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December 9 - December 9, 2022
“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.” —Pierre-Marc-Gaston
“If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months?”
while the world is a gold mine, you need to go digging in other people’s heads to unearth riches.
Success, however you define it, is achievable if you collect the right field-tested beliefs and habits.
The superheroes you have in your mind (idols, icons, titans, billionaires, etc.) are nearly all walking flaws who’ve maximized 1 or 2 strengths.
Humans are imperfect creatures. You don’t “succeed” because you have no weaknesses; you succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them.
Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. The heroes in this book are no different. Everyone struggles. Take solace in that.
“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” —Lao Tzu
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” —J. Krishnamurti
“In the end, winning is sleeping better.” —Jodie Foster
‘What the fuck am I supposed to do now? They failed warmup. They failed warmup.’”
Good luck explaining your “hypertonic muscles.” As one friend said to me, “I think my wife has that same problem. . . .”
Tell people what you want, not what you don’t want, and keep it simple.
“If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”
“A Lonely Place Is an Unmotivated Place”
We always gravitate toward our strengths because we want to be in our glory.”
“Kids don’t do what you say. They do what they see. How you live your life is their example.”
“My work isn’t done tonight. My work was done 3 months ago, and I just have to show up.”
When you answer “I am grateful for . . . ,” I recommend considering four different categories. Otherwise, you will go on autopilot and repeat the same items day after day
meditation acts as a warm bath for the mind. Perhaps you’re a world-conquering machine with elite focus, but you might need to CTFO (chill the fuck out) a few minutes a day before you BTFO (burn the fuck out).
“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.” —James Cameron
“If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn’t plan your mission properly.” —Colonel David Hackworth
In the early days of your venture, if you find someone diving too deep into the numbers, that means they are struggling to find a reason to deeply care about you.”
“We call our test ‘What do the nerds do on nights and weekends?’ Their day job is Oracle, Salesforce.com, Adobe or Apple or Intel or one of these companies, or an insurance company, bank [or they’re a student]. Whatever. That’s fine. They go do whatever they need to do to make a living. The question is: What’s the hobby? What’s the thing at night or on the weekend? Then things get really interesting.”
Where can you create a “red team” in your life to stress-test your most treasured beliefs?
We don’t stop. We don’t slow down. We don’t revisit past decisions. We don’t second guess. So, honestly, that question, I have no idea how to answer.”
‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’”
“Smart people should make things.”
“Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
what both schools have in common is an orientation toward, I would say, original thinking in really being able to view things as they are as opposed to what everybody says about them, or the way they’re believed to be.”
“My goal is not to fail fast. My goal is to succeed over the long run. They are not the same thing.”
“To do original work: It’s not necessary to know something nobody else knows. It is necessary to believe something few other people believe.”
“Andy Grove had the answer: For every metric, there should be another ‘paired’ metric that addresses adverse consequences of the first metric.”
“Every billionaire suffers from the same problem. Nobody around them ever says, ‘Hey, that stupid idea you just had is really stupid.’”
“If [more] information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.”
The solution is to think long-term. To realize that you can do one of these things for a few years, and then do another one for a few years, and then another.
‘Buridan’s ass,’ about a donkey who is standing halfway between a pile of hay and a bucket of water. He just keeps looking left to the hay, and right to the water, trying to decide. Hay or water, hay or water? He’s unable to decide, so he eventually falls over and dies of both hunger and thirst. A donkey can’t think of the future. If he did, he’d realize he could clearly go first to drink the water, then go eat the hay.
“So, my advice to my 30-year-old self is, don’t be a donkey. You can do everything you want to do. You jus...
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‘Busy,’ to me, seems to imply ‘out of control.’ Like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so busy. I don’t have any time for this shit!’ To me, that sounds like a person who’s got no control over their life.”
Instead, if I’m too busy, it’s a cue to reexamine my systems and rules.
“We could do the math, [but] whatever, 93-something-percent of my huffing and puffing, and all that red face and all that stress was only for an extra 2 minutes. It was basically for nothing. . . . [So,] for life, I think of all of this maximization—getting the maximum dollar out of everything, the maximum out of every second, the maximum out of every minute—you don’t need to stress about any of this stuff. Honestly, that’s been my approach ever since. I do things, but I stop before anything gets stressful. . . .
That one goofy email created thousands of new customers. When you’re thinking of how to make your business bigger, it’s tempting to try to think all the big thoughts, the world-changing, massive-action plans. But please know that it’s often the tiny details that really thrill someone enough to make them tell all their friends about you.
“Founders have to realize the bar is set so low because most companies stopped giving a fuck so long ago. . . . It’s something that I really expect other founders to do, and it ends up being pretty easy.
It just requires you to gives lots of damns, which not enough people do.”
One of his questions for founders who apply to Y Combinator: “What are you doing that the world doesn’t realize is a really big fucking deal?”
Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.
“The people who download your book as a bad PDF aren’t your customers. They would never buy it in the first place. Look at it as free advertising.”
What does the dog do if he catches the car? He doesn’t have a plan for it. So I find it just as often on the entrepreneurial side. People don’t plan for success.”
you can’t argue against doing one push-up. Come on. There’s no excuse. I often find I just need to get over that initial hump with something that’s almost embarrassingly small as a goal, and then that can become a habit.”
“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.”
