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January 3, 2019
On my coffee table at home, I have a piece of driftwood. Its sole purpose is to display a quote by Anaïs Nin, which I see every day: “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” It’s a short reminder that success can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations we are willing to have, and by the number of uncomfortable actions we are willing to take.
“Nothing you face today will be harder than what you just did.”
The best way I can describe the feeling is a Finnish word, “sisu”—the mental strength to continue to try even after you feel you’ve reached the limits of your abilities. I don’t think failure is sometimes part of the process—it always is. When you feel you can’t go on, know that you’re just getting started.
Navy SEAL, Richard Machowicz: “Not Dead, Can’t Quit.”
Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
That in order to “have” you must “do,” and in order to “do” you must “be”—and
Intelligence is like following a GPS route right into a body of water until you drown. Wisdom looks at the route but, when it takes a turn into the ocean, decides not to follow it, then finds a new, better way. Wisdom reigns supreme.
You work hard because you’re inspired to, not because you have to.
When you’re creative, you render competition obsolete, because there is only one you, and no one can do things exactly the way you do. Never worry about the competition. When you’re creative, you can, in fact, cheer others on with the full knowledge that their success will undoubtedly be your own.
the excuse “I am too busy” is not only the most inauthentic, it is also the laziest.
You don’t find the time to do something; you make the time to do things.
I do not believe in work-life balance. I believe that if you view your work as a calling, it is a labor of love rather than laborious. When your work is a calling, you are not approaching the amount of hours you are working with a sense of dread or counting the minutes until the weekend. Your calling can become a life-affirming engagement that can provide its own balance and spiritual nourishment. Ironically, it takes hard work to achieve this.
“Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”
The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.
The only way to truly learn something is by doing it. Yes, listen to guidance. But don’t wait.
Memento mori—“remember that you have to die.” All of this will go to nothing. Remember before you were born? Just like that.
In the vast majority of the professions and vocations, the people who succeed are not any cleverer than you. The adult world is not full of gods, just people who have acquired skills and habits that work for them.
Obsess over figuring out the funnest, most exciting, most natural shape of yourself as a writer and start doing that. There are a lot of people on the Internet, and they can all access your work with one tap on the phone in their pocket. So even if only one in every thousand of them—0.1 percent—happens to be a reader peg that perfectly matches the shape of your writing hole, that amounts to over a million people who will absolutely love what you’re doing.
Science is motivated by the human drive to struggle to discover.
I used to resent obstacles along the path, thinking, “If only that hadn’t happened life would be so good.” Then I suddenly realized, life is the obstacles. There is no underlying path. Our role here is to get better at navigating those obstacles. I strive to find calm, measured responses and to see hindrances as a chance to problem-solve. Often I fall back into old frustrations, but if I remind myself, this is a chance to step up, I can reframe conflicts as a chance to experiment with solutions.
“It’s not how well you play the game, it’s deciding what game you want to play.”—Kwame Appiah. This quote separates striving from strategy and reminds me to take a macro view of what I’m doing, like in a video game where you can zoom out and you suddenly
Today when I speak with anyone about anything, I try to hold their perspective with a “light grip”: the knowledge that they, and I, have very incomplete maps of reality.
Life will go faster than you know. It will be tempting to live a life that impresses others. But this is the wrong path. The right path is to know that life is short, every day is a gift, and you have certain gifts. Happiness is about understanding that the gift of life should be honored every day by offering your gifts to the world. Don’t let yourself define what matters by the dogma of other people’s thoughts. And even more important, don’t let the thoughts of self-doubt and chattering self-criticism in your own mind slow you down. You will likely be your own worst critic. Be kind to
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Everyone has their own journey. People who offer great advice understand that their goal is to help someone on their unique journey. People who offer bad advice are trying to relive their old glories.
Ego is about who’s right. Truth is about what’s right.
the outcome is not the outcome. In other words, what we think of as endpoints to a goal are really just forks in a road that is endlessly forking. In the big picture of our lives, we really don’t know whether a particular success or failure is actually helping or hurting us.
