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"A man is free at the instant he wants to be."
-- Voltaire
Your autonomy is your major legacy.
Once you’re «bought», it’s hard to get out. While we all start out wanting more independence, we increasingly live lifestyles that make us dependent. The bank owns us. Work owns us.
Stop being codependent of others and start caring for yourself first. The money, love, and prosperity will follow. Energy and time are limited so every moment wasted on the affairs of others subtracts from your strength. Healthy people will respect your boundaries.
Hints:
- Telling your truth is not selfish. What is more selfless? Making sure that you are taken care of so that you can take care of others or focusing all of your energy on others until you are burnt out, angry, and depressed? You can’t give what you do not have. The first step to truly serving others is to serve yourself. Take time for yourself, allow yourself to recharge and recuperate, invest into your growth and education. Then, and only then, will you be able to serve others to your fullest capacity.
- Stand up for yourself, your friends, or your values, because at the end of the day it is better to live a short life where you face your fears. A boundary is knowing what you want and what you don’t want in a moment. E.g: «If I loved myself at a level 10 of 10, would I do this?»
"I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself."
-- Rita Mae Brown
"That’s the problem with putting others first: you’ve taught them you come second."
-- Unknown
"I can’t give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is: try to please everybody."
-- Herbert Swope
"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
-- Oscar Wilde
"What we reason for ourselves may help others. What we reason for others will not help us." (...)
"If you hurt people because of their expectations of you, that’s their problem."
-- Naval Ravikant
"Care about other people think and you will always be their prisoner."
-- Lao Tzu
"Freedom is not free. It is earned. It is taken. It is wrestled from the jaws of fear and uncertainty and doubt."
-- Dan Kariv
"Never explain: your friends do not need it, and your enemies will not believe you anyway."
-- Elbert Hubbard
"Always be radically honest, but use your honesty as a gift not as a weapon. Your honesty should benefit others."
-- Kevin Kelly
"The man to lies to himself can be more easily offended than any other."
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"When we see truth in a person we call it authenticity."
-- Naval Ravikant
"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not."
-- André Gide
Authenticity isn’t the presence of something, but the absence of everything that isn’t authentic.
Hints:
- If you try to be something you’re not, you end up being nothing. Don’t try to be perfect, people know when they’re talking to the real thing. The more vulnerable you are, the more people will be able to relate to you. Just be real, and the results will come. If something is holding you back, recognize it and fix it, but you don’t have to excel at everything. Find your context.
- If you’re trying to be authentic, you’re not being authentic. You don’t need to learn how to be authentic but to un-learn inauthenticity. The first step is to notice when it arises. Next, take a moment and have a laugh.
- Honesty is an antidote to impostor syndrome.
- Truth is a better way to talk about ourselves. Personal branding will kill you. People justify all kinds of mistakes to preserve the personal narratives they are invested in. Countries rewrite their histories, from the textbook up, to support how they see themselves now.
"Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else."
-- Judy Garland
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
-- Albert Camus
"Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist."
-- George Carlin
"I don’t want to be in environments or people where I have to watch what I say." (...)
"Everybody wants spirituality. Nobody wants the truth." (...)
"Escape competition through authenticity." (...)
"To be honest speak without identity."
-- Naval Ravikant
"We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers - but never blame yourself. It’s never your fault. But it’s always your fault, because if you wanted to change you’re the one who has got to change."
-- Katharine Hepburn
You are your word.
Take responsibility. Only then you will cultivate respect for yourself and earn respect from others. Your choices have determined the body, bank account, and relationships that you have right now.
"Be the person your dog thinks you are."
-- J.W. Stephens
"Without commitment, you cannot have depth in anything, whether it’s a relationship, a business or a hobby."
-- Neil Strauss
"Truth only means something when it’s hard to admit."
-- Nicholas Sparks
"I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me."
-- S.E. Hinton
"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently."
-- Warren Buffett
Trust, not money, is the currency of business and life.
"Your character starts out spotless. You can only stain it." (...)
"The selfish reason to be ethical is that it attracts the other ethical people in the network." (...)
"Integrity is when what you think and what you say and what you do are one." (...)
"Returns are made on the way up. Reputations are made on the way down." (...)
"Living a life of integrity pays off, but it takes a very long time." (...)
"Before you can lie to another, you must firt lie to yourself." (...)
"Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard."
-- Naval Ravikant
"Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you." (...)
"When you die you take absolutely nothing with you except your reputation."
-- Kevin Kelly
"There is no greater fraud than the promise not kept."
-- Proverb
"Who does not trust enough will not be trusted."
-- Lao Tzu
"To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved."
-- George Mcdonald
"You will earn the respect of all if you begin earning the respect of yourself."
-- Rufus
"Pay every debt, as if God wrote the bill."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Quality means doing it right when no one is looking."
-- Henry Ford
"Words are deeds."
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein
"With enough courage, you can do without a reputation."
-- Margaret Mitchell
"The higher we are placed, the more humbly we should walk."
-- Cicero
Modesty means being comfortable that others will discover your greatness.
Ego is the unhealthy belief in our own importance. You are not perfect, and you’ll never be. Success means nothing in life; it’s forgotten in one generation, two at best. On the other hand, your emotional health lives on for hundreds of generations in the lives of everyone you touch and their descendants.
One way to humble yourself is to place yourself in the position of being the weakest person in something during the day.
"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self."
-- Ernest Hemingway
"Virtue signaling is popular because it lets anyone, regardless of objective merit, go on an ego trip."
-- Naval Ravikant
"Humility is mostly about being very honest about how much you owe to luck." (...)
"If you are more fortunate than others, build a longer table rather than a taller fence."
-- Kevin Kelly
"Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t."
-- Bill Nye
You might think you want a fancy car or a nice watch but what you probably want is respect and admiration from your peers.
"Promptness is a sign of respect."
-- Kevin Kelly
"No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn’t know it."
-- Paulo Coelho
"Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others."
-- Cicero
You opened two gifts this morning: your eyes. Play the cards you are dealt. And sometimes you will be dealt bad cards.
Being grateful is looking up. Don’t forget that a group of people blazed the trail we’re enjoying, and another group continues to maintain it.
"Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude."
-- Anne Frank
"When you are grateful, fear disappears and abundance appears." (...)
"You can’t be grateful and angry simultaneously."
-- Anthony Robbins
"Comparison is the thief of joy."
-- Theodore Roosevelt
"If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough."
-- Oprah Winfrey
"How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard."
-- A.A. Milne
"A good life is not a life without problems. A good life is a life with good problems."
-- Mark Manson
"Writing down one thing you are grateful for each day is the cheapest possible therapy ever." (...)
"The most selfish thing in the world you can do is to be generous. Your generosity will return you ten fold." (...)
"You can’t call it charity unless no one is watching."
-- Kevin Kelly
"The blind can’t see. The proud will not."
-- Proverb
"Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. If you realize that you have enough, you are truly rich." (...)
"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. When I let go of what I have, I receive what I need."
-- Lao Tzu
"Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it."
-- William Arthur Ward
Quickly, specifically, sincerely.
"Never ruin an apology with an excuse."
-- Benjamin Franklin
"The superior man is modest in his speech but exceeds in his actions."
-- Confucius
Blessed are the restless.
"The seed of all evil is laziness." (...)
"The longer the tongue, the shorter the hands."
-- Proverbs
"As a grown man you should know better than to go around advising people."
-- Bertolt Brecht
"If you have a dream, don’t waste your energies explaining why."
-- Paulo Coelho
"The most difficult is the decision to act, the rest is just tenacity."
-- Andrea Earhart
Hints:
- Help with a precise thing («I can drop a lasagna at 4:00.») instead of «I’m here for you». Helpful people don’t ask «how can I help». They just help.
- «It’s on documentation. If it’s not add it.»
"Doing is faster than watching."
-- Naval Ravikant
"You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take."
-- Wayne Gretzky
"Our patiente will achieve more than our force."
-- Edmund Burke
"Devote the rest of your life into making progress."
-- Epictetus
"Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection."
-- Mark Twain
"Gold, when beaten, shines." (...)
"If there’s no wind, row." (...)
"Work is the medicine for poverty."
-- Proverbs
"I don’t count my sit-ups. I only start counting once it starts hurting."
-- Muhammad Ali
"The mind gives up before the body." (...)
"Persistence beats timing. Execution beats luck. Not immediately but eventually."
-- Naval Ravikant
"Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most."
-- Abraham Lincoln
"If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It’s lethal."
-- Paulo Coelho
You can choose courage or comfort, but you can’t choose both.
Comfort is the enemy of achievement. The size of your life is directly proportional to how much discomfort you are willing to endure. Breaking rules can be frightening and you keep doing what you’re good at to avoid confronting the real problems in your life. You’ll never achieve what you want in life without taking risks. Prioritizing risk over safety is the path to progress. If you act average, you’ll remain average. To outperform, you must be both different and correct.
Hints:
- Reinvention should be an habit not an event. When you control for one set of risks, another simply arises in its place.
