In my experience, going from 1x to 10x, from 10x to 100x, and from 100x to (when Lady Luck really smiles) 1000x returns in various areas has been a product of better questions. John Dewey’s dictum that “a problem well put is half-solved” applies. Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask. (Location 161)
Tags: questions
Note: Ask good questions
“normal” people are just crazy people you don’t know well enough. (Location 247)
“Nothing you face today will be harder than what you just did.” (Location 444)
Note: Complete a tough gym session in the morning
Real work and real satisfaction come from the opposite of what the web provides. They come from going deep into something—the book you’re writing, the album, the movie—and staying there for a long, long time. (Location 464)
Note: Real work and satisfaction come from going deepp
You will hear so many stories of people who risked everything in order to achieve this or that goal, especially creative goals. But I do not believe that your best creative work is done when you’re stressed out because you’re teetering on the edge of bankruptcy or other personal disasters. Just the opposite. You should set up your life so that it is as comfortable and happy as possible—and so that it accommodates your creative work. (Location 512)
Note: Set up a comfortable life so you have the space and freedom to do the creative
Happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop. The mind is just as malleable as the body. We spend so much time and effort trying to change the external world, other people, and our own bodies, all the while accepting ourselves the way we were programmed in our youths. We accept the voice that talks to us in our head all the time as the source of all truth. But all of it is malleable, every day is new, and memory and identity are burdens from the past that prevent us from living freely in the present. (Location 827)
Tags: newsletter, favorite
Note: Our minds are malleable
Ignore the unfairness—there is no fair. Play the hand that you’re dealt to the best of your ability. People are highly consistent, so you will eventually get what you deserve and so will they. In the end, everyone gets the same judgment: death. (Location 838)
Tags: favorite, fairness
Note: Life is not fair,accept it
“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” (Location 910)
Society loves to glorify the “you-as-CEO” paths and make people who don’t want to be the CEO of their own career feel inferior about their path, but neither of these paths is inherently better or worse than the other—it just depends on your personality, your goals, and what you want from a lifestyle. There are some super smart, talented, special people whose gifts are best expressed as CEO and others whose are best expressed when someone else is worrying about keeping the lights on and you can just put your head down and focus on your work. Likewise, there are some people who need to be CEO to find their work fulfilling and others for whom being CEO and having their work bleed into everything is a recipe for misery. (Location 1039)
Tags: ceo
life is the obstacles. There is no underlying path. Our role here is to get better at navigating those obstacles. I strive to find calm, measured responses and to see hindrances as a chance to problem-solve. Often I fall back into old frustrations, but if I remind myself, this is a chance to step up, I can reframe conflicts as a chance to experiment with solutions. (Location 1125)
Tags: challenges
Note: Life is the obstacle
“It’s not how well you play the game, it’s deciding what game you want to play.”—Kwame Appiah. This quote separates striving from strategy and reminds me to take a macro view of what I’m doing, like in a video game where you can zoom out and you suddenly see you’ve been running around in one corner of the maze. (Location 1184)
Tags: issue5, quotes
Note: It's not how well you play the game, it's deciding what game you want to play
How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen (Location 1310)
When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do? What questions do you ask yourself? I step back … and slow down … and ask the five whys. And when I am done, I also ask if I am afraid of something but too afraid to admit it. (Location 1346)
Tags: favorite
Note: Slow down and ask the five whys
Make sure you have something every day you’re looking forward to. Maybe it’s your job, maybe it’s a basketball game after work or a voice lesson or your writing group, maybe it’s a date. But have something every day that lights you up. It’ll keep your soul hungry to create more of these moments. (Location 1448)
Tags: newsletter, favorite
Note: Make sure you have something to look foorward to every day
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond: This text helped rid me of the nagging incompleteness in my understood connection between the successes and failings of ancient and modern civilizations. Power needs tools and circumstance. Neither need be earned. (Location 1562)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
“One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.” (Location 1724)
Tags: minimalism
Note: Eliminate and simplify
