how to live (2026)
on cultivating taste, weaponizing youth, and seeing alpha in ambiguity
I lived many lives this year.
I was a student.
I was an operator.
At times I was both.
At times I was neither.
I dropped out, I re-enrolled. I moved from Berkeley to NYC and back to Berkeley, and took 38 flights spanning 80,000 miles. I’ve built from scratch when the learning curve felt vertical and accelerated existing rocketships until the growth curve looked vertical.
I shook hands with billionaires for the first time this year. I met folks who built empires, from Palantir to Diary of a CEO. I met folks who made their living by BASE jumping around the world, arbitraging crypto, spreading their religious faith.
Looking back, I feel like I aged many more years than one.
Throughout it all, I amassed a collection of hard-won lessons – some from forcibly adapting to new environments, others from watching people I admire operate up close.
I’ll reflect on these catalysts in my FY25 Year in Review, but this piece is separate – it’s the patterns I observed and the frameworks I’ll carry forward into 2026. Here are ten of my favorite notes to self, written and published in case they’re useful to you too.
1. study taste
Taste is the way you choose to allocate your capital – be it financial, social, human, intellectual, etc.
The outfit you put on for the day, the teams you join and go to war alongside, the skills you cultivate to create value for the world. While individually these are Type 2 decisions, the compounding effect of consistently making them in one direction can create Type 1-like irreversibility.
In a world of limitless optionality, the ability to take bets and do so without losing sleep is everything.
To train this:
Find people with tastes you align with and/or admire, and learn from them.
Choose environments where having “good” taste is a competitive advantage.
2. do things that make you happy, often
I cannot tell you what the meaning of life is. I cannot tell you how to live a “good” life. I cannot tell you if the life you are living is the one you inherently desire, or the one you were programmed to desire by society’s echo chambers.
What I can tell you is that it feels great to bite into crunchy green grapes and jumbo blueberries. It feels great to begin my day by drinking cooler-poured tea on a roadside plastic stool alongside Hanoian locals. It feels great to drag all my housemates out of the apartment, shotgun white claws, and run a 10k to the beach at 1 a.m. on a Saturday, for the simple sake of exercising free will.
Along the way you will be pulled in this way and that. You will feel on top of the world and you will feel like the world is caving in.
To retain your sanity, I’d highly recommend that you frequently do things that make you happy.
3. when winning…
Keep quiet.
Allow yourself to seek counsel from trusted confidants, but refrain from sharing in-progress victories without necessity.
If you must tell the world, do so after you’ve already won.
4. when stuck…
Choose the path with the greatest surface area for luck.
Choose the path of least regret.
5. weaponize your youth
Students are perceived by grown-ups as weak. We’re blissfully ignorant newborn fawns, with no real expectations or responsibilities other than to stumble about until we mature into adults.
In 2025, I experienced an inflection point. I became sharp enough to keep up with (perceived) killers while still being young enough that strength was a pleasant surprise, rather than an expectation. This, combined with agency and bias to action, led to delightful outcomes in networking.
To the students reading this, perhaps those insecure about their credibility – lean into curiosity instead. If you’re interested in coffee-chatting someone, become disgustingly educated in their life’s work and ask them something only they could answer. If you want a role at an (adhocratic) organization, prove you understand their business by building them something of immediate value → offer to implement it yourself.
Fortune favors the audacious :)
6. weaponize your digital footprint
Oh wait! I’ve written about this already:
By the way, this piece…
is my current favorite public piece of writing.
indirectly landed me my next role (more on this soon!).
7. alpha hides in ambiguity
As alluded to with my “seeing in the dark” analogy, I’ve found that the best opportunities are hidden where data is scarce and conviction is expensive.
There are three actionable takeaways here:
Learn how to creatively amass more data.
Learn how to maximize the utility of existing data (i.e. pattern-matching).
Study your winning bets and their win conditions. Iterate so you can replicate!
8. communication is meta
Everything is built on relationships.
Relationships are built on communication.
It follows that it’s productive to become a better communicator, and to build systems conducive to this goal.
Improve writing by making content. I love reading a string of words that describe a notion that I had yet to express, strung into words I wish I’d thought of. I write to instill the same feeling in others and improve my ability to articulate my imagination into reality.
Improve talking by… well… talking. Work the room. Sell a product, even if it’s not yours to sell (I shilled Wispr as a power user long before I did as an employee!). Strike up conversations with strangers in foreign countries. Seek every opportunity to tell stories and get lost in them.
9. you can do it all
“I’m currently juggling a ~50-hr/week in-person internship in SF while enrolled in 18 units at Berkeley.”
– Me, the toolkit
I’ve been telling folks the above statement since September, and a future-tense version since months before. It evoked diverse reactions throughout – I heard everything from “you’ll die” and “that sounds heinous” to “you’re a soldier / weapon” and “there really are levels to this”.
Then, inevitably, “how?”.
The answer isn't grinding harder or sleeping less (though I did both). It's being honest about expected value, and recognizing that value takes different forms. Before making commitments, I thought intentionally about EV.
Go to lecture? Not a chance.
Attack a new initiative? Depends on needle-moving-potential + my existing bandwidth.
Weekend trip to Hawaii / Napa / Yosemite? Sometimes an immediate yes, for amassing dad lore counts as value too!
I gave myself permission to deprioritize what didn’t matter so I could go all-in on what did.
10. it’s all people
At the end of the day, the three highest-ROI pursuits one can have are:
Be a good person.
Surround yourself with good people.
Be good to others.
That’s all for now. I have a few more learnings, but I’ll save them for future pieces. These came from saying yes to hard things, leaning into curiosity, and being blessed by the company of incredible human beings.
If you have thoughts on the above or learnings of your own, I’d love to hear them.
Here’s to 2026 :)
my first read of yours, love the style and relevancy of it all
This is DAMN beautiful