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familiar patterns in my story that will give you confirmation (or confirmation bias) that your own success wasn’t entirely luck.
I pursued a conscious strategy of managing my opportunities in a way that would make it easier for luck to find me.
If you pick up some ideas in this book and go on to great success, you won’t know exactly what made the difference either.
I prefer to embrace my ignorance and leave it an open question.
I’m getting paid to write this book, and we all know that money distorts truth like a hippo in a thong.
And let’s not forget I’m a stranger to most of you. It’s never a good idea to trust strangers.
Goals are for losers. Your mind isn’t magic. It’s a moist computer you can program. The most important metric to track is your personal energy. Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. Happiness is health plus freedom. Luck can be managed, sort of. Conquer shyness by being a huge phony (in a good way). Fitness is the lever that moves the world. Simplicity transforms ordinary
into amazing.
you need a system for sorting truth from rubbish. Most people think they have perfectly good bullshit detectors. But if that were the case, trial juries would always be unanimous, and we’d all have the same religious beliefs. Realistically, most people have poor filters for sorting truth from fiction, and there’s no objective way to know if you’re particularly good at it or not. Consider the people who routinely disagree with you. See how confident they look while being dead wrong? That’s exactly how you look to them.
When it comes to any big or complicated question, humility is the only sensible point of view. Still, we mortals need to navigate our world as if we understood it. The alternative—acting randomly—would be absurd.
Personal experience (Human perceptions are iffy.) Experience of people you know (Even more unreliable.) Experts (They work for money, not truth.) Scientific studies (Correlation is not causation.) Common sense (A good way to be mistaken with complete confidence.) Pattern recognition (Patterns, coincidence, and personal bias look alike.)
the nearest we can get to truth is consistency.
You’ll ask a smart friend how he or she tackled the same problem. A smart friend can save you loads of time and effort.
The best example of the power of simplicity is capitalism. The central genius of capitalism is that all of its complexities, all of the differences across companies, all of the challenges, decisions, successes, and failures can be boiled down into one number: profits. That simplification allows capitalism to work. The underlying complexity still exists in business, but creating a clear and simple measure of progress makes capitalism possible. No smart investor would buy stock in a company without knowing its past and projected profits.
You can debate the morality of viewing profits as the top priority in business, but you can’t argue that it doesn’t work.
A hammer is good only if you stop pounding after the nail is all the way in. Keep pounding and you break the wood.
You’re the best judge of what works for you, as long as you acquire that wisdom through pattern recognition, trial, and observation.
Sometimes the only real difference between crazy people and artists is that artists write down what they imagine seeing.
Living as a presumptive crazy person was hard work.
Research shows that loneliness damages the body in much the same way as aging.
I learned that loneliness isn’t fixed by listening to other people talk. You can cure your loneliness only by doing the talking yourself and—most important—being heard.
I waited for the applause to stop. And when it did, I waited a little longer, as I had learned. When you stand in front of an audience, your sensation of time is distorted.
over the years I have cultivated a unique relationship with failure. I invite it. I survive it. I appreciate it. And then I mug the shit out of it. Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value. I have a long history of profiting from failure. My cartooning career, for example, is a direct result of failing to succeed in the corporate environment.
He’s in business for the wrong reason.
the best loan customer is one who has no passion whatsoever, just a desire to work hard at something that looks good on a spreadsheet.
You want the grinder, not the guy who loves his job.
My hypothesis is that passionate people are more likely to take big risks in the pursuit of unlikely goals, and so you would expect to see more failures and more huge successes among the passionate. Passionate people who fail don’t get a chance to offer their advice to the rest of us. But successful passionate people are writing books and answering interview questions about their secrets for success every day. Naturally those successful people want you to believe that success is a product of their awesomeness, but they also want to retain some humility. You can’t be humble and say, “I
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It’s easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion.
The ones that didn’t work out—and that would be most of them—slowly drained my passion as they failed. The few that worked became more exciting as they succeeded.
my passion level moved with my success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success.
If you ask a billionaire the secret of his success, he might say it is passion, because that sounds like a sexy answer that is suitably humble. But after a few drinks I think he’d say his success was a combination of desire, luck, hard work, determination, brains, and appetite for risk.
when your energy is right you perform better at everything you do, including school, work, sports, and even your personal life.
Energy is good. Passion is bullshit.
success were easy, everyone would do it. It takes effort.
I’ve long seen failure as a tool, not an outcome.
I do want my failures to make me stronger, of course, but I also want to become smarter, more talented, better networked, healthier, and more energized.
Failure is a resource that can be managed.
Can only manage what you measure - gotta measure failure and analyze it, always
Success is entirely accessible, even if you happen to be a huge screwup 95 percent of the time.
Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas. From that point on, I concentrated on ideas I could execute. I was already failing toward success, but I didn’t yet know it.
look for opportunities in which I had some natural advantage.
I learned a good deal about local advertising, marketing, and product development.
timing is often the biggest component of success.
there is no such thing as useful information that comes from a company’s management.
done my own thing since then, mostly in broad-market, unmanaged funds.
He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was an ongoing process. This makes perfect sense if you do the math. Chances are the best job for you won’t become available at precisely the time you declare yourself ready. Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for the better deal. The better deal has its own schedule. I believe the way he explained it is that your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job.
system was to continually look for better options.
Did the businessman owe his current employer loyalty? Not in his view. The businessman didn’t invent capitalism, and he didn’t create its rules. He simply played within the rules.
The second thing I learned on that flight—or confirmed, really—is that appearance matters. By the end of the flight, the CEO had handed me his card and almost guaranteed me a job at his company if I wanted it. Had I boarded the flight wearing my ratty jeans, threadbare T-shirt, and worn-out sneakers, things would have gone differently.
the people who use systems do better. The systems-driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways.
In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary. That feeling wears on you. In time, it becomes heavy and uncomfortable. It might even drive you out of the game.
