Quotes

I'd far rather be happy than right, any day.

A balcony or porch needs to be at least 6 feet (2 meters) deep or it won't be used.

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.

The mirror looked on, quite unimpressed, as I completed a series of rethinks in the hired glare of the windowless bathroom.

To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

When I’m trying to formulate my thinking, I try to write.

Below the surface-stream, shallow and light, Of what we say we feel – below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel – there flows With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.

This is Earth. Not the eternal and only home of mankind, but only a starting point of an infinite adventure. All you need do is make the decision [to end your static society]. It is yours to make.’ [With that decision] came the end, the final end of Eternity.

All that you see will in a moment be changed by the nature which governs the Whole: it will create other things out of this material, and then again others out of that, so that the world is always young.

You have embarked, made the voyage, and come to shore; get out. If indeed to another life, there is no want of gods, not even there. But if to a state without sensation, you will cease to be held by pains and pleasures.

Brief is man’s life and small the nook of the earth where he lives; brief, too, is the longest posthumous fame buoyed only by a succession of poor human beings who will very soon die and who know little of themselves, much less of someone who died long ago.

You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do, say, and think.

You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Dig inside yourself. Inside there is a spring of goodness ready to gush at any moment, if you keep digging.

Do what nature requires at this moment. Start straight away, if that is in your power.

From Maximus: self-mastery, immune to any passing whim; good cheer in all circumstances, including illness; a nice balance of character, both gentle and dignified; an uncomplaining energy for what needs to be done.

From my tutor: to work with my own hands and mind my own business; to be deaf to malicious gossip.

Be like the rocky headland on which the waves constantly break. It stands firm, and round it the seething waters are laid to rest.

No, you do not have thousands of years to live. Urgency is on you. While you live, while you can, become good.

Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence.

So one should pass through this tiny fragment of time in tune with nature, and leave it gladly, as an olive might fall when ripe.

The directing mind is that which wakes itself, adapts itself, makes itself of whatever nature it wishes, and makes all that happens to it appear in the way it wants.

Think of the whole of existence, of which you are the tiniest part; think of the whole of time, in which you have been assigned a brief and fleeting moment.

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

You may leave this life at any moment: have this possibility in your mind in all that you do or say or think.

It was the day my grandmother exploded.

Two days before I decided to kill myself, I decided to live forever.

We take care of the people, the products, and the profits — in that order.

Breaking the silence / Of an ancient pond, / A frog jumped into the water - / A deep resonance.

I’m often asked ‘what’s going to change in the next ten years?’ I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next ten years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two.

The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you are measuring it.

I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat, half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth.

Committees don’t make good decision as you average to the mean and great investments require outlier decisions

Write investment memos with a pre-mortem and a pre-parade. It helps crystallise the most critical issues.

Founders are these people who don’t accept the way the world is. They want to change it. They encounter a frustration and they do something about it.

You’re only as good as your next investment.

If you aren't willing to own a stock for 10 years, don't think about owning it for 10 minutes.

I think that people underestimate — until they get older — they underestimate just how important habits are, and how difficult they are to change when you’re forty-five or fifty, and how important it is that you form the right ones when you’re young.

It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to destroy one.

To make money they didn’t have and didn’t need, they risked what they did have and did need. And that’s foolish. It is just plain foolish. If you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you, it just does not make any sense.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.

Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes.

Audiences don’t want to read explainers, they want to read opinions

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.

A nation trying to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket trying to lift himself up by the handle

But he hated verbosity. ‘This paper, by its very length,’ he told a cabinet meeting, ‘defends itself against the risk of being read.’

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward. This is not a philosophical or political argument — any oculist will tell you this is true.

‘Winston, if I were your wife I’d poison your soup.’ ‘Nancy, if I were your husband, I’d drink it.’

Man conquers the world by conquering himself.

Any habit can be broken down into a feedback loop that involves four steps: cue, craving, response, and reward. The Four Laws of Behavior Change are a simple set of rules we can use to build better habits. They are (1) make it obvious, (2) make it attractive, (3) make it easy…

Feelings come both before and after the behavior. Before acting, there is a feeling that motivates you to act—the craving. After acting, there is a feeling that teaches you to repeat the action in the future—the reward. Cue > Craving (Feeling) > Response > Reward (Feeling) How we feel influences how we act…

More precisely, your habits are how you embody your identity. When you make your bed each day, you embody the identity of an organized person. When you write each day, you embody the identity of a creative person. When you train each day, you embody the identity of an athletic person.

The takeaway is that you should build habits that work for your personality. People can get ripped working out like a bodybuilder, but if you prefer rock climbing, cycling, or rowing, shape your exercise habit around your interests. If your friend follows a low-carb diet but you find that low-fat works for you…

The way to be successful is to learn how to do things right, then do them the same way every time.

Happiness is simply the absence of desire. When you observe a cue, but do not desire to change your state, you are content with the current situation

I have a friend who lost over 100 pounds by asking herself, “What would a healthy person do?” All day long, she would use this question as a guide. Would a healthy person walk or take a cab? Would a healthy person order a burrito or a salad?

In the long-run it is probably most effective to work on the strategy that seems to deliver the best results about 80 to 90 percent of the time and keep exploring with the remaining 10 to 20 percent. Google famously asks employees to spend 80 percent of the workweek on…

Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way. Professionals know what is important to them and work toward it with purpose; amateurs get pulled off course by the urgencies of life.

Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine

The secret to getting results that last is to never stop making improvements. It’s remarkable what you can build if you just don’t stop.

The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition. This is just as true with habit change as it is with sports and business. Habits are easier to perform, and more satisfying to stick with, when they align with your natural inclinations and abilities.

Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.

When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

Your actions reveal how badly you want something. If you keep saying something is a priority but you never act on it, then you don’t really want it. It’s time to have an honest conversation with yourself. Your actions reveal your true motivations.

Follow your intuition, make decisions accordingly

Follow your personal quest, what you want to achieve. The Universe will conspire to help you achieve it

The greatest lie as we grow up, we believe we're losing control of what's happening, and we let fate control us

The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.

You shouldn't fear uncertainty if you're capable of achieving what you want

If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it. Improve the "now", and the future will become better.

When you really want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it

As you become an adult, you realise that things around you weren’t just always there: people made them happen. Only recently have I started to internalise how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.

Speed is a competitive advantage. Moving fast is a habit. Most people don't realize that slowness is usually a choice. At Stripe, we bias toward action.

It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.

There are generally 2 types of LLM users, those that use it to learn everything, and those that use it so they don’t have to learn anything.

The biggest mistake most people make is to judge things based only on what they’ve experienced in their own lifetimes.

A necessary characteristic of great investors is they can't be overly emotional. The best investors favour individual sports — no tribal free thinkers who care more about being right than social approval.

Play nice, but win.