- Repeating close variations on your usual theme unlocks far more value than you’d expect given minimal novelty value is a surprising result.
- Choose the hard way. Life is easy, and a soft life makes for soft people. Take a cold shower, join a boxing gym, use the stairs instead of the escalator, spend a week alone in nature. Being uncomfortable should be «play» for you. Find comfort in discomfort.
- Leap while you’re at the top of the curve, and the next curve builds on the momentum.
- This isn’t just a success strategy; it’s a well-being strategy. The risk of not changing is often greater than the risk of changing.
- Risk looks different for everyone. Stability without stagnation.
- Which do you want - the pain of stayng where you are, or the pain of growth?
"Do one thing that scares you everyday."
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible."
-- Frank Zappa
"When the love-of-life line crosses the fear-of-death line, all hell breaks loose."
-- Johannes Rand
"I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones."
-- John Cage
"When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
"If I’d followed all the rules I’d never have gotten anywhere."
-- Marylin Monroe
"Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it."
-- Vincent Van Gogh
"A ship is safe in the harbor but that’s not what ships are for."
-- John A. Shedd
"One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."
-- Andre Gide
"If we’re growing, we’re always going to be out of our comfort zone."
-- John Maxwell
"The lust for comfort murders the passions of the soul."
-- Kahlil Gibran
"Rather than steering your life to avoid surprises, aim directly for them."
-- Kevin Kelly
"Never test the depth of the river with both feet."
-- Warren Buffett
Being risk-prone is better than being risk-averse, but don’t allow yourself to be out of the game. Adventure comes from perceived risk, not peril. Develop a tolerance for risk so that you can work up to scarier activities later. The discomfort zone is NOT about experiencing pain.
"If your life is free of failures, you're not taking enough risks."
-- H. Jackson Brown
"To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often."
-- Winston Churchill
Most problems can be solved by graded exposure over time.
The accumulation of experience and the analysis of past situations will structure knowledge.
PROGRESS = PAIN + REFLECTION
SKILL = EFFORT * TALENT
Hints:
- Listen to someone explaining challenging techniques, and then attempt to follow their advice. Seek feedback as it accelerates learning.
- If it’s easy and you're not surprised, you’re not learning. You need to push yourself into the zone of discomfort, where you feel clumsy and face challenges. That’s when real learning occurs.
- Reflect on your mistakes; try to identify the cues you missed and what to look for next time.
- Repeat.
"The fastest way to learn is to do things the slow way."
-- Chris Sommer (gymnastics coach)
"Pain plus reflection equals progress."
-- Ray Dalio
"Every man hears only what he understands."
-- J.W. Goethe
"The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend."
-- Robertson Davies
"He who asks a question is fool for five minutes. He who does not ask a question remains a fool forever."
-- Proverb
"In academia there is much talk, little action. In industry, there is much action, little thought."
-- Donald Norman
"It is not that I’m so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer." (...)
"I have no special talent, I’m only passionately curious." (...)
"Once you stop learning, you start dying." (...)
"Play is the highest form of research."
-- Albert Einstein
"Learn how to learn from those you disagree with, or even offend you. See if you can find the truth in what they believe." (...)
"Three things you need: The ability to not give up something till it works, the ability to give up something that does not work, and the trust in other people to help you distinguish between the two." (...)
"When you are right, you are learning nothing." (...)
"When you are stuck, sleep on it. Let your subconscious work for you."
-- Kevin Kelly
"A lesson taught with humor is a lesson retained."
-- Ruth Westheimer
"If you are not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative."
-- Woody Allen
"If a man will begin with certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties."
-- Francis Bacon
"The right way to do things is not to try to persuade people you’re right but to challenge them to think it through for themselves."
-- Noam Chomsky
"You should take the approach that you're wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong."
-- Elon Musk
"Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand." (...)
"If skill could be gained by watching, every dog would become a butcher." (...)
"Ask the experienced rather than the learned."
-- Proverbs
"The difference between theory and practice: in theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is."
-- Van de Snepscheut
"The greatest teacher is called «doing»." (...)
"To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them."
-- Kevin Kelly
"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it."
-- Pablo Picasso
"Fools say that they learn by experience, I prefer to profit by others’ experience."
-- Otto von Bismarck
Practice makes perfect but doesn’t necessarily bring something new. Innovation comes from having a broader perspective and analyzing past situations. People often repeat the same mistakes. You improve by examining your failures; it will help you let go.
Hints:
- Fastest way to learn is to teach. Write advice to yourself or other people. Review it regularly. Edit it. Refine it. It worked for Marcus Aurelius and it worked for Bruce Lee.
- Journal early before your inhibitions take in. Record the lessons you learn in life. You’ll get more out of life and you’ll make less of the same mistakes. A journal, scotch, and a little music will give you more deep thoughts than you want.
"You can only connect the dots looking back, not looking forward."
-- Steve Jobs
"Knowledge without action is useless. «Pathological learners» who are voracious consumers of knowledge live in a 400 square foot apartment, are overweight, and in a relationship that looks like a bad soap opera. Yet they know all this information! The problem is that they do not apply it."
-- Unknown
Action, not knowledge, leads to success. If you are not consistently applying the new information you’re learning, then it’s merely educational porn.
"The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge."
-- Aristotle
"Seek knowledge. Knowledge and courage are the elements of greatness. Wisdom and strength, eyes and hands. Knowledge without courage is sterile."
-- Balthasar Gracian
"Wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice."
-- Sam Harris
"Wisdom is knowing what to do with what you know."
-- J. Winter Smith
Wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions.
WISDOM = INTELIGENCE + EXPERIENCE
"Doubt is the origin of wisdom."
-- René Descartes
"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name."
-- Confucius
"Being wise means having more questions than answers."
-- Kevin Kelly
"The measure of wisdom is how calm you are when facing any given situation." (...)
"Knowledge is discovered colectively. Wisdom is rediscovered individually."
-- Naval Ravikant
"The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook."
-- William James
"To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things everyday."
-- Lao Tzu
"Information is not knowledge."
-- Albert Einstein
"Silence is a fence around wisdom."
-- Rabbi Akiva
"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field."
-- Niels Bohr
"First a punch is just a punch. Then a puch is not only a punch. And finally a punch is just a punch."
-- Bruce Lee
True experts recognize the limits of what they know and what they do not know.
Introverts have more probability of being an expert in their field. Extraversion is not good for mastery.
"Any fool can know. The point is to understand."
-- Albert Einstein
"We have knowledge of a thing only when we have grasped its cause."
-- Aristotle
"Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes."
-- Kevin Kelly
"Masters are able to ask the kinds of simple questions that most people pass over."
-- Robert Greene
"A real DJ has to know how to clear the floor. To know the worse it can happen and how to come back."
-- James Altucher
"You know you’re good at something when you switch from making decisions with your conscious mind to making decisions with your instincts."
-- Naval Ravikant
"The chess grand master considers no more moves than does the expert; he just knows which ones to look at."
-- Robyn Dawes
"Amateurs play for tricks, masters play for position." -- pystack@HN
"Don't play what's there, play what's not there."
-- Miles Davis
"This has always been a motto of mine: Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work."
-- Bette Davis
"I’m no genius. I’m smart in spots—but I stay around those spots."
-- Tom Watson Sr.
"Quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten."
-- Gucci
"My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right."
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
"Clarity precedes mastery."
-- Robin Sharma
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few."
-- Shunryu Suzuki
"One can have no smaller or greater mastery then mastery of oneself."
-- Leonardo Da Vinci
"Order and simplification are the first steps towards mastery of a subject."
-- Thomas Mann
"The price of greatness is responsibility."
-- Winston Churchill
"The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled."
-- Plutarch
"It’s a universal law. Intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility."
-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
College education may help you make a living. Self-education may make you a fortune. The value of formal education is signaling, rather than actual learning. The purpose of high education is first and foremost to meet people and build relationships.
"«I want to have a safety net so I can get a job.» This is what my daughter said to me. Where did she learn the phrase «safety net»? Maybe the thing about college is that a child is not yet ready to be an adult. It’s the last time they will ever hang out with people their own age. My closest friends are not my age. In college though, they were. It’s scary to be an adult. To survive. It’s a jungle. College is still a walled safe city for kids just like you. I would pay a lot to be a child again. To not make the mistakes of adulthood. To not have those fears. So maybe that’s what the college tuition is. The cost to extend childhood. And the cost of childhood is going up."
-- James Altucher
"Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty."
-- Mark Twain
"If you need a degree to do it, it’s not going to make you wealthy." (...)
"Learning is cheap, education is expensive." (...)
"Given that the main funcion of universities these days is filtering and signaling, the best move is to get admitted to Stanford and then drop out." (...)
"The overeducated are worse off than the undereducated, having traded common sense for the illusion of knowledge." (...)
"The modern conceit - educated people think they can outsmart complex systems like evolution, capitalism, weather and biology." (...)
"You get rewarded for unique knowledge, not effort. Effort is required to create unique knowledge."
