很少见到 Pavel Durov 的访谈，感谢 Lex，收获颇多。

If you imagine the worst thing that can happen to you, and then make yourself be comfortable with it, there's nothing more left to be afraid of.

So you stand your ground and you remember that it's worth living your life according to the principles that you believe in, even though this life can end up being shorter than a longer life, but lived in slavery.

But when you approach it rationally, you live and then you die. There's no such thing as your death in your life. You stop experiencing life once you die. So you have to ask yourself this question, "Is it worth living a life full of fear of death?" or, it's much more enjoyable to forget about this and live your life in a way that makes you immune to this fear, at the same time, remembering that death exists so that every day would count.

If you feel you need to drink, there must be some problem you're trying to conceal, some fear you're not ready to confront, and you have to address this fear. If there's a good-looking girl you're afraid to approach, get used of this fear, approach her, practice, do it again and again. It's pretty banal, but this advice works.

It's quite clear that many things/activities that the majority is engaging in are not bringing you any good.

At the same time, there are so many areas which you can explore that have nothing to do with the information you receive on the daily basis. So its extremely important to curate the information sources that you have.

You should deliberately set a goal an area that you want to explore, and then actively search information that is relevant to this field, so that one day, you can become the world's number one expert in this field.

My philosophy here is pretty simple. I want to define what is important in my life, I don't want other people or companies, all kinds of organizations telling me what is important today and what I should be thinking about.

I try to allocate as much time as possible for sleep. Now, even if I allocate, say, 11 or 12 hours for sleep, I won't sleep for 11 or 12 hours. So what I end up doing is I end up lying in bed thinking, I love these moments. I get so many brilliant ideas, or at least they seem brilliant to me at the moment, while I'm lying in bed, either late in the evening or early in the morning. That's my favorite time of the day.

If you open your phone first thing in the morning, what you end up being is a creature that is told what to think about for the rest of the day.

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I do get to experience emotions, and some of them are not very pleasant. But I believe that it's the responsibility of every one of us to cope with these emotions and to learn to work through them. Self-discipline is particularly important, because without it, how can you overcome this seemingly endless loop of negativity or despair that ultimately leads to depression for some people?

I normally never have depression. I don't remember having depression in the last 20 years at least, one of the reasons for that is I start doing things. I identify the problem, I can see a solution, and I start executing the strategy. If you are stuck in this loop of being worried about something, nothing's ever going to change.

You gain energy by doing something. So if you start doing something, then it happens. You feel motivated, you feel inspired, and then ultimately you do something else, a little bit more, and in a few years, you may end up achieving great things.

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But an important thing about swimming and physical activity in general is that it makes your mind clear, and your thinking process is becoming more efficient. Because at the end of the day, the efficiency of our brain is limited by how much sugar and oxygen our heart can push through blood to our brain. So how can you make this go faster, or how do you make your lungs more efficient? How do you make your heart more efficient in doing that? Physical activity is the only way I know of. So it's not just staying healthy or trying to look good. It's also being productive. It's also being stress-resilient.

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Well, this is something I practice every day. I read some piece of news, and I ask myself, "Who benefits from me reading this?", then you can end up coming to this conclusion that maybe 95% of things we read in the news have been written and published because somebody wanted you to buy some product, support some political cause, fight some war, donate some money, just do something that would benefit other people. And this is not a problem to support causes that you truly believe in, as long as it was your intentional choice and you're not being manipulated into fighting other people's wars.

Well, what we realized really early is that quantity of employees doesn't translate to quality of the product they produce. In many cases, it's the opposite. If you have too many people, they have to coordinate their efforts, constantly communicate, and 90% of their time will be spent on coordinating the small pieces of work they're responsible for between each other. The other problem with having too many employees is that some of them won't get enough work to do. And if they don't get enough work to do, they demotivate everybody else by their mere existence. They're still there, they're still getting the salary, but they don't do anything. And if they don't do anything, more often than not, they will start trying to find their purpose elsewhere, maybe inside your team, but not by doing productive work, but by finding the problems that don't exist within the team. And that can disrupt the team and the mood inside it even further. Also when you intentionally don't allow some of your team members to hire more people to help them, they will be forced to automate things.

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But, you know, once you accomplish it, it gives you this immense sense of pride, because nobody's doing this. Nobody really cares. In a way, maybe they're right not to care. Maybe nobody notices this. But there is something about it that feels wrong when such things are neglected.

And I think if we can bring some value/joy into people's lives, even through these subtle details, we have to definitely invest our time in it.