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January 19 - January 19, 2025
Happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future or the past, really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is, and the way it is. [4]
If you look at little children, on balance, they’re generally pretty happy because they are really immersed in the environment and the moment, without any thought of how it should be given their personal preferences and desires.
Memory and identity are burdens from the past preventing us from living freely in the present. [3]
A happy person isn’t someone who’s happy all the time. It’s someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don’t lose their innate peace.
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
By doing more, you’re actually taking on more and more desires. You don’t realize this is slowly destroying your happiness.
Confucius says you have two lives, and the second one begins when you realize you only have one.
The problem with getting good at a game, especially one with big rewards, is you continue playing it long after you should have outgrown it. Survival and replication drive put us on the work treadmill. Hedonic adaptation keeps us there. The trick is knowing when to jump off and play instead.
To me, the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don’t even play the game, who rise above it. Those are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness, they need nothing from anybody else.
Training yourself to be happy is completely internal. There is no external progress, no external validation. You’re competing against yourself—it is a single-player game.
At the end of the day, you are a combination of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with.
The more secrets you have, the less happy you’re going to be. [11]
No exceptions—all screen activities linked to less happiness, all non-screen activities linked to more happiness. [11]
A personal metric: how much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of interest? [11]
Self-discipline is a bridge to a new self-image.
What does acceptance look like to you? It’s to be okay whatever the outcome is. It’s to be balanced and centered. It’s to step back and to see the grander scheme of things.
Acceptance. You go for what it is you truly want but accept the way things are or how they end up. You will be okay no matter the outcome.
No one in the world is going to beat you at being you.
When everyone is sick, we no longer consider it a disease.
“Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.”
Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind.
For your entire life, things have been happening to you. Some good, some bad, most of which you have processed and dissolved, but a few stuck with you. Over time, more and more stuck with you, and they almost became like these barnacles stuck to you. You lost your childhood sense of wonder and of being present and happy. You lost your inner happiness because you built up this personality of unresolved pain, errors, fears, and desires that glommed onto you like a bunch of barnacles. How do you get those barnacles off you? What happens in meditation is you’re sitting there and not resisting your
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The advantage of meditation is recognizing just how out of control your mind is. It is like a monkey flinging feces, running around the room, making trouble, shouting, and breaking things. It’s completely uncontrollable. It’s an out-of-control madperson.
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.
There is a difference in thinking about yourself, your thoughts, your behaviors vs. taking a step back and truly recognizing your place in the world around you.
Meditation is turning off society and listening to yourself.
The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.
Impatience with actions, patience with results. As Nivi said, inspiration is perishable. When you have inspiration, act on it right then and there. [78]
Scott Adams famously said, “Set up systems, not goals.” Use your judgment to figure out what kinds of environments you can thrive in, and then create an environment around you so you’re statistically likely to succeed.
Do what you gotta do. Go where youve gotta go.
I’m not going to be the most successful person on the planet, nor do I want to be. I just want to be the most successful version of myself while working the least hard possible.
If there’s something you want to do later, do it now. There is no “later.”
At some level, you’re doing it for social approval. You’re doing it to fit in with the other monkeys. You’re fitting in to get along with the herd. That’s not where the returns are in life. The returns in life are being out of the herd.
Social approval is inside the herd. If you want social approval, definitely go read what the herd is reading. It takes a level of contrarianism to say, “Nope. I’m just going to do my own thing. Regardless of the social outcome, I will learn anything I think is interesting.”
that’s why the smartest and the most successful people I know started out as losers. If you view yourself as a loser, as someone who was cast out by society and has no role in normal society, then you will do your own thing and you’re much more likely to find a winning path.
internal freedom. It’s “freedom from.” Freedom from reaction. Freedom from feeling angry. Freedom from being sad. Freedom from being forced to do things. I’m looking for “freedom from,” internally and externally, whereas before I was looking for “freedom to.” [4]
Courage isn’t charging into a machine gun nest. Courage is not caring what other people think.
This doesn’t mean you can’t relax. As long as you’re doing what you want, it’s not a waste of your time. But if you’re not spending your time doing what you want, and you’re not earning, and you’re not learning—what the heck are you doing?
