Read the quotes below to get pumped up — great quotes and short stories builds immense positivity and strength in my mind. Absorbing information through “quotes” is amazing because the human brain resonates, remembers and internalizes stories tied to emotion in a very effective manner. I truly believe that simply reading the quote list below in a positive mindstate on a regular basis is enough to make you a happy, productive and moral person. The categories are as follows (they are bolded):
- Strength: Struggle / Failure / Resilience / Courage
- Patience: Commitment / Focus
- Happiness: Mindfulness
- Personal Development: Leadership, Productivity, Career
- Work-Place: Culture, Strategy
- Negotiation
- Relationships: Love, Empathy
- Inspiration: Altruism, Purpose, Success,
- Creativity: Idea Generation, Art
- Original Thought
- Long Term Travel
- Health
- Technology and Progress
On Struggling / Failure / Resilience / Courage
A strength Coach’s notes on resilience: “Dealing with the temporary frustration of not making progress is an integral part of the path towards excellence. In fact, it is essential and something that every single elite athlete has had to learn to deal with. If the pursuit of excellence was easy, everyone would do it. In fact, this impatience in dealing with frustration is the primary reason that most people fail to achieve their goals. Unreasonable expectations timewise, resulting in unnecessary frustration, due to a perceived feeling of failure. Achieving the extraordinary is not a linear process. The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home. A blue collar work ethic married to indomitable will. It is literally that simple. Nothing interferes. Nothing can sway you from your purpose. Once the decision is made, simply refuse to budge. Refuse to compromise. No beating yourself up over small bumps in the road. Learn to enjoy and appreciate the process. This is especially important because you are going to spend far more time on the actual journey than with those all too brief moments of triumph at the end. More importantly, learn from defeats when they happen. In fact, if you are not encountering defeat on a fairly regular basis, you are not trying hard enough. And absolutely refuse to accept less than your best.”
On prioritizing fear in an exciting situation: “In those situations, I look at all the emotions I’m feeling, which are anticipation, exhilaration, focus, confidence, fun, and fear. Then I take fear and say, ‘Well, how much priority am I going to give this? I really want to do this.’ I put it where it belongs. It’s like brick laying or making a stone wall, you fit the pieces together. I actually want someone to partition each emotion as if it’s a little separate block and then put it in a line. Once you assess your own skill and the situation, often things change. As long as you stop and really look at the fear, I think peoples lives will change radically.”
“Courage takes practice. It’s a skill you have to develop. I feel like a coward sometimes. We’re sitting here in my house and doing this interview, and on my coffee table is a quote on a piece of driftwood [from Anaïs Nin]. It says, ‘Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.’ I literally have this on my coffee table so I see it every single day.”
“Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Everyone struggles. Take solace in that.”
Things You Can Always Do: “I can think” → Have good rules for decision-making, and have good questions you can ask yourself and others. “I can wait” → Be able to plan long-term, play the long game, and not misallocate your resources. “I can fast” → Be able to withstand difficulties and disaster. Train yourself to be uncommonly resilient and have a high pain tolerance.
“I’m not the strongest. I’m not the fastest. But I’m really good at suffering.”
On being worried before during a big moment: ‘Why would I be wound up? I’m either ready or I’m not. Worrying about it right now ain’t gonna change a damn thing. Right? Whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen. I’ve either done everything I can to be ready for this, or I haven’t.’
Create an Attitude of Impermanence: “I say, ‘At the end of the day, who cares? What’s the big deal? I’m here, I’m going to try my best, and I’m going to go home, and my family’s there. . . . Even though my whole world’s wrapped up in this, who cares?”
“Even the best in the world struggle. I need to relearn this lesson often. Knowing that many of the “greats” are going through the same thing. It’s reassuring to know that someone at the top of their game — who has seemingly beaten all of the odds — still has the daily struggle.”
“All greatness comes from suffering.”
“The hero and the coward both feel the same thing, but the hero uses his fear, projects it onto his opponent, while the coward runs. It’s the same thing — fear — but it’s what you do with it that matters.”
“Give vulnerability a shot. Give discomfort its due. Because I think he or she who is willing to be the most uncomfortable is not only the bravest, but rises the fastest.”
“You must want to be a butterfly so badly, you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.”