-- Naval Ravikant
"Learning is a treasure that will follow it’s owner everywhere."
-- Proverb
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
-- Maimonides
"Polymaths are late bloomers."
-- Robin Hanson
"Nine-tenths of education is encouragement."
-- Anatole France
"Education is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think."
-- Albert Einstein
"Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten."
-- B.F. Skinner
"The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change."
-- Carl Rogers
"The highest result of education is tolerance."
-- Helen Keller
"The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values."
-- William Burroughs
"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance."
-- Will Durant
"We learn 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30% of what we see, 50% of what we see and hear, 70% of what we discuss, 80% of what we experience and 95% of what we teach to others."
-- William Glasser
"Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is."
-- Isaac Asimov
Hints:
- Study physics, mathematics, computers, microeconomics, game theory and persuasion.
- Believe in principles. The basics are really important, not jargon or specifics. Understand it, not memorize it. You only need to understand a few basic concepts. complexity emerges from very simple rules.
- Applied focus. This means that while you should only strive for mastery in a small handful of skills, you should seek to be competent in a wide variety of disciplines. Don’t major on minor things.
- School fails in subjects like: how to build self confidence / how to be good with money / dating and relationships skills / confrontation skills / critical thinking / creative productivity.
- Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition.
- School rewards generalists, the world not so.
- School's real study topic is obedience. No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them.
- Success is the worst teacher.
- The biggest mistake anyone makes when studying a foreign language is that they do it little by little, not jumping into it head first. Language is not mathematics; one doen't need to learn it, one needs to get accustomed to it. It's not about logic or memory; It's about experience and skill.
"The strongest intellectual foundation is built upon science, math and philosophy, as they are the search for universal truths." (...)
"Study math to understand physics. Study physics to understand chemistry. Study chemistry to understand biology. Study biology to understand psychology. Study psychology to understand economics. Study economics and philosophy to be free." (...)
"Timeless: science, math, philosophy, rhetoric. First principles. Creating art & business. Family & lifelong friends. Habits to calm mind & body. Temporary: politics, news, estertainment. Memorizing facts. Hourly work. Transactional relationships. Drugs & doctors for mind and body." (...)
"The ideal school would teach health, wealth and happiness. It would be self-paced and available to all. It would show opposing ideas and students would self-verify truth. No grades, no tests, no diplomas - just learning. Actually you’re already here. Careful who you follow."
-- Naval Ravikant
"I cannot remember the books I have read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Reading trains your model of the world. Even if you forget most, its effect persists.
"A book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think."
-- Louis L’amour
"Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself."
-- Matt Haig
"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all."
-- Abraham Lincoln
"Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out."
-- J.K. Rowling
"Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books."
-- Julian Barnes
"A library is infinity under a roof."
-- Gail Carson Levine
"Think before you speak. Read before you think."
-- Fran Lebowitz
"No book is worth reading that isn’t worth rereading."
-- Susan Sontag
"One cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader."
-- Vladimir Nabokov
"I have never met a person I admired who did not read more books than I did."
-- Kevin Kelly
"You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
-- Ray Bradbury
"When the reader is ready the book appears."
-- Naval Ravikant
Don’t read the books made to make money, read the ones they want to ban. Most books are propaganda.
"The great books are the books that never have to be written again."
-- Carl Van Doren
"A classic is a book which people praise and don’t read."
-- Mark Twain
"The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones."
-- Joseph Joubert
"Tears are words that need to be written."
-- Paulo Coelho
"I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I’m afraid of."
-- Joss Whedon
Write to learn not to teach. If you are writing to be read you are doing it wrongly. If you have lived a diverse life you’ll have a lot to say.
"The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink."
-- T.S. Eliot
"The pen is the tongue of the mind."
-- Miguel de Cervantes
"The best writing is rewriting."
-- E.B. White
"Write drunk. Edit sober."
-- Ernest Hemingway
"There are no more writers like Shakespeare because all he had was a table, a candle, a pen and some paper."
-- Chris Cornell
"I have made this letter longer then usual because I lacked the time to make it shorter."
-- Blaise Pascal
"I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say."
-- Flannery O’Connor
"This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important. So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music"
-- Gary Provost
"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word." (...)
"When you are consumed by thoughts, write. When you are uninspired, read."
-- Stephen King
"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit at a typewriter and open a vein."
-- Red Smith
Hints:
- Make the subject unique, meaningful and easily searchable.
- Make a single, specific, simple request – such that it’s hard to say no - in the first line and then explain if you need to. The reader should be able to reply to the email in one word, forward it on to the right person or delete it so be specific in your request. Examples:
- «Do you have time for a 5 min call this week?»
- «Can you meet Wed, Sept 10 in XYZ location between 10 am and 12 pm?» instead of «Can you meet sometime next week?»
- «Please review and sign this document.»
- «Can you make a quick intro to XYZ person?»
- «I’d love a letter of support from you. I’ve attached a draft for your review.»
- Keep it under three lines, more than this call.
- Use easy-to-read formatting. Font 12/14, bold, underline and ALL CAPS for the MAIN QUESTION, IMPORTANT DATES, and other KEY DETAILS.
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
-- Will Durant
Habits are systems. We are essentially our habits. Habits are like compound interest in real life.
Consistency doesn’t result from effort, it comes from showing up. Long-term thinking and discipline will guarantee you an easier life. Endurance is more relevant than toughness.
Hints:
- See your life as a series of “hotspots.” Every day you invest your time, energy, and attention into seven hotspots: mind, body, emotions, career, finances, relationships, and fun. See your hotspots as a portfolio to make sure you don’t overinvest in some areas and underinvest in others. Annual review: GOOD + BAD.
- You do not raise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.
- Stop a bad behaviour by filling the space with a better one. Replacement is better than abstinence.
"At any given time, I’m either trying to pick up a good habit or discard a previous bad habit." (...)
"It isn’t 10k hours that creates outliers, it’s 10k iterations." (...)
"I probably read 1-2 hours a day, and that puts me in the top 0,00001%."
-- Naval Ravikant
"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."
-- Kevin Kelly
"Continuous effort, not strength or intelligence, is the key to unlocking our potential."
-- Winston Churchill
"First we make our habits, then our habits make us."
-- Charles C. Nobel
"People don’t decide their future, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures."
-- F.M. Alexander
"Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are to heavy to be broken."
-- Warren Buffett
"Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things."
-- Charles Duhigg
We tend to abandon the good system we’ll follow in search of the perfect system that we will quit.
Hints:
- Try to break a bad habit and form a good one every 6 months.
- Avoid low-leverage habits: news (unnecessary stress and negative bias), pointless notifications, social media (use it for output, not entertainment; other people’s stories are more interesting when you don’t know what’s going on), smartphones (should not be the first thing you see in the morning or the last thing at night), owning a TV, overworking, unhealthy relationships, judgment, micromanagement, perfectionism, virtue signaling.
- Cultivate high-leverage habits: develop useful skills, exercise, rest, meditate, travel, read, journal, enjoy music, create, network, make friends, spend time outdoors with friends and family, indulge in massages, practice gratitude, forgive, prioritize self-awareness, plan, eat mindfully, focus, do less, prioritize sleep and naps, smile, and embrace colors.
- Small steps are more likely to lead to success. For example, if you find resistance to meditating for 15 minutes, try starting with just five minutes.
- Anticipate obstacles to new habits.
- Get accountable by making an agreement with someone that includes financial penalties for habits that are bad for you.
- Reward yourself to reinforce new habits.
- Pay attention, correct your course and don’t judge. Don’t strive for perfection. Having a few vices makes life more interesting.
"The difference between sounding smart and being smart is «I don’t know»." (...)
"The real test of intelligence is if you get what you want from life."
-- Naval Ravikant
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage, to move in the opposite direction."
-- Ernst F. Schumacher
To reveal the true nature of your intelligence rarely pays. Talent is fragile and it’s the most sensitive envy trigger.
Intelligence is a spectrum, your dog is intelligent also.
"I think we have an ideology about talent that says that talent is a tangible, resilient, hardened, shiny thing. It will always rise to the top. To find and encourage talent, all you have to do as a society, is to make sure the right doors are open. Free campus visits, free tuition, letters to the kids with high score. You raise your hand and say, «over here!» and the talent will come running, but that’s not true. It’s not resilient and shiny, talent is really, really fragile."
-- Malcolm Gladwell
"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination." (...)
"The measure of intelligence is the ability to change."
-- Albert Einstein
"Intelligence is like a river: the deeper it is, the less noise it makes."
-- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent."
-- Isaac Asimov
"What is the difference between a madman and a genious? Success."
-- Javier Milei
"Genious is finding the invisible links between things."
-- Vladimir Nabokov
"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see."
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
"Most geniuses prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities."
-- Andy Benoit
"Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet."
-- Bob Marley
"If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know."
-- Louis Armstrong
"Andy Warhol is the only genius I’ve ever known with an IQ of 60."
-- Gore Vidal
"Genious is man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind."