What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? What advice should they ignore? [My advice is to] take risks, now. The advantages that college students and new grads have are their youth, drive, lack of significant responsibilities, and, importantly, lack of the creature comforts one acquires with time. Nothing to lose, everything to gain. Barnacles of the good life tend to slow you down, if you don’t get used to risk-taking early in your career. (Location 1790)
Tags: career
Note: Take risks early in your career
10% Happier by Dan Harris made me totally rethink mindfulness and meditation. (Location 1887)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
The best skill is to be able to communicate efficiently both in writing and speaking. The two college courses that were probably most important for my career were a course in literature and composition and a course in logic (an advanced math course). These courses taught me how to reach the correct conclusion from a set of facts and how to communicate that conclusion to a diverse audience. (Location 2035)
The Tao of Power by Lao Tzu [a translation of the Tao Te Ching by R. L. Wing] helped me see the relationship between “enough,” health, and wealth. It sent me on a 30-year journey to find enough food, exercise, and rest; to learn how to live between too much and too little to create a youthful and happier existence. (Location 2088)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
Nothing truly meaningful or lasting has ever been created in a short period of time. If you learn the story behind any great success, you realize how many years went by and how many hard choices were made to achieve it. (Location 2128)
Tags: time
Note: All successes take time
I say no to blame, no to complaints, and no to gossip. I also teach my daughter these three rules. If I have nothing positive to say, I don’t say anything. It makes my life easier and happier. The moment I start one of these three behaviors—blaming, complaining, or gossiping—I become negative. It is a sign of avoiding what I am responsible for: my life. Negativity is like pollution. It pollutes the mind and relationships. (Location 2268)
Note: Say no to blame,complaints and gossip
“No one owes you anything.” We live in a world that’s rampant with entitlement, with many people believing that they deserve to be given more. My parents raised me to be self-sufficient, and impressed upon me that the only person you can really depend on in life is you. If you want something, you work for it. You don’t expect it to be given. If others help you out along the way, that’s fantastic, but it’s not a given. I believe that the key to self-sufficiency is breaking free of the mindset that someone, somewhere, owes you something or will come to your rescue. (Location 2320)
Tags: entitlement
Note: Nobody owes you anything. You aren't entitled to anything.
“Many a false step was made by standing still.” (Location 2730)
Tags: quotes
Note: .quotes
Her TED Talk, “Why You Think You’re Right—Even If You’re Wrong,” has more than three million views. (Location 2834)
Tags: towatch
Note: .towatch
Good judgment is what allows you to evaluate whether a recommendation is appropriate to your situation or not; without it, you can’t tell the difference between good and bad advice. (Location 2860)
Note: Good judgement allows you to evaluate good and bad advice .advice
The books Superforecasting (by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner) and How to Measure Anything (by Douglas W. Hubbard) have some good advice on how to improve your ability to make accurate predictions. (Location 2861)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
If they’re interested in running, I give them Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. (Location 2905)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
hand. I guess if I’m sticking to the “$100 or less” rule, the Brain.fm app has been life-changing, too. Really helps me to focus on my work. (Location 2911)
First, I listen to my gratitude playlist on Spotify, any song on the list. For example, here are nine tracks as of today: “Breathturn” by Hammock “Your Hand in Mine” by Explosions in the Sky “Devi Prayer” by Craig Pruess and Ananda “Horizon” by Tycho “Recurring” by Bonobo “Hanging On” by Active Child “Long Time Sun” by Snatam Kaur “Angels Prayer” by Ty Burhoe, James Hoskins, Cat McCarthy, Manorama, and Janaki Kagel “Twentytwofourteen” by The Album Leaf (Location 2926)
Tags: tocheckout
Note: .tocheckout
Poker has taught me to disconnect failure from outcomes. Just because I lose doesn’t mean I failed, and just because I won doesn’t mean I succeeded—not when you define success and failure around making good decisions that will win in the long run. What matters is the decisions I made along the way, and every decision failure is an opportunity to learn and adjust my strategy going forward. By doing this, losing becomes a less emotional experience and more an opportunity to explore and learn. (Location 2983)
Tags: decisions, failure
Note: Disconnect failure from outcomes. Have a long term system for success
