Lately I feel like I’ve been struggling to understand where to allocate my resources – brain cycles, personal funds, social capital, and physical energy being the primary ones that come to mind. Let me briefly break down each of these:
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Brain cycles: What do I spend my time trying to learn about?
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Personal funds: Where do I deploy my cash?
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Social capital: How do I accumulate and utilize my network, both in the personal and professional sense?
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Physical energy: How do I expend physical energy to improve my wellbeing, aesthetic, and athletic abilities?
Some of these resources impede on each other while others may be fixed and refresh on a regular basis. For example, I have a fixed amount of physical energy I’m able to expend per day: for me, going to the gym >2x per day results in fatigue and minimal progress. Sleep and recovery replenish energy for the next day. A similar phenomenon occurs for brain cycles, though I will say I don’t feel I utilize 100% of my intellectual bandwidth daily. Accumulating social capital is a time investment that trades off with expending brain cycles or physical energy, just because there’s only so much time in a single day.
My guiding principle in allocating resources wisely should be thinking on a long-term time horizon. I should allocate resources in such a manner to optimize 50-year IRR. Of course, the numerator here is highly subjective but it still offers a useful framework for how to think about life. Thinking on such a long-term time horizon is difficult and mentally taxing, as 90% of people around me are not thinking along the same lines.
Let’s start by getting a sense of what my reward function looks like. This feels crude and reductive to write out, but must be necessary to think about how to “optimize” life:
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X = net worth
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Many will argue monetary success is a shallow goal. One of my favorite movies, Margin Call, does a great job of portraying a life where individuals make huge sums of money but are devoid of meaning.
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I think in my case, net worth may naturally align with building something of social utility and technical value. Hence, I am being a bit reductive here and oversimplifying.
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Y = health
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Z = relationships
I want to:
- maximize (mX + nZ) under the constraint that Y > “some, self-defined athletic threshold”, and m >> n
In simpler terms: I would like to achieve a maximal weighting of net worth and relationships, where net worth is the dominating component, while maintaining good physical health.
Maybe this all seems obvious, but there are a few important takeaways here already. Let’s say I define my athletic threshold as 225 bench (of course, if that’s the only thing you are optimizing for over a 50-year time horizon, you are leaving a lot on the table, but let’s keep it simple for argument’s sake). Once I hit 225 on bench, I do NOT want to invest incremental energy to hit 315, 405, etc. bench. I will settle for maintaining my current max. Settling might be overkill, but the key is I don’t want to expend unnecessary incremental energy into thinking about how to become “more jacked”. This feels counterintuitive – why not always strive to be the best at what you are doing? The key is recognizing opportunity cost – more time at the gym or more time spent watching Jeff Nippard videos or more time in recovery = less time spent building or learning, and the return on those latter investments is much more valuable to maximizing mX.
Another note is optimizing mX + nZ on a 50 year time horizon is very different from optimizing it over the short term. Let’s say I meet a group of strong “going out” friends – in the short term, it may feel productive to nZ to hang out with them, go to bars, etc. But these aren’t relationships that will necessarily last or be productive for you over time: it may be better to allow a short-term dip in nZ by letting go of those friends to find a circle that supercharges rather than suppresses you. Similarly, for mX, say I start getting into equities trading – this may be productive over the medium term and I may even get really good at it, but 20-50% compounded returns over a 3-5 year time horizon pales in comparison to the opportunity cost: spending time building in AI and generating hundreds of millions in value.
These are contrived scenarios and highly differ person to person. In my life, I’ve seen a direct time investment opportunity cost between investing and building – for others, who knows? Claude Shannon was a genius who spent his time juggling tens of different interest including information theory and investing and was highly successful at all of them. Maybe there is a world where you can build up your bandwidth and suddenly spending time on multiple pursuits becomes highly productive. But I do not know how to build this bandwidth (is it just experience? innate genius?) and would rather just focus on my present scenario.