The competition might not be very good. You could totally be setting the wrong benchmarks, if you’re measuring yourself against a competition that’s not really that great. And you can also learn a lot about what not to do from competition. But I actually think it sounds quaint…

I think, therefore I am.

A culture is a set of ideas that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways. By ‘ideas’ I mean any information that can be stored in people’s brains and can affect their behaviour.

An entire political, moral, economic and intellectual culture – roughly what is now called ‘the West’ – grew around the values entailed by the quest for good explanations, such as tolerance of dissent, openness to change, distrust of dogmatism and authority, and the aspiration to progress both by individuals and for the culture as a whole.

But one thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge.

No good explanation can predict the outcome, or the probability of an outcome, of a phenomenon whose course is going to be significantly affected by the creation of new knowledge. This is a fundamental limitation on the reach of scientific prediction, and, when planning for the future…

Static societies eventually fail because their characteristic inability to create knowledge rapidly must eventually turn some problem into a catastrophe. Analogies between such societies and the technological civilization of the West today are therefore fallacies.

That is what makes good explanations essential to science: it is only when a theory is a good explanation – hard to vary – that it even matters whether it is testable.

The growth of knowledge consists of correcting misconceptions in our theories.

The opposing position – namely the recognition that there are no authoritative sources of knowledge, nor any reliable means of justifying ideas as being true or probable – is called fallibilism. Fallibilists expect even their best and most fundamental explanations to contain misconceptions in addition to truth…

Today, almost the entire capacity of the Earth’s ‘life-support system for humans’ has been provided not for us but by us, using our ability to create new knowledge.

Today, the creativity that humans use to improve ideas is what pre-eminently sets us apart from other species. Yet for most of the time that humans have existed it was not noticeably in use.

What was needed for the sustained, rapid growth of knowledge was a tradition of criticism. Before the Enlightenment, that was a very rare sort of tradition: usually the whole point of a tradition was to keep things the same.

Simplicity is the hallmark of truth — we should know better, but complexity continues to have a morbid attraction. When you give an academic audience a lecture that is crystal clear from alpha to omega, your audience feels cheated… The sore truth is that complexity sells better.

What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years

I tell them it’s like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

It's not whether you are right or wrong that's important. It's how much money you make when you're right & how much you lose when you're wrong

Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.

Curiosity is a key superpower.

You’ve got to back your own instincts, and sometimes you’re going to be ok, and sometimes you’re not

Invention — and it’s not about being brilliant — it’s about being logical and persistent.

To know much is not to be wise.

if you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

I came to realize that A) If you’re serious all the time, you’ll wear out before the truly serious stuff gets done; and B) if you don’t regularly appreciate the small wins, you will never appreciate the big wins. They’ll all fall through your fingers like sand as you obsess on the next week…

When you rush, time shrinks. When you're relaxed, time expands. This is true even though it's very hard for the mind to get.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast

Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

Remember that algorithms don’t have your best interests in mind. You have to consciously shake up your information stream now and then to bend it towards the kind of person you want to become.

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.

And how does a human being go about finding meaning? As Charlotte Bühler has stated: “All we can do is study the lives of people who seem to have found their answers to the questions of what ultimately human life is about as against those who have not.”

What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life…

Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself…

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety.

If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason.

We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

As soon as you start to limit exceptionalism and high performers, you reduce inequality, but you limit progress. You move the entire curve to the left.

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.

The liberals are: illiberal in their demand for liberality, exclusive in their demand for inclusivity, homogeneous in their demand for heterogeneity, undiverse in their call for diversity.

Adults follow paths. Children explore.

Two heads are only better than one if the other head keeps its mouth shut and stops telling you things you already know.

It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.

Flatter is faster; leaner is better.

Are You Hunting Antelope or Field Mice

Thoreau was wrong. Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.

You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well

I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory…

Life can get more enjoyable with age.

Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.

A great leader's courage to fulfill his vision comes from passion, not position.

All the best investments are contrarian bets. If something is popular, it's probably not a good investment.

In a world that's changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks

A multi-ethnic global society is forming over and above the individual states. Entrepreneurs, engineers, bankers and scholars throughout the world speak the same language and share similar views and interests.

People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices.

Why are so many people afraid that we are running out of energy? Why do they warn of disaster if we exhaust all available fossil fuels? Clearly the world does not lack energy. All we lack is the knowledge necessary to harness and convert it to our needs.

Every point in history is a crossroads. A single travelled road leads from the past to the present, but myriad paths fork off into the future. Some of those paths are wider, smoother and better marked, and are thus more likely to be taken…

One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations

Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds…

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

“How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”

The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

Slough House is where the slow horses end up — spooks who’ve messed up, marking time until they quit.

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity.

Cheap booze is a false economy.

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea.

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

“Hitch: making rules about drinking can be the sign of an alcoholic,” as Martin Amis once teasingly said to me. (Adorno would have savored that, as well.) Of course, watching the clock for the start-time is probably a bad sign, but here are some simple pieces of advice for the young.

Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.

That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid.

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.

The difficulty is not so great to die for a friend, as to find a friend worth dying for

The Great Game, as this shadowy struggle for supremacy in Central Asia came to be known, was to last for most of the nineteenth century, and only ended with the Russian Revolution in 1917. It was a secret war, fought largely by brave and resourceful individuals, and its battlefields were the passes…

A value is merely a belief, but a virtue is a belief that you actively pursue or embody.

As CEO, I wasn’t zero-tolerance about much, but I was definitely zero-tolerance on managers who undermined decisions, because that led to cultural chaos.

At Slack, “collaborative” means taking leadership from everywhere. Collaborative people know that their success is limited by uncollaborative people, so they are either going to help those people raise their game or they are going to get rid of them.

Building a great culture means adapting it to circumstances. And that often means bringing in outside leadership from the culture you need to penetrate or master.

CEOs are judged on the efficiency of their process and the acuity of their decisions, and Everyone has input, then I decide tends to balance informed decision making with speed. It also acknowledges that not everyone in the organization has enough information to make a given decision…

As a society, we often ask, “Why do we have so few African-American CEOs of Fortune 500 companies?” And we get answers like “Racism, Jim Crow, slavery, and structural inequality.” Perhaps we should be asking, “How in the world did a black kid from the notorious Chicago housing project Cabrini-Green Gardens become the only African-American CEO of McDonald’s?”

CEOs delegate inclusion programs to “heads of diversity.” These heads of diversity are tasked with achieving diverse representation rather than with the whole company’s success. So they often focus on achieving specific race and gender targets rather than on finding talent from diverse pools.

If the key to inclusion means seeing someone for who they are even if they come in a color or gender that you’re not used to, then it follows that hiring people on the basis of color or gender will actually defeat your inclusion program. You won’t see the person…

So how do you know when you’re off track? Here are a few signs - The wrong people are quitting too often. - If your business is going well, yet people are leaving at a higher-than-industry-expected rate, you have a culture problem. If they’re precisely the people you want to keep…

We obviously can’t offer lifetime employment. I hope what we can deliver is that in fifteen years, when people look back, they will think that they were able to do the most meaningful work of their careers here. In exchange, I expect two things: first, ethical integrity. Second…

When I was CEO, I had a rule that everyone, including me, was held to: if you don’t complete all your written performance reviews, nobody who works for you will receive their raises.