In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to? I finally came to the understanding that my downtime is just as valuable as my uptime, and I have to schedule it in accordingly. Previously, if I saw a big chunk of free time on my calendar, it was a lot more difficult to turn down projects, speaking engagements, or even coffee meetings. Now, I see that block of time, and think, “Oh, that’s my binge-watching Netflix time. Sorry.”
What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? I think people assume that you have to weigh all feedback on your product (whether it’s a podcast, an app, etc.) equally. Not all feedback is created equal, and not all ideas from your users are good ones! Taking too much stock in feedback can change the vision for your own product, and suddenly it won’t feel like yours anymore.
Deterioration is automatic in the process of aging, and the result is that we get depressed. But if we live like a stoic, it does not affect us in a negative way. A stoic is always ready for any disaster and ready to embrace it, to turn it into opportunity.
What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? When I started studying fire protection engineering, a professor gave a welcome speech and said something like this: “Up to today, you studied hard and repeated what the world told you. Our purpose in the next four years is to teach you how to think for yourself. If we succeed, you will create something this world has never seen before, but if we do not, you will just be stuck copying others and repeating. Take my words seriously, study hard, but also open your imagination. One day you will be
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If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and why? Are there any quotes you think of often or live your life by? A good friend of mine once said: “It’s really easy to say what you’re not. It’s hard to say what you are.” In other words, you can spend all day undermining other people, and even if you’re right, who cares? Anybody can talk about why something’s bad. Try doing something good.
Poker has taught me to disconnect failure from outcomes. Just because I lose doesn’t mean I failed, and just because I won doesn’t mean I succeeded—not when you define success and failure around making good decisions that will win in the long run. What matters is the decisions I made along the way, and every decision failure is an opportunity to learn and adjust my strategy going forward. By doing this, losing becomes a less emotional experience and more an opportunity to explore and learn.
“There is no exact answer to the question ‘what is the meaning of life.’ It’s like asking a chess master ‘what is the best move in the world?’ It all depends on what situation you are in.”
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” –BILL GATES Co-founder of Microsoft
Always take the time to acknowledge people—and not just when you know you have something to gain. If you show interest in them, they will be interested in you. People react to kindness with kindness, to respect with respect. Relationships—even brief ones—are doorways to opportunity.
“If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in the dark with a mosquito.”—Betty Reese
“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”—Warren Buffett
“Our fears are always more numerous than our dangers.”—Seneca the Younger
“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”—Harry Truman
“Don’t hire a dog, then bark yourself.”—David Ogilvy
“I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment. They are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post: for support, rather than for illumination.”—David Ogilvy
What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? Focus on your writing skills. It’s the one thing I’ve found that really helps people stand out. More and more communication is written today. Get great at presenting yourself with words, and words alone, and you’ll be far ahead of most.
“People look for retreats for themselves, in the country, by the coast, or in the hills. There is nowhere that a person can find a more peaceful and trouble-free retreat than in his own mind …. So constantly give yourself this retreat, and renew yourself.”
The point of a disruptive technology is not the market or the competitors that it destroys. It is the new markets and the new possibilities that it creates.
Listen to your inner voice, which tells you what to choose. Socrates called it his “daimon.” Lao Tzu said of the wise man that “He has his no, and he has his yes.” It is this ability to wait quietly for the right moment, rather than rushing about aimlessly, that can lead even an ambitious success-hunter to capture the biggest game.
Don’t shy away from the hard times. Tackle them head-on, move toward the path less trodden, riddled with obstacles, because most other people run at the first sign of battle. The storms give us a chance to define ourselves, to distinguish ourselves, and we always emerge from them stronger.
What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made? Problem identification is always a sound investment of time, money, and energy. Einstein said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” It feels uncomfortable to spend time and resources trying to figure out exactly what the problem is—we want to jump to fixing way too fast. Most of us are plagued with action bias and really struggle to stay in problem identification. I’ve found that getting clear about what’s wrong and why it’s a
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