Introduction
This book is filled with facts and practical advice on how to build wealth and create happiness in life. This is a very long summary just because there is a lot of useful, good and true information. All tweets are in bold. Here’s a link to the full book: Link to pdf
Building Wealth
Making money is not a thing you do—it’s a skill you learn.
It’s not really about hard work. You can work in a restaurant eighty hours a week, and you’re not going to get rich. Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it. It is much more about understanding than purely hard work. Yes, hard work matters, and you can’t skimp on it. But it has to be directed in the right way.
If you don’t know yet what you should work on, the most important thing is to figure it out. You should not grind at a lot of hard work until you figure out what you should be working on.
The tweets below has all the information and principles about building wealth, so if you absorb these and you work hard over ten years, you’ll get what you want.
- How to Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky):
- Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.
- Understand ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.
- You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity—a piece of a business—to gain your financial freedom.
- You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.
- Pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people.
- The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.
- Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
- Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity.
- Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
- Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.
- Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you.
- Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
- Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.
- When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships, not schools.
- Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.
- Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.
- Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).
- Capital means money. To raise money, apply your specific knowledge with accountability and show resulting good judgment.
- Labor means people working for you. It’s the oldest and most fought-over form of leverage. Labor leverage will impress your parents, but don’t waste your life chasing it.
- Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.
- If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.
- Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment.
- Judgment requires experience but can be built faster by learning foundational skills.
- Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.
- Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.
- Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.
- Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work.
- Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
- There are no get-rich-quick schemes. Those are just someone else getting rich off you.
- Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.
- When you’re finally wealthy, you’ll realize it wasn’t what you were seeking in the first place.
- Summary: Productize Yourself.
If you’re looking toward the long-term goal of getting wealthy, you should ask yourself, “Is this authentic to me? Is it myself that I am projecting?” And then, “Am I productizing it? Am I scaling it? Am I scaling with labor or with capital or with code or with media?”. But this is hard. This is why I say it takes decades—I’m not saying it takes decades to execute, but the better part of a decade may be figuring out what you can uniquely provide.
What’s the difference between wealth and money?
Money is how we transfer wealth. Money is social credits. It is the ability to have credits of other people’s time. If I do my job right, if I create value for society, society says, “Oh, thank you. We owe you something in the future for the work you did in the past. Let’s call that money.”.
Wealth is the thing you want. Wealth is assets (i.e. stocks, real estate, a business) that earn while you sleep.
Society always wants new things. And if you want to be wealthy, you want to figure out which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get but it will want and providing it is natural to you, within your skill set, and within your capabilities. Then, you have to figure out how to scale it because building just one is not enough.
Find and build specific knowledge.
Specific knowledge cannot be taught, but it can be learned.
When I talk about specific knowledge, I mean figure out what you were doing as a kid or teenager almost effortlessly. Something you didn’t even consider a skill, but people around you noticed. The specific knowledge is sort of this weird combination of unique traits from your DNA, your unique upbringing, and your response to it. It’s almost baked into your personality and your identity.
Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion. It’s not by going to school for whatever is the hottest job. Very often, specific knowledge is at the edge of knowledge. It’s also stuff that’s only now being figured out or is really hard to figure out. If you’re not 100 percent into it, somebody else who is 100 percent into it will outperform you. And they won’t just outperform you by a little bit—they’ll outperform you by a lot.
No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.
The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.
You can go on the internet, and you can find your audience. And you can build a business, and create a product, and build wealth, and make people happy just uniquely expressing yourself through the internet. The internet enables any niche interest, as long as you’re the best person at it to scale out. And the great news is because every human is different, everyone is the best at something— being themselves.
You want to escape competition through authenticity. Basically, when you’re competing with people, it’s because you’re copying them. It’s because you’re trying to do the same thing. But every human is different. Don’t copy.
The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn anything you want to learn. It’s much more important today to be able to become an expert in a new field in nine to twelve months than to have studied the “right” thing a long time ago.
You really care about having studied the foundations, so you’re not scared of any book. If you go to the library and there’s a book you cannot understand, you have to dig down and say, “What is the foundation required for me to learn this?” Foundations are super important. Basic arithmetic and numeracy are way more important in life than doing calculus. Similarly, being able to convey yourself simply using ordinary English words is far more important having an extensive vocabulary, or speaking seven different foreign languages.
Foundations are key. It’s much better to be at 9/10 or 10/10 on foundations than to try and get super deep into things. You do need to be deep in something because otherwise you’ll be a mile wide and an inch deep and you won’t get what you want out of life. You can only achieve mastery in one or two things. It’s usually things you’re obsessed about.
Play long-term game with long term people
Compound interest is a very powerful concept. Compound interest applies to more than just compounding capital. Compounding in business relationships is very important. Look at some of the top roles in society, like why someone is a CEO. It’s because people trust them. They are trusted because the relationships they’ve built and the work they’ve done has compounded. They’ve stuck with the business and shown themselves (in a visible and accountable way) to be high integrity people.
Compound interest also happens in your reputation. If you have a sterling reputation and you keep building it for decades upon decades, people will notice. Your reputation will literally end up being thousands or tens of thousands of times more valuable than somebody else who was very talented but is not keeping the compound interest in reputation going.
When you find the right thing to do, when you find the right people to work with, invest deeply. Sticking with it for decades is really how you make the big returns in your relationships and in your money. So, compound interest is very important.
99% of effort is wasted.
Obviously, nothing is ever completely wasted because it’s all a Learning moment. But for example, when you go back to school, 99 percent of the articles and books you read is probably not needed in terms of achieving your goals in life. But you probably learned other important lessons such such as value of hard work or you might have learned something that went deep into your psyche and became a piece of the person you are now.
Another example is all the people you dated until you met your husband or wife. It was wasted time in the goal sense. Not wasted in the exponential sense, not wasted in the learning sense, but definitely wasted in the goal sense.