Now that was a highly dubious way of “resetting” each week, which I don’t recommend! But the idea of having a fresh restart whenever overwhelmed is excellent. So, let’s say by noon on any given day I’m running behind, and it’s clear I’m in danger of becoming overwhelmed in short order. Rather than attempting to keep all of my afternoon appointments, which I’d reach later and later as the day progressed, I scan my calendar, asking myself which is the earliest appointment I can “burn” by postponing it to another day. I’d rather reschedule one appointment and make the other three on time than be late and frazzled for all four appointments that afternoon. (Location 3265)
Note: When running late for numerous appointments see if you can postpone one so as to be on time for all the others rather than late for them all
What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? Just about anything that comes from someone who has not lived and been tested in the trenches. (Location 3328)
Note: Dont trust advice from those who havent experienced what they are advising on
a world where we emphasize the creation of new products through rapid iteration and experimentation, we often forget to step back and make sure that the future we are racing to is one we truly want to create. (Location 3389)
Note: We should think more carefuly about the impact of our inventions
Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application, which is available for free at gettingreal.37signals.com (Location 3407)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
“The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.”—John Rawls (Location 3427)
Tags: quotes
Note: .quotes
“In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”—Bertrand Russell (Location 3438)
Tags: quotes
Note: .quotes
“In the hopes of reaching the moon men fail to see the flowers that blossom at their feet.”—Albert Schweitzer (Location 3445)
Tags: quotes
Note: .quotes
Time and attention are very different things. They’re your most precious resources moving forward. Just like you walk through the air and you swim through the water, you work through your attention. It’s the medium of work. While people often say there’s not enough time, remember that you’ll always have less attention than time. Full attention is where you do your best work, and everyone’s going to be looking to rip it from you. Protect and preserve it. (Location 3482)
Tags: attention
Note: Just like you swim through water, you work through attention
failure is not the opposite of success but a steppingstone to success. (Location 3561)
Tags: challenges
Note: .challenges
Everybody’s impatient at a macro, and just so patient at a micro, wasting your days worrying about years. I’m not worried about my years, because I’m squeezing the fuck out of my seconds, let alone my days. It’s going to work out. (Location 3627)
“Money in a business is like gas in your car. You need to pay attention so you don’t end up on the side of the road. But your trip is not a tour of gas stations.” (Location 3692)
Tags: wealth
Note: .wealth
“Look around. Look around. How lucky we are to be alive right now!” (Location 3708)
Tags: gratitude
Note: .gratitude
“Disrupt!” When Clayton Christensen introduced the term “disruptive technology” in his 1997 business classic, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, he was asking a very different question than “How can I get funded by convincing VCs that there’s a huge market I can blow up?” He wanted to know why existing companies fail to take advantage of new opportunities. He discovered that breakthrough technologies that are not yet mature first succeed by finding radically new markets, and only later disrupt existing markets. The point of a disruptive technology is not the market or the competitors that it destroys. It is the new markets and the new possibilities that it creates. Just like transistor radios or the early World Wide Web, these new markets are often too small for established companies to consider them worth pursuing. By the time they wake up, an upstart has taken a leadership position in the emerging segment. (Location 3719)
Note: Large companies ignore small new markets until they become large enough. At that stage the startups have a dominant position in those markets
“Execution is strategy—it’s all about the people and the doing, not the talking and the theory. (Location 3765)
Tags: execution
Note: .execution
Tom has given more than 2,500 speeches, and his speech and writing materials are available for free at tompeters.com (Location 3766)
Tags: toexplore
Note: .toexplore
Linda Kaplan-Thaler’s The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness and The Power of Small: (Location 3771)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
Little Things Make All the Difference, and Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data (Location 3772)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
most of us undervalue introverts and, thus, effectively take a pass on about 40 percent of the population. In particular, introverts tend to be more thoughtful and deliberate. And it’s not that they don’t like people—in fact, they tend to have deeper relationships with fewer people relative to extroverts. (Location 3773)
Note: Introverts are undervalued. They tend to have deeper relationships but with fewer people
Excellence is the next five minutes or nothing at all. It’s the quality of your next five-minute conversation. It’s the quality of, yes, your next email. Forget the long term. Make the next five minutes rock! (Location 3813)
Note: Focus on the next five minutes.