-- Naval Ravikant
"Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood let alone believed by the masses."
-- Plato
"Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles."
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious."
-- Albert Einstein
"To be wealthy, accumulate all those things that money can’t buy." (...)
"No one is as impressed with your possessions as you are."
-- Kevin Kelly
Being rich is being fulfilled. An unhurried sense of time is in itself a form of wealth.
"Being rich is having money; being wealthy is having time."
-- Stephen Swidr
"Being poor is not having too little, it is wanting more."
-- Seneca
"Some people are so poor, all they have is money."
-- Patrick Meagher
"Beware of overconcern for money, or position, or glory. Someday you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are."
-- Rudyard Kipling
"You’re not supposed to optimize for money; you’re supposed to optimize for happiness."
-- Mr. Money Mustache
"You spend the first 20 years of being rich accumulating all of this stuff. And then you’ll spend the next 20 years trying to get out of one thing after another to simplify your life."
-- Peter Mallouk
Money is a force multiplier to help you live the life of your dreams. However, the perpetual pursuit of more is not the path to happiness. Money doesn’t purchase happiness; it buys freedom.
"A problem that can be solved with money is not really a problem."
-- Kevin Kelly
"We don’t make movies to make money; We make money to make more movies."
-- Walt Disney
"Don’t think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money."
-- Voltaire
"After a certain point, money is meaningless. It ceases to be the goal. The game is what counts."
-- Aristotle Onassis
"You don’t get rich by spending your time to save money; you get rich by saving your time to make money."
-- Naval Ravikant
Making money is not about luck.
- Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
- Equip yourself with specialized knowledge, accountability, and leverage. Specialized knowledge is what you learn uniquely, not through standard education. If society can teach it to you, it can teach it to others, making you replaceable. You acquire specialized knowledge by following your genuine interests, not just current trends. While you might find it enjoyable, others may see it as hard work. This kind of knowledge is usually passed on through apprenticeships, not traditional schooling. It often involves technical or creative expertise that’s difficult to outsource or automate.
- Embrace responsability and take business risks under your own name. In exchange, society might grant you more duties, ownership, and influence. The most accountable people usually have unique, public, and bold personal brands, like Oprah, Trump, Kanye, and Elon.
- Select partners with intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity. Stay away from cynics and pessimists, as their negative beliefs can become self-fulfilling prophecies.
- To become wealthy, offer what society wants but can’t access easily, and do it at a large scale. Pick an industry for long-term projects with similar-minded people. The internet has opened up diverse career options, yet many haven’t realized this. Focus on persistent efforts. In life, the most substantial gains come from building on past progress. Money is a tool for trading experiences. Create valuable experiences to build your wealth.
- Prioritize building wealth instead of chasing money or status. Wealth involves owning assets that generate income without constant effort. Understand that it’s possible to create wealth ethically. Don’t pay attention to those who focus on status games; they often gain status by criticizing wealth builders. Money is a sensitive topic as many tie their self-worth and identity to their jobs and earnings, reflecting their skills and competence in the market.
- You won’t achieve significant wealth by simply trading your time for money. To attain financial freedom, you must have ownership or equity in a business or venture. You’re spending time to save money when you should be spending money to save time.
- When you eventually attain wealth, you will realize that it wasn’t your primary pursuit in the first place. Free wealth: Books, friends, sleep, ideas, questions, gratefulness, laugh.
- Being broke is hard. Becoming rich is hard. Choose your hard.
"Rich people stay rich by living like they’re broke. Broke people stay broke by living like they’re rich."
-- Unknown
"To succeed, get other people to pay you; to become wealthy, help other people to succeed."
-- Kevin Kelly
"Money follows execution, not precedes it." (...)
"Making money is not something that you do - it’s a skill that you learn." (...)
"If you want to be wealthy, spend your time earning, learning, or relaxing. Outsource or ignore everything else." (...)
"Management is the oldest, and most over-rated form of leverage. Capital, media, and code are the modern forms." (...)
"Asymmetric opportunities: invest in startups. Start a company. Create a book, podcast, video. Create a (software) product. Go on many first dates. Go to a cocktail party. Read a Lindy book. Move to a big city. Buy bitcoin. Tweet."
-- Naval Ravikant
"I succeeded because I have a long attention span. (...)
"Waiting helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait."
-- Charlie Munger
The secret of healthy finances is not to make more money but to keep some.
Hints:
- Diversify with uncorrelated investment bets (barbell strategy).
- Spend less than you make. Saving 10% of all paychecks is a good start. Keep some liquidity, avoid investing in anything you can’t sell in a month or two.
- Modern slaves are not chains, they are debt. Ultimately is about the total cost of the mortgage. That is the price of the home. The closing price is an illusion. Today, people with moderate incomes, are forced to speculate or live in poverty.
"Diversification may preserve wealth, but concentration builds wealth." (...)
"Never lose money. Rule No. 2: don’t forget rule No. 1." (...)
"It’s nice to have a lot of money, but you know, you don’t want to keep it around forever. I prefer buying things. Otherwise, it’s a little like saving sex for your old age."
-- Warren Buffett
"It is a wise man who lives with money in the bank, it is a fool who dies that way."
-- Proverb
"Money just comes to me because I know where to stand."
-- Chelsea Lazkani
"When volatility or drawdowns are large, the price contains no information." (...)
"400% up is equivalent to 80% down. And when you look at graphs use log scale. Linear is uninformative."
-- Nassim Taleb
"Gold is money. Everything else is credit."
-- J.P. Morgan
"The best investments are «buy and forget.»" (...)
"The two biggest investing mistakes are panic buying and panic selling." (...)
"The Memorial Day we remember our unrealized gains." (...)
"Markets do find truth - first by moving up to the last FOMO buyer, then by moving down to the first HODLer." (...)
"The larger the herd, the lower the returns." (...)
"I only believe in micro. I don’t believe in macro." (...)
"All returns in life, weather in wealth, relationships or knowledge come from compound interest." (...)
"A great reason to buy instead of renting is that you get to fire your landlord."
-- Naval Ravikant
"For every dollar you spend purchasing something substantial, expect to pay a dollar in repairs, maintenance, or disposal by the end of its life."
-- Kevin Kelly
"When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night’s sleep for the chance of extra profits."
-- Warren Buffett
Scared money never wins. It’s all about the risk of losing money versus the risk of missing opportunity.
"The safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket."
-- Kin Hubbard
"I'm not interested in anything that's not sustainable. Friendships, investing, careers, podcasts, reading habits, exercise habits. If I can't keep it going, I'm not interested in it."
-- Morgan Housel
"It’s not what you buy. It’s what you pay. There is no asset which is so good that it can’t be overpriced and very few assets which are so bad that they can’t be underpriced. How do you get low price to value? The answer is low optimism."
-- Howard Marks
What’s my religion? Arbitrage and rents.
Hints:
- What’s going to stay the same in the next ten years. While boring, offer the best investment opportunities.
- Where is low optimism. Recessions are caused when a bunch of people lose confidence all at once.
- Know who are the buyers, the sellers and their motivations.
- Investments are competing with each other.
- The best companies aren’t sold, they’re bought. Stay away from junk stocks.
- The more you know, the less you need to diversify. Diversification is an hedge against lack of knowledge.
- Take risk from the table whenever possible.
- Don’t buy on future hopes, buy on past mistakes. We don’t loose money on star businesses, we loose money on businesses we think will be star businesses.
- Good investors don’t sell investment advice and not talk about their returns.
"You’re looking for a mispriced gamble." (...)
"Life, in part, is like a poker game, wherein you have to learn to quit sometimes when holding a much-loved hand. You must learn to handle mistakes and new facts that change the odds." (...)
"What an investor needs is the ability to correctly evaluate selected businesses. Note that word “selected”: You don’t have to be an expert on every company, or even many. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital."
-- Charlie Munger
"The future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious."
-- John Sculley
"Every increase in the real wealth of the society, every increase in the quantity of useful labour employed within it, tends indirectly to raise the real rent of land."
-- Adam Smith
"If someone is trying to convince you it’s not a pyramid scheme, it’s a pyramid scheme."
-- Kevin Kelly
"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."
-- Bjarne Stroustrup
See fame as a multiplier.
People say they want to be famous to impact the world, often what they want is the adoration of their peers.
"If you’re not ready to be hated, you’re not ready to be famous." (...)
"The reward for getting on the stage is fame. The price of fame is that you can’t get off stage." (...)
"You want to be rich and anonymous, not poor and famous." (...)
"Venture funds sell brand for the right to invest money."
-- Naval Ravikant
"Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time. Sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product."
-- Elon Musk
"He who is known as an early riser need not get up until noon."
-- Proverb
"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
-- Oscar Wilde
"Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"If you live long enough, most people will get what they deserve."
-- Charlie Munger
Unless you’re winning, life will seem unfair to you.
Bad luck is often bad planning. If you’re sure it’s not, be positive, the pendulum will swing back your way eventually. «Random» usually means that you haven’t looked long enough to see a pattern emerge. «Surprises» only happen when they didn’t repeat on one’s lifetime. Everything is a pattern.