First impressions of a culture are difficult to reverse.

I often see companies that plan to go into new areas, but don’t want to shift their culture accordingly. Many consumer companies want to penetrate the enterprise market—that is, selling to big companies—but resist having employees who walk around in fancy suits. They believe that their original culture should suffice.

In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.

In many cases, it will often be faster to make the wrong decision, discover that it’s wrong, and pivot to the right decision, than to spend the time a priori figuring out the right decision.

In the speed-versus-accuracy calibration, the cultural question of empowerment plays an important role. How far down the org chart can a decision get made? Do you trust lower-level employees to decide important matters, and do they have enough information to do so with accuracy?

Integrity, honesty, and decency are long-term cultural investments.

- Make Decisions That Demonstrate Cultural Priorities: The more counterintuitive the leader’s decision, the stronger the impact on the culture.

Making your hiring profile a big part of how you define your culture makes enormous sense — because who you hire determines your culture more than anything else.

My way or the highway disempowers everyone beneath the CEO and creates severe bottlenecks at the top.

Nothing signals the importance of an issue like daily meetings about it.

People always ask me, “What’s the secret to being a successful CEO?” Sadly, there is no secret, but if there is one skill that stands out, it’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves.

People’s receptivity when they join, and the lasting impact of first impressions, is why the new-employee process is the most important one to get right.

So it’s critical to a healthy culture that whatever your decision-making process, you insist on a strict rule of disagree and commit. If you are a manager, at any level, you have a fundamental responsibility to support every decision that gets made. You can disagree in the meeting…

Sometimes, however, the things you’re not doing are the things you should actually be focused on.

The first thing to recognize is that no startup has time to do optional things. Therefore, training must be mandatory.

The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.

The most important element of any corporate culture is that people care. They care about the quality of their work, they care about the mission, they care about being good citizens, they care about the company winning.

What you say means far less than what you do. If you really want to cement a lesson, use an object lesson. It need not be a Sun Tzu–style beheading, but it must be dramatic.

Your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there.

Your job as a leader is to be right at the end of the meeting, not at the beginning.

Assuming that something ugly will stay ugly is an easy forecast to make. And it’s persuasive, because it doesn’t require imagining the world changing. But problems correct and people adapt. Threats incentivize solutions in equal magnitude. That’s a common plot of economic history that is too easily forgotten by pessimists who forecast in straight lines.

Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there. But keeping money requires the opposite of taking risk. It requires humility, and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast.

My investing strategy doesn’t rely on picking the right sector, or timing the next recession. It relies on a high savings rate, patience, and optimism that the global economy will create value over the next several decades.

Realizing the future might not look anything like the past is a special kind of skill that is not generally looked highly upon by the financial forecasting community.

The ability to stick around for a long time, without wiping out or being forced to give up, is what makes the biggest difference.

The biggest gains occur infrequently, either because they don’t happen often or because they take time to compound. So the person with enough room for error in part of their strategy (cash) to let them endure hardship in another (stocks) has an edge over the person who gets wiped out…

The hardest thing about this was that I loved the work. And I wanted to work hard. But doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate.

The most important driver of anything tied to money is the stories people tell themselves and the preferences they have for goods and services. Those things don’t tend to sit still. They change with culture and generation. They’re always changing and always will.

There is an iron law in economics: extremely good and extremely bad circumstances rarely stay that way for long because supply and demand adapt in hard-to-predict ways.

There is never a moment when you’re so right that you can bet every chip in front of you. The world isn’t that kind to anyone — not consistently, anyways. You have to give yourself room for error. You have to plan on your plan not going according to plan.

Use money to gain control over your time, because not having control of your time is such a powerful and universal drag on happiness. The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want to, pays the highest dividend that exists in finance.

When things are going extremely well, realize it’s not as good as you think. You are not invincible, and if you acknowledge that luck brought you success then you have to believe in luck’s cousin, risk, which can turn your story around just as quickly.

You’re not going to lose your job to an AI, but you’re going to lose your job to someone who uses AI.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history, and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

If you are lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.

True creativity involves the ability to combine observation with imagination, thereby blurring the border between reality and fantasy.

The power to move the world is in your subconscious mind.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

Who is the most powerful person in the world? The storyteller.

Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.

Not merely should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.

One of the principal lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is – beware intellectuals.

System 1 generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification.

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

The main virtue of the premortem is that it legitimizes doubts.

The way to block errors that originate in System 1 is simple in principle: recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down, and ask for reinforcement from System 2.

The world makes much less sense than you think.

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Be a pro. Back up your backup. Have at least one physical backup and one backup in the cloud. Have more than one of each. How much would you pay to retrieve all your data, photos, notes if you lost them? Backups are cheap compared to regrets.

Compliment people behind their back. It’ll come back to you

Constantly search for overlapping areas of agreement and dwell there. Disagreements will appear to be edge cases

When you get invited to do something in the future, ask yourself: Would I do this tomorrow? Not too many promises will pass that immediacy filter.

Criticize in private, praise in public

Don’t wait in line to eat something famous. It is rarely worth the wait.

If you are stuck in life, travel to a place you have never heard of.

If you can’t tell what you desperately need, it’s probably sleep.

If you want something to get done ask a busy person to do it.

If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go further, go together.

In preparing for a long hike old shoes of any type are superior to brand-new shoes of any type. Don’t use a long hike to break in shoes

Learn how to tie a bowline knot. Practice in the dark. With one hand. For the rest of your life you’ll use this knot more times than you would ever believe

Promptness is a sign of respect

A recipe for success: underpromise and overdeliver.

The four most powerful words in any negotiation should be uttered by you: “Can you do better?”

To meditate, sit and pay attention to your breathing. Your mind will wander to thoughts. Then you bring your attention back to your breathing where it can’t think. Wander. Retreat. Keep returning to breath no thoughts. That is all.

When speaking to an audience, pause frequently. Pause before you say something in a new way, pause after you have said something you believe is important, and pause to let listeners absorb details.

When you are presented with a task that could be completed in two minutes or less, do it immediately.

Your enjoyment of travel is inversely proportional to the size of your luggage. This is 100% true of backpacking. It is liberating to realize how little you really need

Do more of what looks like work to others but is play for you.

Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you

Don’t be afraid to ask a question that may sound stupid because 99% of the time everyone else is thinking of the same question and is too embarrassed to ask it

Don’t be the best. Be the only.

