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The oceans are our world’s greatest asset, covering 72 percent of its surface and comprising 99 percent of its livable space.
A disengaged student is one who attends school but doesn’t engage in doing the work. A disconnected student is one who doesn’t attend school and the system has lost track of.
I realized that the satisfaction of success doesn’t come from achieving your goals, but from struggling well. To understand what I mean, imagine your greatest goal, whatever it is—making a ton of money, winning an Academy Award, running a great organization, being great at a sport. Now imagine instantaneously achieving it. You’d be happy at first, but not for long. You would soon find yourself needing something else to struggle for. Just look at people who attain their dreams early—the child star, the lottery winner, the professional athlete who peaks early. They typically don’t end up happy
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The marginal benefits of having more fall off pretty quickly. In fact, having a lot more is worse than having a moderate amount more because it comes with heavy burdens.
I believe that everything that happens comes about because of cause-effect relationships that repeat and evolve over time.
Look to the patterns of those things that affect you in order to understand the cause-effect relationships that drive them and to learn principles for dealing with them effectively.
There is nothing more important than understanding how reality works and how to deal with it. The state of mind you bring to this process makes all the difference. I have found it helpful to think of my life as if it were a game in which each problem I face is a puzzle I need to solve. By solving the puzzle, I get a gem in the form of a principle that helps me avoid the same sort of problem in the future. Collecting these gems continually improves my decision making, so I am able to ascend to higher and higher levels of play in which the game gets harder and the stakes become ever greater.
All sorts of emotions come to me while I am playing and those emotions can either help me or hurt me. If I can reconcile my emotions with my logic and only act when they are aligned, I make better decisions.
Learning how reality works, visualizing the things I want to create, and then building them out is incredibly exciting to me. Stretching for big goals puts me in the position of failing and needing to learn and come up with new inventions in order to move forward. I find it exhilarating being caught up in the feedback loop of rapid learning—just as a surfer loves riding a wave, even though it sometimes leads to crashes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still scared of the crashes and I still find them painful. But I keep that pain in perspective, knowing that I will get through these setbacks and that
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My point is that people who create great things aren’t idle dreamers: They are totally grounded in reality. Being hyperrealistic will help you choose your dreams wisely and then achieve them. I have found the following to be almost always true:
a. Dreams + Reality + Determination = A Successful Life. People who achieve success and drive progress deeply understand the cause-effect relationships that govern reality and have principles for using them to get what they want.
The converse is also true: Idealists who are not well grounded in reality create...
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Some people want to change the world and others want to operate in simple harmony with it and savor life. Neither is better. Each of us needs to decide what we value most and choose the paths we take to achieve it.
I wanted crazy amounts of each, was thrilled to work hard to get as much of them as possible, and found that they could largely be one and the same and mutually reinforcing.
1.2 Truth—or, more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality—is the essential foundation for any good outcome.
1.3 Be radically open-minded and radically transparent.
Radical open-mindedness and radical transparency are invaluable for rapid learning and effective change. Learning is the product of a continuous real-time feedback loop in which we make decisions, see their outcomes, and improve our understanding of reality as a result. Being radically open-minded enhances the efficiency of those feedback loops, because it makes what you are doing, and why, so clear to yourself and others that there can’t be any misunderstandings. The more open-minded you are, the less likely you are to deceive yourself—and the more likely it is that others will give you
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Being radically transparent and radically open-minded accelerates this learning process. It can also be difficult because being radically transparent rather than more guarded exposes one to criticism. It’s natural to fear that. Yet if you don’t put yourself out there with your radical transparency, you won’t learn.
Learning to be radically transparent is like learning to speak in public: While it’s initially awkward, the more you do it, the more comfortable you will be with it.
Imagine how many fewer misunderstandings we would have and how much more efficient the world would be—and how much closer we all would be to knowing what’s true—if instead of hiding what they think, people shared it openly.
nature optimizes for the whole, not for the individual, but most people judge good and bad based only on how it affects them.
Most people call something bad if it is bad for them or bad for those they empathize with, ignoring the greater good. This tendency extends to groups: One religion will consider its beliefs good and another religion’s beliefs bad to such an extent that their members might kill each other in the mutual conviction that each is doing what’s right.
Typically, people’s conflicting beliefs or conflicting interests make them unable to see things through another’s eyes.
