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B.J. likes and recommends two podcasts related to debating, the second of which is completely farcical: Intelligence Squared and The Great Debates.
Large, uninterrupted blocks of time—3 to 5 hours minimum—create the space needed to find and connect the dots.
Life favors the specific ask and punishes the vague wish.
All of my biggest wins have come from leveraging strengths instead of fixing weaknesses. Investing is hard enough without having to change your core behaviors. Don’t push a boulder uphill just because you can.
“Make your peace with the fact that saying ‘no’ often requires trading popularity for respect.” —Greg McKeown, Essentialism
“When you are struggling with just about anything, look up. Just ponder the night sky for a minute and realize that we’re all on the same planet at the same time. As far as we can tell, we’re the only planet with life like ours on it anywhere nearby. Then you start looking at the stars, and you realize that the light hitting your eye is ancient, [some of the] stars that you’re seeing, they no longer exist by the time that the light gets to you. Just mulling the bare-naked facts of the cosmos is enough to thrill me, awe me, freak me out, and kind of put all my neurotic anxieties in their proper
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To “fix” someone’s problem, you very often just need to empathically listen to them. Even on social media or my blog, I’ve realized that people knowing you’re listening—valuing them, collectively—is more important than responding to everyone.
“Life is a continual process of arrival into who we are.”
“The world is this continually unfolding set of possibilities and opportunities, and the tricky thing about life is, on the one hand having the courage to enter into things that are unfamiliar, but also having the wisdom to stop exploring when you’ve found something worth sticking around for. That is true of a place, of a person, of a vocation. Balancing those two things—the courage of exploring and the commitment to staying—and getting the ratio right is very hard. I think my 70-year-old self would say: ‘Be careful that you don’t err on one side or the other, because you have an ill-conceived
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I had a great mentor early on in my career give me advice that I’ve heeded until now, which is that you should have a running list of three people that you’re always watching: someone senior to you that you want to emulate, a peer who you think is better at the job than you are and who you respect, and someone subordinate who’s doing the job you did—one, two, or three years ago—better than you did it. If you just have those three individuals that you’re constantly measuring yourself off of, and you’re constantly learning from them, you’re going to be exponentially better than you are.”
Think about how old you are right now and think about being a 10-year-older version of yourself. Then think, ‘What would I probably tell myself as an older version of myself?’ That is the wisdom that I think you found in that exercise. . . . [If you do this exercise and then start living the answers,] I think you’re going to grow exponentially faster than you would have otherwise.”
‘Work will work when nothing else will work.’”
After you feel the acute pain of your current handicapping beliefs, you formulate 2 to 3 replacement beliefs to use moving forward. This is done so that “you are not pulled back into [old beliefs] by old language patterns.” One of my top 3 limiting beliefs was “I’m not hardwired for happiness,” which I replaced with “Happiness is my natural state.”
“On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice. It’s actually very easy to give people good advice. It’s very hard to follow the advice that you know is good. . . . If someone came to me with my list of problems, I would be able to sort that person out very easily.”
‘Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.’
“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.” —Benjamin Disraeli, former British Prime Minister
“Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’” —Seneca
“I actually have a countdown clock that Matt Groening at Futurama was inspired by, and they did a little episode of Futurama about it. I took the actuarial tables for the estimated age of my death, for someone born when I was born, and I worked back the number of days. I have that showing on my computer, how many days. I tell you, nothing concentrates your time like knowing how many days you have left. Now, of course, I’m likely to live longer than that. I’m in good health, etc. But nonetheless, I have 6,000-something days. It’s not very many days to do all the things I want to do.
Simplify, simplify. . . . A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
Once you’ve realized—and it requires a monthly or quarterly reminder—how independent your well-being is from having an excess of money, it becomes easier to take “risks” and say “no” to things that seem too lucrative to pass up. There is more freedom to be gained from practicing poverty than chasing wealth. Suffer a little regularly and you often cease to suffer.
“In Order for Art to Imitate Life, You Have to Have a Life”
“Codependence is often used incorrectly. It’s when you look to other people to decide how you are feeling.”
My trauma therapist said every time you meet someone, just in your head say, ‘I love you’ before you have a conversation with them, and that conversation is going to go a lot better.
“Happiness is wanting what you have.”
“To blame someone for not understanding you fully is deeply unfair because, first of all, we don’t understand ourselves, and even if we do understand ourselves, we have such a hard time communicating ourselves to other people. Therefore, to be furious and enraged and bitter that people don’t get all of who we are is a really a cruel piece of immaturity.”