“You’ve got to be able to look at your failures and know that there’s a key to success in every failure. If you look through the ashes long enough, you’ll find something. Failure isn’t always durable. You can go back and you can look at it and go, ‘Oh, that wasn’t a failure.”
“The hardest thing you’re ever going to do in your life is fail at something, and if you don’t start failing at things, you will not live a full life. You’ll be living a cautious life on a path that you know is pretty much guaranteed to more or less work. That’s not getting the most out of this amazing world we live in. You have to do the hardest thing that you have not been prepared for in this school or any school: As you work through that process of failure and learning, you will really deepen into the human being you’re capable of being.”
In reference to a massive Earthquake in early 1900’s “Shared disaster creates equality” — keep in mind as a way to unite through mutual struggle.
“If you can have a positive attitude, look at it, and say, “Let me see, what I can learn from this?” . . . Why would you ever get upset about anything?”
“There is more freedom to be gained from practicing poverty than chasing wealth. Suffer a little regularly and you often cease to suffer.”
“Deep down, I am certain that people are plastic in the positive sense: flexible and able to grow. I think almost everything is made, not born, and that makes people uncomfortable because it puts them on the hook, but I truly believe it.”
On toughness and struggle: “I would never trade in my bumps. Because if I hadn’t had those bumps, I wouldn’t be me, and I’m glad I’m me.”
“What we’ve found is that the first version always sucks.”
“Nobody is paying attention to anybody else at all — So take as long as you want if you’re talented. You’ll get their attention again if you have a reason to.”
Neil Strauss on overcoming blockages (specifically related to writing): “2 crappy pages a day”. Break things into small chunks to get them done. Everything has a first step.
“Discipline equals freedom.’” “It also means that if you want freedom in life — be that financial freedom, more free time, or even freedom from sickness and poor health — you can only achieve these things through discipline.”
“It’s not giving up, to put your current path on indefinite pause.”
“If you want to be tougher mentally, it is simple: Be tougher. Don’t meditate on it.”
“I remember sharing in an Al-Anon meeting something that really hurt my feelings. I said: ‘He did this, and then he did this . . .’ and people started laughing. I realized, ‘Oh, my God, this is funny because it’s happened to other people, and people are relating and it’s resonating. Tell the truth about your embarrassing moments and show your shadow, a catharsis happens.”
“What’s the worst that can happen? Well, the worst that can happen is that I’d have a backpack and a sleeping bag, and I’d be eating oatmeal. And I’d be fine.”
“Honor those who seek the truth, beware of those who’ve found it’ [adapted from Voltaire]. A reminder that the path never ends and that absolutely nobody has this shit figured out.”
“When in doubt, work on the deficiencies you’re most embarrassed by.”
On Morning Journals: “Once we get those muddy, maddening, confusing thoughts [nebulous worries, jitters, and preoccupations] on the page, we face our day with clearer eyes.” I’m just caging my monkey mind on paper so I can get on with my fucking day.”
On Patience / Commitment / Focus
“Slow down. Where’s the fire?”
“No hurry, no pause. You can get 95% of the results you want by calmly putting one foot in front of the other.”
‘Sit, sit. Walk, walk. Don’t wobble.’ …. It’s this idea that when I’m with a person, that’s total priority. Anything else is multitasking. Single tasking is a superpower.
“Are you spending all your time and exhausting all your energy catching field mice? Another way I often approach this is to look at my to-do list and ask: “Which one of these, if done, would render all the rest either easier or completely irrelevant?”
“If the commitment is to a long-term goal and not to a series of smaller intermediate goals, then only one decision needs to be made and adhered to. Clear, simple, straightforward. Much easier to maintain than having to make small decision after small decision to stay the course when dealing with each step along the way. This provides far too many opportunities to inadvertently drift from your chosen goal. The single decision is one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.”
“Think long-term. To realize that you can do one of these things for a few years, and then do another one for a few years, and then another. You’ve probably heard the fable, I think it’s ‘Buridan’s ass,’ about a donkey who is standing halfway between a pile of hay and a bucket of water. He just keeps looking left to the hay, and right to the water, trying to decide. Hay or water, hay or water? He’s unable to decide, so he eventually falls over and dies of both hunger and thirst. A donkey can’t think of the future. “So, my advice to my 30-year-old self is, don’t be a donkey. You can do everything you want to do. You just need foresight and patience.”
