The Fertile Philosopher

A Book for Free Thinkers and Doers.

(You may contribute to The Fertile Philosopher, and get into the credits of the book, by supporting me on Indiegogo.)

I’m writing the Fertile Philosopher as the first in a series of two books. While the Fertile Philosopher outlines my general philosophical ideas, beliefs and values, “Empowerment: How to Liberate Value Creators from Egalitarian Standardization”, on the other hand, will focus on my specific guiding principle of empowering individuals through the realization of meritocratic power structures and autodidactic education.

In general, the Fertile Philosopher is about living to turn ephemeral moments into the source of eternal compounding. Throughout the course of the book, the following themes occur over and over again:

1. Authenticity over Conformism.
2. Eternality over Ephemerality.
3. Cumulative Compounding.
4. Power to Create over Power to Conserve.
5. Free Thinking and Free Doing.
6. Power through Merit over Power through Authority.
7. Equal Opportunity over Egality.
8. Individual Empowerment over Collectivism.
9. Trust.

Finally, for the curious, here is a chronological listing of all the quotes used in the book — they should deliver the gist of it:

0. Methodology

In the introductory chapter, I describe how philosophical texts should be authentic and seek an end in creation.

I. “It is all very fine to have your pictures hung, but you are painting for yourself, not for the jury.” — Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

II. “Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

III. “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” — Peter Thiel, Zero to One

IV. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” — Karl Marx

I. Purpose

What is the purpose of life? Authentic creation.

1. “Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in ‘another’ or ‘better’ life.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

2. “There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.” — Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

3. “Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

4. “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

5. “’We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

6. “Of the three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child… What is difficult? asks the spirit that would bear much, and kneels down like a camel wanting to be well loaded… Who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no longer call lord and god? ‘Thou shalt’ is the name of the great dragon. But the spirit of the lion says, ‘I will’… The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes.’ For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred ‘Yes’ is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

II. Free Doing

How to live? As a free thinker and doer.

7. “In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don’t believe any real artist cares whether what he does is ‘art’ or not. Who, after all, knows what art is?” — Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

8. “You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.” — Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

9. “Nerds are always getting in trouble. They say improper things for the same reason they dress unfashionably and have good ideas. Convention has less hold over them.” — Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

10. “Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.” — Pablo Picasso

11. “You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.” — Peter Thiel, Zero to One

12. “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” — Wayne Gretzky

13. “Either I went all-in, or Tesla dies… I didn’t want to look back and say there was something more I could have done and didn’t… I spent everything. Everything. I had to borrow money from friends.” — Elon Musk

14. “In order to improve your game, you must study the endgame before everything else, for whereas the endings can be studied and mastered by themselves, the middle game and the opening must be studied in relation to the endgame.” — José Raul Capablanca

15. “The idea of lying on a beach as my main thing just sounds… horrible to me. I would go bonkers. I would have to be on serious drugs, I’d be super-duper bored. I like high intensity.” — Elon Musk

16. “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.” — Steve Jobs

17. “So here in sum is how determination seems to work: it consists of willfulness balanced with discipline, aimed by ambition.” — Paul Graham, The Anatomy of Determination

18. “I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.” — Warren Buffett

19. “I think the way to ‘solve’ the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you. Work on an ambitious project you really enjoy, and sail as close to the wind as you can, and you’ll leave the right things undone.” — Paul Graham, Good and Bad Procrastination

20. “Fall in love in with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.” — Richard Feynman

21. “[The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] taught me that the tough thing is figuring out what questions to ask, but that once you do that, the rest is really easy.” — Elon Musk

22. “In any interesting domain, the difficulties will be novel. Which means you can’t simply plow through them, because you don’t know initially how hard they are… So you have to be resourceful. You have to keep trying new things.” — Paul Graham, Relentlessly Resourceful

23. “We all need people who give us feedback. That’s how we improve.” — Bill Gates

24. “Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing.” — Steve Jobs

25. “If you’re trying to achieve, there will be roadblocks. I’ve had them; everybody has had them. But obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.” — Michael Jordan

26. “The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” — Mark Zuckerberg

27. “Do you feel pressure or do you apply pressure?” — Ben Horowitz

28. “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.” — Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson

29. “If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint’, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.” — Vincent van Gogh

30. “Flying by the seat of your pants precedes crashing by the seat of your pants.” — Bill Walsh, The Score Takes Care of Itself

31. “Do every act of your life as though it were the very last act of your life.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

32. “By seeking and blundering we learn.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

33. “Become who you are!” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

34. “When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

35. “Do whatever you do intensely.” — Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

36. “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

37. “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” — Mahatma Gandhi

38. “A life lived for others, is the only life worth living.” — Albert Einstein

39. “Presence, power and warmth.” — Olivia Fox Cabane, The Charisma Myth

40. “A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.” — Steve Martin

41. “Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.” — Albert Camus

42. “Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.” — Steve Jobs

III. Advancement

What is progress, and how to achieve it? The source and destination of progress is the empowered individual.

