# 11 of My Favorite @Paulg... ! [ rw-book-cover] (https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1590221913128837121/SfucaJh8.jpg) URL: https://twitter.com/tferriss/status/1868106573941248229 Author: @tferriss on Twitter  ## AI-Generated Summary None ## Highlights > 11 of my favorite [paulg](https://twitter.com/paulg) essays: > 1. “Keep Your Identity Small.” This piece just becomes more and more important. One of the key lines: “The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.” > 2. “How to Think for Yourself.” Here’s one of my favorite excerpts from it: “Treat it as a puzzle. You know that some accepted ideas will later turn out to be wrong. See if you can guess which. The end goal is not to find flaws in the things you’re told, but to find the new ideas that had been concealed by the broken ones.” > 3. “The Four Quadrants of Conformism.” Pair this with Paul’s 2004 essay “What You Can’t Say,” which features The Conformist Test: “Let’s start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you’re supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn’t. Odds are you just think what you’re told.” > 4. “The Right Kind of Stubborn.” I especially like the first half of this essay plus the synopsis in the last two paragraphs. Great distinctions to keep in mind, such that you keep an open mind. > 5. “The Acceleration of Addictiveness.” To give you a taste, here are two excerpts that I highlighted for myself: > ​ > ​One sense of “normal” is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best. > ​ > These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don’t think you’re weird, you’re living badly. > ​ > ​[...] > ​​ > People commonly use the word “procrastination” to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what’s happening as merely not-doing-work. We don’t call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working. > ​ > ​Note that the second snippet is from one of his footnotes, which I always read. > 6. “How to Do Great Work.” One of the many great reminders in this essay: “Competition can be an effective motivator, but don’t let it choose the problem for you; don’t let yourself get drawn into chasing something just because others are. In fact, don’t let competitors make you do anything much more specific than work harder. Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what’s worth paying attention to.” > 7. “Haters.” Hat tip to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong ([brian_armstrong](https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong)), who recommended this essay during our conversation for the podcast. > 8. “The Top Idea in Your Mind.” This is arguably the most important short reading I’ve done in a while. > 9. “The Risk of Discovery,” which is only a few paragraphs long. It’s worth rereading a few times. > 10. “Having Kids.” Here is one of my favorite sections: “I remember perfectly well what life was like before. Well enough to miss some things a lot, like the ability to take off for some other country at a moment’s notice. That was so great. Why did I never do that? … See what I did there? The fact is, most of the freedom I had before kids, I never used. I paid for it in loneliness, but I never used it.” > 11. “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.” ([View Tweet](https://twitter.com/tferriss/status/1868106573941248229)) > https://t.co/bPdHCOPwv6 ([View Tweet](https://twitter.com/tferriss/status/1868106575602213066))