“Busy = Out of Control. Don’t wear it like a badge of honor. = Because I’m in control of my time. I’m on top of it. Instead, if I’m too busy, it’s a cue to reexamine my systems and rules.”
“Slow down. I think a lot of the mistakes of my youth were mistakes of ambition, not mistakes of sloth”
On being “busy”. ‘The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure. There will be a wide margin for relaxation to his day. He is only earnest to secure the kernels of time, and does not exaggerate the value of the husk.’ — ‘Those who work much, do not work hard.’ I love that.”
“Ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that symbolizes work ethic, or toughness, or some other virtue — but really, it’s a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect.”
“Sometimes the best “No” is “No Reply”. “Why put in the effort to explain why it isn’t a fit, if they haven’t done the homework to determine if it is a fit?”
On Happiness / Mindfulness / Tranquility
“If its not a Hell Yes — It’s a No. “Because most of us say yes to too much stuff, and then, we let these little, mediocre things fill our lives. . . . The problem is, when that occasional, ‘Oh my God, hell yeah!’ thing comes along, you don’t have enough time to give it the attention that you should, because you’ve said yes to too much other little, half-ass stuff, right?”
“The quality of your life is the quality of your questions.” Questions determine your focus. Most people — and I’m certainly guilty of this at times — spend their lives focusing on negativity.
“If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.”
“Play! Play more. I feel like people are so serious, and it doesn’t take much for people to drop back into the wisdom of a childlike playfulness. If I had to prescribe two things to improve health and happiness in the world, it’d be movement and play”.
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
‘Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts,’ which means that enlightenment isn’t this thing you achieve after 30 years sitting in a corner on a mountaintop. It’s something you can achieve moment to moment, and you can be a certain percentage enlightened every single day.”
“If something offends you, look inward. . . . That’s a sign that there’s something there.”
“The core of it was to be your unapologetically weird self. I think authenticity is one of the most lacking things out there these days.” “Weirdness is why we adore our friends. . . . Weirdness is what bonds us to our colleagues. Weirdness is what sets us apart, gets us hired. Be your unapologetically weird self. In fact, being weird may even find you the ultimate happiness.”
“Make time to value “enough” and “contentment”. Gratitude is the most important practice.”
“Well, I got to cheer for me before anyone else can cheer for me.” Kanye West on why he had a poster of himself in his main room.
“Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.” Most people don’t realize that’s what it is — we go about desiring things all day long and then wonder why we’re unhappy.
“It’s not how much time you spend doing what you love. It’s how little time you spend doing what you hate.”
“The reason you’re suffering is you’re focused on yourself.”
On reducing Anxiety— 45 minutes vs 43 minutes: “I noticed it was always 43 minutes. That’s what it took me to go as fast as I could on that bike path. But I noticed that, over time, I was starting to feel less psyched about going out on the bike path. Because mentally, when I would think of it, it would feel like pain and hard work. . . . So, then I thought, ‘You know, it’s not cool for me to associate negative stuff with going on the bike ride. Why don’t I just chill? For once, I just enjoyed the ride and noticed the surroundings and when I finished, it turned out to be 45 minutes. I couldn’t believe it. So this lead me to stop before things get to the point of stressful — “You notice this internal ‘Argh.’ That’s my cue. I treat that like physical pain. What am I doing? I need to stop doing that thing that hurts. What is that? And, it usually means that I’m just pushing too hard, or doing things that I don’t really want to be doing.”
On gratitude and why it’s important to be present: “It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.”
“Sometimes you need to stop doing things you love in order to nurture the one thing that matters most.”
“Put the Big Stones in First — on planning your priorities (maintain focus on the big things first like health, family, relationships etc.)”
“Remember who you are”
Rick Rubin on advice to his 30 year old self: “Be kinder to myself, because I think I’ve beaten myself up”
“Be open to whatever comes next.”
“Anytime I’m telling myself, ‘But I’m making so much money,’ that’s a warning sign that I’m doing the wrong thing.”
“You don’t need to know where it’s all going.”
“When I articulated that I didn’t care anymore about what anybody thought about what I did except me, all the weight of the world came off my shoulders, and everything became possible. It shifted to everybody else [being] worried. Now they’re worried. But everything for me, it shifted to a place where I felt free.”