Don’t define yourself by your opinions because then you can’t change your mind. Define yourself by your values

Don’t ever work for someone you don’t want to become

Don’t say anything about someone in email you would not be comfortable saying to them directly because eventually it will reach them

Each time you connect to people bring them a blessing; then they’ll be happy to see you when you bring them a problem

Figure out what time of day you are most productive and protect that time period

For every good thing you love ask yourself what your proper dose is.

Habit is far more dependable than inspiration. Make progress by making habits. Don’t focus on getting into shape. Focus on becoming the kind of person who never misses a workout

Half the skill of being educated is learning what you can ignore

If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room. Hang out with, and learn from people smarter than yourself. Even better, find smart people who will disagree with you

If you ask for someone’s feedback you’ll get a critic. But if instead you ask for advice you’ll get a partner

If you can avoid seeking the approval of others your power is limitless.

If your opinions on one subject can be predicted from your opinions on another you may be in the grip of an ideology. When you truly think for yourself your conclusions will not be predictable

If you’re doing something that you are hiding from others it’s probably not good for you.

It’s unfortunate when someone you carefully trained leaves; but it is worse if you don’t train them and they stay

When you lead, your real job is to create more leaders, not more followers.

Your growth as a mature human being is measured by the increasingly difficult conversations you are willing to have.

Efficiency is highly overrated; goofing off is highly underrated. Regularly scheduled sabbaths, sabbaticals, vacations, breaks, aimless walks, and time off are essential for top performance of any kind. The best work ethic requires a good rest ethic.

Learn how to be alone without being lonely. Solitude is essential for creativity

Let your children choose their punishments. They’ll be tougher than you will

Looking ahead, focus on direction rather than destinations. Maintain the right direction and you’ll arrive at where you want to go

Occasionally your first idea is best, but usually it’s the fifth idea. You need to get all the obvious ideas out of the way. Try to surprise yourself

Over the long term the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist you don’t have to ignore the multitude of problems we create; you just have to imagine how much our ability to solve problems improves.

Pay attention to who you are around when you feel your best. Be with them more often.

Prototype your life. Try stuff instead of making grand plans

Read the books that your favorite authors once read

That thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult —if you don’t lose it.

The advantage of a ridiculously ambitious goal is that it sets the bar very high so even if your effort falls short it may exceed an ordinary success

The best way to learn anything is to try to teach what you know

The biggest lie we tell ourselves is “I don’t need to write this down because I will remember it.”

The consistency of your endeavors (exercise, companionship, work) is more important than the quantity. Nothing beats small things done every day

The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it

The real test of your character is not how you deal with adversity— although that will teach you much. The real test is how you deal with power. The only cure for power is humility and the admission that your power comes from luck. The small person believes they are superior…

There is no such thing as being "on time." Either you are late or you are early. Your choice.

To be interesting just tell your own story with uncommon honesty.

To get better at speaking watch a recording of yourself speaking. It is shocking and painful but an effective way to improve.

Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets. Unwavering honesty will help seal in trust.

Trust the 3-star product reviews because they tell both the good and the bad, which is the real state for most things.

Very few regrets in life are about what you did. Almost all are about what you didn’t do

What you do instead of work reveals what you should be doing for work.

When negotiating don’t aim for a bigger piece of the pie; aim to create a bigger pie

When speaking to an audience it’s better to fix your gaze on a few people than to “spray” your gaze across the room. Your eyes telegraph to others whether you really believe what you are saying

When you are stuck, sleep on it. Give your subconscious an assignment while you sleep. You’ll have an answer in the morning

When you find something you really enjoy do it slowly.

Worry is ineffective. It never solves tomorrow's problems, only steals today's peace.

You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.

You can really change someone’s life for the better simply by offering words of encouragement.

You cannot get smart people to work extremely hard just for money

You don’t have to attend every argument you are invited to.

You lead by letting others know what you expect of them which may exceed what they themselves expect. Provide them a reputation that they can step up to

You will thrive more —and so will others— when you promote what you love rather than bash what you hate. Life is short; focus on the good stuff

You’ll get 10 times better results by elevating good behavior rather than punishing bad behavior especially in children and animals.

Your behavior, not your opinions will change the world

Your ideal partner is not someone you never disagree with but someone you are glad to disagree with

Your opinion on a contentious issue gains power when you can argue the opposite side as well as they can

Your time and space are limited. Remove, give away, throw out anything that no longer gives you joy in order to make room for those that do

Ideas shape the course of history.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about…

80% of the results come from 20% of the causes. A few things are important; most are not.

A minority of causes, inputs, or effort usually lead to a majority of the results, outputs, or rewards.

For a niche to be a separate market, it must have different customers, different products or services and a different way of doing business from the main market or other market niches.

Most of our failures are in races for which others enter us. Most of our successes come from races we ourselves want to enter.

More skills equals more opportunities. Varied knowledge equals unique insights. Multiple income streams equals financial security.

Private truths, public lies

Everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you

All men dream: but not equally, Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

“I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,” Smiley went on, more lightly. “Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.”

A precondition for an honest government is that candidates must not need large sums of money to get elected, or it must trigger off the cycle of corruption. Having spent a lot to get elected, winners must recover their costs and also accumulate funds for the next election. The system is self-perpetuating.

After several years in government I realised that the more talented people I had as ministers, administrators and professionals, the more effective my policies were, and the better the results.

During the riots of the 1950s and early '60s, people would join in the rioting, stone windscreens, overturn cars and burn them. When riots broke out in the mid-1960s, after they owned homes and property, they acted differently. I saw young men carrying their scooters parked on the roads to safety up the stairs of their HDB blocks.

I always tried to be correct, not politically correct.

Leadership is more than just ability. It is a combination of courage, determination, commitment, character and ability that makes people willing to follow a leader.

Running a government is not unlike conducting an orchestra. No prime minister can achieve much without an able team. My style was to appoint the best man I had to be in charge of the most important ministry at that period.

The second part of my strategy was to create a First World oasis in a Third World region. If Singapore could establish First World standards in public and personal security, health, education, telecommunications, transportation and services, it would become a base camp for entrepreneurs, engineers…

We had one simple guiding principle for survival, that Singapore had to be more rugged, better organised and more efficient than others in the region. If we were only as good as our neighbours there was no reason for businesses to be based here.

We stand a better chance of not failing if we abide by the basic principles that have helped us progress: social cohesion through sharing the benefits of progress, equal opportunities for all and meritocracy, with the best man or woman for the job, especially as leaders in government.

Welfare undermined self-reliance. The handout became a way of life. The downward spiral was relentless as motivation and productivity went down.

The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.

Every man has a property in his own person

The key thing is subtraction. This is where the founder’s energy comes from. It seems to me it’s only founders who subtract in companies.

Search for promising stocks overlooked by most fund managers, where their market cap is too low to qualify for their funds. Once these stocks rise in price, so does their market cap, and only then do bigger funds invest in them.

Behind every stock there's a company. Find out what it's doing.