Risk is everything you left over and didn’t thought about.
RISK = THREATS x VULNERABILITIES
"Risk is what's left over when you think you've thought of everything."
-- Carl Richards
"Karma is just you, repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve."
-- Naval Ravikant
"The devil always takes back his gifts."
-- Proverb
"Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous." (...)
"God is subtle but he is not malicious."
-- Albert Einstein
"Nothing in the world is ever completely wrong. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day."
-- Paulo Coelho
"What do I want to know about investing that we can’t know? The exact role of luck in successful outcomes."
-- Robert Schiller
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."
-- Seneca
Every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. The best things in life are born from coincidence. Luck is an open door. Chance is the willingness to step through. This creates the illusion that certain people are luckier.
"If you risk nothing, then you risk everything."
-- Geena Davis
"Opportunity is missed by most of people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."
-- Thomas Edison
"Things that come with little help of luck are more resistant to randomness."
-- Nassim Taleb
"The day you decide to do it is your lucky day." (...)
"Luck sometimes visit a fool, but it never sits down with him."
-- Proverbs
"Necessity is the mother of taking chances."
-- Mark Twain
"In the realm of scientific observation, luck is granted only to those who are prepared."
-- Louis Pasteur
"Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper."
-- Francis Bacon
"Hope is the bread of the poor."
-- Proverb
"Hope is not a strategy."
-- Vince Lombardi
"If cats looked like frogs we’d realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That’s what people remember."
-- Terry Pratchett
A beautiful person always see beauty in others. Beauty grabs attention. Personality grabs the heart.
"A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction."
-- Oscar Wilde
"Dress shabbily and they remember the dress; dress impeccably and they remember the woman."
-- Coco Chanel
"Beauty needs a witness. This the only thing a man ever needs to know."
-- Zan Perrion
"Elegance is a physical quality. If a woman doesn’t have it naked, she’ll never have it clothed."
-- Karl Lagerfeld
"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."
-- Mark Twain
"The only thing more mysteriously attractive than beauty is corruption."
-- Octave Mirbeau
"Many complain of their looks but none of their brains."
-- Proverb
"The secret to living well and longer is: eat half, walk double, laugh triple and love without measure."
-- Proverb
Health is also an envy trigger. Often what people really envy is self-control.
- Exercise is king. Balance on body training is training flexibility (yoga or animal movements) and strength (weights). Minimum effective dose.
- Nutrition is queen. Eat more real foods and practice intermittent fasting.
- Follow your circadian rhythm. If you need an alarm clock to get you started mornings, you are cheating yourself on rest. Memories need sleep to get consolidated.
"The food you eat can either be the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison."
-- Ann Wigmore
"I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money - I think that can be a burden - I’m greedy for an exciting life."
-- David Hockney
It's okay to live a life others don't understand.
We were designed to walk dozens of miles each day, catch our own meals, live in a close-knit tribe, have regular sex, raise children and die. When life becomes about enjoying every second over accumulating more stuff, we are able to live lives of true abundance and joy.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
-- Robert Heinlein
"Each of us, when our day’s work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves."
-- O. Henry
"Spend extravagantly on the things that you love and cut costs mercilessly on the things you don’t."
-- Ramit Sethi
"Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted."
-- Bertrand Russell
"I drink to make other people more interesting."
-- Ernest Hemingway
"Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out."
-- Anton Chekhov
"Mondays are fine. It's your life that sucks."
-- Ricky Gervais
"What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits quantity."
-- William S. Burroughs
"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."
-- Cicero
"The happiest of all lives is a busy solitude."
-- Voltaire
"Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often a torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words."
-- Carl Jung
"Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value."
-- Arthur Miller
"Travel and tell no one, live a true love story and tell no one, people ruin beautiful things."
-- Kahlil Gibran
Hints:
- Build a business with the heuristic of «maximize my vacation time». You will often be presented with two options: the lucrative option and the lifestyle option.
- Aspire to work 3 days a week; 3 weeks a month; 3 months free a year.
- Aspire to move past room-mates, commutes, alarm clocks and calendars. (Naval Ravikant)
- Own my house on a few acres with clean water river frontage, and assets I can enjoy & be creative with (car, bike, music equipment, tools, etc)
- How to reduce your expenses without sacrificing your quality of life? Geoarbitrage. Car: max 10K. Job: live next to it. Income doesn’t make you rich. spending habits do.
- The opposite of play isn’t work, it’s depression. Create a life you don't need a vacation from. Making money in order to consume goods can't mankinds's sole purpose on this planet.
- 3 hobbies: one creative, one to keep in shape and one to make money.
- House + work + third place. We drink to loosen our tongues. Feel like a local celebrity: everybody knows who you are.
- I have no plans to retire. It’s the perfect combination of work and play that keep you young.
- You can never be over dressed or over educated but avoid clothing that are more interesting than you are.
- Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
"At a restaurant do you order what you know is great, or do you try something new? Do you make what you know will sell or try something new? Do you keep dating new folks or try to commit to someone you already met? The optimal balance for exploring new things vs exploiting them once found is: 1/3. Spend 1/3 of your time on exploring and 2/3 time on deepening. It is harder to devote time to exploring as you age because it seems unproductive, but aim for 1/3." (...)
"For a great payoff, be especially curious about the things you are not interested in." (...)
"Acquiring things will rarely bring you deep satisfaction. But acquiring experiences will."
-- Kevin Kelly
"Hard work is simply the refuge of people that have nothing to do." (...)
"We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities."
-- Oscar Wilde
"Think of each day as a single life."
-- Seneca
"He who buys what he does not need, steals from himself." (...)
"Joy and sorrow sleep on the same bed."
-- Proverbs
"To measure your quality of life, simply do nothing and see how it feels." (...)
"People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom." (...)
"When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you. When playing, surround yourself with people more happy than you." (...)
"No routine. I’m famously unscheduled." (...)
"You should be too busy to do coffee, while still keeping an uncluttered calendar." (...)
"Develop strategic incompetence - people won’t ask you to do things you hate to do if you’re bad at them."
-- Naval Ravikant
"Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain."
-- Jack Kerouac
Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer. Travels are mini-lifes. They solve a plethora of self-improvement goals.
Hints:
- Travelling is getting under the skin of the place.
- Think less about money optimization and more about who you’re going with.
- Travellers are the best money managers. People have a cultural memory of travelling as expensive but it’s not. Just buy a ticket to the next destination, look for empty seats and get people to take you home.
- Choose places with «lifers»: people who are dedicated to the business itself, not to a paycheck.
"What gives value to travel is fear."
-- Albert Camus
"A vacation + a disaster = an adventure."
-- Kevin Kelly
"A vacation is a very expensive way to schedule the time to read a book in peace."
-- Naval Ravikant
"Success doesn’t come to you. You go to it."
-- Marva Collins
There is no shortcut. Success is nothing but the accumulation of small things done consistently over a long period. Succeeding means securing advantage.
SUCCESS = EDUCATION + ACTION
Success (and happiness) is internal not external. True fulfillment comes from living not from achievement. Experiences worth more than material. When people finally became a «success» they realize that they were no more fulfilled at 40 with $100K in the bank and a BMW in the garage than they were flipping burgers at the age of 20 with only $10 to their name. They spent so much time, money, and energy in pursuit of something that didn’t really matter to them.
Hints:
- The true measure of success is a calm nervous system.
- Success is a collection of well curated failures.
- The most successful people are those who are good at plan b.
"Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming."
-- John Woode
"A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do."
-- Bob Dylan
"To me success has meant just two things: a good life for my family, and the money to buy books and continue the education of this wandering man."
-- Louis L’amour
"Most overnight successes take at least 5 years. Budget your life accordingly." (...)
"Recipe for success: under-promise and over-deliver." (...)
"Show up. Keep showing up. Somebody successful said: 99% of success is just showing up."
-- Kevin Kelly
"Want to get ahead in life? Start genuinely rooting for others to succeed. It’s as simple as that."
-- Sahil Bloom
"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose."
-- Bill Gates
"Strive not to be a success, but rather be of value."
-- Albert Einstein
"The success formula: solve your own problems and freely share the solutions." (...)
"The price of growth is outgrowing people." (...)
"Predicting failure is easier than predicting success."
-- Naval Ravikant
"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."
-- Winston Churchill
"Success lies in relentless execution of the basics."
-- Leonardo da Vinci
"I failed my way to success."
-- Thomas Edison
"The way to succeed is to double your failure rate."
-- Thomas John Watson
"Anything that is successful is a series of mistakes."
-- Billie Armstrong
Fear, not failure, is the biggest barrier to success. Some people are terrified of success, they may be forced to buy a suit.
We don’t get successful by knowing everything, we get successful by listening.
"Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will."
-- Suzy Kassem
"Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right."
-- Henry Ford
"If you didn’t get what do you want, it’s a sign that you didn’t really wanted it or you bargained the price."