“I think there’s a great power in not taking things so seriously.”
“The tricky thing about life — is on one hand having the courage to enter into things that are unfamiliar, but also having the wisdom to stop exploring when you’ve found something worth sticking around for. That is true of a place, of a person, of a vocation. Balancing those two things — the courage of exploring and the commitment to staying — and getting the ratio right is very hard.”
On baking cookies as an activity people enjoy when dying (from a caregiver): “One oddly powerful alternative is baking cookies together. And this is another thing that leads back to art. Art for its own sake. Art and music and dance. One way for all of us to live until we’re actually dead is to prize those little moments.”
“The most important thing is to be you, not your inner actor. It’s so much less work just to be yourself.”
“Cynicism is a disease that robs people of the gift of life.”
“Happiness is wanting what you have.”
“Appreciate what’s good about this moment. Don’t always think that you’re on a permanent journey.”
“The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a choice that you make and a skill that you develop. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles.”
“Tell your friends that you’re a happy person. Then you’ll be forced to conform to it. You’ll have a consistency bias. You have to live up to it. Your friends will expect you to be a happy person.”
Glenn Beck: “What I realized that day was people are starving for something authentic. They’ll accept you, warts and all, if that’s who you really are. Be willing to fail or succeed on who you really are. Don’t ever try to be anything else. What you are — is good enough for whatever it is you’re doing.”
“Don’t be so fucking shy”
‘Write everything down because it’s all very fleeting.’
“Enough is as good as a feast.”
“Could it be that everything is fine and complete as is? If I feel stressed, stretched thin, or overwhelmed, it’s usually because I’m overcomplicating something or failing to take the simple/ easy path because I feel I should be trying “harder” (old habits die hard).”
“Let go of what’s not working and really assess what is working and ‘what can I be excited about?’ It’s not that bad things don’t happen to me. I don’t label a lot of things good/ bad. [Instead, I ask] can I evolve from this? What do I want now? Where is my center now?”
“Expect disaster. Own as little as possible — things reduce happiness, reduce your contentment, increase your sense of “I”.”
Personal Development + Productivity + Leadership + Career
“Investing in yourself is the most important investment you’ll ever make in your life. . . . There’s no financial investment that’ll ever match it, because if you develop more skill, more ability, more insight, more capacity, that’s what’s going to really provide economic freedom.”
On leadership in the SEALS: ‘Humility.’ You’ve got to be humble, and you’ve got to be coachable. A good leader would come back and say ..‘What did I do wrong?’ And when you told them, they’d nod their head, pull out their notebook, and take notes. Being able to detach yourself from the situation, so you can see what’s happening, is absolutely critical to being a leader.
Cultivate Beginner’s Mind: “Experience often deeply embeds the assumptions that need to be questioned in the first place. When you have a lot of experience with something, you don’t notice the things that are new about it. You don’t notice the idiosyncrasies that need to be tweaked. You don’t notice where the gaps are, what’s missing, or what’s not really working.”
Strong Views — Loosely Held: “Most people go through life and never develop strong views on things, or specifically go along and buy into the consensus. One of the things I think you want to look for as both a founder and as an investor is things that are out of consensus, something very much opposed to the conventional wisdom. . . . Then, if you’re going to start a company around that, if you’re going to invest in that, you better have strong conviction because you’re making a very big bet of time or money or both. “Loosely held” also plays a role. People everywhere hate changing their minds, but you need to be able to adapt in light of new information. Many of my friends will fight you tooth and nail over a topic, perhaps making dinner company nervously glance around, but as soon as you cite better information or a better logic, they’ll concede and say something like, “You’re totally right. I never thought about that.”
“It’s not what you know, it’s what you do consistently.”
“What you choose to work on, and who you choose to work with, are far more important than how hard you work.”
“End the work day with very high quality, which for one thing means you’re internalizing quality overnight.”
“Choose the plan with the most options.”
“If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.”
“When you’re earlier in your career, I think the best strategy is to just say ‘yes’ to everything. Every little gig. You just never know what are the lottery tickets.”
