# Advice to Young People, The Lies I Tell Myself

> Jason Liu shares principles from his 20s and 30s on luck, confidence, money, and identity, including going from zero to millions and losing most of it.

Published: 2026-04-05
URL: https://daniliants.com/insights/advice-to-young-people-the-lies-i-tell-myself/
Tags: mindset, confidence, career, networking, self-improvement, agency, decision-making, money

---

## Summary

A machine learning researcher (Jason Liu) shares hard-won principles from his 20s and 30s covering luck, hiring, confidence, money, and identity. Written for his younger sister but rooted in specific personal data: going from $157 in his bank account to $3 million net worth, then losing most of it in one bad decision. Updated in 2026 with business-building lessons added on top of the original 2024 essay.

## Key Insight

**On luck and opportunity**

- Lucky people don't have more opportunities - they have wider perception. The classic experiment: unlucky people counted photos in a newspaper and missed the headline that said "there are 43 photos." Focus too narrow = miss the signal.
- Ask yourself periodically: "I'm focused on getting X, but what headlines am I missing?"

**On getting hired**

- Almost nobody gets a job on pure merit at scale - there's IOI and top 1%, and then there's everyone else. Soft skills and likability matter more than the next 10% of technical improvement for most people.
- "High agency" is the real signal hiring managers look for: have you thought about the problem before asking? A useful test: do people respond to your cold outreach, or ghost you?
- Approach hiring like a plumber: you're there to solve their problem, not collect charity.

**On confidence**

- "Confidence is the memory of success." Not bravado - it's accumulated evidence from doing hard things repeatedly.
- Practical example: the author swam 80m underwater and held breath 4.5 min in training so that the 45m dive and 2.5 min hold during the actual trip felt easy. He fell asleep in the water before his 30m dive with a heart rate of 43 bpm.
- His first public talk got 120k views on YouTube - he rehearsed standing up in the same jacket ~20 times beforehand. Confidence came from having already done it.

**On money and decisions**

- "Your whole life is really built around a couple of good decisions and making as few bad decisions as possible."
- Concrete numbers: two good decisions got him to $3M net worth; one bad decision dropped him to $500K. One decision to overwork cost three years of productive capacity.
- After hard work becomes table stakes, the differentiator is judgment and luck - not more hours.
- Refusing to engage with money as a skill makes life harder. The people who ask "where are you looking? what's the neighborhood?" outperform the people who roll their eyes.

**On identity and self-worth**

- You are not your work. Separating identity from output makes it easier to share work, receive feedback, and iterate.
- Inverted self-love exercise: "What would I do if I really hated myself?" Stay home, avoid rejection, neglect health, make excuses. Then do the opposite.

**On simplicity and action**

- Complexity as a proxy for intelligence is a trap. Best systems are simplest.
- "Do it scared." Over-researching before acting is just avoidance dressed up as diligence.
- "Use your potions." The arbitrary constraints we impose (no leverage, no help, no hiring) are self-imposed challenge runs. Either acknowledge the constraint consciously or stop applying it.

**On anticipation and anxiety**

- MRI study: monks had no resting anxious anticipation before a shock, but felt the shock more intensely. Regular people had chronic background anxiety that dampened both pain and joy. Anticipation extracts a tax on the present moment.