-- Roger Kipling
"Success and rest don’t sleep together."
-- Proverb
"Your brain has expectations, and it doesn’t want to be wrong. So when it’s wrong, it just makes up the difference."
-- Erik Vance
There’s nothing more therapeutic than action.
We were built to hunt, gather, and move, not to stay still. However, the root cause of most health problems is often not physical but mental.
"Everything that makes you weak, physically, intellectually, and spiritually, reject as poison."
-- Swami Vivekananda
"The wise man accepts his pain, endures it, but does not add to it."
-- Marcus Aurelius
"If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within; secondary reality without."
-- Eckhart Tolle
"A healthy body is light and silent, just as a healthy mind." (...)
"The modern mind is overstimulated and the modern body is understimulated and overfed. Meditation, exercise, and fasting restore an ancient balance." (...)
"Yoga cultivates peace of body. Meditation cultivates peace of mind." (...)
"Meditation isn’t hard. All you have to do is sit and do nothing. Just sit down, close your eyes, and say: «I’m just going to give myself a break for an hour. This is my hour off from life. This is an hour I’m not going to do anything.»" (...)
"Life hack: When in bed, meditate. Either you’ll have a deep meditation or fall asleep. Victory either way." (...)
"All modern diseases are diseases of abundance. We punish ourselves by constantly entertaining our minds and bodies." (...)
"When it comes to nutrition, subtract before you add."
-- Naval Ravikant
"An healthy person has a thousand wishes. A sick person has one." (...)
"Civilize the mind but make savage the body." (...)
"A doctor will take care of the rich man; the poor man is cured with work." (...)
"Tension is who you think should be. Relaxation is who you are."
-- Proverbs
"If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present."
-- Lao Tzu
Depression and anxiety are symptoms of under-stimulation and over-stimulation, not diseases:
- Depression (under-stimulation) can be viewed as a lack of self-expression. It may arise when one feels powerless or dominated, leading to chronic stress as a way to stimulate oneself.
- Anxiety (over-stimulation) manifests as hypersensitivity and can be linked to our evolutionary need for control. Anxiety isn’t productive planning; it’s a continuous state of apprehension over various scenarios. Worrying about the unknown is unproductive; we have limited control and primarily influence rather than dictate outcomes. Stress often results from excessive concern, and worrying is a misuse of the imagination. The past exists only in your thoughts; what truly matters is the present and the future.
Hints:
- The two best doctors: Mr. Outdoors (sunshine, water, air, exercise) and Mrs. Diet.
- Stress is who you think you should be. Peace is who you are. As I began to love myself, my relationship with everyone changed.
- Financial health is just as important as physical health. Nothing feels as good as having a «fuck you» fund.
- Therapy (awareness of past) / Spirituality (awareness of present) / Yoga (awareness of future)
- The philosopher Alain de Botton has written about this in his book Status Anxiety. In centuries past, he says, people knew where they fit into the social order. If you were born a peasant, you knew you were a peasant. If you were born a lord, you knew you were a lord. There was no mobility or opportunity, and so there was no stress about getting ahead. You weren’t responsible for your birthright, so you accepted it and moved on. But in a meritocratic society, something changes. In a meritocracy, if you’re poor, or you gain success and then lose it, it’s not an accident. It’s worse. It’s your fault. You’re the failure. You’re the one who lost everything. And this causes people to live shackled with a constant fear of inadequacy; all the world’s hustle and bustle motivated by a baseline status anxiety. De Botton doesn’t argue that feudal societies or poor societies were somehow better. He simply makes the point that when a society goes from feudal and destitute to meritocratic and wealthy, the price its people pay for that increased standard of living and social mobility is an increase in stress and anxiety.
- Anxious persons feel the only way to achieve relaxed certainty is getting new info but the more you know the more you’ll realize you don’t know.
- Avoiding anxiety leads to more anxiety. While we’re busy trying to avoid the feeling of anxiety, we begin to restrict our life more and more.
- Thinking about it makes it worse. Writing about it makes it better.
- Burnout is an oversaturation of the sameness.
- No purpose attracts depression. Unemployment makes you unhappy. Dot.
- Seeds of doubt grow into forests of inaction.
- The hardest prison to escape is in your own mind. Depression hates a moving target.
"Boredom is a soul sucker. The unfed mind devours itself."
-- Gore Vidal
"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."
-- Søren Kierkegaard
"When people don’t express themselves, they die one piece at a time." (...)
"In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves."
-- Laurie Halse Anderson
"Worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe."
-- Mark Twain
"A man is as miserable as he thinks he is." (...)
"We suffer more often in imagination than in reality."
-- Seneca
"The mind is everything. What you think you become."
-- Buddha
"Hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness, and depression. It is the source of all misery and the cause of all addiction."
-- Mark Manson
"Develop strenght to do bold things, not the strenght to suffer."
-- Niccoló Machiavelli
"Your trauma creates you." (...)
"Unresolved thoughts, prematurely pushed out of the mind, pile up in an internal landfill - which eventually pokes out of the subconscious and manifests as chronic, nonspecific anxiety." (...)
"Uncertainty, not outcome, is the root of stress." (...)
"A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside of their control." (...)
"You won’t have inner peace until you give up your war against the world." (...)
"The quality of your mind is the quality of your life." (...)
"One of the most powerful things to realize is that you can change your own self-image." (...)
"Fasting focuses the mind. It replaces all desires with a single desire." (...)
"You’re offended when you fear that it might be true."
-- Naval Ravikant
"If I had to prescribe two things to improve health and happiness in the world, it’s movement and play."
-- Jason Nemer
Action cures everything. Physical stress eliminates the need for control.
Hustling (the right amount of stimulation) involves consistently stretching your comfort zone. Avoiding stress is avoiding life.
Hints:
- The best antidepressant is knowing that we matter to others. People don’t die from suicide; they die from sadness.
- Exercise: burn extra calories to reduce the need for control. When you’re feeling stressed out, take a moment to breathe. Remember that body language affects your psychology, mood, and even hormonal balance. People tend to be naturally happier when they’re kept busy. Exercise is a celebration of what your body can do not a punishment for what you ate.
- Diet is also relevant: debug your body as much as you can.
"If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else."
-- Booker T. Washington
"Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, surrounded by assholes."
-- Sigmund Freud
"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional."
-- Haruki Murakami
"No medicine cures what happiness cannot."
-- Gabriel García Márquez
"The soul is healed by being with children."
-- Fyodor Dostoyevski
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light."
-- Plato
Fear is paralyzing. Fear does not stop death, it stops life.
When you view everything through the lens of fear, you’re more likely to remain in retreat mode. Anger and excuses often mask underlying fears. Remember that all excuses can be challenged. The best years of your life are the ones in which you take ownership of your problems rather than blaming them on your family, the environment, or the president. Living in reality requires less energy than cultivating a victim mentality. Escaping reality drains your energy. What are we afraid of? We’re afraid of growth. We’re terrified of exposure. Remember, nothing scares the crap out of us more than advancing, because to advance is to move from the known to the unknown. fear that you are not good enough: that you will never find a woman as good as your current girlfriend, or that other men will be able to care for her and satisfy her better than you will.
"Don’t give in to your fears. If you do, you won’t be able to talk to your heart."
-- Paulo Coelho
"We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them."
-- Christian Nestell Bovee
Replace fear with curiosity. Conquering fear means defining fear.
Fear makes the wolf bigger than he really is.
"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood."
-- Marie Curie
"Fear is incomplete knowledge."
-- Agatha Christie
"It’s not the mountain we conquer but ourselves."
-- Sir Edmund Hillary
"A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears."
-- Michel de Montaigne
"Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; ha can anger you only you permit yourself being disturbed by him."
-- Epictetus
"Where you fear is, there your task is." (...)
"That which we need the most will be found where we least want to look."
-- Carl Jung
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage."
-- Anaïs Nin
"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear."
-- Mark Twain
A coward has no scar.
Heros and cowards feel the same fear but their answers are different. Courage implies low reverence. Courage is a form of intelligence not strenght. It’s about outwitting your limiting beliefs, irrational fears and insecurities.
"Without courage there cannot be truth, and without truth there can be no other virtue."
-- Sir Walter Scott
"All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle."
-- Francis of Assisi
"Evil will prevail if good men stand back and do nothing."
-- Edmund Burke
"Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it."
-- Albert Camus
"Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice."
-- Ayaan Hirsi Ali
"It’s better to be a restrained monster than a well-behaved coward."
-- Jordan Peterson
"Troops would never be deficient in courage, if they could only know how deficient in it their enemies were."
-- Duke of Wellington
"It is courage that vanquishes in war, and not good weapons." (...)
"He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he that loses his courage loses all."
-- Miguel de Cervantes
"Courage makes a man more than himself; for he is then himself plus his valor."
-- William R. Alger
"Courage is grace under pressure."
-- Ernest Hemingway
"Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. (He is also a fool.)"
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"Courage is knowing it might hurt and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same. And that's why life is hard."