I failed selection for the British SAS on my first attempt, and it ripped my heart out at the time. I had never given so much for anything and to fall short was soul-destroying. But I went back and tried a second time and eventually passed. Four out of 120 will generally make it, and they often say the best soldiers pass the second time. I like that. It tells me that tenacity matters more than talent, and in life, that is certainly true. (Location 3840)
Tags: attitude
Note: Tenacity matters more than talent
Simple one for me to answer: “Storms make us stronger.” If I had one message for young people embarking on life, it would be this. Don’t shy away from the hard times. Tackle them head-on, move toward the path less trodden, riddled with obstacles, because most other people run at the first sign of battle. The storms give us a chance to define ourselves, to distinguish ourselves, and we always emerge from them stronger. (Location 3847)
Tags: challenges
Note: Storms make us stronger .challenges
“Courage over comfort.” Just a simple reminder that there’s nothing comfortable about being courageous. Everyone wants to be brave, but no one wants to be vulnerable. (Location 3881)
Tags: favorite, comfortzone
Note: .comfortzone go beyond your comfort zone
“There is no way to happiness—happiness is the way.” (Location 3916)
Tags: happiness
Note: .happiness
“Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.” (Location 3923)
Tags: simplify
“Always make new mistakes!” (Location 4051)
Tags: quotes
Note: .quotes
The Whole Earth Catalog by Stewart Brand (Location 4087)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand: (Location 4090)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
Don’t try to find your passion. Instead master some skill, interest, or knowledge that others find valuable. It almost doesn’t matter what it is at the start. You don’t have to love it, you just have to be the best at it. Once you master it, you’ll be rewarded with new opportunities that will allow you to move away from tasks you dislike and toward those that you enjoy. If you continue to optimize your mastery, you’ll eventually arrive at your passion. (Location 4125)
Note: Seek mastery in a domain
“If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.” (Location 4178)
Note: You should be making mistakes,it shows youre working on difficult problems
Propaganda by Edward Bernays, (Location 4218)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
the documentary The Century of the Self. (Location 4219)
Tags: towatch
Note: .towatch
Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan. (Location 4249)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
“The things you own end up owning you.” (Location 4521)
Tags: simplify
Note: .simplify
“Don’t let the weight of fear weigh down the joy of curiosity.” Fear is really false evidence appearing real. (Location 4601)
Tags: comfortzone
Note: .comfortzone
The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. (Location 4666)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
“If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn’t plan your mission properly.” (Location 4756)
Tags: planning
Note: .planning
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” (Location 4974)
Tags: courage
Note: .courage
“Part of knowing who you are is knowing who you’re not.” (Location 5007)
Tags: quotes
Note: .quotes
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami (Location 5284)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” (Location 5408)
Tags: prioritise
Note: .prioritise
“If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, you must go together.” (Location 5558)
Tags: quotes
Note: .quotes
if you plan to try something new, especially if that something new disrupts the status quo, then you should expect to be called nuts. You can’t rock the boat without being told you’re off your rocker. The greatest asset of entrepreneurs is their contrarian way of thinking, their tendency to zig when others zag, to go in a new direction. But many people don’t give themselves permission to get going for fear that they will be called crazy. I say not only is crazy a compliment, but if you’re not called crazy when you start something new, then you’re not thinking big enough! (Location 5594)
Note: Crazy is a compliment
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” (Location 5679)
“Those who are determined to be ‘offended’ will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.” (Location 5937)
Tags: offence
Note: People will always find a reason to be offended
“Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.” (Location 5941)