With this framework in mind, let’s jump into an analysis of my resources and goals:
Resource Breakdown:
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Brain Cycles – let’s measure this in time per day: 6-8 hours.
- This is the maximum amount of time per day I believe I could “lock in” on a subject, on a regular basis.
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Physical energy – let’s measure this in time per day as well: 2-4 hours.
- This is the maximum amount of time per day I could regularly spend on physical, athletic endeavors (lifting, running, basketball, etc.).
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Financials – looking out to Mar. 2026: ~$300,000 in liquidity
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Social Capital – this is hard to quantify. It’s something that I’d say is starting at 0 or near-0 given I am moving to SF, and will be built up over time.
Active Pursuits/Qualitative Goals:
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I want to deploy some portion of my cash into long-term investments. I would like to have 12-24 months’ worth of expenses in cash or highly liquid instruments.
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I would like to become a highly skilled programmer that is capable of building valuable technology.
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I want to have a close group of friends that I can be myself around and strong professional network in SF.
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I want to maintain/slowly grow my current lifting abilities/aesthetic, have reasonable cardiovascular health, and get incrementally more skilled at basketball.
Now let’s run this through my framework and see if we can come up with a tangible plan:
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To maximize long-term net worth (X), I should work to become as skilled of a programmer as I can.
- If we break this into nearer term goals, this implies becoming as skilled as possible for my next role (as a software developer at Thunder Compute).
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I want to deploy cash into investments, but the long-term return here pales in comparison to the return on investment on becoming a better programmer.
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The investment pattern here is a large upfront investment in understanding a few long-term businesses, and then a smaller but very real operating cost of reading quarterly reports and thesis tracking.
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The takeaway here is to only own long-term investments, that I have a strong plan/ability to track theses for. Otherwise, default to SPY or cash.
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Additionally, it’s worth considering if this upfront time investment is worth it.
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I need to set physical goals that I would like to maintain or incrementally progress towards. These should define a minimum maintenance baseline, and I should not over-allocate time or energy to this category.
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Social capital wise, I think we will have to punt a little bit until we reach SF. I have a hard time understanding what the scene will be like until I get there. That said, I think there is some room for me to become more extroverted upfront and hopefully build a more powerful network as a result without a large incremental time or mental investment.
I am moving to SF in 3 months and so it’s valuable for me to come up with a short-term set of goals over these next 3 months, that align with my long-term framework:
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To become a more skilled programmer for Thunder Compute:
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Read DDIA
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Continue “interview prep” for OS, networking, C++ – just not for the sake of interviewing, but rather absorbing long-term knowledge
- Containers, Kubernetes, Go, CRIU, cloud infrastructure, etc. are some other good things to wrap your head around
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Continue learning about GPUs and the Thunder problem space
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To become better at using AI coding tools:
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Continue working with Ani on Padmi, but this should be a LOW time commitment
- You could argue this should be cut out.
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Learn more about Claude, coding tools, etc. as a result
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Finance
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Find long-term investments to allocate too. Do NOT spend too much time here.
- We want 150k in liquid cash/treasuries/checkings/savings. The remaining 150k needs to be deployed.
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Physical
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Lift 4-5 times per week — maintain / incremental growth.
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Cardio 3-4 times per week — re-evaluate baseline after hitting stride in this.
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Lower mobility 2 times per week — critical for being able to lift and perform cardio effectively. Incorporate whatever adjustments are needed to leg day lifts so cardio + gym + mobility becomes effective.
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Maintain current weight (or go lower) — 165 lbs
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Some valuable notes from ChatGPT – I didn’t use AI to write any of this (despite the excessive number of em-dashes), but I pasted this into ChatGPT to see what I missed, and I think it gave some interesting feedback:
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We don’t discuss meta-investments here that improve supply of future resources – for example writing may meaningfully improve your ability to learn over time. That compounds brain cycles.
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(mX >> nZ) is a dangerous assumption – Z gates off non-linear opportunities. Having a strong network can put you in situations that supercharge ability to reach greater X. m dominates early, n becomes critical later.