-- Jeremy Goldberg
"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."
-- Lao Tzu
"Tell a man that he is brave, and you help him become so."
-- Thomas Carlyle
"Courage ought to be guided by skill, and skill armed by courage."
-- Sir P. Sidney
"Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision."
-- Wiston Churchill
"Courage is doing what you are afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you are scared."
-- Eddie Rickenbacker
"A man of courage is also full of faith."
-- Cicero
"Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes."
-- Oscar Wilde
Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn. Fail fast and bounce back quickly.
A failure is a man who has blundered but is not capable of cashing in on the experience. Failure is only failure if you don’t learn from it. Accept it as part of the process. Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done. Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. When you don’t know something you will pay for it - that’s the stupidity tax. We should fear missing opportunity more than we should fear failure.
Smart people aren’t used to failing, so they struggle to learn from their mistakes and often respond by blaming someone else.
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."
-- Jim Horning
"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable, but more useful, than a life spent doing nothing."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to continually be afraid you will make one."
-- Elbert Hubbard
"We’re even wrong about which mistakes we’re making."
-- Carl Winfeld
"All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride."
-- Sophocles
"If something fails where you thought it would fail, that is not a failure." (...)
"When crisis and disaster strike, don’t waste them. No problems, no progress."
-- Kevin Kelly
"Calling it an experiment gives you permission to fail."
-- A.J. Jacobs
"It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it."
-- Lou Holtz
"There is no failure, only feedback." (...)
"Most of our suffering comes from avoidance."
-- Naval Ravikant
"There are only two kinds of people who fail: those who listen to nobody... and those who listen to everybody."
-- Thomas Beshere, Jr.
"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavour."
-- Truman Capote
"It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace."
-- Chuck Palahniuk
"You’re going to make mistakes in life. It’s what you do after the mistakes that counts."
-- Brandi Chastain
"The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you."
-- Bob Harris (Lost in translation)
"And God said «love your enemy», and I loved myself. -- Khalil Gibran*
Anger is a punishment we give ourselves for someone else’s mistake.
Hint:
- Pay attention to what people say out of anger, they've been dying to tell you that.
"A scar is not an injury. A scar is an healing. After an injury, a scar is what makes you whole."
-- China Mieville
Don’t punish yourself for failing. Failing is learning.
You are more than your mistakes. Past mistakes are meant to guide you, not to define you.
"The scars you acquire by exercising courage will never make you feel inferior."
-- Giovanni Battista Cima
"It’s not just other people we need to forgive. Sometimes we need to forgive ourselves."
-- Mitch Albom
"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift."
-- Mary Oliver
"Your pain, is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding." (...)
"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars."
-- Kahlil Gibran
"Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey. But, sorrow is at least an arriving."
-- Alan Paton
"In anger we should refrain both from speech and action."
-- Pythagoras
"I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided."
-- Fernando Pessoa
"Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides."
-- Andre Malraux
"Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change."
-- Brene Brown
You are not what you think you are: you are what you hide. The things you hate most about yourself are the things you hide from the rest of the world.
Trauma is a tattoo on the soul. Tattoos and body piercings compensate insecurities. I’ve never met anyone yet covered in tattoos who isn’t profoundly insecure.
"I was ashamed of myself when I realized that life was a costume party; and I attended with my real face."
-- Franz Kafka
"The greater the outward show, the greater the inward poverty."
-- J. Krishnamurti
"Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure."
-- Alan Watts
"One who believes in himself has no need to convince others." (...)
"When you accept yourself, the whole world accepts you."
-- lao Tzu
"Value yourself. The only people who appreciate a doormat are people with dirty shoes."
-- Leo Buscaglia
"Having a low opinion of yourself is not modesty. It’s self-destruction."
-- Bobby Sommer
Confidence is the opposite of shame. Confidence is shamelessness.
You don’t have to prove anything to anybody, including yourself. Low confidence is the source of all problems and neediness its marker.
Hints:
- Too many people undervalue what they are and overvalue what they are not. If the universe didn’t need you, you wouldn’t be here. Don’t wait for someone to tell you that you are special.
- To get self-aceptance you have to do the unconfortable things that you know you are right. When you break an agreement you made with yourself, your self-esteem plummets. It’s really hard to have self-esteem. Everyone wants to take it from you. A boss, a teacher, a parent, a friend, a lover.
- Confidence markers: the space you take up in the world indicates to others and yourself how confident you feel. Presence is confidence without arrogance. Authenticity can’t be faked. The greatest demonstration of power and security is to actually make oneself defenseless, to become as comfortable with one’s weaknesses as possible. When accompanied by authenticity and personal accountability, vulnerability is almost always an extremely attractive behavior. When it’s not attractive, then it signals legitimate incompatibility.
- Believe you can, and you’re halfway there. If you don’t believe you are good, you’ll never be good. If you say it with confidence, you are who you say you are. So you’re only as good as your next speech.
- Confidence is silent. Insecurities are loud.
- get confidence: impress yourself
- Not being insecure about an unattractive quality instantly makes you way more attractive. Generally the thing you’re most ashamed of is actually your biggest strenght/asset but you haven’t figured out how to use it.
- Self-worth is how you feel about the negative aspects of yourself. The people who truly have self-worth don’t think they’re something special.
- Men stop valuing themselves and their own opinions and beliefs and start valuing only the approval and validation of women.
- Rejection is a tool that reveals incompatibility not your inadequateness.
- Confidence come from some success. You need some accomplishment to get there.
- Everything you’re running away is in your head. We hold on to something so tight because we fear something so great won’t happen twice.
- Money problems are self-confidence problems.
"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence."
-- Charles Bukowski
"Guilt is society’s voice speaking in your head." (...)
"Self-esteem is just the reputation you have with yourself. You’ll always know." (...)
"Ego is false confidence, self-respect is true confidence." (...)
"You are a story you tell yourself."
-- Naval Ravikant
"Self-confidence is the memory of success."
-- David Storey
"Once you’ve accepted your flaws, no one can use them against you."
-- Tyrion
Honesty is the pathway to confidence.
When hiding something about yourself, you automatically create shame. You’re saying this thing that’s true about myself is wrong. Speaking openly about an imperfection is a sign of strength, not a weakness. So you gotta share that shit in order to heal it.
"Imperfections are attractive when their owners are happy with them."
-- Augusten Burroughs
"The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act."
-- Tara Ploughman
"Just get out of the room."
-- Robert Glover
"Arrogance is a smokescreen for insecurity."
-- Amy Cuddy
"Rudeness is the weak person’s imitation of strength."
-- Eric Hoffer
Confidence is not walking into a room thinking you are better than everyone, it’s walking in not having to compare yourself with anyone. Someone else’s strengths don’t make you look bad, being jealous and insecure does.
Entitlement comes in two forms:
- I’m better than everybody so I deserve special treatment.
- I’m worse than everybody so I deserve special treatment.
"The first part of life is devoted to forming an healthy ego. The second half is going inward and letting go of it."
-- Carl Jung
There’s always room for improvement; be humble. There is no place for a «prima donna».
If you’re not improving today, you’re regressing. Skills are perishable, and the path to mastery is a never-ending story. Some of the skills you need to achieve expertise have not yet been systematized.
"I am not young enough to know everything."
-- Oscar Wilde
"If you aren’t growing you’re dying."
-- Tony Robbins
"If you gain any kind of attention or success for your work, you face the great danger of creeping conservatism." (...)
"How often our early triumphs turn us into a kind of caricature of ourselves."
-- Robert Greene
"A good deed dies when it is spoken about."
-- Proverb
"You’ll never be criticized by someone who is doing more than you. You’ll always be critized by someone who is doing less. Remember that."
-- Denzel Washington
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."
-- Henry Thomas Buckle
Jealousy is the face of low self-esteem. An healthy mind does not speak ill of others.
Outliers inspire envy. Once they stop talking to you, they start talking about you. Intelligence, wealth, fame, luck, beauty, health, sucess and lifestyle (freedom) are the main triggers.
Treat haters like toddlers. When people criticize your life they are speaking about their fears and limitations not yours. Only take advice from those achieving what you want to achieve. Ignore and be flattered by the rest. Never hate people who are jealous of you. Respect their jealousy - they think that you’re better than them. If someone is copying you, you won.
"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence." (...)
"If A is a success in life, then A = X + Y + Z. Work is X; Y is play; and Z is keeping your mouth shut."
-- Albert Einstein
"Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you are two steps ahead."
-- Fannie Flagg
"They called her witch because she knew how to heal herself."
-- Te’ V. Smith
"Think as you like but behave like others." (...)
"Never appear too perfect."
-- Robert Greene
"Success makes so many people hate you. I wish it wasn’t that way. It would be wonderful to enjoy success without seeing envy in the eyes of those around you."
-- Marilyn Monroe
"The dogs bark but the caravan moves on."
-- Proverb
"It is not greed that drives the world, but envy."
-- Warren Buffet
Choose inspiration over envy."
