The 80-hour-per-week, 500 000$-per-year investment banker is less “powerful” than the employed New Rich who works 1/4 the hours for 40 000$, but has complete freedom of when, where, and how to live.

You are the author of your own life, and it’s never too late to replace the stories you tell yourself and the world.

Most of the time, “What should I do with my life?” is a terrible question.

I believe that life exists to be enjoyed, and that the most important thing is to feel good about yourself.

To enjoy life, you don’t need fancy nonsense, but you do need to control your time and realize that most things just aren’t as serious as you make them out to be.

To feel more at peace and more successful, you don’t need genius-level brain power, access to some secret society, or to his a moving target of “just” and additional X dollars. Those are all distractions.

If you make yourself laugh every once in a while, at least you will have fun. And that is perhaps the best strategy of all.

If you want confusion and heartache, ask vague questions. If you want uncommon clarity and results, ask uncommonly clear questions.

Service isn’t limited to saving lives or the environment. It can also improve life. If you are a musician and put a smile on the faces of thousands or millions, I view that as service. If you are a mentor and change the life of one child for the better, the world has been improved.

To dramitically change your life, you don’t need to run a 100-mile race, get a PhD, or completely reinvest yourself. It’s the small things, done consistently, that are the big things.

Does your life have a purpose? Are you contributing anything useful to this world, or just shuffling papers, banging on a keyboard, and coming home to a drunken existence on the weekends?

If we’re serious all the time, we’ll wear out before we get the truly serious stuff done.

This is something that is – being true to oneself – I think that most people struggle with. 

To have an uncommon lifestyle you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decisions, both for yourself and for others.

The tricky thing about life is, on the one hand having the courage to enter into things that are unfamiliar, but also having the wisdom to stop exploring when you’ve found something worth sticking around for. That is true of a place, of a person, of a vocation. Balancing those two things—the courage of exploring and the commitment to staying – and getting the ratio right is very hard. I think my 70-year-old self would say: ‘Be careful that you don’t err on one side or the other, because you have an ill-conceived idea of who you are.

For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect.

If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way.

Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.

It’s far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor.

To the pregnant void of infinite possibilities, only possible with a lack of obligation, or at least, no compulsive reactivity. Perhaps this is only possible with the negative space to – as Kurt Vonnegut put it – “fart around”? To do things for the hell of it? For no damn good reason at all?

You don’t need to go through life huffing and puffing, straining and red-faced. You can get 95% of the results you want by calmly putting one foot in front of the other.

For all their bitching about what’s holding them back, most people have a lot of trouble coming up with the defined dreams they’re being held from.

Often, all that stands between you and what you want is a better set of questions.

A large guaranteed decrease in present quality of life doesn’t justify a large speculative return.

By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable. It’s the perfect example of having your cake and eating it, too.

Once your life shifts from pitching outbound to defending against inbound, however, you have to ruthlessly say “no” as your default. Instead of throwing spears, you’re holding the shield.

The concept of lifestyle design as a replacement for multi-staged career planning is sound.

Mini-retirements are wonderful, but I’m not going to spend my entire life on the sidelines.

The major fears of modern man could be boiled down to two things: too much e-mail and getting fat.

True freedom is much more than having enough income and time to do what you want. 

Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective – doing less – is the path of the productive.

By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable. It’s the perfect example of having your cake and eating it, too.

What you do is infinitely more important that how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but is useless unless applied to the right things.

I think time management as a label encourages people to view each 24-hour period as a slot in which they should pack as much as possible.

People, even good people, will unknowingly abuse your time to the extent that you let them. Set good rules for all involved to minimize back-and-forth and meaningless communication.

Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is not laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.”

There are certain things I will automate, but when it comes to quality control, I want to keep a very close eye.

The great “deloading” phase. This is what I’m experiencing this afternoon, and it makes a Tuesday feel like a lazy Sunday morning. This is when the muse is most likely to visit. I need to get back to the slack.

I miss writing, creating, and working on bigger projects. YES to that means NO to any games of whack-a-mole.

Large, uninterrupted block of time — 3-5 hours minimum — create the space needed to find and connect the dots. And one block per week isn’t enough.

By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable. It’s the perfect example of having your cake and eating it, too.

The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.

Indiscriminate action is a form of laziness.

The first thing I would do for anyone who’s trying to lose body fat, for instance, would be to remove foods from the house that he or she would consume during lapses of self-control.

Ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that symbolizes work ethic, or toughness, or some other virtue—but really, it’s a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect.

In practice, strictly making health #1 has real social and business ramifications. That’s a price I’ve realized I must be fine paying, or I could lose weeks or months to sickness or fatigue.

I would emphasize that by improving your physical machine, which includes the brain, you improve all of your performance, and the transfer is incredible to business.

Nothing breaks my heart more than seeing that person who’s struggling to lose weight who thinks that they need to run 20 miles a week. They have no desire to do it, their knees hurt, they hate it, and they’re not losing weight. And I’d like to say, ‘Well, I’ve got great news for you. You don’t ever need to run another step a day in your life, because there’s no value in that.’ “There is value in exercise, though, and I think that the most important type of exercise, especially in terms of bang for your buck, is going to be really high-intensity, heavy strength training. Strength training aids everything from glucose disposal and metabolic health to mitochondrial density and orthopedic stability. That last one might not mean much when you’re a 30-something young buck, but when you’re in your 70s, that’s the difference between a broken hip and a walk in the park.

Most losses or mistakes are really survivable.

Don’t get angry, don’t get even – focus on living well and that will eat at them more than anything you can do.