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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.