43. “Never confuse movement with action.” — Ernest Hemingway

44. “Moral judgement and condemnation is the favourite form of revenge of the spiritually limited on the less so.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

45. “TWO AND TWO MAKES FIVE” — George Orwell, 1984

46. “The word ‘We’ is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages.” — Ayn Rand, Anthem

47. “If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does that.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

48. “If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

49. “I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.” — Theodor Roosevelt

50. “Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment of whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather, necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to society… He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention.” — Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

51. “Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work – going from 1 to n.” — Peter Thiel, Zero to One

52. “Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things – going from 0 to 1.” — Peter Thiel, Zero to One

53. “Big breakthrough ideas often seem nuts the first time you see them.” - Marc Andreessen

54. “Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.” — Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary

55. “Mankind must toil unceasingly to bring forth individual great men: this and nothing else is its task… progress depends only on the higher individual types, which are rarer, yet more persistent, complex and productive.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator

56. “Entrepreneurship rests on a theory of economy and society. The theory sees change as normal and indeed as healthy. And it sees the major task in society – and especially in the economy – as doing something different rather than doing better what is already being done. That is basically what Say, two hundred years ago, meant when he coined the term entrepreneur. It was intended as a manifesto and as a declaration of dissent: the entrepreneur upsets and disorganizes. As Joseph Schumpeter formulated it, his task is ‘creative destruction.’” — Peter F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship

IV. Venture

How to found a startup? Manifest an authentic secret.

57. “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” — Isaac Newton

58. “The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.” — Marc Andreessen, The Only Thing that Matters

59. “The point of greatest peril in the development of a high-tech market lies in making the transition from an early market dominated by a few visionary customers to a mainstream market dominated by a large block of customers who are predominantly pragmatists in orientation.” — Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm

60. “Viruses do their damage by entering the cells of the host organism and then using the cellular machinery to replicate themselves… This leads to the release of new viruses that proceed to infect other cells, which in turn produce yet more virus particles, and so on.” — George Church, Regenesis

61. “Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity of themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.” — Mark Zuckerberg

62. “Competition is for losers.” — Peter Thiel

63. “I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths… and then reason up from there.” — Elon Musk

64. “One of the challenges in networking is everybody thinks it’s making cold calls to strangers. Actually, it’s the people who already have strong trust relationships with you, who know you’re dedicated, smart, a team player, who can help you.” — Reid Hoffman

65. “What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.” — Aristotle

66. “I’m sort of abstract… I think about things like product and strategy and business in an abstract way… ‘What’s the right answer? What should we do?’… [Ben Horowitz] thinks about it from an organizational standpoint, from a management standpoint: ‘What are we capable of doing?’… [We’ll meet] at that intersection point of what is intellectually the correct thing to do, or the optimal thing to do, and the actual practical reality of what can be done.” — Marc Andreessen

67. “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

68. “It took me a lifetime.” — Pablo Picasso

69. “I’ve built a lot of my success off finding these truly gifted people and not settling for B and C players, but really going for the A players… I found that when you get enough A players, they really like working with each other. Because they’ve never had a chance to do that before. And they don’t want to work with B and C players and so it becomes self-policing and they only want to hire more A players. And so you build up these pockets of A players, and it propagates.” — Steve Jobs

70. “The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.” — Paul Graham, How to Get Startup Ideas

71. “Iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1. A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.” — Peter Thiel, Zero to One

72. “If you’re an investor, you look at the risk around an investment as if it’s an onion. Just like you peel an onion and remove each layer in turn, risk in a startup investment comes in layers that get peeled away – reduced – one by one.” — Marc Andreessen

73. “’Thiel’s law’: a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.” — Peter Thiel, Zero to One

74. “The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can’t wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.” — Paul Graham, Do Things That Don’t Scale

75. “The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.” — Eric Ries, The Lean Startup

76. “Instead of relying on expensive marketing, habit-forming companies link their services to the users’ daily routines and emotions.” — Nir Eyal, Hooked

77. “Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow market. It’s like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs.” — Paul Graham, Do Things That Don’t Scale

78. “At some point, there was a very noticeable change in how Stripe felt. It tipped from being this boulder we had to push to being a train car that in fact had its own momentum.” — Patrick Collison

79. “This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.” — Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach

80. “We have the power, by living the values, to build the culture. We also have the power, by breaking the values, to fuck up the culture. Each one of us has this opportunity, this burden.” — Brian Chesky

81. “Excellence in business does not happen merely because you get the structure right… Excellence in business (or any other institution) must begin with those rare and special individuals who are able to carry a new idea forward into the boardroom, the workplace, or the marketplace, and get it done.” — Peter Engel, The Exceptional Individual

82. “By far the most difficult skill I learned as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology.” — Ben Horowitz, The Hard Things About Hard Things

83. “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” — Steve Martin

84. “The founders just hired their friends since they could trust them.” — Peter Thiel

85. “Staying in business over the long term – whether getting past infancy in an uncertain venture, or steering an established company through times of economic crisis – means not running out of cash.” — Randy Komisar & John Mullins, Getting to Plan B

86. “Facebook, the best investment in our 2005 fund, returned more than all the others combined. Palantir, the second-best investment, is set to return more than the sum of every other investment aside from Facebook.” — Peter Thiel, Zero to One

V. The Future

The book finishes with my general vision of the future.

(Empowerment will then proceed to zoom into the specific vision I’m personally focused on.)