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August 17 - September 1, 2023
Your character and your reputation are things you can build, which will let you take advantage of opportunities other people may characterize as lucky, but you know it wasn’t luck. [78]
“In a long-term game, it seems that everybody is making each other rich. And in a short-term game, it seems like everybody is making themselves rich.”
“Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find 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?
Everybody wants to get rich immediately, but the world is an efficient place; immediate doesn’t work. You do have to put in the time. You do have to put in the hours, and so I think you have to put yourself in the position with the specific knowledge, with accountability, with leverage, with the authentic skill set you have, to be the best in the world at what you do.
You have to enjoy it and keep doing it, keep doing it, and keep doing it. Don’t keep track, and don’t keep count because if you do, you will run out of time. [78]
People are oddly consistent. Karma is just you, repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve. Always pay it forward. And don’t keep count.
Your real résumé is just a catalog of all your suffering.
wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment.
Picking the direction you’re heading in for every decision is far, far more important than how much force you apply. Just pick the right direction to start walking in, and start walking. [1]
If you can’t explain it to a child, then you don’t know it. It’s a common saying and it’s very true.
The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level.
The number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be. One definition of a moment of suffering is “the moment when you see things exactly the way they are.” This whole time, you’ve been convinced your business is doing great, and really, you’ve ignored the signs it’s not doing well. Then, your business fails, and you suffer because you’ve been putting off reality.
You can only make progress when you’re starting with the truth. The hard thing is seeing the truth. To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth. The smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, the less desires you can have about the outcome you want, the easier it will be to see the reality.
The problem isn’t reality. The problem is their desire is colliding with reality and pre-venting them from seeing the truth, no matter how much you say it.
It’s only after you’re bored you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time. [7]
A contrarian isn’t one who always objects—that’s a conformist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure to conform. Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy. Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.
It’s really important to be able to uncondition yourself,
If all your beliefs line up into neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious.
The classical virtues are all decision-making heuristics to make one optimize for the long term rather than for the short term. [11]
Almost all biases are time-saving heuristics. For important decisions, discard memory and identity, and focus on the problem.
“You should never, ever fool anybody, and you are the easiest person to fool.” The moment you tell somebody something dishonest, you’ve lied to yourself. Then you’ll start believing your own lie, which will disconnect you from reality and take you down the wrong road.
praise specifically, criticize generally.
Charisma is the ability to project confidence and love at the same time. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive. [71]
COLLECT MENTAL MODELS
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]
if you want it done right, then you have to go yourself and do it. When you are the principal, then you are the owner—you care, and you will do a great job. When you are the agent and you are doing it on somebody else’s behalf, you can do a bad job.
IF YOU CAN’T DECIDE, THE ANSWER IS NO.
It’s very, very important we only say yes when we are pretty certain. You’re never going to be absolutely certain, but you’re going to be very certain.
If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.
Read what you love until you love to read.
the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed.
Read the greats in math, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth above social approval. [11]
If you’re a perpetual learning machine, you will never be out of options for how to make money. You can always see what’s coming up in society, what the value is, where the demand is, and you can learn to come up to speed. [74]
When solving problems: the older the problem, the older the solution. If you’re trying to learn how to drive a car or fly a plane, you should read something written in the modern age because this problem was created in the modern age and the solution is great in the modern age. If you’re talking about an old problem like how to keep your body healthy, how to stay calm and peaceful, what kinds of value systems are good, how you raise a family, and those kinds of things, the older solutions are probably better.
happiness is not something you inherit or even choose, but a highly personal skill that can be learned, like fitness or nutrition.
Whatever happiness means to me, it means something different to you. I think it’s very important to explore what these definitions are.
Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.
Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something. In that absence, for a moment, you have internal silence. When you have internal silence, then you are content, and you are happy.
Every positive thought even has a seed of a negative thought within it and vice versa, which is why a lot of greatness in life comes out of suffering.
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. The fewer desires I can have, the more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving, because the mind really exists in motion toward the future or the past. The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be.
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]
It is only in our particular minds we are unhappy or not happy, and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire. [4]
The world just reflects your own feelings back at you.
you have no expectation for how life should “actually” be. Life is just the way it is. When you accept that, you have no cause to be happy or unhappy.
We think of ourselves as fixed and the world as malleable, but it’s really we who are malleable and the world is largely fixed.
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]
I have lowered my identity. I have lowered the chattering of my mind. I don’t care about things that don’t really matter. I don’t get involved in politics. I don’t hang around unhappy people. I really value my time on this earth. I read philosophy. I meditate. I hang around with happy people. And it works.
Happiness, love, and passion…aren’t things you find—they’re choices you make.
Memory and identity are burdens from the past preventing us from living freely in the present. [3]