The reason I say this is not to say that 99 percent of your life is wasted and only 1 percent is useful. I say this because you should be very thoughtful and realize in most things (relationships, work, even in learning) what you’re trying to do is find the thing you can go all-in on to earn compound interest.
When you’re dating, the instant you know this relationship is not going to be the one that leads to marriage, you should probably move on. When you’re studying something, like a history class, and you realize you are never going to use the information, drop the class. It’s a waste of time and energy.
I’m not saying don’t do the 99 percent, because it’s very hard to identify what the 1 percent is. What I’m saying is: when you find the 1 percent of your discipline which will not be wasted, which you’ll be able to invest in for the rest of your life and has meaning to you—go all-in and forget about the rest.
Take on accountability
Embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.
To get rich, you need leverage. Leverage comes in labor, comes in capital, or it can come through code or media. But most of these, like labor and capital, people have to give to you. For labor, somebody has to follow you. For capital, somebody has to give you money and assets. So to get these things, you have to build credibility, and you have to do it under your own name as much as possible, which is risky. So, accountability is a double-edged thing. It allows you to take credit when things go well and the failure when things go badly.
Clear accountability is important. Without accountability, you can’t build credibility. But you take risks. You risk failure. You risk humiliation. You risk failure under your own name.
Realize that in modern society, the downside risk is not that large. Even personal bankruptcy can wipe the debts clean in good ecosystems. Generally, people will forgive failures as long as you were honest and made a high-integrity effort. There’s not really that much to fear in terms of failure, and so people should take on a lot more accountability than they do.
For someone who is early in their career (and maybe even later), the single most important thing about a company is the alumni network you’re going to build. Think about who you will work with and what those people are going on to do.
Build or buy equity in a business and why it’s important
If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path towards financial freedom.
It’s ownership versus wage work. If you are paid for renting out your time, even lawyers and doctors, you can make some money, but you’re not going to make the money that gives you financial freedom. You’re not going to have passive income where a business is earning for you while you are on vacation.
This is probably one of the most important points. People seem to think you can create wealth—make money through work. It’s probably not going to work. There are many reasons for that. Without ownership, your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs. In almost any salaried job, even one paying a lot per hour like a lawyer or a doctor, you’re still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid.
The company you work for are not going to pay you enough. They are going to pay you the bare minimum they have to, to get you to do their job. That can be a high bare minimum, but it’s still not going to be true wealth where you’re retired but still earning.
Owning equity in a company basically means you own the upside. If you don’t own equity in a business, your odds of making money are very slim.
Find a position of leverage
We live in an age of infinite leverage, and the economic rewards for intellectual curiosity have never been higher. Following your intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now. Knowledge only you know or only a small set of people knows is going to come out of your passions and your hobbies.
I only really want to do things for their own sake. That is one definition of art. Whether it’s business, exercise, romance, friendship, whatever, I think the meaning of life is to do things for their own sake. Ironically, when you do things for their own sake, you create your best work.
The less you want something, the less you’re thinking about it, the less you’re obsessing over it, the more you’re going to do it in a natural way. The more you’re going to do it for yourself. The people around you will see the quality of your work is higher.
If someone can train other people how to do something, then they can replace you. If they can replace you, then they don’t have to pay you a lot. You want to know how to do something other people don’t know how to do at the time period when those skills are in demand.
You’re never going to get rich renting out your time.
Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. What you want in life is to be in control of your time. You want to get into a leveraged job where you control your own time and you’re tracked on the outputs. If you have specific knowledge, you have accountability and you have leverage; they have to pay you what you’re worth. Then you get your time back because all you care about is the actual work itself, like you don’t need to do meetings for meetings sake.
Tools and leverage create this disconnection between inputs and outputs. The higher the creativity component of a profession, the more likely it is to have disconnected inputs and outputs. If you’re looking at professions where your inputs and your outputs are highly connected, it’s going to be very hard to create wealth and make wealth for yourself in that process.
If you want to be part of a great tech company, then you need to be able to SELL or BUILD. If you don’t do either, learn.
Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable. Building can for example be development, manufacturing and design. Selling can for example be selling to individual customers, marketing, recruiting and communicating with others.
The one thing you have to avoid is the risk of ruin. Avoiding ruin means stay out of jail. So, don’t do anything illegal. Stay out of total catastrophic loss. I also means to stay out of things that could be physically dangerous or hurt your body. You have to watch your health. Stay out of things that could cause you to lose all of your capital, all of your savings. Don’t gamble everything on one go. Instead, take rationally optimistic bets with big upsides.
There are three classes of leverage
1. Labor – which is other humans working for you. It is the oldest form of leverage, and actually not a great one in the modern world. Managing other people is incredibly messy. It requires tremendous leadership skills.
2. Money – It means every time you make a decision, you multiply it with money. Capital is a trickier form of leverage to use. It’s probably been the dominant form of leverage in the last century. It scales very well. If you get good at managing capital, you can manage more and more capital much more easily than you can manage more and more people.
3. Products with no marginal cost of replication – This includes books, media, movies, and code. Code is probably the most powerful form of permissionless leverage. All you need is a computer—you don’t need anyone’s permission.
This is the new form of leverage. This was only invented in the last few hundred years. It started with the printing press. It accelerated with broadcast media, and now it’s really blown up with the internet and with coding. Now, you can multiply your efforts without involving other humans. This book is a form of leverage. Before, I would have to sit in a lecture hall and lecture each of you personally. I would have maybe reached a few hundred people, and that would have been that.
Probably the most interesting thing to keep in mind about new forms of leverage is they are permissionless. They don’t require somebody else’s permission for you to use them or succeed. This can for example be coding, writing books, recording podcasts, tweeting, YouTubing.
