How to Live: 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion

by Derek Sivers

Money is nothing more than a neutral exchange of value.

Making money is proof you’re adding value to people’s lives.

The world rewards you for creating value. Pursue wealth because it’s moral, good, and unlimited.

Think about what’s valuable to others. To do the opposite is the cliché of the starving artist: creating something that’s valuable to you, but not to others.

Great art has been created in pursuit of profit.

The more something costs, the more people value it.

Charge more than is comfortable to your current self-image.

Value yourself higher, then rise to fit t...

If you subconsciously don’t feel you deserve it, you’ll sabotage your pursuit.

So adjust your self-image first.

Aiming to be rich makes you think bigger, which is more exciting, more fun, and less conventional since most people don’t think big.

The world needs more boldness. Refuse the comfortable addiction of a steady paycheck. Boldly jump on opportunities. Take risky action.

Use other people’s ideas. Ideas are worth almost nothing. Execution is everything. The world is filled with ideas, yet so few take action and make them happen. Better to be filled with action than ideas.

Instead of making a key, then looking for a lock, find something locked, then make its key.

Follow the rising tides of where profits are going. Get in early on an industry that’s developing quickly. More risk, more opportunity, more investors, more rewards.

The fun is in creating a business, not maintaining it.

Be disciplined, not clever. It’s a matter of math, not mood. Emotions are the enemy of investing.

Don’t act rich. Don’t lose touch with regular people.

Reducing your expenses is so much easier than increasing your income.

You don’t need to tell anyone you have money. You don’t even need to spend it. Don’t buy too many things, too big of a house, or hire too many people. Rich people who do this feel trapped and miserable. The less you buy, the more you’re in control. Forget lifestyle. Forget yourself. Stay ...

Money makes problems go away, but amplifies personality traits. Money won’t change you, but it will amplify who you are.

When you win a game, you stop playing. Don’t be the dragon in the mountain, just sitting on your gold. Don’t lose momentum in life. Once you’ve done it, take it with you and do something else.

People love stories, so they connect two events, calling them cause and effect. But the connection is fiction.

Definitions are just your old responses to past situations.

Whatever happened before has nothing at all to do with what happens next.

Doing what you’ve always done is bad for your brain. If you don’t change, you’ll age faster and get stuck.

The way to live is to regularly reinvent yourself.

Every year or two, change your job and move somewhere new. Change the way y...

Disconnect from your past. Cut all common threads. Keep nothing permanent. No tattoos. Remain a clean slate.

At every little decision, ten times a day, choose the thing you haven’t tried. Act out of character. It’s liberating. Get your security not from being an anchor, but from being able to ride the waves of change.

The timid cling to achievements. The wise keep their hands free.

Every reinvention is the beginning, which is the most exciting time.

Learning is loving. The more you learn about something, the more you can love it.

Impress yourself. Be your ideal self.

Love your partner, but don’t need your partner. Need is insatiable. Need destroys love.

It’s better to create something bad than nothing at all. You can improve something bad. You can’t improve nothing.

They make the mundane more interesting to you, which then makes you less interesting to others. They make you think you’re creative when you’re actually boring. Only creating makes you creative.

Embrace what’s weird about you, and use it to create.

Discover yourself. Create questions, not answers. Explore whatever excites you most. If you’re not excited by it, your audience won’t be either.

The public comments won’t affect you, since they will be about your past work.

Charge money to make sure your creations are going to people who really want them.

Keep a counterweight job. Something effortless that covers your bills.

Let your last spark of life go into your work. Die empty, so death takes only a corpse.

When you’re gone, your work shows who you were. Not your intentions. Not what you took in. Only what you put out.

Don’t try to be more right. Just be less wrong.

So try even harder to avoid accidents. Reduce risks.

So people focus on having the upsides in life. Instead, focus on avoiding the downsides.

Most of eating healthy is just avoiding bad food. Most of being right is just not being wrong. To have good people in your life, just cut out the bad ones.

Don’t waste a single minute. Life can be long if you use time wisely. But wasting time brings death quicker. Time is the ...

Just keep a log. A mistake only counts as experience if you learn from it.