Everyone has the brainpower to make money in stocks. Not everyone has the stomach.

Far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections or trying to anticipate them than has been lost in corrections themselves

Your ultimate success or failure will depend on your ability to ignore the worries of the world long enough to allow your investments to succeed

If everyone knows rates are about to rise, what difference does it make which month the process starts? No one ever offered a convincing answer.

I’m convinced that everything that’s important in investing is counterintuitive, and everything that’s obvious is wrong.

One of the critical mistakes people are guilty of – we see it all the time in the media – is believing that changes in security prices are the result of events: that favorable events lead to rising prices and negative events lead to falling prices.

Skepticism calls for pessimism when optimism is excessive. But it also calls for optimism when pessimism is excessive.

When there’s a really powerful bias against an asset class, that’s a way to get a bargain. And that’s what I did.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it

The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to gain. Workers of the world, unite!

The wolves are running.

A high quality management team is one that knows how to take resources including capital and people, and put them to their best and highest use.

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way

Acknowledging what you don’t know is the dawning of wisdom.

All investment evaluations should begin by measuring risk, especially reputational.

Another idea—and this may remind you of Confucius, too—is that the acquisition of wisdom is a moral duty. It’s not something you do just to advance in life. And there’s a corollary to that idea that is very important. It requires that you’re hooked on lifetime learning. Without lifetime learning…

I feel that I’m not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think that I am qualified to speak only when I’ve reached that state.

Perhaps the most important rule in management is “Get the incentives right.”

Perverse associations are also to be avoided. You particularly want to avoid working directly under somebody you don’t admire and don’t want to be like. It’s dangerous. We’re all subject to control to some extent by authority figures, particularly authority figures who are rewarding us.

The way to win is to work, work, work, work and hope to have a few insights. You're probably not going to be smart enough to find thousands in a lifetime—when you get a few, you really load up. It's just that simple.

Warren and I are very good at changing our prior conclusions. If you can't change your mind, your mind will change you.

I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.

It is not enough to think problems through forward. You must also think in reverse.

It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.

Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome

Take a simple idea and take it seriously.

The only way to win is to work, work, work, work, and hope to have a few insights.

The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want. It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.

To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

You’ve got to learn 100 models and a few mental tricks and keep doing it all of your life. It’s not that hard.

You’ve got to use those tools checklist-style, because you’ll miss a lot if you just hope that the right tool is going to pop up unaided whenever you need it.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.

I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. It's important to view knowledge as a semantic tree. Make sure you understand the fundamental principles before you get into the details.

Data is the fossil fuel of AI.

He who has a why to live, can bear with almost any how.

The whole secret to winning big in the stock market is not to be right all the time, but to lose the least amount possible when you’re wrong.

The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows.

Her hand touched me at the wrist. “If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn’t you?” I didn’t say anything.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

How proud some women are in putting a man to the thumb, notwithstanding that they deserve far less consideration than they receive.

Don't use the words perhaps, maybe, possibly, probably — they are cheap words saying to the reader you haven't worked hard enough.

The measure of a man is what he does with power

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation

‘Homini lupus,’ said Plautus. ‘Man is a wolf to man.’

The trouble with having an open mind... is that people will insist on trying to put things in it.

Number is the ruler of forms and ideas

Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity.

Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all.

The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - you know that your society is doomed

Who is John Galt?

“Dagny, how did you do it? How did you manage to remain unmangled?” “By holding to just one rule.” “Which?” “To place nothing — nothing — above the verdict of my own mind.”

I refuse to apologize for my ability — I refuse to apologize for my success — I refuse to apologize for my money.

All benefits in life come from compound interest, whether in money, relationships, love, health, activities, or habits. I only want to be around people I know I’m going to be around for the rest of my life. I only want to work on things I know have long-term payout.

At the end of the day, you are a combination of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with.

Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom.

Code is probably the most powerful form of permissionless leverage. All you need is a computer — you don’t need anyone’s permission.

Compounding in business relationships is very important. Look at some of the top roles in society, like why someone is a CEO of a public company or managing billions of dollars. It’s because people trust them. They are trusted because the relationships they’ve built and the work they’ve done has compounded.

“Escape competition through authenticity.” Basically, when you’re competing with people, it’s because you’re copying them. It’s because you’re trying to do the same thing. But every human is different. Don’t copy.

Another way of thinking about something is, if you can outsource something or not do something for less than your hourly rate, outsource it or don’t do it. If you can hire someone to do it for less than your hourly rate, hire them. That even includes things like cooking.

Anyone who has known me for a long time knows my defining characteristic is a combination of being very impatient and willful. I don’t like to wait. I hate wasting time. I’m very famous for being rude at parties, events, dinners, where the moment I figure out it’s a waste of my time…

Basically, if someone is using a lot of fancy words and a lot of big concepts, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. I think the smartest people can explain things to a child. If you can’t explain it to a child, then you don’t know it.

Caught in a funk? Use meditation, music, and exercise to reset your mood. Then choose a new path and commit your emotional energy to it for the rest of the day.

CEOs are highly paid because of their leverage. Small differences in judgment and capability really get amplified.

Choosing to Care for Yourself: My number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health. It starts with my physical health. Second, it’s my mental health. Third, it’s my spiritual health. Then, it’s my family’s health. Then, it’s my family’s wellbeing.

Don’t read books, read authors. Don’t read to read, read to understand. Don’t write to persuade, write to refine. Don’t speak to others, speak to hear yourself

Don’t spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It’s not your problem. If you are happy, it makes other people happy

For me these days, happiness is more about peace than it is about joy.

People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom.

How important is networking? I think business networking is a complete waste of time. And I know there are people and companies popularizing this concept because it serves them and their business model well, but the reality is if you’re building something interesting, you will always have more people who will want to know you.

I like the Buddhist saying, “Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at somebody.” I don’t want to be angry, and I don’t want to be around angry people. I just cut them out of my life.

I was basically telling people, “I’m retired, I’m not working.” Then, I had the time for whatever was my highest valued project in front of me. By doing things for their own sake, I did them at their best.

If you had to pass down to your kids one or two principles, what would they be? Number one: read. Read everything you can.

If you want to make the maximum amount of money possible, if you want to get rich over your life in a deterministically predictable way, stay on the bleeding edge of trends and study technology, design, and art—become really good at something.

It is incorrect to say you should choose your friends very wisely. But you shouldn’t choose them haphazardly based on who you live next to or who you happen to work with. The people who are the most happy and optimistic choose the right five chimps.

It’s very, very important we only say yes when we are pretty certain

Keep your body strong, keep your mind healthy

Most fit and healthy people focus much more on what they eat than how much. Quality control is easier than (and leads to) quantity control.