“1) Become the best at one specific thing. 2) Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it. I always advise young people to become good public speakers (top 25%). Anyone can do it with practice. At least one of the skills in your mixture should involve communication, either written or verbal. And it could be as simple as learning how to sell more effectively than 75% of the world. That’s one. Now add to that whatever your passion is, and you have two, because that’s the thing you’ll easily put enough energy into to reach the top 25%.”
On learning skills: “We cannot out-obedience the competition. Therefore, we have to out-lead or out-solve the other people. Seth Godin believes markers of success include leadership and ability to solve interesting problems.”
“‘Don’t keep stuff to yourself.’ You’re surrounded by smart people. Bring them in. Get other people’s opinions. Share it with them. And most importantly, emotion is what matters. It’s an emotional journey.”
Build Skills that Accrue Over Time: “Use language, on “systems” instead of “goals.” This involves choosing projects and habits that, even if they result in “failures” in the eyes of the outside world, give you transferable skills or relationships. In other words, you choose options that allow you to inevitably “succeed” over time, as you build assets that carry over to subsequent projects. Example: “Writing is a skill that requires practice. So the first part of my system involves practicing on a regular basis. I didn’t know what I was practicing for, exactly, and that’s what makes it a system and not a goal. I was moving from a place with low odds (being an out-of-practice writer) to a place of good odds (a well-practiced writer with higher visibility). “The second part of my blogging system is a sort of R&D for writing. I write on a variety of topics and see which ones get the best response. I also write in different ‘voices.’ I have my humorously self-deprecating voice, my angry voice, my thoughtful voice, my analytical voice, my half-crazy voice, my offensive voice, and so on. Readers do a good job of telling me what works and what doesn’t. “When the Wall Street Journal took notice of my blog posts, they asked me to write some guest features. Thanks to all of my writing practice, and my knowledge of which topics got the best response, the guest articles were highly popular. Those articles weren’t big moneymakers either, but it all fit within my system of public practice. “My writing for the Wall Street Journal, along with my public practice on the blog, attracted the attention of book publishers, and that attention turned into a book deal. And the book deal generated speaking requests that are embarrassingly lucrative. So the payday for blogging eventually arrived, but I didn’t know in advance what path it would take. My blogging has kicked up dozens of business opportunities over the past years, so it could have taken any direction.”
“I pushed myself to a point that was incredibly uncomfortable and required myself to deliver at the highest level. I charged accordingly because I had done the work, done the research, and knew what the top guys and gals were getting. I put myself in that caliber right away. . . . I set it at $ 2,000 to $ 2,500 a day.”
Be Different — Not just better: “If I look across and everyone else is doing X, how do you zig when everyone else is zagging? The way that I zigged when everyone else was zagging in photography was I chronicled my exploits of learning my craft. . . . It was 10 years before it was cool to be transparent, and I was actually vilified for sharing trade secrets.”
“Don’t be afraid to do something you’re not qualified to do.”
“If your material is good, if it is engaging, there is almost no maximum you can write. . . . My point is not ‘write longer.’ It is ‘do not worry about space.’ Always guest post if you can.”
“Asking the right dumb question is often the smartest thing you can do.”
On learning: “If You Can’t Read It, Try Listening to It”
On career planning: “The job I was going to do hadn’t even been invented yet. . . . The interesting jobs are the ones that you make up.”
“Don’t Try and Find Time. Schedule Time.”
“When given a choice . . . take both. Multiple projects lead to multiple successes. When forced to compromise, ask for more. If you can’t win, change the rules. If you can’t change the rules, then ignore them. “No” simply means begin again at one level higher. When in doubt: THINK.”
To become “successful,” you have to say “yes” to a lot of experiments. To learn what you’re best at, or what you’re most passionate about, you have to throw a lot against the wall. Once your life shifts from pitching outbound to defending against inbound, however, you have to ruthlessly say “no” as your default. Instead of throwing spears, you’re holding the shield.
“Take Extreme Ownership of Your World”. “You can’t blame your boss for not giving you the support you need. Plenty of people will say, ‘It’s my boss’s fault.’ No, it’s actually your fault because you haven’t educated him, you haven’t influenced him, you haven’t explained to him in a manner he understands why you need this support that you need. That’s extreme ownership. Own it all.”