We live in an age of leverage. As a worker, you want to be as leveraged as possible so you have a huge impact without as much time or physical effort. A leveraged worker can out-produce a non-leveraged worker by a factor of one thousand or ten thousand. With a leveraged worker, judgment is far more important than how much time they put in or how hard they work. Inputs don’t match outputs for leveraged workers.
Real estate example with leverage
The worst kind of job is someone who’s doing labor to repair a house. Maybe you get paid fifteen dollars an hour. You go to people’s houses, your boss demands you’re there at 8:00 a.m., and you repair your piece of the house. Here, you have zero leverage and accountability. Your accountability is to your boss, not to the client. You don’t have any real specific knowledge, since what you’re doing is labor lots of people can do.
The next level up might be the general contractor working on the house for the owner. They may be getting paid $50,000 to do the whole project, then they’re paying the labor fifteen dollars an hour and they’re keeping the difference.
A general contractor is obviously a better place to be. But how do we measure it? How do we know it’s better? Well, we know it’s better because this person has some accountability. They’re responsible for the outcome, they have to sweat at night if things aren’t working. Contractors have leverage through laborers working for them. They also have little bit more specific knowledge: how to organize a team, make them show up on time, and how to deal with city regulations.
The next level up might be a real estate developer. A developer is someone who’s going to buy a property, hire a bunch of contractors, and transform it into something higher value. They probably have to take out a loan to buy a house or go to investors to raise money. Instead of $50,000 like the general contractor, or fifteen dollars an hour like the laborer, the developer might be able to make a million dollars or half a million dollars in profit when they sell the house. But now, notice what is required from the developer: a very high level of accountability.
The developer takes on more risk, more accountability, has more leverage, and needs to have more specific knowledge. They need to understand fundraising, city regulations, where the real estate market is headed. It is more difficult.
Prioritize and focus
Value your time at an hourly rate, and ruthlessly spend to save time at that rate. You will never be worth more than you think you’re worth.
No one is going to value you more than you value yourself. You just have to set a very high personal hourly rate and you have to stick to it. Even when I was young, I just decided I was worth a lot more than the market thought I was worth, and I started treating myself that way.
Can you expand on your statement, “If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you”?
If you get into a relative mindset, you’re always going to hate people who do better than you, you’re always going to be jealous of them. When you try and do business with somebody, if you have any bad thoughts or any judgments about them, they will feel it. Humans are wired to feel what the other person deep down inside feels. You have to get out of a relative mindset.
Literally, being anti-wealth will prevent you from becoming wealthy, because you will not have the right mindset for it, you won’t have the right spirit, and you won’t be dealing with people on the right level. Be optimistic, be positive. It’s important. Optimists actually do better in the long run.
Wealth creation is an evolutionarily recent positive-sum game. Status is an old zero-sum game. Those attacking wealth creation are often just seeking status.
There are fundamentally two huge games in life that people play. One is the money game. Because money is not going to solve all of your problems, but it’s going to solve all of your money problems. People realize that, so they want to make money.
The other is the status game. Status is your ranking in the social hierarchy. Status is a zero-sum game. It’s a very old game. We’ve been playing it since monkey tribes. It’s hierarchical. Who’s number one? Who’s number two? Who’s number three? And for number three to move to number two, number two has to move out of that slot. So, status is a zero-sum game.
The problem is, to win at a status game, you have to put somebody else down. That’s why you should avoid status games in your life they make you into an angry, combative person. You’re always fighting to put other people down, to put yourself and the people you like up.
What is the most important thing to do for younger people starting out?
Spend more time making the big decisions. There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.
If you’re going to live in a city for ten years, if you’re going to be in a job for five years, if you’re in a relationship for a decade, you should be spending one to two years deciding these things. These are highly dominating decisions. Those three decisions really matter.
You have to say no to everything and free up your time so you can solve the important problems. Those three are probably the three biggest ones.
Figure out what you’re good at, and start helping other people with it. Give it away. Pay it forward. Karma works because people are consistent. On a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project. But don’t measure—your patience will run out if you count.
Find work that feels like play
I learned how to make money because it was a necessity. After it stopped being a necessity, I stopped caring about it. At least for me, work was a means to an end. Making money was a means to an end.
What you really want is freedom. You want freedom from your money problems, right? I think that’s okay. Once you can solve your money problems, either by lowering your lifestyle or by making enough money, you want to retire.
What is your definition of retirement?
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.
How do you get there?
Well, one way is to have so much money saved that your passive income (without you lifting a finger) covers your burn rate.
A second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero—you become a monk.
A third is you’re doing something you love. You enjoy it so much, it’s not about the money. So there are multiple ways to retirement.
The way to get out of the competition trap is to be authentic, to find the thing you know how to do better than anybody. You know how to do it better because you love it, and no one can compete with you. Then figure out how to map that to what society actually wants. Apply some leverage and put your name on it. You take the risks, but you gain the rewards, have ownership and equity in what you’re doing, and just crank it up.
Money is not the root of all evil; there’s nothing evil about it. But the lust for money is bad. The lust for money is not bad in a social sense. It’s not bad in the sense of “you’re a bad person for lusting for money.” It’s bad for you.
Lusting for money is bad for us because it is a bottomless pit. It will always occupy your mind. If you love money, and you make it, there’s never enough. There is never enough because the desire is turned on and doesn’t turn off at some number. It’s a fallacy to think it turns off at some number.
You make money to solve your money and material problems. I think the best way to stay away from this constant love of money is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money. It’s very easy to keep upgrading your lifestyle as you make money.
Another thing that helps: I value freedom above everything else. All kinds of freedom: freedom to do what I want, freedom from things I don’t want to do, freedom from my own emotions or things that may disturb my peace.
