People who have the ability to fail in public under their own names actually gain a lot of power. 

“Trying” is the biggest mistake you can make early on in a relationship. It sets a false expectation that you will eventually tire of.

No one is going to value you more than you value yourself. 

A busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to create anything great.

Happiness is a state where nothing is missing.

Nothing you do is going to matter that much in the long run. Don’t take yourself so seriously.

Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.

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

We waste our time with short term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.

I don’t care how rich you are. I don’t care whether you’re a top Wall Street banker. If somebody has to tell you when to be at work, what to wear and how to behave, you’re not a free person. You’re not actually rich.

School, politics, sports, and games train us to compete against others. True rewards — wealth, knowledge, love, fitness, and equanimity — come from ignoring others and improving ourselves.

Most of modern life, all our diseases, are diseases of abundance, not diseases of scarcity.

When you’re healthy you have 10000 needs, but when you’re sick you only have one need.

Sing the song that only you can sing, write the book that only you can write, build the product that only you can build… live the life that only you can live.

You can escape competition through authenticity, when you realize that no one can compete with you on being you. That would have been useless advice pre-internet. Post-internet, you can turn that into a career.

The modern struggle – Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising, up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games and addictive drugs.

You make your own luck if you stay at it long enough. 

Whatever the geeks are doing in their garage on weekends is what the entire earth will be doing 20 years later as a mainstream thing.

Now the main source of capital is how many “robots”, programmers, and machines you have working for you. Those are the ultimate force multipliers.

You have to put in the time, but more important is the judgment. The direction you’re heading in matters more than how fast you drive.

That’s the fundamental delusion – that there is something out there that will make you happy forever.

You’ll do better work if you’re bored rather than busy.

The world doesn’t always give what you want, but it often gives you what you need.

The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a skill that you develop and a choice that you make. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it.

You want to be rich and anonymous, not poor and famous.

What you do, who you do with, and how you do it are way more important than how hard you work.

Trade money for time, not time for money. You’re going to run out of time first.

Arm yourself with specific knowledge.

I would rather read the best hundred books over and over again until I absorb them rather than read every single book out there.

The means of learning are abundant, it’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.

The phrase that I use the most to myself in my head is I just tell myself one word: accept.

I’m not afraid of death anymore. […] I don’t have the quest for immortality anymore.

Be too busy to “do coffee”.

Be present above all else.

Productize yourself.

The older the problem, the older the solution.

The first rule of handling conflict is don’t hang around people who are constantly engaging in conflict.

Debate rather than dictate.

Signaling virtue is a vice.

Anything deep is interesting.

Guard your time. Forget the money.

Eventually you will get what you deserve.

Busy is the death of productivity.

Desire is just fear by another name.

To be honest, speak without identity.

The heart decides, the head rationalizes.

No matter how high your bar is, raise it.

Spend your time doing only what you can uniquely do.

Ideally you want to end up specializing in being you.

No one in the world is going to beat you at being you.