At least, if you happen to be near me in brain space. What advice would you give your younger self? That was the prompt for a class I taught at PAIR 2024. About a quarter of participants ranked it in their top 3 of courses at the camp and half of them had it listed as their favorite. I hadn’t expected that. I thought my life advice was pretty idiosyncratic. I never heard of anyone living their life like I have. I never encountered this method in all the self-help blogs or feel-better books I consumed back when I needed them. But if some people found it helpful, then I should probably write it all down. Why Listen to Me Though? I think it’s generally worth prioritizing the advice of people who have actually achieved the things you care about in life. I can’t tell you if that’s me, but I can tell you a bit about my life, why I ended up developing the heuristics I did, and how that worked out for me. I spawned in on the server I mean, I was born on a farm in a rural part of the Netherlands. My parents had more kids than money. We were Dutch poor, which is basically kind of fine. It means we all shared bedrooms, had boring food, and our car would break down… Then you’d get out and push the car. And I thought this was great cause I was the youngest of four kids, and everything was a game. My family doted on me, I had loads of friends, and everyone I knew was healthy. Overall, I’d give my childhood a 10/10 for happiness, love and quality of life. On the other hand, growing up, no one in my family had a degree. My entire town was blue collar jobs. And if you didn’t want to go to school, you worked at one of the nearby factories. So when I graduated from high school and I wanted to apply to MIT, everyone told me that wasn’t real. That was a thing people did on TV. Normal people couldn’t do that. It’s like becoming a Hollywood actor or an astronaut. So I didn’t apply. Instead I went to the most prestigious college in the N