How to get lucky?
- Hope luck finds you.
- Hustle until you stumble into it.
- Prepare the mind and be sensitive to chances others miss.
- Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny. Build your character in a certain way, then your character becomes your destiny.
One of the things I think is important to make money is having a reputation that makes people do deals through you.
If you are a trusted, reliable, high-integrity, long-term-thinking dealmaker, when other people want to do deals but don’t want to do them with strangers, they will literally approach you and give you a cut of the deal just because of the integrity and reputation you’ve built up.
Your character and your reputation are things you can build, which will let you take advantage of opportunities other people may characterize as lucky, but you know it wasn’t luck.
How important is networking?
Trying to build business relationships well in advance of doing business is a complete waste of time. I have a much more comfortable philosophy: “Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.”
And once you’ve met someone, how do you determine if you can trust someone? What signals do you pay attention to?
If someone is talking a lot about how honest they are, they’re probably dishonest. When someone spends too much time talking about their own values or they’re talking themselves up, they’re covering for something.
I believe deep down we all know who we are. You cannot hide anything from yourself. Your own failures are written within your psyche, and they are obvious to you. If you have too many of these moral shortcomings, you will not respect yourself. The worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem. If you don’t love yourself, who will?
I think you just have to be very careful about doing things you are fundamentally not going to be proud of, because they will damage you. The first time someone acts this way, I will warn them. By the way, nobody changes. Then I just distance myself from them. I just have this saying inside my head: “The closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be.”
Be patient
One thing I figured out later in life is generally, great people have great outcomes. You just have to be patient. Every person I met at the beginning of my career twenty years ago, where I looked at them and said, “Wow, that guy or gal is super capable” almost all of them became successful. You just had to give them a long enough timescale. It never happens in the timescale you want, but it does happen. You just need to put in the time.
You have to do hard things create your own meaning in life.
Money buys you freedom in the material world. It’s not going to solve your health problems, it’s not going to make your family great, it’s not going to make you fit, it’s not going to make you calm. But it will solve a lot of external problems. Money will remove a set of things that could get in the way of being happy, but it is not going to make you happy.
Building Judgement
Can you define judgment?
My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment. They’re highly linked; knowing the long-term consequences of your actions and then making the right decision to capitalize on that.
Without hard work, you’ll develop neither judgment nor leverage.
You have to put in the time, but the judgment is more important. The direction you’re heading in matters more than how fast you move, especially with leverage. Picking the direction you’re heading in for every decision is far, far more important than how much force you apply. Just pick the right direction to start walking in, and start walking.
How to think clearly
When explaining something, if someone is using a lot of fancy words, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. I think the smartest people can explain things to a child.
The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level. f you can’t rederive concepts from the basics as you need them, you’re lost. You’re just memorizing.
The number one thing clouding us from being able to see real- ity is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be.
In the moment of suffering—when you’re in pain—is a moment of truth. It is a moment where you’re forced to embrace reality the way it actually is. Then, you can make meaningful change and progress. You can only make progress when you’re starting with the truth.
The hard thing is seeing the truth. To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth. The smaller you can make your ego, the less likely you are to react in a bad way, the less desires you can have about the outcome you want, the easier it will be to see the reality.
It can be difficult to see the truth when we are in the moment of suffering and pain. We wish reality was different. The problem isn’t reality. The problem is their desire is colliding with reality and preventing them from seeing the truth.
It’s only after you’re bored you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time. I encourage taking at least one day a week where you just have time to think.
Shed your identity to see reality
Our egos are constructed in our formative years—our first two decades. They get constructed by our environment, our parents, society. Then, we spend the rest of our life trying to make our ego happy. We interpret anything new through our ego: “How do I change the external world to make it more how I would like it to be?”
You absolutely need habits to function. You cannot solve every problem in life as if it is the first time it’s thrown at you. We accumulate all these habits. We put them in the bundle of identity, ego, ourselves, and then we get attached to them.
It’s really important to be able to uncondition yourself, to be able to take your habits apart and say, “Okay, this is a habit I probably picked up when I was a kid. Now I’ve reinforced it and I call it a part of my identity. Does it still serve me? Does it make me happier? Does it make me healthier? Does it make me accomplish whatever I set out to accomplish?”
Facebook redesigns. Twitter redesigns. Personalities, careers, and teams also need redesigns. There are no permanent solutions in a dynamic system.
Learn the skills of decision making
Radical honesty just means I want to be free. Part of being free means I can say what I think and think what I say. They’re highly congruent and integrated. Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman famously said, “You should never, ever fool anybody, and you are the easiest person to fool.” The moment you tell somebody something dishonest, you’ve lied to yourself. Then you’ll start believing your own lie, which will disconnect you from reality and take you down the wrong road.
I never ask if “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” I think “this is what it is” or “this is what it isn’t.” —Richard Feynman
It’s really important for me to be honest. I don’t go out of my way volunteering negative or nasty things. I would combine radical honesty with an old rule Warren Buffett has, which is praise specifically, criticize generally.
If you have a criticism of someone, then don’t criticize the person—criticize the general approach or criticize the class of activities. If you have to praise somebody, then always try and find the person who is the best example of what you’re praising and praise the person, specifically.
Collect mental models
During decision-making, the brain is a memory prediction machine. A lousy way to do memory prediction is “X happened in the past, therefore X will happen in the future.” It’s too based on specific circumstances. What you want is principles.
Inversion
I don’t believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I try to eliminate what’s not going to work. I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It’s not about having correct judgment. It’s about avoiding incorrect judgments.
Principal-agent problem
It’s a very simple concept. Julius Caesar famously said, “If you want it done, then go. And if not, then send.” What he meant was, if you want it done right, then you have to go yourself and do it. When you are the principal, then you are the owner—you care, and you will do a great job. When you are the agent and you are doing it on somebody else’s behalf, you can do a bad job. You just don’t care. You optimize for yourself rather than for the principal.
