Jake Weidokal

I recently turned 26. I’m no sage, but I’ve picked up a couple of lessons in my time. Below are 26 things I would tell a younger me if I could.

1 Read more material that endures. Posts and videos are ephemeral. They come and go. Seek out knowledge and stories that have survived years, decades, or centuries.

2 Write as much as you can. Write anything. Document your days. You’ll love flipping through old journal entries, and seeing what you were doing. Trap your anxious and messy thoughts on paper, so they don’t consume your mind. When confronted with something hard, think through it in writing. It will slow you down, and allow you to evaluate your thoughts more clearly.

3 You have an aversion to conflict. You can feel it in your bones. That’s okay. Stay in it, and realize there are many ways to work through conflict. Guide the conflict into a style that you do well with. Conflict can be important, so do not avoid it when it is necessary. Stay calm and explain yourself clearly, even if you need to tremble through it.

4 You have a guilty conscience. This is good because it means you have a sense of morality but beware of people who will try to use that against you. If someone or something is making you feel guilty, pay close attention to the motives.

5 Smile, make eye contact, and when you ask someone how they are, really ask them.

6 The world is lonely without a community that shares your values. As soon as you realize you do not have this, find it. Or make it.

7 You can become a good public speaker. Like conflict, you feel like you need to run from it, but the truth is you must do exactly the opposite. Seek out opportunities to speak in front of others. It will be uncomfortable, but the more you do it, the better you will get. And absolutely practice beforehand, winging it is a terrible idea.

8 Stay open. Much of the good in your life will come from opportunities you didn’t foresee at all and had no control over. You might miss them if you keep too tight a grip on what you think you need.

9 Related to the above, don’t forget how much you owe to God and luck. You think you know this, but you cannot comprehend its depth.

10 Remember that every lie you tell will be accompanied by a confession, or worse, an exposure. Think of this anytime you consider lying, and do not do it. Lying is like smoking, it builds up tar in your soul.

11 Remember that it’s temporary. In the midst of anxiety, it will feel all-consuming and never-ending. It isn’t so. It will end.

12 Everybody is fascinating if you ask. So ask, then listen.

13 Initiate connection in your marriage daily. It will not initiate itself.

14 Step up and lead. Getting everyone’s opinion and deciding by majority may feel inclusive, but it is not leading. You will need to make tough, uncomfortable, and even unpopular calls. Make them and then bear them.

15 You so desire to be better that you will have a tendency to believe all feedback you receive. Some feedback is neither valid nor helpful. Don’t get stirred up over it. Recognize it for what it is, and move on.

16 Say what you want. Especially to your managers at work. People don’t know what you want if you don’t tell them. Most people will try to help you get what you want if they know what it is.

17 Never disbelieve in what you are capable of. You will learn to love olives. And you will become a master diaper changer. If you can do those, you can do anything.

18 Nourish your curiosity. You do a good job of exploring new things and not caring so much if others think they’re weird. In fact, relish in the confused gaze you get when you tell people about your new abstract hobby or interest. Keep doing that.

19 You follow rules really well. Try breaking them more.

20 Just because everyone is doing it, does not mean it’s good for you. You are allowed to completely cut yourself off from things that are not good for you.

21 Don’t get too obsessed with being better or doing better. You’ll lose sight of now, which is bad because it’s always now. Be present. Accept what is.

22 Start developing habits to maintain your health. Your high metabolism will not last forever, and avoiding the doctor will only cause more problems later. Get a primary care physician, see a dermatologist, and keep up with the dentist.

23 Don’t be ashamed of your age. People use age as a proxy for competence and trustworthiness, so these assumptions will not be given to you easily. Be honest about who you are, and what you are, and lean into your strengths. Wherever you are, you are there for a reason, even if you feel out of place.

24 Please take yourself less seriously. Not everything needs to be about “finding signal” or doing better. Have fun and be goofy. Don’t forget how to take it easy, this seems to get a little harder for you each year.

25 Go to bed earlier and wake up earlier. It’s amazing how much better life feels this way.

26 Be less selfish. Think of others more, and make a system to do so if it does not come naturally.

The following is a message I shared with my organization today.

In light of NASA’s push to train up the workforce on AI, I wanted to share a tool that I’ve been using in my day-to-day. This is a simple tool that would be a good introduction for folks who haven’t been using AI much.

Perplexity AI is a conversational AI assistant and search engine that provides citations for sources it is using. You can also specify whether you want it to only search through academic journals, Reddit, or other sources.

I’ve been using this about as much as I’ve been searching for links with Google. I’ve been using it for research, learning new things, troubleshooting other tools I use at work, etc. The cited sources help me to see where the answer is coming from, to judge whether I should trust it or not. And it’s really easy to use. Just type in a question you want an answer to, and it will give you cited responses.

A lot of the other big LLMs are good too, and each have there own strengths and weaknesses. Perplexity would be happy to tell you what they are!

Some others I’ve tried are:

• ChatGPT, from Open AI: https://chatgpt.com/
• Gemini, from Google: https://gemini.google.com/
• Claude, from Anthropic: https://claude.ai/

I would like to note that as I write this, I am not following the advice contained within whatsoever.

I want to write better articles. I want to use them to reason and think. I would like to do some research and link to sources, so that my articles have some ground to stand on and they provide real value.

To this end, I’ve been doing some research on writing a good article and I made the cheat sheet below for myself. I don’t plan to follow this dogmatically, but it will help me remember what to focus on in different stages of my writing. The following is primarily a reframing of the essay app’s writing guide, because its advice resonated with me the most of what I found online.

How to Write a Kickass Article

1. Read to get ideas.
   • Books
   • Articles
2. Give yourself plenty of time to write.
3. Make an outline to start.
   • Shoot for 10ish bullets. Any bigger and it is hard to see the flow of the argument.
4. Write a bad draft - remember producing and editing are different activities.
   • Produce, produce, produce.
5. Write more than you think you need, then chop it down.
6. Edit it.
   1. Rewrite every sentence.
   2. Reorder until it makes sense.
   3. Reread the whole thing.
   4. Refine, refine, refine.
7. Create a new outline - Try reconstructing your argument from memory. What you remember is the good stuff. The rest might be crap. Ponder that.
8. Cut and paste from your old outline into the new one.
9. Make sure you have hyperlinks in the text for citations.