The most important one by far is realizing that the real measure of a good life is “How happy and satisfied am I with my life right now?” This turns out to be a lot simpler than you might think. We all have our ups and downs, so your goal is simply to maximize your “up” time and minimize those downs to as close to zero as possible. If you ask yourself this question at the end of a thoroughly great day, the answer is very often positive. After a horrible day (or a string of them), you’re more likely to say that life sucks. I came to realize that the key to a great life is simply having a bunch of great days. So you can think about it one day at a time. And it turns out there are some pretty simple buttons you can press to give yourself a great day. Start by waking up from a good sleep, eating good food, leaving your phone/newspaper/computer behind, and simply writing down your plan for what will make the day great. Several hours of physical activity, some hard work, a chance to laugh with and help out other people—and you’re pretty much there. So the longer-term challenge is simply designing your life so that you have more of this stuff and less of the fluff. Look at every activity as you go through your day and think, “Is this contributing to getting me a better day—today—and if not, is there anybody in the world who has managed to design this activity out of their lives and still succeed beyond my level?” (Location 5965)
Note: Very little is needed to live a happy life
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, explains more about life (including human behavior and myself) than anything else I’ve read. (Location 6039)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
“Know before you go.” (Location 6477)
Tags: planning
Note: .planning
What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? “Find an area of expertise.” It’s so weird when I hear this. Just learn how to learn. Then you can always figure out the next thing that you will need to know. (Location 6721)
Tags: learning
Note: .learning
One thing business owners don’t realize is that every social media platform you’re active on becomes an open channel for customer service. People will ask questions there and, yes, they’ll complain there, too. Think that through. Have a process in place for someone on your team to sweep social channels on a regular basis so you don’t create a customer service nightmare for yourself. Just because you can be active on a platform doesn’t mean you should. (Location 7091)
Note: Every social media channel you are on is a channel for customer service
What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? What advice should they ignore? I thought about this a lot when I gave the commencement address at MIT back in 2013. I said that if I had a cheat sheet I could give myself at 22, it would have three things on it: a tennis ball, a circle, and the number 30,000. The tennis ball is about finding something that you can become obsessed with, like my childhood dog who would go crazy whenever anyone threw a ball for her. The most successful people I know are all obsessed with solving a problem that really matters to them. The circle refers to the idea that you’re the average of your five closest friends. Make sure to put yourself in an environment that pulls the best out of you. And the last is the number 30,000. When I was 24, I came across a website that says most people live for about 30,000 days—and I was shocked to find that I was already 8,000 days down. So you have to make every day count. I’d give the same advice today, but I would clarify that it’s not just about passion or following your dreams. Make sure the problem you become obsessed with is one that needs solving and is one where your contribution can make a difference. As Y Combinator says, “Make something people want.” (Location 7129)
Tags: advice
Note: .advice
(when reading The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker, one of my all-time favorite management books) (Location 7145)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
“Great opportunities never have ‘great opportunity’ in the subject line.” (Location 7171)
Tags: opportunity
Note: .opportunity
You must seize opportunities when they present themselves, not when they are convenient or obvious. The only way to cultivate your own luck is to be more flexible (you’ll need to give up something for the right opportunity), humble (timing is out of your control), and gracious (when you see it, seize it!). Life’s greatest opportunities run on their own schedule, not yours. (Location 7178)
Tags: opportunity
Note: .opportunity
The greatest lessons you learn in the beginning of a career are about people—how to work with people, be managed by people, manage expectations with people, and lead other people. As such, the team you choose to join, and your boss, are huge factors in the value of a professional experience early in your career. Choose opportunities based on the quality of people you will get to work with. (Location 7202)
Tags: career
Note: The greatest lessons you learn early in your career are about people