If you can’t decide, the answer is no
If you cannot decide, the answer is no. And the reason is, modern society is full of options. We live on a planet of seven billion people, and we are connected to everybody on the internet. There are hundreds of thousands of careers available to you. There are so many choices.
When you choose something, you get locked in for a long time. Starting a business may take ten years. You start a relationship that will be five years or more. You move to a city for ten years. These are very long-lived decisions. It’s very important we only say yes when we are pretty certain. You’re never going to be absolutely certain, but you’re going to be very certain.
Run uphill
If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.
If you have two choices to make, and they’re relatively equal choices, take the path more difficult and more painful in the short term.
What’s actually going on is one of these paths requires short- term pain. And the other path leads to pain further out in the future. And what your brain is doing through conflict- avoidance is trying to push off the short-term pain.
By definition, if the two are even and one has short-term pain, that path has long-term gain associated. With the law of com- pound interest, long-term gain is what you want to go toward.
Your brain is overvaluing the side with the short-term happiness and trying to avoid the one with short-term pain.
So you have to cancel the tendency out by leaning into the pain. As you know, most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term.
Learn to love to read
The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower. We live in the age when every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away. The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that is scarce.
I don’t want to read everything. I just want to read the 100 great books over and over again. It’s really about identifying the great books for you because different books speak to different people.
Reading a book isn’t a race—the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed.
When you read a book you might not remember everything but what happens is that you subconsciously remembers it. At some deep level, you absorb them, and they become threads in psyche. They kind of weave in there.
I probably read one to two hours a day. That puts me in the top .00001 percent. I think that alone accounts for any material success I’ve had in my life and any intelligence I might have. Real people don’t read an hour a day. Real people, I think, read a minute a day or less. Making reading an actual habit is the most important thing.
Learning Happiness
A calm mind, a fit body, valuable skills and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought. They must be earned.
Maybe happiness is not something you inherit or even choose, but a highly personal skill that can be learned, like fitness or nutrition.
What is happiness? The answer that works for me is going to be nonsense to you, and vice versa. Whatever happiness means to me, it means something different to you. I think it’s very important to explore what these definitions are.
I believe happiness is really a default state. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.
We are highly judgmental survival-and-replication machines. We constantly walk around thinking, “I need this,” or “I need that,” trapped in the web of desires. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something.
People mistakenly believe happiness is just about positive thoughts and positive actions. But every positive thought holds within it a negative thought. If I say I’m happy, that means I was sad at some point. If I say he’s attractive, then somebody else is unattractive.
To me happiness is about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things. The fewer desires I can have, the more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving, because the mind really exists in motion toward the future or the past. The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be.
If I latch onto a feeling, if I say, “Oh, I’m happy now,” and I want to stay happy, then I’m going to drop out of that happiness. Now, suddenly, the mind is moving. It’s trying to attach to something. It’s trying to create a permanent situation out of a temporary situation.
Happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not think- ing too much about the future or the past, really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is, and the way it is.
Thing happen and we have experiences in our life. How you choose to interpret them is up to you. You have that choice. This is what I mean when I say happiness is a choice. If you believe it’s a choice, you can start working on it.
We think of ourselves as fixed and the world as malleable, but it’s really we who are malleable and the world is largely fixed.
Happiness is a choice
Happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop.
The mind is just as malleable as the body. We spend so much time and effort trying to change the external world, other people, and our own bodies—all while accepting ourselves the way we were programmed in our youths. We accept the voice in our head as the source of all truth.
Happiness requires presence
At any given time, when you’re walking down the streets, a very small percentage of your brain is focused on the present. The rest is planning the future or regretting the past. It’s keeping you from seeing the beauty in everything and for being grateful for where you are. You can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all of your time living in delusions of the future.
We crave experiences that will make us be present, but the cravings themselves take us from the present moment.
Happiness requires peace
Are happiness and purpose interconnected?
For me these days, happiness is more about peace than it is about joy. I don’t think peace and purpose go together.
If it’s your internal purpose, the thing you most want to do, then sure, you’ll be happy doing it. But an externally inflicted purpose, like “society wants me to do X,” “I am the first son so I should do Y”, I don’t think it will make you happy.
I think a lot of us have this low-level pervasive feeling of anxiety. If you pay attention to your mind, sometimes you’re just running around and you notice your mind is chattering about something. There’s this “nexting” thing where you’re sitting in one spot thinking about where you should be next.
It’s always the next thing, then the next thing, the next thing after that, then the next thing after that creating this pervasive anxiety.
It’s most obvious if you ever just sit down and try and do nothing. I mean literally just sit down and do nothing. You can’t do it, because there’s anxiety always trying to make you get up and go, get up and go, get up and go. I think it’s important just being aware the anxiety is making you unhappy.
How I combat anxiety: I don’t try and fight it, I just notice I’m anxious because of all these thoughts. I try to figure out, “Would I rather be having this thought right now, or would I rather have my peace?” Because as long as I have my thoughts, I can’t have my peace.
Every desire is a chosen unhappiness
I think the most common mistake for humanity is believing you’re going to be made happy because of some external circumstance. I know that’s not original. That’s not new.
We bought a new car. Now, I’m waiting for the new car to arrive. Every night I’m on the forums reading about the car. Why? It’s just a car. It’s not going to change my life much or at all. I know the instant the car arrives I won’t care about it anymore. The thing is, I’m addicted to the desiring. I’m addicted to the idea of this external thing bringing me some kind of happiness and joy, and this is completely delusional.