These are notes to myself. Your frame of reference, and therefore your calculations, may vary. These are algorithms for success. Happiness = Health + Wealth + Good Relationships Health = Exercise + Diet + Sleep Exercise = High Intensity Resistance Training + Sports + Rest Diet = Natural Foods +…

To me, the principal-agent problem is the single most fundamental problem in microeconomics. If you do not understand the principal-agent problem, you will not know how to navigate your way through the world. It is important if you want to build a successful company or be successful in your dealings.

Related to the skill of reading are the skills of mathematics and persuasion. Both skills help you to navigate through the real world. Having the skill of persuasion is important because if you can influence your fellow human beings, you can get a lot done. I think persuasion is an actual skill.

Science, to me, is the study of truth and mathematics is the language of science and nature.

Sugar makes you hungry. Sugar signals to your body, “There’s this incredible food resource in the environment we’re not evolved for,” so you rush out to get sugar. The problem is the sugar effect dominates the fat effect. If you eat a fatty meal and you throw some sugar in…

We’re not meant to check our phone every five minutes

What habit would you say most positively impacts your life? The daily morning workout. That has been a complete game-changer. It’s made me feel healthier, younger. It’s made me not go out late. It came from one simple thing, which is everybody says, “I don’t have time.” Basically…

What is your definition of retirement? Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.

What you want in life is to be in control of your time. You want to get into a leveraged job where you control your own time and you’re tracked on the outputs. If you do something incredible to move the needle on the business, they have to pay you.

When you’re young and healthy, you can do more. By doing more, you’re actually taking on more and more desires. You don’t realize this is slowly destroying your happiness. I find younger people are less happy but more healthy. Older people are more happy but less healthy. When you’re young…

You’ll notice when I say happiness, I mean peace. When a lot of people say happiness, they mean joy or bliss, but I’ll take peace.

Courage isn’t charging into a machine gun nest. Courage is not caring what other people think

Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now.

Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media)

Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it.

Happiness is being satisfied with what you have.

I use my tweets and other people’s tweets as maxims that help compress my own learnings and recall them. The brain space is finite—you have finite neurons—so you can almost think of these as pointers, addresses, or mnemonics to help you remember deep-seated principles where you have the underlying experience to back it up.

If I can’t verify it on my own or if I cannot get there through science, then it may be true, it may be false, but it’s not falsifiable, so I cannot view it as a fundamental truth

If there’s something you want to do later, do it now. There is no “later.”

If they can train you to do it, then eventually they will train a computer to do it.

If you are fundamentally building and marketing something that is an extension of who you are, no one can compete with you on that

If you are paid for renting out your time, even lawyers and doctors, you can make some money, but you’re not going to make the money that gives you financial freedom

If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.

If you find yourself creating a spreadsheet for a decision with a list of yes’s and no’s, pros and cons, checks and balances, why this is good or bad…forget it. If you cannot decide, the answer is no.

If you have nothing in your life, but you have at least one person that loves you unconditionally, it’ll do wonders for your self-esteem.

If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.

It’s actually really important to have empty space. If you don’t have a day or two every week in your calendar where you’re not always in meetings, and you’re not always busy, then you’re not going to be able to think.

Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind. Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind. Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit.

Meditation is turning off society and listening to yourself. It only “works” when done for its own sake. Hiking is walking meditation. Journaling is writing meditation. Praying is gratitude meditation. Showering is accidental meditation. Sitting quietly is direct meditation.

A happy person isn’t someone who’s happy all the time. It’s someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don’t lose their innate peace.

Observe when you’re angry—anger is a loss of control over the situation. Anger is a contract you make with yourself to be in physical and mental and emotional turmoil until reality changes.

Pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people.

Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity.

Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest

Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it

Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now

Stay out of things that could cause you to lose all of your capital, all of your savings. Don’t gamble everything on one go. Instead, take rationally optimistic bets with big upsides.

The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn anything you want to learn

There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life where you live, who you're with, and what you do.

Think about what product or service society wants but does not yet know how to get. You want to become the person who delivers it and delivers it at scale. That is really the challenge of how to make money.

To get rich, you need leverage. Leverage comes in labor, comes in capital, or it can come through code or media. But most of these, like labor and capital, people have to give to you. For labor, somebody has to follow you. For capital, somebody has to give you money…

To have peace of mind, you have to have peace of body first.

To think clearly, understand the basics. If you’re memorizing advanced concepts without being able to re-derive them as needed, you’re lost.

Value your time at an hourly rate, and ruthlessly spend to save time at that rate. You will never be worth more than you think you’re worth

Well, if you’re not already good at it or if you’re not really into it, maybe it’s not your thing—focus on the thing that you are really into

Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay.

You’re going to die one day and none of this is going to matter. So enjoy yourself. Do something positive. Project some love. Make someone happy. Laugh a bit. Appreciate the moment. And do your work.

You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity—a piece of a business—to gain your financial freedom.

As a broad generalisation, the more people trust each other in a society, the more prosperous that society is, and trust growth seems to precede income growth.

At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.

In 1900, the average American spent $76 of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter. Today he spends $37

In other words, cooking encourages specialisation by sex. The first and deepest division of labour is the sexual one

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term ‘meme’ for a unit of cultural imitation

Those of libertarian bent often prove more generous than those of a socialist persuasion: where the socialist feels that it is government’s job to look after the poor using taxes, libertarians think it is their duty.

Yet as soon as Greece was unified into an empire by a thug – Philip of Macedon in 338 BC – it lost its edge

Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.

Good news is no news, so the media megaphone is at the disposal of any politician, journalist or activist who can plausibly warn of a coming disaster.

Good rules reward exchange and specialisation; bad rules reward confiscation and politicking.

Humanity is experiencing an extraordinary burst of evolutionary change, driven by good old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection. But it is selection among ideas, not among genes.

Innovation, not rationing, is the key to feeding the world.

It is common to find that two traders both think their counterparts are idiotically overpaying: that is the beauty of Ricardo’s magic trick.

It is easier to wax elegiac for the life of a peasant when you do not have to use a long-drop toilet

It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem-solving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways

It is strange to me that most people assume companies will be imperfect (as they are), but they assume that government agencies will be perfect, which they are not

Not inventing, and not adopting new ideas, can itself be both dangerous and immoral.

Optimism is rational because it is the innovators, not the pessimists, who have shaped the modern world.

Plainly, there is something beneficial to the growth of the division of labour when governments are limited (though not so weak that there is widespread piracy), republican or fragmented. The chief reason is surely that strong governments are, by definition, monopolies and monopolies always grow complacent, stagnant and self-serving.

Specialisation encouraged innovation, because it encouraged the investment of time in a tool-making tool. That saved time, and prosperity is simply time saved, which is proportional to the division of labour.

Technologies emerge from the coming together of existing technologies into wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts.

The big firms that survive will do so by turning themselves into bottom-up evolvers

The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella)

The inescapable fact is that most technological change comes from attempts to improve existing technology. It happens on the shop floor among apprentices and mechanicals, or in the workplace among the users of computer programs, and only rarely as a result of the application and transfer of knowledge from the ivory towers of the intelligentsia.