“Follow your passion is terrible advice: Find a satisfying job where the biggest predictor of job satisfaction is mentally engaging work. Its whether the job provides a lot of variety, gives you good feedback, allows you to exercise autonomy, contributes to the wider world — Is it actually meaningful? Is it making the world better? — and also, whether it allows you to exercise a skill that you’ve developed.”
“Formula for greatness: Consistency driven by a deep love of the work.”
“Life favors the specific ask and punishes the vague wish.”
Just Do It: “The material is like 10% of it. Being comfortable on stage is all of it. So I would say, just get on stage. The first year and a half, two years of standup is just getting comfortable on stage. Your material doesn’t matter.”
On Your Workplace / Culture / Strategy
On Stories as Narratives: “We want to attach ourselves to narratives. We don’t act because of equations. We follow our beliefs. We get behind leaders who stir our feelings. In the early days of your venture, if you find someone diving too deep into the numbers, that means they are struggling to find a reason to deeply care about you.”
Special forces soldiers became calmer when they heard of an overwhelming attack — it was stressful to wait for the unknown. But once an attack was signaled, they had a plan. Keep this in mind as an allegory for work. Deal with uncertainty through planning and action.
Be expensive: “The number-one theme that companies have when they really struggle is they are not charging enough for their product. And we just see over and over and over again people failing with that, because they get into a problem called ‘too hungry to eat.’ They don’t charge enough for their product to be able to afford the sales and marketing required to actually get anybody to buy it. Is your product any good if people won’t pay more for it?”
“I have come to learn that part of the business strategy is to solve the simplest, easiest, and most valuable problem. And actually, in fact, part of doing strategy is to solve the easiest problem, so part of the reason why you work on software and bits is that atoms [physical products] are actually very difficult. When reviewing your task list — make easy a key criterion — Which of these highest-value activities is the easiest for me to do? You can build an entire career on 80/ 20 analysis and asking this question.”
“A Lonely Place Is an Unmotivated Place”
On Hiring: “I look for a passion, attention to detail, drive beyond the things that they need to do. I’m totally down with quirky.”
“The metaphor I think of the most — because it’s simple — is the dog chasing the car. What does the dog do if he catches the car? He doesn’t have a plan for it. So I find it just as often on the entrepreneurial side. People don’t plan for success.”
“Give me an example of something that you’ve built into your product or your service that you’re especially proud of, that’s one of these touch points for someone to just go, “Wow . . . if you can inject this life into your software, into the copy, into the whatever, you can connect with people.” Improve a notification email from your business (e.g., subscription confirmation, order confirmation, whatever): “Invest that little bit of time to make it a little bit more human or — depending on your brand — a little funnier, a little more different, or a little more whatever. It’ll be worth it, and that’s my challenge.”
You, generally, never want to be part of a popular trend. What I prefer over trends is a sense of mission. That you are working on a unique problem that people are not solving elsewhere.
“Sometimes, being outside of the known hotspots is a huge advantage” Shaun White had a huge advantage being in SoCal because they were first to have big parks, it was warm, and the parks had T-Bar so he could get in 10x more runs per day.
“Breaking your rules to co-invest with well-known investors is usually a bad idea, but following your rules when others reject a startup can work out extremely well.”
On Vetting employees for talent — “You know it if they don’t just accept the strategy you hand them. They should suggest modifications to the plan based on their closeness to the details.”
“Seek a single reason for a potentially expensive action (trip, campaign, etc), and then the worthiness of the trip needs to be measured against that one reason. If I go, then we can backfill into the schedule all the other secondary activities. But if I go for a blended reason, I’ll almost surely come back and feel like it was a waste of time.”
On Marketing a Product: “First, Ten customers,” and it is a simple theory of marketing that says: tell ten people, show ten people, share it with ten people; ten people who already trust you and already like you. If they don’t tell anybody else, it’s not that good and you should start over. If they do tell other people, you’re on your way.”
“To create something great — start small: What’s the smallest possible footprint I can get away with? What is the smallest possible project that is worth my time? What is the smallest group of people who I could make a difference for, or to? Because smallest is achievable. Smallest feels risky. Because if you pick smallest and you fail, now you’ve really screwed up.”
“Open up and be vulnerable with the person you’re going to interview before you start. It works incredibly well to get people to open up.”