The idea you’re going to change something in the outside world, and that is going to bring you the peace, everlasting joy and happiness, is a fundamental delusion we all suffer from. The mistake is to say, “Oh, I’ll be happy when I get that thing,”. That is the fundamental mistake we all make, 24/7, all day long.
The fundamental delusion: There is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever.
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. I don’t think most of us realize that’s what it is. I think we go about desiring things all day long and then wonder why we’re unhappy. I like to stay aware of it, because then I can choose my desires very carefully. I try not to have more than one big desire in my life at any given time.
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
When you’re young and healthy, you can do more. By doing more, you’re actually taking on more and more desires. You don’t realize this is slowly destroying your happiness.
When you’re young, you have time. You have health, but you have no money. When you’re middle-aged, you have money and you have health, but you have no time. When you’re old, you have money and you have time, but you have no health. So the trifecta is trying to get all three at once.
By the time people realize they have enough money, they’ve lost their time and their health.
Success does not earn happiness
Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose.
This led me to the conclusion that happiness is internal. That conclusion set me on a path of working more on my internal self and realizing all real success is internal and has very little to do with external circumstances.
The problem with getting good at a game, especially one with big rewards, is you continue playing it long after you should have outgrown it.
To me, the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don’t even play the game, who rise above it. Those are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness, they need nothing from anybody else.
I think of happiness as an emergent property of peace. If you’re peaceful inside and out, that will eventually result in happiness. But peace is a very hard thing to come by. The irony is the way most of us try to find peace is through war. When you start a business, in a way, you’re going to war. When you argue who should clean the dishes, you’re going to war. You’re struggling so you can have some sense of security and peace later.
Today, the way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems. But there are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up this idea of problems.
Jealousy is the enemy of happiness
The enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people.
Jealousy was a very hard emotion for me to overcome. When I was young, I had a lot of jealousy. By and by, I learned to get rid of it. It still crops up every now and then. It’s such a poisonous emotion because, at the end of the day, you’re no better off with jealousy. You’re unhappier, and the person you’re jealous of is still successful or good-looking or whatever they are.
One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say I want his body or I want his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their outlook on life? If you’re not willing to do a 100 percent swap with that person, then there is no point in being jealous.
Once I came to that realization, jealousy faded away because I don’t want to be anybody else. I’m perfectly happy being me. By the way, even that is under my control. To be happy being me. It’s just there are no social rewards for it.
Happiness is built by habits
My most surprising discovery in the last five years is that peace and happiness are skills. You can increase your happiness over time, and it starts with believing you can do it.
When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you. When playing, surround yourself with people happier than you.
What type of skill is happiness?
It’s all trial and error. You just see what works. A good idea is to build good habits. Not drinking alcohol and eating suger will keep your mood more stable. Not going on Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter will keep your mood more stable. Playing video games will make you happier in the short run but in the long run, it could ruin your happiness. You’re being fed dopamine and having dopamine withdrawn from you in these little uncontrollable ways.
The difference between people who get happier as they get older and people who don’t can be explained by their habits. Are they habits that will increase your long-term happiness rather than your short-term happiness? Are you surrounding yourself with people who are generally positive and upbeat people? Are those relationships low- maintenance? Do you admire and respect but not envy them?
The first rule of handling conflict is: Don’t hang around people who constantly engage in conflict. I’m not interested in anything unsustainable or even hard to sustain, including difficult relationships.
The most important trick to being happy is to realize happiness is a skill you develop and a choice you make. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. You decide it’s important to you. You prioritize it. You read everything on the topic.
Happiness habits
The obvious one is meditation.
Just being very aware in every moment. I used to get annoyed about things. Now I always look for the positive side of it. It used to take a rational effort. It used to take a few seconds for me to come up with a positive. Now I can do it sub-second.
Every time you catch yourself desiring something, say, “Is it so important to me I’ll be unhappy unless this goes my way?” You’re going to find with the vast majority of things it’s just not true.
I think working out every day made me happier. If you have peace of body, it’s easier to have peace of mind.
The more you judge, the more you separate yourself. You’ll feel good for an instant, because you feel good about yourself, thinking you’re better than someone. Later, you’re going to feel lonely. Then, you see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you.
Tell your friends you’re a happy person. Then, you’ll be forced to conform to it. You’ll have a consistency bias. You have to live up to it. Your friends will expect you to be a happy person.
The more secrets you have, the less happy you’re going to be.
No exceptions—all screen activities linked to less happiness, all non-screen activities linked to more happiness.
A personal metric: how much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of interest?
Find happiness in acceptance
In any situation in life, you always have three choices: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it.
If you want to change it, then it is a desire. It will cause you suffering until you successfully change it. So don’t pick too many of those. Pick one big desire in your life at any given time to give yourself purpose and motivation.
What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you could leave it but not leaving it and not accepting it. That struggle is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: “accept.”
What does acceptance look like to you?
It’s to be okay whatever the outcome is. We don’t always get what we want, but sometimes what is hap- pening is for the best. The sooner you can accept it as a reality, the sooner you can adapt to it.
Achieving acceptance is very difficult. I have a couple of hacks I try, but I wouldn’t say they are totally successful.
One hack is stepping back and looking at previous bits of suffering I’ve had in my life. It can be “Last time you broke up with somebody, last time you had a business failure, last time you had a health issue, what happened?” And then look for what you learned and how you grew from it.
I have another hack I use for minor annoyances. When they happen, a part of me will instantly react negatively. But I’ve learned to mentally ask myself, “What is the positive of this situation?”
For example “I’ll be late for a meeting. But what is the benefit to me? I get to relax and be outside more for a moment. I’ll also spend less time in that boring meeting.” There’s almost always something positive.
Saving Yourself
Doctors won’t make you healthy. Teachers won’t make you smart. Trainers won’t make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself.