-- Naval Ravikant
However beware of blindspots, not all criticism is envy. When somebody says something bad about you, is negativity. When everyone says it, is advice.
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing."
-- Aristotle
"Empathy without boundaries is self destruction."
-- Silvy Khoucasian
Honesty witout empathy is brutality. Empathy without honesty is manipulation.
"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails."
-- William Arthur Ward
"There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, «Oh, it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything», and an optimist who says, «Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine any way». Either way, nothing happens."
-- Yvon Chouinard
Pessimism is a scarcity mindset.
Pessimism is seductive. Optimism sounds like a sales pitch, pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you. While optimism is not always the way, pessimism is rarely the way. On the long term, an optimistic bias may payoff.
Hints:
- Entrepreneurs are inherently optimistic because they are rewarded by being optimistic. Intelectuals the opposite.
- Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than oportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.
"That was one of the virtues of being a pessimist: nothing was ever as bad as you thought it would be."
-- James Jones
"A pessimist sees a difficulty in every opportunity. An optimist sees an opportunity in every difficulty."
-- Bertram Carr
"While optimists will sometimes mistake a steaming turd for pure gold, they will not miss a piece of genuine gold when it crosses their path."
-- Mark Manson
"Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money."
-- Nat Friedman
"I’m always looking for a way to make it happen, not excuses why it won’t work."
-- Aaron Walker
"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"Criticism without creativity is just pessimism. The honest way to critique is to create the alternative." (...)
"To see if they really think that things are getting worse, ask them if they’d rather live in the future or in the past."
-- Naval Ravikant
"You'll never meet a very successful pessimistic person. If you want to be remarkable, get better at being optimistic."
-- Kevin Kelly
"Keep you thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words. Keep your thoughts positive because your words become your behaviour. Keep your behavior positive because your behavior becomes your habits. Keep your habits positive because your habits becomes your values. Keep your values positive because your values become your destiny."
-- Mahatma Gandhi
"An optimist expects his dreams to come true; a pessimist expects his nightmares to."
-- Laurence J. Peter
"Worry gives small things a big shadow."
-- Proverb
Worrying is worshipping the problem. If you panic, panic early.
"If something is wrong fix it. But train yourself not to worry, worry fixes nothing."
-- Ernest Hemingway
"Perfectionism is the fear of being criticized."
-- Caroline Myss
"The perfect is the enemy of the good."
-- Voltaire
Strive for excellence, not for perfection. From good enough you derive success. From perfection you derive procastination, anxiety and depression. It’s liberating to see yourself as a «doist».
"Have no fear of perfection. You’ll never reach it."
-- Salvador Dali
"Perfectionism doesn’t make you feel perfect; it makes you feel inadequate."
-- Maria Shriver
"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
-- Augusten Burroughs
"The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men."
-- George Eliot
"No one in the brief history of computing has ever written a piece of perfect software. It’s unlikely that you’ll be the first."
-- Andy Hunt
"We are all broken, that's how the light gets in."
-- Ernest Hemingway
"Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence." -- Vince Lombardi
"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good."
-- Charlie Brown
"If I had any humility I would be perfect."
-- Ted Turner
"We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training."
-- Archilochus
Your fears define your limits.
Nothing can sabotage you more quickly and more completely than limiting beliefs. People underestimate their possibilities. However your level of success will seldom exceed your level of personal development.
"To define is to limit."
-- Oscar Wilde
"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
"Often isn't the mountains ahead that wear you out, it's the little pebble in your shoe."
-- Muhammad ALi
"There is no limit on better. Talent is distributed unfairly, but there is no limit on how much we can improve what we start with."
-- Kevin Kelly
"Impossible is just an opinion."
-- Paulo Coelho
"The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it."
-- Proverb
"If you think we can't change the world, it just means you're not one of those that will."
-- Jacque Fresco
"The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible."
-- Arthur C. Clarke
"A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility."
-- Aristotle
"In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd." -- Miguel de Cervantes
"If you can't, you must. If you must, you can."
-- Tony Robbins
"It's kind of fun to do the impossible!"
-- Walt Disney
"Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible."
-- St. Francis of Assisi
"It's not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It's because we dare not venture that they are difficult."
-- Seneca
"I am where I am because I believe in all possibilities."
-- Whoopi Goldberg
"Expectations are resentments waiting to happen."
-- Brene Brown
"With a strong enough «why», you can overcome any «how»."
-- Tony Robbins
Often our productivity struggles are caused not by a lack of efficiency, but a lack of motivation. Most people keep telling themselves old stories that aren’t serving them. Lazyness is resting before getting tired.
"Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going."
-- Jim Rohn
"There was a gun to my head. The gun was, I didn’t want to be in an assisted living home, watching TV all day, waiting to die. Every day I wake up with that gun to my head. Every day I live."
-- Unknown (tetraplegic)
"The eyes do not see what the mind does not want."
-- Proverb
"No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong."
-- François de La Rochefoucauld
Self awareness is the ability to pause your mind. It reduces the gap between who you are and who you think you are.
Do you know anyone who doesn’t have any blind spots? So why would you be different?
Hints:
- Meditation makes you more mindful. Over time, meditation can rewire your brain to be less reactive and enable you to thoughtfully respond to your feelings.
- Ask questions to challenge your assumptions: «What if I’m wrong about this?»
"The best mirror is an old friend."
-- George Herbert
"Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them."
-- A.A. Milne
"The things we see every day are the things we never see at all."
-- G.K. Chesterton
"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking."
-- H.L. Mencken
"I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others."
-- Marcus Aurelius
"Until you make the uncouncious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
-- Carl Jung
"People who can’t laugh at themselves will always be outwitted by people who can."
-- T.K. Coleman
"Your growth as a conscious being is measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations you are willing to have." (...)
"A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others."
-- Kevin Kelly
"Self-awareness is the most attractive trait." (...)
"Meditation is a good way to measure where you are." (...)
"Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind. Distractions are to mind the same as sugar to body." (...)
"The best meditation is being curious about the contents of your own mind." (...)
"A fit mind is a clear mind."
-- Naval Ravikant
"If you correct your mind, the rest of your life will fall into place."
-- Lao Tzu
"It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves."
-- Andre Gide
"If you arrive to my age and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster."
-- Warren Buffett
"Nothing is more disgraceful than that an old man should have nothing to show to prove that he has lived long, except his years."
-- Seneca
After reaching a certain age, you are no longer seen as an individual; you become an institution and are treated as institutions are. You are expected to behave like a piece of historical furniture, an architectural landmark.
"Every one desires to live long, but no one would be old."
-- Jonathan Swift
"My life was sharply divided in two halves. In the first half, I was always the youngest in the group; in the second half, I was always the oldest. There was no transitional period."
-- Stan Ulam
"Loneliness really haunts me. That’s a theme for the young – not wanting to be alone, not wanting to be older, not wanting to give up their teenage lack of responsibility. They postpone everything in order to find some beauty, which becomes increasingly difficult as you get older."
-- John Cassavetes
"When you’re young, you have so much time but never enough money. When you’re old you have money but never enough time."
-- Jon Boorman
"A man that lives from memories becames old. One that lives from projects remains young."
-- Bruno Munari
People my age are so much older than me.
"We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"You are only as young as the last time you changed your mind."
-- Kevin Kelly
"It takes a very long time to become young."
-- Pablo Picasso
"An honest man is always a child."
-- Socrates
Aging implies wear and tear, often seen as a high price to pay for maturity.
"Every day in the mirror I watch death at work."
-- Jean Cocteau
"Once I was beautiful, now I’m myself."
-- Anne Sexton
"When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it."
-- Mark Twain
"Ain't nothin' an old man can do for me but bring me a message from a young man."
-- Moms Mabley
"The foundation of maturity: just because it’s not your fault doesn’t mean it’s not your responsibility."
-- Kevin Kelly
The advantage of aging is that you become more decisive. Maturing is realizing that many things don’t need your comments.
"We mature with the damage, not with the years."
-- Mateus William
"That is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful."
-- Ernest Hemingway
"We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public."
-- Bryan White
"Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it."
-- George Orwell
"Youth is when you blame all your troubles on your parents; maturity is when you learn that everything is the fault of the younger generation."
-- Bertold Brecht
"The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything."
-- Oscar Wilde
"Aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been."
-- David Bowie
"The youth can walk faster but the elder knows the road."
-- Proverb
"Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age."
-- Victor Hugo
"Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research."
-- Carl Jung
"Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools."
-- George Chapman
"Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow."
-- Naval Ravikant
Finding a place to die is an important thing to do.
"A man dies when he stops working." (...)
"Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die."
-- Proverbs
"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring."
-- Chuck Palahniuk
"Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other."
-- Francis Bacon
"Be a good ancestor. Do something a future generation will thank you for. A simple thing is to plant a tree."
-- Kevin Kelly
"If a man knows more than others he becomes lonely." (...)
"Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you."
-- Carl Jung
"If you are afraid of loneliness, don't marry."
-- Anton Chekhov