As mentioned before, more than 80% of the world-class performers I’ve interviewed meditate in the mornings in some fashion. But what of the remaining 20%? Nearly all of them have meditation-like activities. One frequent pattern is listening to a single track or album on repeat, which can act as an external mantra for aiding focus and present-state awareness.
On a book deadline, I pick 1 or 2 albums and 1 or 2 movies for late-night writing sessions, as I do my best work between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. Polling the most prolific authors I know, more than 90% do their best work when others are sleeping, whether they start after 10 p.m. or wake up well before 6 a.m.
“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.”
‘Say less.’ That’s it. Just say less.”
Honor those who seek the truth, beware of those who’ve found it’ [adapted from Voltaire]. A reminder that the path never ends and that absolutely nobody has this shit figured out.”
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
“It wasn’t until I started meeting some of the most intellectually gifted people in the sciences and beyond . . . I realized that this was sort of the open secret of what I call the hallucinogenic elite, whether it’s billionaires, or Nobel laureates, or inventors and coders. . . . A lot of these people were using these agents either for creativity or to gain access to the things that are so difficult to get access to through therapy and other conventional means.”
And even though I wanted to do science rather than technology, it’s better to be in an expanding world and not quite in exactly the right field, than to be in a contracting world where peoples’ worst behavior comes out.
Evan and others said “fuck” or “fucking” at least once a sentence, and it all went on the screen. I asked afterward, “Doesn’t it take a lot of time to polish the script?” to which Evan responded with a smile: “You can always de-fuck the script later.”
Evan and Seth are both serious marijuana connoisseurs, and they use different strains for different purposes. For writing and other creative sessions, Evan considers “Jack Herer” to be a good working weed. It’s described by Leafly online as “a sativa-dominant cannabis strain that provides the perfect pairing of cerebral elevation and full-body relief.”
You can’t reason someone out of something they didn’t reason themselves into.
“Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity. You’ll avoid the tough decisions, and you’ll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted.”—Colin Powell
“In any situation in life, you only have three options. You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. It’s that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery.
Anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else (Buddhist saying).
All the real benefits in life come from compound interest.
When Mara visits us, in the form of troubling emotions or fearsome stories, we can say, “I see you, Mara,” and clearly recognize the reality of craving and fear that lives in each human heart. By accepting these experiences with the warmth of compassion, we can offer Mara tea rather than fearfully drive him away. Seeing what is true, we hold what is seen with kindness. We express such wakefulness of heart each time we recognize and embrace our hurts and fears.
Passion’ is an overstated word. I think passion develops. . . . I threw myself into food, and although I was passionate about it, it wasn’t a life passion until I combined food and nourishment with health, sustainability, politics, policy, and what we’re doing to really help make sure that all people can live healthy, productive, awesome lives through the food that they’re eating.
“Art is socialism but life is capitalism,”
‘Write in a trance and act in a trance.’
‘Write everything down because it’s all very fleeting.’
There is a mason jar on my kitchen counter with jar of awesome in glitter letters on the side. Anytime something really cool happens in a day, something that made me excited or joyful, doctor’s orders are to write it down on a slip of paper and put it in this mason jar. When something great happens, you think you’ll remember it 3 months later, but you won’t. The Jar of Awesome creates a record of great things that actually happened, all of which are easy to forget if you’re depressed or seeing the world through gray-colored glasses. I tend to celebrate very briefly, if at all, so this pays
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Look for the good, practice finding the good, and you’ll see it more often.
if you try to approach every problem with your moral compass, first and foremost, you’re going to make a lot of mistakes. You’re going to exclude a lot of possible good solutions. You’re going to assume you know a lot of things, when in fact you don’t, and you’re not going to be a good partner in reaching a solution with other people who don’t happen to see the world the way you do.”
‘Don’t be scared.’ There are a lot of things I did not do, a lot of experiences I never tried, a lot of people I never met or hung out with because I was, in some form, intimidated or scared. . . . It also plays into what psychologists call the ‘spotlight effect,’ [as if] everybody must be caring about what I do. And the fact is: Nobody gives a crap what I do.”
One of Josh’s favorite writers, Hemingway, had a practice of ending his writing sessions mid-flow and mid-sentence. This way, he knew exactly where to start the next day, and he could reliably both end and start his sessions with confidence.