The message from history is so blatantly obvious – that free trade causes mutual prosperity while protectionism causes poverty – that it seems incredible that anybody ever thinks otherwise.

The world of things – of pecans or power stations – is indeed often subject to diminishing returns. But the world of ideas is not. The more knowledge you generate, the more you can generate. And the engine that is driving prosperity in the modern world is the accelerating generation of useful knowledge.

Think of this never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.

This is the diagnostic feature of modern life, the very definition of a high standard of living: diverse consumption, simplified production. Make one thing, use lots.

This is what prosperity is: the increase in the amount of goods or services you can earn with the same amount of work.

Though they may start out full of entrepreneurial zeal, once firms or bureaucracies grow large, they become risk-averse to the point of Luddism. The pioneer venture capitalist Georges Doriot said that the most dangerous moment in the life of a company was when it had succeeded, for then it stopped innovating.

State — Story — Strategy. First change your state (physiology), then change your story (meaning), then change your strategy (actions).

Amazon keeps profit and free cash flows artificially low by investing everything back into the business. All these investments have led to lines of business like AWS cloud computing and advertising that are relatively much more profitable than its e-commerce segment.

Cut out all the news and noise in the evenings. The only thing you are allowed to do before bed is read.

Gut health, Sun, Exercise, Sleep. Get these right and the rest is easy.

The political theorist Patrick J. Deneen has argued that liberalism has failed because it fulfilled its ideals.

Is it possible that AI excels at thinking but not at doing? It can come up with great inputs to strategy but is not actually good at implementing that strategy.

Keep moving forwards!

What works in practice is a more reliable indicator than tonnes of analysis.

Figure out what you are really selling. Sell the better future your customer will receive if they use your product.

The fastest way to learn someone's true nature is to play them at a competitive game.

The lesson of the past two years for me was the complete and utter importance of execution.

The maths doesn’t math.

Time passes, things move, and that's what happens — things become other things.

What is scarce is rewarded

You know you have true conviction in a stock or token when you are delighted that the price has dropped because you can buy more.

Believing that there will be great results is the driving force behind all great careers.

Get rid of the habit of being distracted

Look at those who fail and you will find that most people fail not because they make mistakes, but because they are not fully committed. The same goes for companies

Our destiny is determined by our actions and not by our origins.

The people who can get ahead in the world are those who know how to find their ideal environment. If they cannot find it, they will create it themselves

Mood follows action.

The Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood…

There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.

You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.

All definite knowledge—so I should contend—belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy.

Philosophy, as distinct from theology, began in Greece in the sixth century B.C. After running its course in antiquity, it was again submerged by theology as Christianity rose and Rome fell. Its second great period, from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, was dominated by the Catholic Church…

Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand, induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance…

Philosophers are both effects and causes: effects of their social circumstances and of the politics and institutions of their time; causes (if they are fortunate) of beliefs which mould the politics and institutions of later ages.

To understand an age or a nation, we must understand its philosophy, and to understand its philosophy we must ourselves be in some degree philosophers.

Whether you are raising money, pitching your product to customers, selling the company, or recruiting employees, never forget that underneath all the math and the MBA bullshit talk, we are all still emotionally driven human beings. We want to attach ourselves to narratives. We don’t act because of equations.

Be on offense “I wanted to go on offense. I wanted to have the time to focus, to learn the things I wanted to learn, to build what I wanted to build, and to really invest in relationships that I wanted to grow, rather than just doing a day of coffee after coffee after coffee.”

Focus on positive scenarios. Don’t let the downside risk override your decisions

Good Stories always beat good spreadsheets

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

Nobody planned the global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it. This particularly offends intellectuals, for capitalism renders them redundant. It gets on perfectly well without them.

But more importantly, I have a rule: no complaining about a situation unless you’re prepared to do something to make it better.

Be Useful.

Fuck plan B. You gotta have tunnel vision. You can't have a safety net. That's like a trapeze artist working with a net — it changes the way you perform.

He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary

We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession.

Letter 2 - On Discursiveness in Reading: “Each day acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes as well; and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested that day.”

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.

To be or not to be, that is the question.

Earth-treading stars that make dark heaven light.

I do bite my thumb, sir.

It is an honor that I dream not of.

My only love sprung from my only hate!

With tears augmenting the fresh morning's dew,

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

A Just Cause is a specific vision of a future state that does not yet exist; a future state so appealing that people are willing to make sacrifices in order to help advance toward that vision.

If we are a player in an infinite game, however, we have to stop thinking of other players as competitors to be beaten and start thinking of them as Worthy Rivals who can help us become better players.

The Courage to Lead is a willingness to take risks for the good of an unknown future. And the risks are real. For it is much easier to tinker with the month, the quarter or the year, but to make decisions with an eye to the distant future is much more difficult.

When we lead with a finite mindset in an infinite game, it leads to all kinds of problems, the most common of which include the decline of trust, cooperation and innovation.

When you look at all the mistakes you make in life, private and professional, it’s almost always because you reached for some short-term fix or some short-term high.

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.

Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.

I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think

Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.

To find yourself, think for yourself.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Snow-capped as they are, / The gentle slopes of the mountains / Fade into the hazy mist

Bureaucracy is quantified by the number of people who can veto your actions. Generally, it should be low. Yet if it hits zero, you have no team. The inverse of bureaucracy is direct personal accountability. Many people quickly find they prefer bureaucracy.

Every statistic is a numerical distillation of a raw data table. Ask for that table.

Everybody has strong opinions about people they’ve never met based on tales told by people they do not know.

Nothing is more costly than incompetent leadership.

People around you repeating the same idea may have gotten it from the same source. This fools our truth sensors, but popularity does not equal truth. There is no point debating someone who can’t whip out plots, primary URLs, or raw data. Argue with signal sources, not signal repeaters.

Technology’s first law: whatever can be done over the internet will be done over the internet. (Though it might take a while for any given phenomenon to move online.) The statement might sound obvious, but the implications are far-reaching.

Tech’s best feature? The past is past. There is always another train leaving the station, another rocket ship blasting off. Found it, fund it, or join it. We’ll have to work to create the future we want.

The founder is usually the only one who has the credibility to impose large short-term costs for larger long-term gains.

The gap between stated preference (what is praised) and expressed preference (what is bought) is an inexhaustible source of startup ideas.

The hard way to gain status is to build something, to accomplish something, to add value. The easy way to gain status is to accuse someone else of being a bad person.

The newest technical papers and the oldest books are the best sources of arbitrage. They contain the least popular facts and the most monetizable truths. What do you know to be true that others cannot or will not bring themselves to admit? There is your competitive advantage.

Today we have ninety-year-old laws wielded by seventy-year-old people to prevent twenty-somethings from using twenty-first century technology.

Unpopular truth is a reliable source of profit. Behind every great fortune is a great thoughtcrime.