A lot of what goes on today is what many of you are doing right now—beating yourself up and scribbling notes and saying, “I need to do this, and I need to do that, and I need to do…” No, you don’t need to do anything. Instead just be you.
No one in the world is going to beat you at being you. Certainly, listen to other people, but don’t try to emulate. It’s a fool’s errand. Instead, each person is uniquely qualified at something. They have some specific knowledge, capability, and desire nobody else in the world does.
If you have nothing in your life, but you have at least one person that loves you unconditionally, it’ll do wonders for your self-esteem.
Choosing to care for yourself
Nothing like a health problem to turn up the contrast dial for the rest of life.
My number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health. It starts with my physical health. Second, it’s my mental health. Then, it’s my family’s wellbeing. After that, I can go out and do whatever I want to do.
Most fit and healthy people focus much more on what they eat than how much. Quality control is easier and leads to quantity control.
World’s simplest diet: The more processed the food, the less one should consume.
Whenever you suggest good habit at somebody, they’ll have an excuse for themselves. Usually the most common is “I don’t have time.” “I don’t have time” is just another way of saying “It’s not a priority.” What you really have to do is say whether it is a priority or not. If something is your number one priority, then you will do it. That’s just the way life works. If you’ve got a fuzzy basket of ten or fifteen different priorities, you’re going to end up getting none of them.
Like everything in life, if you are willing to make the short-term sacrifice, you’ll have the long-term benefit. My physical trainer always says, “Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.”
Meditation and mental strength
I learned a very important lesson from this: most of our suffering comes from avoidance. Most of the suffering from a cold shower is the tip-toeing your way in. Once you’re in, you’re in. It’s not suffering. It’s just cold. Your body saying it’s cold is different than your mind saying it’s cold. Acknowledge your body saying it’s cold. Look at it. Deal with it. Accept it, but don’t mentally suffer over it. Taking a cold shower for two minutes isn’t going to kill you
Do you have a current meditation practice?
The one I found works best for me is called Nonjudgmental Awareness. When out walking you don’t make any decisions. You don’t judge anything. You just accept everything. If I do that for ten or fifteen minutes while walking around, I end up in a very peaceful, grateful state.
If I saw a guy with a bad hair day, I would at first think “Haha, he has a bad hair day.” Well, why am I laughing at him to make me feel better about myself? Because I’m losing my hair, and I’m afraid it’s going to go away. What I find is 90 percent of thoughts I have are fear-based. The other 10 percent may be desire-based.
As you watch your thoughts, you realize how many of them are fear-based. The moment you recognize a fear, without even trying it goes away. After a while, your mind quiets.
Another method I’ve learned is to just sit there and you close your eyes. For your entire life, things have been happening to you. Some good, some bad, most of which you have processed and dissolved, but a few stuck with you. Over time, more and more stuck with you and these things might influence you in a negative way.
So how to deal with these things? What happens in meditation is you’re sitting there and not resisting your mind. These things will start bubbling up. It’s like a giant inbox of unanswered emails, going back to your childhood. They will come out one by one, and you will be forced to deal with them. I recommend meditating for one hour.
You will be forced to resolve them. Resolving them doesn’t take any work—you just observe them. Now you’re an adult with some distance, time, and space from previous events, and you can just resolve them. You can be much more objective about how you view them.
Over time, you will resolve a lot of these deep unresolved things you have in your mind. Once they’re resolved, there will come a day when you sit down to meditate, and you’ll hit a mental “inbox zero.” When you open your mental “email” and there are none, that is a pretty amazing feeling. It’s a state of joy and peace. Once you have it, you don’t want to give it up.
Meditation isn’t hard. All you have to do is sit there and do nothing. Just sit down. Close your eyes and say, “I’m just going to give myself a break from life. I’m not going to do anything now.
If thoughts come, thoughts come. I’m not going to fight them. I’m not going to embrace them. I’m not going to think harder about them. I’m not going to reject them. I’m just going to sit here for an hour with my eyes closed, and I’m going to do nothing.” How hard is that? What’s so hard about giving yourself an hour-long break?
The advantage of meditation is recognizing just how out of control your mind is. It’s completely uncontrollable. You have to see this mad creature in operation before you feel a certain distaste toward it and start separating yourself from it. In that separation is liberation. You realize, “Oh, I don’t want to be that person. Why am I so out of control?” Awareness alone calms you down.
Another problem is “future-fantasy planning”. During these moments we should catch ourselves and ask ourselves if we need to do this now or is it better to be in the present moment. Ninety-five percent of what my brain runs off and tries to do, I don’t need to tackle in that exact moment. If the brain is like a muscle, I’ll be better off resting it, being at peace. When a particular problem arises, I’ll immerse myself in it.
We live too much in this internal monologue in our heads. All of which is just programmed into you by society and by the environment when you were younger.
What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made in your life and how did you recover?
Life is going to play out the way it’s going to play out. There will be some good and some bad. Most of it is actually just up to your interpretation. How you choose to interpret those experiences is up to you, and different people interpret them in different ways.
Really, I wish I had done all of the same things, but with less emotion and less anger. I would have realized the anger and emotions are a completely unnecessary consequence. Now, I’m trying to learn from that and do the same things I think are the right things to do but without anger and with a very long-term point of view. If you take a very long-term point of view and take the emotion out of it, I wouldn’t consider those things mistakes anymore.
To have peace of mind, you have to have peace of body first.
Whenever we say we’re going to try to do something or try to form a habit, we’re wimping out. We’re just saying to ourselves, “I’m going to buy myself some more time.” The reality is when our emotions want us to do something, we just do it. If you want to go approach a pretty girl, if you want to have a drink, if you really desire something, you just go do it.