frequently give the book A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. I’m not a visual person, but this book taught me to see the world around me in an entirely new way. It’s a brilliant way of analyzing experience and information. It’s haunting. (Location 7455)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
I was persuaded to adopt a low-carb approach to eating when I read Gary Taubes’ book Why We Get Fat. (Location 7465)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
The book I’ve gifted most is Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching: ancient Taoist wisdom applicable to anything. It can be read at different times in your (Location 7571)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are. It’s a wonderful book from 1994. The beauty of it is that it can spark the desire in a nonmeditator to take up the practice. [At the same time] you could be a lifelong meditator, read it, and still learn a tremendous amount. Thinking about it now inspires me to read it again. (Location 7575)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
work tirelessly. I feel very lucky and blessed in my life, and I know this is because I totally submerged myself in what I was doing. I spent my every waking hour, every day, enjoying it when I was doing it and truly living it. In a sense, it wasn’t a job because it was my whole life. In retrospect, I probably missed a lot of life because of it, but that’s the give and take. As I think about it, that might be what it takes to start something, but not necessarily to sustain it. So when you start something new, it’s okay to do it in an unsustainable way. Once you achieve it, then you can devote your time to figuring out how to sustain it. They’re two different playbooks. (Location 7627)
Note: Work extremely hard to start something and once up and running you can focus on reaching a balance to sustain it
In 2016, I started doing New Month Resolutions [as opposed to New Year Resolutions]. Here’s some of what I did: July: Daily reading August: No TV or movies September: No dairy October: No gluten November: Daily meditation December: No news or social media feeds As you can see, a few of the months were elimination months and a few were daily behavior months. The elimination months were interesting because I learned that I came away less dependent on the thing I eliminated. I now watch less TV and fewer movies, I eat less bread and gluten, and I still block the news and my social media feeds. The only thing I reinstated was dairy, choosing to continue to consume it. The daily behavior months were interesting because they gave me an on-ramp to maintaining certain behaviors. I still meditate daily, and while I don’t read daily, I read at a frequency close to that. So far, my favorite experiments have been no news or social media feeds, workouts every day, no TV or movies, reading every day, and waking up at 7:30 every morning. (Location 7677)
Note: Have a new resolution each month .todo
The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker (here). Most news is about things that are going wrong. It can be discouraging and makes people feel powerless. This book takes a long view and shows the long-term decline in violence that has occurred. (Location 7718)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
I feel like a lot of people in Silicon Valley serialize their lives. They think, “First I’ll do college. Then I’ll do a startup. Then I’ll make money. Then I’ll do X.” There’s some truth in that [approach], but most of the most important stuff has to be parallel-processed, like your relationships and your health, because you can’t make up the time by doing more of it later. You can’t neglect your wife for four years and then say, “Okay, now it’s my wife years.” Relationships don’t work that way, and neither does your health or your fitness (Location 7733)
Note: Its important to look after your relationships and health whilst working hard
I think this idea that you learn the most from failures is wrong. It’s a good thing to say so that people feel better, but whenever you want to learn how to do something well, you start by studying people who are really good. You don’t study all the failed sprinters to learn how to run fast; you study the person who’s really fast. There are a lot of reasons things can go wrong, but your job is to make things work. (Location 7743)
Tags: metaphor
Note: .metaphor
“Do something you’re afraid of every day.”—often attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt. (Location 7927)
Tags: comfort zone, quotes
Note: .quotes
“He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.” (Location 7982)
Tags: worry
Note: .worry
“We try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric. It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” (Location 7985)
Tags: unforced errors
Note: Try to be consistently not stupid!