Evolution is the single greatest force in the universe; it is the only thing that is permanent and it drives everything.18 Everything from the smallest subatomic particle to the entire galaxy is evolving. While everything apparently dies or disappears in time, the truth is that it all just gets reconfigured in evolving forms. Remember that energy can’t be destroyed—it can only be reconfigured. So the same stuff is continuously falling apart and coalescing in different forms. The force behind that is evolution.
From this perspective, we can see that perfection doesn’t exist; it is a goal that fuels a never-ending process of adaptation.
Evolving is life’s greatest accomplishment and its greatest reward.
But we do know that what we call mankind was simply the result of DNA evolving into a new form about two hundred thousand years ago, and we know that mankind will certainly either go extinct or evolve into a higher state. I personally believe there is a good chance man will begin to evolve at an accelerating pace with the help of man-made technologies that can analyze vast amounts of data and “think” faster and better than we can.
Earth is just one of about 100 billion planets in our galaxy,
which is just one of about two trillion galaxies in the universe.
Though most people think that they are striving to get the things (toys, bigger houses, money, status, etc.) that will make them happy, for most people those things don’t supply anywhere near the long-term satisfaction that getting better at something does.
This means that for most people success is struggling and evolving as effectively as possible, i.e., learning rapidly about oneself and one’s environment, and then changing to improve.
It is natural that it should be this way because of the law of diminishing returns.
It is a fundamental law of nature that in order to gain strength one has to push one’s limits, which is painful.
There is no avoiding pain, especially if you’re going after ambitious goals. Believe it or not, you are lucky to feel that kind of pain if you approach it correctly, because it is a signal that you need to find solutions so you can progress.
Most people have a tough time reflecting when they are in pain and they pay attention to other things when the pain passes, so they miss out on the reflections that provide the lessons.
(I created a Pain Button app to help people do this, which I describe in the appendix.)
If you choose to push through this often painful process of personal evolution, you will naturally “ascend” to higher and higher levels. As you climb above the blizzard of things that surrounds you, you will realize that they seem bigger than they really are when you are seeing them up close; that most things in life are just “another one of those.” The higher you ascend, the more effective you become at working with reality to shape outcomes toward your goals. What once seemed impossibly complex becomes simple.
Every time you confront something painful, you are at a potentially important juncture in your life—you have the opportunity to choose healthy and painful truth or unhealthy but comfortable delusion.
By “getting to the other side,” I mean that you will become hooked on: • Identifying, accepting, and learning how to deal with your weaknesses, • Preferring that the people around you be honest with you rather than keep their negative thoughts about you to themselves, and • Being yourself rather than having to pretend to be strong where you are weak.
This evolutionary process of productive adaptation and ascent—the process of seeking, obtaining, and pursuing more and more ambitious goals—does not just pertain to how individuals and society move forward.
The quality of your life will depend on the choices you make at those painful moments. The faster one appropriately adapts, the better.
1.8 Weigh second- and third-order consequences.
By recognizing the higher-level consequences nature optimizes for, I’ve come to see that people who overweigh the first-order consequences of their decisions and ignore the effects of second- and subsequent-order consequences rarely reach their goals.
1.9 Own your outcomes.
Psychologists call this having an “internal locus of control,” and studies consistently show that people who have it outperform those who don’t. So don’t worry about whether you like your situation or not. Life doesn’t give a damn about what you like. It’s up to you to connect what you want with what you need to do to get it and then find the courage to carry it through.
Distinguish between you as the designer of your machine and you as a worker with your machine. One of the hardest things for people to do is to objectively look down on themselves within their circumstances (i.e., their machine) so that they can act as the machine’s designer and manager. Most people remain stuck in the perspective of being a worker within the machine. If you can recognize the differences between those roles and that it is much more important that you are a good designer/manager of your life than a good worker in it, you will be on the right path. To be successful, the
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Instead of having this strategic perspective, most people operate emotionally and in the moment; their lives are a series of undirected emotional experiences, going from one thing to the next. If you want to look back on your life and feel you’ve achieved what you wanted to, you can’t operate that way.
biggest mistake most people make is to not see themselves and others objectively, which leads them to bump into their own and others’ weaknesses again and again.
This is why higher-level thinking is essential for success.
Successful people are those who can go above themselves to see things objectively and manage those things to shape change. They can take in the perspectives of others instead of being trapped in their own heads with their own biases.
