It seems like maybe there are two types of happiness: happiness that is cancelled out by predictability, and happiness that isn’t.

Happiness that’s canceled out by predictability sounds like our old friend the hedonic treadmill: if your life gets better, that doesn’t improve your long-term happiness, because you just adjust.

Something like this must be sort of true - if medieval serfs had normal happiness level, modern middle-class people have so many advantages over them that you’d expect them to be delighted all the time, but this doesn’t seem right . On the other hand, the hedonic treadmill can’t be the whole story, or else there would be no advantage of being rich/healthy/popular to being poor/sick/shunned. But studies usually find that rich people tend to be happier than poor people.

The trick is to surround yourself with people who are *free* in ways you’re not. In other words, don’t surround yourself with smarter people. Surround yourself with *differently free* people.

If I can predict what you’ll do or say, I’ll lose interest in you rapidly. If you can keep regularly surprising me in some way, forcing me to actually think in unscripted ways in order to respond, I’ll stay interested. It’s reciprocal. I suspect the people with whom I develop long-term relationships are the ones I surprise regularly.

When you inhabit your own behaviors this way, you get creative. You have enough surplus attention to notice bits of reality that are *non sequiturs* in relation to the finite game you are in.

This is why dispassionate perception plus appropriate action equals freedom to keep playing: they enable you to create a space where *ways* to keep playing become visible.

I think it's very important, especially in academia, but in many spheres, does that person understand which are the correct hierarchies to be climbing? And this may be influenced by my own background as a chess player. When I was quite young, I knew a lot of super talented young chess players, just brilliant people, young kids full of energy to play chess.

But they always were just stuck on the notion that winning at chess was the game they should be playing. And from Magnus Carlson, that's true. That's the game he should have been playing, and he is still. But for most of those people, if they stayed in the chess game, their lives are miserable. You know, they're now old, they don't have health insurance, they're not top players anymore.

Resumes are good for understanding how the person wants to be perceived by the broader world. And so this is helpful for both kind of obvious things like checking for typos and what not, but also what they take pride in their identity. You know, I love asking people sometimes, "Of what i see on your Linkedin your resume, what are things you are kind of trying to hide, and what do you wish you could feature more?"