I am not here to give advice, here are some reminders to myself I find useful I am sharing here. 

1. "Investing in yourself" means to improving your skillsets to increase your earning potential, improving your perspectives to make better decisions.

2. "Provide value to others" can be informational insight, providing advice, making introductions to others, providing emotional support, providing entertainment, doing tasks/work for them.

3. My order for achieving Ikigai would be: 

   • Look at the list of high earning professions/jobs (this narrows the options down to what the world pays for, and avoids things that's that value accretive to others) 

   • See which domain your are curious about (in your 20s, you don't know yourself yet or what you are passionate about, because you haven't tried things yet) 

   • Interview people in those jobs, research, do internships in those domains (when you start doing the bread and butter activities, see how you feel, and how you perform)

   • Then narrow the list down to the ones that you are good at/passionate about (I'm not too picky about those too because we have already narrowed the list down in step 1 so there is a large margin of safety)

Note: Don't mess up the order

4. Be kind to others (disengage with the jerks, remember you have to power to walk away)

5. Relationships (all kinds) are about fit, not about specs (this means that you also have to know yourself, not just the other person)

6. Prestige & status is overrated once you get it. It doesn't pay the bills, and it doesn't bring long term happiness. (Although I would still encourage people to go for it because you can only learn the lesson once you have obtained it, you eliminate any "what ifs")

7. Create a thesis/antithesis/synthesis for all advice you've been given, then self assess where you sit of the spectrum give your context. 

8. You can not understand the entire world, focus on understanding your industry first.

9. In my view, there are 4 buckets of professional jobs in the world  - in ascending order of abstraction

   • Technical/Creative - you deliver the service/create the product (professional services, engineers, designers, creators etc)

   • Operational/Managerial - you zoom out of the day to day and improve the efficiency of those technical/creative

   • Advisory - you zoom out of the singular business and look at the market landscape to provide insight, guidance/decisions to operational/managerial/investment

   • Investment - you also zoom out of a singular business, allocate money to different businesses within markets

(More coming...)