Organization is the enemy of innovation.

Solve via iteration. Then get paid via repetition.

Partner with rational optimists.

Give society what it doesn’t how how to get.

In well-functioning teams, each individual has high accountability for their part.

In an older society with few resources and mechanical work, the scheduled life is the most productive. In a modern society with permissionless leverage and creative work, the unscheduled life is the most productive.

You’re never going to be the best in the world at anything unless it’s something that you just absolutely love to do.

Meetings should really be phone calls, phone call should be emails, and phone calls should just be texts.

Be present. Be meditative. Form real friendships. Stay away from business networking events or friendships where there is always an underlying business angle.

Surround yourself with the best people possible. If there’s someone greater out there to work with, go work with them.

Forty hour workweeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes — train and sprint, then rest and reassess.

Generally, most people will make the mistake of paying too much attention to the competition and being too much like the competition and not being authentic enough.

A small band of deeply committed believers will spread a story better than a horde of the lightly committed. True for religion, reputation, brand, currency, politics.

At heart I’m an entrepreneur and any day in which I solve the same problem twice in a row, I’m pretty unhappy. So by definition, I like to do something different every day. I think all humans are sort of meant to do that kind of thing.

Any meeting with eight people sitting around at a conference table, nothing is getting done in that meeting. You are literally just dying one hour at a time.

At the end of the day, we’re all founders. We’re all meant to work for ourselves. We’re not meant to go to nine to five jobs and be told what to do over and over.

Unnecessary meetings (and most are) are a mutually-assured-destruction of time. Learning how to avoid them is a prerequisite of doing anything great.

Networking is overrated. Become first and foremost a person of value and the network will be available whenever you need it.

It’s only after you’re bored that you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time.

A lot of people think you can go to school and you can study for how to make money, but the reality is, there’s no skill called “business”.

The best founders I’ve found are the ones who are very long-term thinkers. Even decisions that maybe they shouldn’t care that much about early on, they fix it because they are not building a house, they’re putting bricks in the foundation of the skyscraper, at least in their minds.

My number one predictor of whether or not a company will find product-market fit: High shipping cadence.

Keep an incredibly high bar for who you work with.

Behind every successful entrepreneur is a former failed self.

On the Internet, a single individual can accomplish anything.

The human brain is not designed to absorb all of the world’s breaking news and 24/7 emergencies, injected straight into the skull with clickbait headlines. If you pay attention to that stuff, even if you have a sound mind and body, it will eventually drive you insane.

I think long-term, Bitcoin is a currency of the Internet. So, even if humans don’t use it, routers will use it. Web browsers will use it. Web servers will use it.

Think of Bitcoin as a bank account in the cloud, and it’s completely decentralized: not the Swiss government, not the American government. It’s all the participants in the network enforcing.

I think of Twitter as the place where I go to have a great conversation when I can’t have one locally, which seems to be all the time, and the more time that I spend on Twitter, the more I sort of curate this incredible group of very intelligent people that I just get to know purely through the quality of their thoughts.

Creativity is the last frontier. Automation over a long enough period of time will replace every non-creative job. That’s great news. That means that all of our basic needs are taken of, and what remains for us is to be creative, which is really what every human wants.

Perhaps this time is different, automation will permanently destroy jobs, and humanity is incapable of relearning and doing creative work. Perhaps it’s time to drop the tyranny of low expections, and new tools will liberate individuals from a lifetime of drudgery, as they always have.

I think long-term and on a long enough time scale, maybe it’s 50 years from now or maybe it’s 500 years from now, almost everybody on this planet will work for themselves.

Technology is the application of knowledge to control the natural world. It’s the greatest driver of both human prosperity and our capacity for self-annihilation.

Social media has degenerated into a deafening cacophony of groups signaling and repeating their shared myths.

Ubiquitous streaming cameras with remote storage will eventually end almost all physical criminal activities.

The pace of technological change is accelerating so much that I think we do have the reach for all humans to live a life of abundance in our grasp.

Humans aren’t evolved to worry about everything happening outside of their immediate environment.

You are engaging in envy, dispute, and resentment, comparison, jealousy, anger, about things that frankly just don’t matter.

You are essentially playing a game that’s created by the creators of those systems, and yes, it can be a useful game once in a blue moon.

Things like Twitter and Facebook are not making you happy. They are making you unhappy.

The modern world is a gift. It gives us tools and choices, but we need the self-discipline and wisdom to choose wisely.

Technology is not only the thing that moves the human race forward, but it’s the only thing that ever has. Without technology, we’re just monkeys playing in the dirt.

In the digital world, the upside is so large that there’s almost no such thing as risk.

Building technology means you don’t have to choose between practicing science, commerce, and art.

Notifications are just alarm clocks that someone else is setting for you.

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

You won’t get rich renting out your time.

Escape competition through authenticity.

Money will solve all your money problems but it doesn’t get you everywhere.

You just realize as you get older that it matters less and less and less.