A couple of months ago, Eileen Gu gave a brilliant interview in which she offered a couple of insights into her mind; here is a small sample of it.

I’ll not go into the details as you can watch the interview yourself, but in short, it inspired me to think a lot more about my own mind and my own consciousness.

In particular, as a creature with both goals and constraints, and the ability to formulate my goals in relation to these constraints…

• How specifically do I think as a human being?
• What are the characteristics of my thought process?
• What systems or processes do I have for regulating my behavior, internal regulation, thought processes in relation to my goals in…
  i) Self-development
  ii) Skills
  iii) Finances
  iv) Social intelligence
  v) Relationships with others
  vi) Managing an external image?
• What false beliefs am I holding about myself that hold me back or that stand as points of friction within my system(s)?
• What unknown or otherwise unobserved aspects of my day or failures to plan in relation to larger goals prevent me from attaining to the highest manifestation of what I can become…
  i) In the seconds and minutes?
  ii) In the short term?
  iii) In the longer term?
• What aspects of my mind remain unseen to myself?

And perhaps most immediately relevant in a way that I ask myself this question constantly…

What aspects of myself may I tailor in ways that are practical and add in a modular and self-integrating way into this system of mind that we are building?

In managing the complexity arising from that to create a manageable and defined pathway…

What is the small change I can make now, in this moment, to improve in some way, against the broader context of who I am, what I aspire to be, and what I do not know that I aspire to be as mediated through my unconscious and conscious minds?

I think this last thing is most interesting to think about, because I think about it all day – not as a fully formed question, but rather intuitively – because that’s the route through which improvement happens.

The answers are all interesting, though often disjointed and disconnected.

• “Learn this” – *immediately starts searching up the etymology of Agape love, the origins of countries, the story of Joan of Arc.
• “Do this” – *starts writing a blog post*
• Create a new system – *internally thinks about architecture to save time, whether in instantaneous action, or throughout the day*
• Move slightly faster
• Don’t think so much – *defaults to an existing system to reduce cognitive load and pressure, preserving bandwidth*.

I did say, by the way, that all of this was motivated by Eileen Gu – but a part of it is also motivated by my experiments with LLMs and creating agentic systems as well as software products, which in turn have taught me quite a bit about managing the psychologies of artificial agents and to then question the analogy to human minds at large, whether those of others, or simply that of my own, in a much more general way than I had been conceptualizing it before.

I think I am a little bit overdue in writing about that and it may derail the train of my thoughts, but I’ll just drop these pictures here to give you a sense of what’s been happening.

Huge aside, but back to the thought on mind:

There are certainly a few things that I would like to accomplish through my experiments and iterations on consciousness with a view to developing my natural intelligence.

• Never concern myself with money again – which is achievable both by leveling up and building better real-world systems to ensure that that occurs as a matter of business fact, but also in terms of conditioning desires.
• Develop the skills that I want – DJing, music, and a range of other things – to a professional level, and to manifest them to create incredible experiences for the world.
• Obtain a sense of greater peace from a better equilibrium.

This last point is worth elaborating on – If it seems that analyzing your thoughts is overly intricate, a Rube Goldberg Machine-esque endeavor with unclear results, I should say that I’ve actually been doing some of the things I’ve described for some time now, and have discovered, interestingly, more leisure, more mental clarity, better engagement, and generally, better health and self-confidence.

It is unclear if there will be some sort of super-showy result that would stand testament to all of this, but it will be interesting to see the results. 😀