Whether you agree or disagree with them, the information sources you choose will steer your life and establish your priorities. In a real sense, they are upstream of “you.”

Write out your goals. It’s amazing how few people do. By writing out your goals, you prevent a random walk through life. So many people just wander through life.

When something isn’t going great, you always have to decide: do we need to give it time, persevere with what we think is right, double down and keep going; or do we need to say, ‘We got this all screwed up,’ and suddenly change course? That’s a decision we are always making…

What Samuel Johnson said about second marriages is true about soft landings: they represent the triumph of hope over experience. There’s never been a time when inflation was above four, unemployment was below four, and the US economy didn’t go into recession before that situation was resolved.

True wealth: worriless sleeping; a clear conscience; reciprocal gratitude; absence of envy; a good appetite; muscle strength; physical energy; frequent laughs; no meals alone; no gym classes; some physical labor; good bowel movements; no meeting rooms; and periodic surprises.

Invest in preparedness, not in prediction.

We tend to ‘tunnel’ while looking into the future… when in fact there is nothing usual about the future.

When I ask people to name three recently implemented technologies that most impact our world today, they usually propose the computer, the Internet, and the laser. All three were unplanned, unpredicted, and unappreciated upon their discovery, and remained unappreciated well after their initial use. They were consequential. They were Black Swans.

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only — if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it?

Bull markets are born on pessimism, grown on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria. Maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and maximum optimism the best time to sell.

To be contrarian, in a world where people don't believe in anything, is to actually think about things, have well-defined beliefs and to anchor them.

The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative. Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places…

The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).

Men are born soft and supple; dead, they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life.

To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.

Care just enough not to go mad

We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.

A stitch in time saves nine.

All the grace and humour of a horse taking a piss.

Always be quick to give credit and to take blame.

The best techniques for changing a culture: constant contact. By requiring his team to eat together, work out together, and study together, he made them constantly aware of the cultural changes he was making. Nothing signals the importance of an issue like daily meetings about it.

I am feeling strong, generous, joyful, happy, at one with the world, in a good mood

I am fortunate to live in a beautiful place

I have good friends whose company I enjoy and whom i can count on.

May the best of your past be the worst of your future.

Pessimists sound smart, optimists make money

Simple is beautiful. It is not always easy, but it is beautiful. Simple means letting go, refining, and honing in on what matters most. Quiet the noise, and you can finally relax and be you.

The darkest hour of the night comes just before the dawn.

The ends justify the means.

The friendships you get reflect the effort you put into the friendships you have.

To cold wine and warm hearts.

Today is a phenomenal day. I am turning DOWN the volume of negativity in my life, while simultaneously turning UP the volume of positivity. I am filled with focus. I am not pushed by my problems; I am led by my dreams.

Layer 1 fees will compress. People will find a way to route to lower cost alternatives.

Open source projects will become far more prevalent and disruptive due to their ability to attract top talent from anywhere in the world.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do

Work hard. Dream big. Never give up.

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Be careful who you choose.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

The best is the enemy of the good.

China is an engineering state, which can’t stop itself from building, facing off against America’s lawyerly society, which blocks everything it can.

Looking at these two countries, I came to realize the inadequacy of twentieth-century labels like capitalist, socialist, or, worst of all, neoliberal. They are no longer up to the task of helping us understand the world, if they ever were.

While engineers envision bridges, lawyers envision procedures.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Extreme Ownership is a principle that leaders are responsible for all aspects of their team, including failures and successes alike. They must claim ownership of everything that affects their mission.

Human beings are generally not capable of managing more than six to ten people, particularly when things go sideways and inevitable contingencies arise. No one senior leader can be expected to manage dozens of individuals, much less hundreds. Teams must be broken down into manageable elements of four to five operators…

Leaders who exercise Extreme Ownership do not shy away from these hard decisions. They are loyal to the team and the mission above any individual member. If underperformers cannot improve, the leader must make the tough call to terminate them and hire others who can get the job done.

The humility to admit and own mistakes and develop a plan to overcome them is essential to success. The best leaders are not driven by ego or personal agendas.

The proper understanding and utilization of Decentralized Command takes time and effort to perfect. For any leader, placing full faith and trust in junior leaders with less experience and allowing them to manage their teams is a difficult thing to embrace. It requires tremendous trust and confidence in those frontline leaders…

The single most important factor on the battlefield, and in any leadership scenario, is whether the leader is effective at leading the team to accomplish the mission.

In order to convince and inspire others to follow and accomplish a mission, a leader must be a true believer in the mission. Even when others doubt and question the amount of risk, asking, “Is it worth it?” the leader must believe in the greater cause. If a leader does not believe…

When leaders who epitomize Extreme Ownership drive their teams to achieve a higher standard of performance, they must recognize that when it comes to standards, as a leader, it’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate. When setting expectations, no matter what has been said or written…

Discipline starts every day when the first alarm clock goes off in the morning. The moment the alarm goes off is the first test; it sets the tone for the rest of the day.

For all the definitions, descriptions, and characterizations of leaders, there are only two that matter: effective and ineffective. Effective leaders lead successful teams that accomplish their mission and win.

If an individual on the team is not performing at the level required for the team to succeed, the leader must train and mentor that underperformer, guiding them to meet the team standards. If the underperformer continually fails to meet standards…

If you don’t understand or believe in the decisions coming down from your leadership, it is up to you to ask questions until you understand how and why those decisions are being made. Not knowing the why prohibits you from believing in the mission. When you are in a leadership position…

So often, the best way to contend with problems, with issues, with adversity is action, is by taking action. The more you sit and the more you wait and the more time you spend with that adversity with the upper hand inside your head, the worse it’s going to get.

Leaders must be willing to accept responsibility for failures, acknowledge them openly, and strive to develop strategies to mitigate future risks.

Leaders must own everything in their world. There is no one else to blame. The leader must acknowledge mistakes and admit failures, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win.

Although discipline demands control and asceticism, it actually results in freedom. When you have the discipline to get up early, you are rewarded with more free time.

As a leader, it’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.

On the battlefield, countless problems compound in a snowball effect, every challenge complex in its own right, each demanding attention. But a leader must remain calm and make the best decisions possible. To do this, SEAL combat leaders utilize Prioritize and Execute. We verbalize this principle with this direction: “Relax…

It has never been particularly difficult to tell the difference between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.

Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. You must look into that storm and shout, as you did in Rome, “Do your worst…

'The problem that institutions are grappling with... is their analysts are very siloed and specialised by industry, or sub-industry or sub-sub-industry... the problem with that is these new innovation platforms are cross sector in their ramifications... so it is on the platforms our analysts have focussed their attentions on...

Wine comes in at the mouth / And love comes in at the eye; / That's all we shall know for truth / Before we grow old and die. / I lift the glass to my mouth, / I look at you, and I sigh.

There are three ways to be a professional writer: Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich. Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living. Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.