“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” —Bertrand Russell (Location 8016)
Note: The stupid are full of confidence whilst the intelligent know the limits of their knowledge
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”—Albert Einstein (Location 8021)
Note: If you create a problem alter your mindset to then fix it .obstacles
What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love? Egg boxing, though I’m convinced if the world knew about it, it would become a worldwide sport and eventually an Olympic sport and therefore cease to be absurd. [Note from Tim: Egg boxing arguably deserves its own chapter, but it’s beyond the scope of this book. For a video of Peter demonstrating egg boxing, please visit tim.blog/eggboxing (Location 8037)
Tags: toexplore
Note: .toexplore
As for advice to ignore: Too often, I hear people effectively given advice that is consistent with sunk cost fallacies. I certainly heard it a lot. “You’ve spent X years learning Y, you can’t just up and leave and now do Z,” they say. I think this is flawed advice because it weighs too heavily the time behind you, which can’t be changed, and largely discounts the time in front of you, which is completely malleable. (Location 8048)
Note: Avoid the sunk cost fallacy. Just because you have spend consierable time on something it shouldnt prevent you from changing course
The practice of daily journaling has been a remarkable tool in helping me navigate the storms of life and be my best self through it all. The daily ritual of self-reflected writing has produced priceless personal insights in my life. For me, daily writing heightens my personal awareness in a nearly magical way. I see, feel, and experience things so much more vividly as a consequence of the writing. The hectic pace of life becomes more balanced and manageable when I intentionally set aside time for self-reflection. I am able to be more in the present in everything I do and, for whatever reason, more accepting of my flaws.
Journal writing can be used for catharsis and healing or for growing and expanding capacity. Entries can be as short as a minute or as long as time permits. It typically takes two to four weeks before one can see and feel positive results. For the best outcomes, entries to one’s journal should be made by hand rather than on a computer. (Location 8234)
Tags: journaling
Note: .journaling
“To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.”—Elbert Hubbard (Location 8299)
Note: People will always find reason to criticise,especially if you are doing anything different
never let a good crisis go to waste. It’s the universe challenging you to learn something new and rise to the next level of your potential. (Location 8554)
Tags: challenges
Note: .challenges
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I think it is the most prophetic book of the 20th century, and the most profound discussion of happiness in modern Western philosophy. It had a deep impact on my thinking about politics and happiness. And since, for me, the relationship between power and happiness is the most important question in history, Brave New World has also reshaped my understanding of history. (Location 8650)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
Excellence is the next five minutes, improvement is the next five minutes, happiness is the next five minutes. This doesn’t mean you ignore planning. I encourage you to make huge, ambitious plans. Just remember that the big-beyond-belief things are accomplished when you deconstruct them into the smallest possible pieces and focus on each “moment of impact,” one step at a time. (Location 8826)
Note: Excellence is the next five minutes .focus
I read Mental Toughness Training for Sports in a bunk bed, and it changed my life. (Location 8857)
Tags: toread
Note: .toread
To learn from the best, you don’t need to meet them, you just need to absorb them. This can be through books, audio, or a single powerful quote. (Location 8858)
Tags: mentor
Note: You dont need to meet the best to learn from them, you can absorb through other mediums .mentors
“LOVE THE PAIN” isn’t about self-flagellation. It’s a simple reminder that nearly all growth requires discomfort. Sometimes the discomfort is mild, like an uphill bike ride or swallowing your ego to listen more attentively. Other times, it’s far more painful, like lactic-threshold training or the emotional equivalent of having a bone reset. None of these stressors are lethal, and it’s the rare person who pursues them. The benefits or lack thereof depend on how you talk to yourself. (Location 8864)
Tags: growth
Note: Nearly all growth requires discomfort
focus on what’s in front of you, design great days to create a great life, and try not to make the same mistake twice. That’s it. (Location 8897)
Note: Design great days to create a great life