When you say, “I’m going to do this,” and “I’m going to be that,” you’re really putting it off. You’re giving yourself an out. At least if you’re self-aware, you can think, “‘I say I want to do this, but I don’t really because if I really wanted to do it, I would just do it.”
Commit externally to enough people. For example, if you want to quit smoking, all you have to do is go to everybody you know and say, “I quit smoking. I did it. I give you my word.”
Impatience with actions, patience with results.
Anything you have to do, just get it done. Why wait? You’re not getting any younger. Your life is slipping away. You don’t want to spend it waiting in line.
When you do them, you want to do them as quickly as you can while doing them well with your full attention. But then, you just have to be patient with the results because you’re dealing with complex systems and people.
If there’s something you want to do later, do it now. There is no “later.”
If you had to pass down to your kids one or two principles, what would they be?
Number one: read. Learn to love to read. Just read for its own sake.
Next is persuasion and mathematics. Having the skill of persuasion is important because if you can influence your fellow human beings, you can get a lot done. I think persuasion is an actual skill. So you can learn it, and it’s not that hard to do so.
Mathematics helps with all the complex and difficult things in life. If you want to make money, if you want to do sci- ence, if you want to understand game theory or politics or economics or investments or computers, all of these things have mathematics at the core. It’s a foundational language of nature. You just have to know basic statistics, arithmetic, etc. You should know statistics and probability forwards and backwards and inside out.
Choosing to free yourself
Be aware there are no “adults.” Everyone makes it up as they go along. You have to find your own path, picking, choosing, and discarding as you see fit. Figure it out yourself, and do it.
How have your values changed?
When I was younger, I really, really valued freedom. Freedom was one of my core values. Ironically, it still is. It’s probably one of my top three values, but it’s now a different definition of freedom.
My old definition was “freedom to.” Freedom to do anything I want. Now, the freedom I’m looking for is internal freedom. It’s “freedom from.” Freedom from reaction. Freedom from feeling angry. Freedom from being forced to do things. I’m looking for “freedom from,” internally and externally, whereas before I was looking for “freedom to.”
Freedom from expectations
If you hurt other people because they have expectations of you, that’s their problem. If they have an agreement with you, it’s your problem. But, if they have an expectation of you, that’s completely their problem. It has nothing to do with you.
Value your time. It is all you have. Do not waste your time. This doesn’t mean you can’t relax. As long as you’re doing what you want, it’s not a waste of your time. But if you’re not spend- ing your time doing what you want, and you’re not earning, and you’re not learning—what the heck are you doing?
Don’t spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It’s not your problem. If you are happy, it makes other people happy. If you’re happy, other people will ask you how you became happy and they might learn from it, but you are not responsible for making other people happy.
Freedom from anger
What is anger? Anger is a way to signal as strongly as you can to the other party you’re capable of violence. Anger is a precursor to violence.
Observe when you’re angry—anger is a loss of control over the situation. Anger is a contract you make with yourself to be in physical and mental and emotional turmoil until reality changes.
Freedom from employment
People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t understand.
A taste of freedom can make you unemployable.
A big habit I’m working on is trying to turn off my “monkey mind.” When we’re children, we’re pretty blank slates. We live very much in the moment. We live in what I would call the “real world.” Puberty is the onset of desire—the first time you really, really want something and you start long-range planning. You start thinking a lot, building an identity and an ego to get what you want.
If you walk down the street and there are a thousand people in the street, all thousand are talking to themselves in their head at any given point. They’re constantly judging everything they see. They’re playing back movies of things that happened to them yesterday. They’re living in fantasy worlds of what’s going to happen tomorrow. They’re just pulled out of base reality. That can be good when you do long-range planning. It can be good when you solve problems.
I think it’s actually very bad for your happiness. To me, the mind should be a servant and a tool, not a master. My monkey mind should not control and drive me 24/7.
The meaning of life
What is the meaning and purpose of life?
Answer 1: It’s personal. You have to find your own meaning. Any piece of wisdom anybody else gives you, whether it’s Buddha or me, is going to sound like nonsense. You just have to sit there and dig with the question. It might take you years or decades. When you find an answer you’re happy with, it will be fundamental to your life.
Answer 2: There is no meaning to life. There is no purpose to life. Osho said, “It’s like writing on water or building houses of sand.” The reality is you’ve been dead for the history of the Universe, 10 billion years or more. You will be dead for the next 70 billion years or so, until the heat death of the Universe. Anything you do will fade. It will disappear, just like the human race will disappear and the planet will disappear. No one is going to remember you past a certain number of generation.
There is no fundamental, intrinsic purposeful meaning to the Universe. If there was, then you would just ask the next question. You’d say, “Why is that the meaning?”. There is no answer you could give that wouldn’t have another “why.”
Live by your values
Honesty is a core value. By honesty, I mean I want to be able to just be me. I never want to be in an environment or around people where I have to watch what I say. I’m no longer in the moment if Im not being honest because now I have to be future-planning or past-regretting every time I talk to somebody.
Another example of a foundational value: I don’t believe in any short-term thinking or dealing. If I’m doing business with somebody and they think in a short-term manner with somebody else, then I don’t want to do business with them anymore. All benefits in life come from compound interest, whether in money, relationships, love, health, activities, or habits.
Another one is I only believe in peer relationships. I don’t believe in hierarchical relationships. I don’t want to be above anybody, and I don’t want to be below anybody. If I can’t treat someone like a peer and if they can’t treat me like peer, I just don’t want to interact with them.
I think everybody has values. Much of finding great relationships or great coworkers is finding other people where your values line up. If your values line up, the little things don’t matter. Generally, I find if people are fighting or quarrelling about something, it’s because their values don’t line up. If their values lined up, the little things wouldn’t matter.
How do you define wisdom?
Understanding the long-term consequences of your actions.
Inspiration is perishable—act on it immediately.
