More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 18, 2024 - January 10, 2025
If you have nothing in your life, but you have at least one person that loves you unconditionally, it’ll do wonders for your self-esteem. [8]
Unconditional Love
Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom. [8]
Books
Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
Curiosity
When you’re dating, the instant you know this relationship is not going to be the one that leads to marriage, you should probably move on.
Dating advice
accountability is a double-edged thing. It allows you to take credit when things go well and to bear the brunt of the failure when things go badly. [78]
Accountability
Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now. [11]
Curiosity
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.
Retirement
Money is not the root of all evil; there’s nothing evil about it. But the lust for money is bad. The lust for money is not bad in a social sense. It’s not bad in the sense of “you’re a bad person for lusting for money.” It’s bad for you. Lusting for money is bad for us because it is a bottomless pit. It will always occupy your mind. If you love money, and you make it, there’s never enough. There is never enough because the desire is turned on and doesn’t turn off at some number. It’s a fallacy to think it turns off at some number.
Money and lust
Not in some cosmic, karma kind of way, but I believe deep down we all know who we are. You cannot hide anything from yourself. Your own failures are written within your psyche, and they are obvious to you. If you have too many of these moral shortcomings, you will not respect yourself. The worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem. If you don’t love yourself, who will?
Honesty With oneself
“The closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be.” [4]
Choosing Friend
Your real résumé is just a catalog of all your suffering.
Quote
Our egos are constructed in our formative years—our first two decades. They get constructed by our environment, our parents, society. Then, we spend the rest of our life trying to make our ego happy. We interpret anything new through our ego: “How do I change the external world to make it more how I would like it to be?” [8]
Ego
There are two attractive lessons about suffering in the long term. It can make you accept the world the way it is. The other lesson is it can make your ego change in an extremely hard way.
Lessons From suffering
praise specifically, criticize generally.
Quote
I don’t believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I try to eliminate what’s not going to work. I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It’s not about having correct judgment. It’s about avoiding incorrect judgments. [4]
Inversion
Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.
Quote
Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.
Reading
The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.
Quote
happiness is not about positive thoughts. It’s not about negative thoughts. It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things.
Desire Vs happiness
Real happiness only comes as a side-effect of peace. Most of it is going to come from acceptance, not from changing your external environment. [8]
ACCEPTANCE
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. I don’t think most of us realize that’s what it is. I think we go about desiring things all day long and then wonder why we’re unhappy. I like to stay aware of it, because then I can choose my desires very carefully. I try not to have more than one big desire in my life at any given time, and I also recognize it as the axis of my suffering. I realize the area where I’ve chosen to be unhappy. [5]
How to deal with desire
Confucius says you have two lives, and the second one begins when you realize you only have one.
Quote
Peace is happiness at rest, and happiness is peace in motion.
Peace and happiness
When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you. When playing, surround yourself with people happier than you.
Working vs playing
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 could leave it but not leaving it and not accepting it. That struggle or aversion is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: “accept.” [5]
Acceptance
You are more than just your habits. You are more than just your preferences. You’re a level of awareness. You’re a body. Modern humans, we don’t live enough in our bodies. We don’t live enough in our awareness. We live too much in this internal monologue in our heads. All of which is just programmed into you by society and by the environment when you were younger.
Intefnal monologue
Honesty is a core, core, core value. By honesty, I mean I want to be able to just be me. I never want to be in an environment or around people where I have to watch what I say. If I disconnect what I’m thinking from what I’m saying, it creates multiple threads in my mind. I’m no longer in the moment—now I have to be future-planning or past-regretting every time I talk to somebody. Anyone around whom I can’t be fully honest, I don’t want to be around.
Honesty
There is actually nothing but this moment. No one has ever gone back in time, and no one has ever been able to successfully predict the future in any way that matters. Literally, the only thing that exists is this exact point where you are in space at the exact time you happen to be here.
Present moment
