There's nothing wrong with having goals, but obsessing over them is often counterproductive because, in reality, achieving a goal isn't always what it's cracked up to be.

Writing/reading is like visiting another person's brain. And a short book or article is like a short stay. You come in, have a coffee, talk about the weather or sports, and then move on.

Whether you're from Egypt or Argentina or Singapore or Canada, you have a need to feel important, a need to feel secure, and a need to feel loved. The culture and economics just determine how those needs are expressed.

My belief is that we all already care about something important. We all already know what is important and meaningful for ourselves. The problem is just that many of us have lost touch with it.

Self-publishing provides more freedom and control, but it also provides more risk. Publishing provides more credibility and promotion, but your vision can also get lost in the bureaucratic machinery of the business. It's a tough decision to make.

Long-term, perpetual travel is the dream of many. But surprisingly, for such a popular desire, few people realize how accessible it is.

Be motivated by something beyond simply money or glory.

Ultimately, I think, as humans, we all care deeply about our life's legacy, and contemplating our own mortality is the only real way to approach that question of legacy honestly.

I speak four languages, and I've seen some of the most spectacular locations in the world and met hundreds of fascinating people.

Many people come to self-help material because they feel like something is wrong with them or the way they are. The problem is that anything that tells you how to improve your life is also implying that there is something inherently wrong with you the way you are.

I think most people who try to start a business, they realise very quickly that one of the biggest hurdles is having to be self-determined.

The reason we fall in love with certain music and writing is we connect with it on a very personal level.

Happiness is not something you achieve. It's not something you do or someplace you get to. Happiness is something you inhabit.

I think my approach to a creative career was very entrepreneurial. Even though I'm a writer, I've always viewed my work much in the same way as a startup or marketer might view their work.

Aside from birthing me my first grey hairs and keeping me up at night more times than I'd like to count, 'The Subtle Art' taught me a lot about the nature of work. And a lot of that had to do with how my perception of the work itself evolved over the course of writing the book.

Success is self-defined. You can choose what you think success is, and you can always change your mind.

I hate calendars, and after running my own online business for almost 10 years, I still don't have one.

Pain is important, and changing who you are is difficult, painful, and scary. Most of the self-help industry sees change as this euphoric, liberating thing and tells you that you can be happy all the time. I think the opposite.

The motivation to do anything - like change your entire life around - doesn't just come from some magical, mystical place within you. Action is both the effect of motivation and the cause of it.

One of the problems of modern society, or the post-Internet age, is that there are so many things bombarding us that we could care about. I think it's more important than ever to really get clear and focus on what's worth caring about and what's just noise or distraction.

We usually think of improving our life by adding stuff - like more things, more success, more friends. I think the starting place should be removing stuff - try a month without Instagram; try a week without looking at fashion pictures. See how that affects your life, your friendships, and your ability to focus on other things.

In a strange way, I feel like we need to cultivate more boredom in our lives: like, boredom needs to be okay again. It needs to be seen as a good thing, and I think it's definitely a good thing for relationships.

Self Help is a notoriously crowded market, but I believe that I've successfully differentiated myself in a few ways. For one, most demographic data shows that millennials think/act/see the world differently, and I don't think there's much personal development stuff out there that caters to millennial attitudes and experiences very well.

Obviously, we all want to feel pleasure. It can't be one of our highest priorities because, simply put, anything worthwhile in life is going to be un-pleasurable at times. Pleasure is the type of thing that if you get the other stuff right, pleasure will happen on its own.

I think people who become compulsive about fitness or eating right, a lot of the time it's out of fear that they're going to lose control or that they're not good enough, so I think anything done out of fear or motivated by fear is often unhealthy.

Real happiness comes from discovering a sense of importance in one's actions and in one's life.

We start caring way too much about that new TV show or how many likes we're getting on Facebook or what our mother will think of our new house plant. These are bad values that turn us into frivolous people.

The problem with idealizing love is that it causes us to develop unrealistic expectations about what love actually is and what it can do for us.

It's possible to fall in love with somebody who doesn't treat us well, who makes us feel worse about ourselves, who doesn't hold the same respect for us as we do for them, or who has such a dysfunctional life themselves that they threaten to bring us down with them.

You can always do something about the problems life gives you.

I'm constantly obsessing about brand. I think of my books in terms of brand. I think of my blog articles in terms of branding. How does it fit my branding? I think in terms of demographics.

What I really, really love is writing. If I can just write and make a really nice living out of that, why would I change that?

People want to offer opportunities to people they care about. They want to help people they believe are good people or have shared life experiences with.

I'm your typical highly educated, progressive white dude. I've lived my life resisting racism both within myself and in the society around me.

A lot of cases, what makes you an interesting and complex person makes you a really horrible person to be with romantically.

I think it's always been normal for humans to compare themselves to each other, but we're so hyper-connected all the time now that it's driving us insane.

We're not accustomed to judging things on philosophical importance.

Generally, our first idea of what our business is going to be is not the right one. It takes a few iterations; to get there, you have to be able to let go.

I can't really stand self-help stuff myself.

It's easy to want the benefits of something; it's hard to want the cost.

I felt that no self-help book had been written for millennials yet, so my ultimate goal was to write it.

Every new conversation, every new relationship, brings new challenges and opportunities for honest expression.

As soon as you try to eliminate a thought or emotion, you make it stronger.

For all we know, we are the only shot the universe has at intelligent self-organization. Therefore, we need to take it seriously.

When people lay around whining to their therapists and ex-wives that they're finally going to 'change' themselves, they are promising something imaginary and made up.

Here's a pro-tip: there's no such thing as a 'gym person.' There are just people who go to the gym. Similarly, there's no such thing as a 'productive person.' There are just people who do productive things fairly often.

Don't hang out with a bunch of people who drag you down when you can hang out with one person who makes you feel good.

There's a paradox with self-improvement, and it is this: the ultimate goal of all self-improvement is to reach the point where you no longer feel the need to improve yourself.

There is no such thing as an optimum life.

The truth is, I do some of my best writing at 3 A.M. while blasting 'Every Time I Die' into my ear drums.