“The ultimate sense-enhancing device is a searching mind.”

Hey! Leo here. Writing about the intersection of mind, craft, and the strange experience of being human. Perhaps just a craftsman embracing a dream.

Below is a collection of personal principles I guide my life by. The list might shrink or grow as I learn more.

1. Always invert. Happiness is a slippery target, so flip the problem: learn the art of not-being-miserable.
2. Life is a colossal local-optimization, constraint-satisfaction problem, enacted solely within the theater of your subjective experience.
3. Attention is the first domino. It is the foundational currency of experience, so be intentional and ruthless in its allocation.
4. I trust the craft practiced while ecstatic, grieving, wired, bored, or half-asleep; if you’re tired, do it tired. Mastery that survives mood swings is the only mastery.
5. Repetition rarely makes things easier; it makes you tougher.
6. We forget almost everything—yesterday already fades—so radical presence is not luxury but necessity.
7. Money is collective fiction. The only ground truth is value creation. Focus on causes, not effects.
8. Time gives no refunds. It is the non-negotiable denominator of your life; value it accordingly.
9. The great lie of self-help is that you need motivation to start. The truth is that motivation is an emergent property of action. Deconstruct any problem until you find a step so small it feels trivial, and begin there. Momentum will follow.
10. You must actively court luck by preparing your mind and increasing your surface area for opportunities; never ignore geography’s grip on destiny.
11. Refuse to die where you were born; expansion is a moral imperative.
12. The most valuable skills are transferable and abstract. Metacognition, problem-dissection, story-telling—these transfer everywhere.
13. Metaphysical truths show up for anyone willing to ride a thought-experiment all the way to its unsettling end.
14. The simulation hypothesis is very much on the menu.
15. “God”—whatever that may be—is an antimeme. In other words, attempts to define, depict or “prove” “God” leave only an outline: a “negative space” we try to infer divinity from. The divine is unknowable by direct description.
16. Your brain excels at simulating realities, making it an exceptional predictive engine.
17. Truest intuition—pertaining to highly accurate predictions—is somatic and you can train yourself to recognize it. It bears penetrating insights that don’t defy logic but rather shortcut it.
18. Personal growth obeys the Lindy effect: your vices and virtues persist in proportion to their age.
19. Trust the process, not the outcome. The compound effect compounds despite the lack of an immediate feedback.
20. Embrace a lifelong sport; the body’s wisdom reveals truths no word can convey. Your body is the first and last frontier of experience.
21. Cultivate an intimate relationship with your subconscious. A dream is decoded lossy data your brain signals to itself.
22. Fixed choices are sleight of hand—remember Caesar at Alesia: build the wall no one expects.
23. “Tempt fate with your own purpose”.