Saying yes to too much “cool” will bury you alive and render you a B-player, even if you have A-player skills.

To develop your edge initially, you learn to set priorities; to maintain your edge, you need to defend against the priorities of others.

Once you reach a decent level of professional success, lack of opportunity won’t kill you. It’s drowning in 7-out-of-10 “cool” commitments that will sink the ship.

I hope you find the strength to say no when it matters most. I’m striving for the same, and only time will tell if I pull it off.

Alternating periods of activity and rest is necessary to survive, let alone thrive. Capacity, interest, and mental endurance all wax and wane. Plan accordingly.

Observe your thoughts, instead of being constantly the victim of your thoughts.

Even if it’s for ten minutes a day so that your not in a reactive mode. It’s really a game changer. Physiologically, it had a lot of effects for me as well. When my cortisol level dropped, I was able to lose body fat more easily in my abdomen, for instance.

It’s like this extended period of calm and ease in decision-making. Uncluttered, like you closed every browser on your computer and shut off the anti-virus, and rebooted the whole thing.

The physiological or psychological effects are so fascinating, like you said, because you’ll do it for a couple of days and you’re like, whatever. Then you hit this sort of inflection point where you just drop from 200 RPMs to 150. You’re like, “Whoa. Okay. This is different”. The whole week, you’re kind of zenned out. 

That non-attachment to an outcome, i.e. controlling my thoughts, was very helpful.

All I did was think about my todo list the entire time, that’s fine, as long as I’m paying attention to my breath.

The more you schedule and practice discomfort deliberately, the less unplanned discomfort will throw off your life and control your life.

Stoicism can help you to become a better, kinder person. In helping you to become less emotionally reactive (e.g., reflexively angry or annoyed), it helps you to better resolve conflict, and teach others to do the same.

The best way to counter-attack a hater is to make it blatantly obvious that their attack has had no impact on you.

To do anything remotely interesting you need to train yourself to be effective at dealing with, responding to, even enjoying criticism.

I’ve certainly stumbled a lot, but that’s how you figure things out.

The first book (4 Hour Work Week) was turned down by 26 publishers.

When everything and everyone is failing, what is the cost of a little experiment outside of the norm? Most often, nothing.

Greatness is setting ambitious goals that your former self would have thought impossible, and trying to get a little better every day.

When — despite your best efforts — you feel like you’re losing at the game of life, remember: Even the best of the best feel this way sometimes.

Pure hell forces action, but anything less can be endured with enough clever rationalization.

Learn from your mistakes until you succeed. It’s that simple.

When I’m in the pit of despair, I recall what iconic writer Kurt Vonnegut said about his process: “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”

Role models who push us to exceed our limits, physical training that removes our spare tires, and risks that expand our sphere of comfortable action are all examples of eustress—stress that is healthful and the stimulus for growth.

With routines, you don’t want your threshold for “success” to be checking 100% of the boxes. Look for 3/5 wins or 2/5 wins. Otherwise, the human inclination is self-sabotage with “Well, I miss A or B, so I failed today,” or “Now today is going to be harder” and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

On how to get over analysis paralysis: set deadlines for decisions (put them in your calendar or they aren’t real) and break large intimidating actions/projects into tiny mini-experiments that allow you to overcome fear of failure.

Sometimes it pays to model the outliers, not flatten them into averages. This isn’t limited to business.

Every time I find myself stressed out, it’s because I do things primarily driven by growth.

I encourage active skepticism – when people are being skeptical because they’re trying to identify the best course of action. They’re trying to identify the next step for themselves or other people.

I discourage passive skepticism, which is the armchair variety where people sit back and criticize without ever subjecting their theories or themselves to real field testing.

Rehearsing the worst case scenarios or negative visualization is a very powerful tool, which paradoxically allows you to become more relaxed and therefore, more response-able, i.e., able to chose your response if you get thrown a curveball question or if you flub and make a mistake in the middle of a live broadcast.

Anyone you have in your mind as an icon is an imperfect, flawed creature, just like all humans on the planet.

My goal is to learn things once and use them forever.

Much like you would train your body, you can train your mind.

To learn is to live. I see no other option. Once the learning curve flattens out, I get bored.

I know nothing. I am a beginner. But I ask a lot of questions.

Focus on an obsession that makes you a bit weird.

Make it fun for you and you will find an audience.

It’s never too late to begin a new chapter, add a surprise twist, or change genres entirely.

Listen to other experiences, and start forming questions that you can journal.

If you sit down in a negative state, you will be thinking first and foremost of problems, and not solutions.

The question, ‘what is the worst thing that can happen?’ is a very powerful question.

If someone’s criticism is completely unfounded on data, then I don’t want to hear it. It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Bloggers are uniquely positioned to create bestsellers.

It has never been easier to create content self-published, but it has never been harder to get the attention you want, or need, to really put something into orbit.

I have built my blog traffic and book buzz using mostly offline activities, and I recommend others do the same.

The top stories all polarize people. Do not try to appeal to everyone. Instead, take a strong stance and polarize people: make some love you and some hate you.

If you make it threaten people’s 3 Bs — behavior, belief, or belongings — you get a huge virus-like dispersion.

Success, however you define it, is achievable if you collect the right field-tested beliefs and habits.

You don’t “succeed” because you have no weaknesses; you succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them.