Second Brain

“Just Use Common Sense”: Advice to His Younger Self

The Story

When asked what advice he’d give his younger self, Boris’s answer was disarmingly simple: “Just use common sense.”

He elaborated: “There’s a lot of stuff, especially in big companies, that pulls you away from common sense. Things are this way because they have been this way. There’s a lot of misaligned incentives.”

Boris saw this in startups too. “Use common sense to figure out what the market wants and what users want.”

This tracks with everything in his career. He tested products with cafeteria workers because it was common sense. He built tools he personally needed because it was common sense. He moved to Japan for love because it was common sense. He didn’t chase promotions because common sense told him that doing great work was the actual goal.

At Anthropic, he found an organization where common sense still prevailed: “Everyone just has common sense and generally just does the right thing. So I don’t have to spend a lot of time convincing people to do stuff.”

Lesson for Creators

Most creator advice overcomplicates things. The algorithm, the optimal posting time, the perfect funnel. Boris’s career, from weed review site to $1B product, was built on doing the obvious right thing at each step. When you’re drowning in strategy, frameworks, and best practices, zoom out and ask: what’s the common sense move here?

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