before nationals and fight through it. And if you lose, you have to refrain from making excuses. That's incredibly challenging. It's perfectly acceptable to choose not to pursue that path.
+
+### Love Plateaus
+
+Once you start hitting a plateau, can you just start thinking about progressive overload and making sure what you're doing is facing difficulty at some consistent rate, but ultimately this is just to get you over and through some of these spots. At some point in the future, how much better you get will just be a function of how badly you want it and how much you enjoy the act.
+
+### On Season and Off Season
+
+I think a lot of people ask me specifically about this question because I do so many things. I'm a martial artist, assistant, free diver, blah blah blah blah blah. I don't think I'm a leader at any of these things, but I do think I'm elite at learning. And just like there is an off-season and on-season for sports, I think there's an off-season and on-season for learning. And I think that's the most important thing to understand.
+
+At some point, cardio will hurt your strength gains. At some point, strength gains will hurt your cardio. At some point, you're gonna have to choose between being a powerlifter or a marathon runner. And that's okay. You can always come back to it. But I think the most important thing is to understand that you can't be good at everything all the time. And that's okay. You can always come back to it.
+
+## How to Be Confident
+
+I am a deeply insecure person, and I think my therapist would probably agree that I have low self-esteem. But I am confident just the same. I believe it's important to understand that confidence is the ability to believe despite feeling uneasy.
+
+> Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather taking action despite the fear.
+
+I think this applies to many virtues. So I'll only talk about my own experience with confidence. My confidence simply comes from taking action. I know I outwork everyone around me, even if I have no talent. I know I'm willing to make sacrifices, and I know I can focus my energy on a specific goal. Why? Because I've done it so many times in my life.
+
+### Jiu Jitsu
+
+When I started doing jiu-jitsu, I trained hard five days a week. Every training session was challenging, but it also meant that whenever I went to a new gym or a competition, I knew I could handle it. I had already been through tough situations, and I knew I could overcome them again.
+
+### Freediving
+
+When I started freediving, I swam for an hour every day, six days a week. At the end of each workout, I would practice my breathing routines and apnea training. By the end of my training session, I could swim 80 meters in a pool without taking a breath and hold my breath for 4 1/2 minutes. This was important because I knew that during my diving trip, the longest distance I would have to swim was 45 meters and the longest breath-hold would be 2 1/2 minutes. By the time I went on my diving trip, I felt relaxed and ready to enjoy the water. I knew I could do it because I had already accomplished it.
+
+### Public Speaking
+
+People don't believe this, but my talk at the AI Summit was actually my first public speaking experience. It has over 120k views on YouTube. I was so nervous that I basically blacked out and didn't eat all day until the talk. Leading up to the talk, I rehearsed it for about two hours each day in the past three days. By the time I got on stage, the words just flowed out of me. I had rehearsed the speech standing up, wearing the same jacket, about 20 times in the past month. I knew I could do it because I had already done it.
+
+The theme is consistent throughout. I don't think it's the only way to gain confidence, as there could be some delusion at play. But I have simply shown myself, over the past 15 years, that I can overcome difficult challenges and do them repeatedly..