Phil Libin from Evernote on managing growth: “This effectively means that every single thing in your company breaks every time you roughly triple in size. His hypothesis is that everything breaks at roughly these points of 3 and 10 [multiples of 3 and powers of 10]. And by ‘everything,’ it means everything: how you handle payroll, how you schedule meetings, what kind of communications you use, how you do budgeting, who actually makes decisions. Every implicit and explicit part of the company just changes significantly when it triples. You should constantly, perpetually be thinking about how to reinvent yourself and how to treat the culture.”
Book your A list for after your first 10 pitches.
“How would you disrupt yourself?’ One of the most fundamental realizations is that every entrepreneur, every business, every company will get disrupted. ‘How will you disrupt yourself, and how are you trying to disrupt yourself? If you’re not, you’re in for a surprise.”
On maintaining standards in the kitchen — good metaphor for work: ‘We can do something else. If it’s not ready, we’re not going to send it out, and just hope they don’t notice that it’s not that good. We’ll fix it. We’ll do something else, but don’t try to slip by something that you know is below the standard. Hold the standard. Ask for help. Fix it. Do whatever’s necessary. But don’t cheat.” — Head Chef of Fat Duck in response to poor meal Chris had prepared.. Also illustrates disappointment often more powerful tool than anger.
You get what you incentivize. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
The advice I’d give to anyone young is.. it’s really about developing people who are going to do the work. Every minute you spend on that is leveraged — its exponential return.
On Interview Questions for hiring: “Everybody loves you — but they don’t love (x) about you… One, it forces them to come to grips with ‘What is it people don’t love about me?’ And the second is, they’ve got to say it to you. Helps you gauge somebodies self-perception. “To me, the most important thing was that they have an answer. A) It shows the courage to be able to address it, and B) it shows self-awareness that ‘I might be top peer-rated and have this great career, but there’s somebody out there, and here’s what they’d probably say. They’d say I was self-serving at one time, or I appear too good on paper, or I’m lazy on these types of physical training, or whatever the case may be. Show me that, if you identify it, you’re working on it.”
“Andy Grove had the answer: For every metric, there should be another ‘paired’ metric that addresses adverse consequences of the first metric.”
“Perfectionism leads to procrastination, which leads to paralysis.”
“A positive attitude won’t solve problems, but neither will dwelling on problems. Accept reality, but focus on the solution. Take that issue, take that setback, take that problem, and turn it into something good. Go forward. And, if you are part of a team, that attitude will spread throughout.”
“To get huge, good things done, you need to be okay with letting the small, bad things happen.”
“People’s IQs seem to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.”
“If I could only work 2 hours per week on my business, what would I do? “What 20% of customers/ products/ regions are producing 80% of the profit? What factors or shared characteristics might account for this?” What’s the least crowded channel for marketing?”
“What if I couldn’t pitch my product directly? What if I had to sell around the product?” Tim Ferris: Well, I could showcase people from the book who’ve completely redesigned their lives (human interest); I could write about unrelated crazy experiments, but drive people to my book-focused website (Google “Geek to Freak” to see the result. It was my first-ever viral blog post); I could popularize a new term and aim for pop culture (see “lifestyle design” on page 278); I could go meta and make the launch itself a news item (I also did this with my video “book trailer” for The 4-Hour Body, as well as the BitTorrent partnership for The 4-Hour Chef). People don’t like being sold products, but we all like being told stories.
“What might I put in place to allow me to go off the grid for 4 to 8 weeks, with no phone or email? It forces you to put systems and policies in place, ditch ad-hoc email-based triage, empower other people with rules and tools, separate the critical few from the trivial many, and otherwise create a machine that doesn’t require you behind the driver’s wheel 24/ 7.”
On Negotiation
Schwarzenegger on managing expectations: “Franco would play the bad guy, and I played the good guy. We would go to someone’s house and then someone would say, ‘Well, look at my patio. It’s all cracked. Can you guys put a new patio in here?’ I would say ‘yes’ and then we would run out and get the tape measure, but it would be a tape measure with centimeters. No one in those days could at all figure out anything with centimeters. We would be measuring up and I would say ‘4 meters and 82 centimeters.’ They had no idea what we were talking about. We were writing up dollars and amounts and square centimeters and square meters. Then I would go to the guy and say, ‘It’s $ 5,000,’ and the guy would be in a state of shock. He’d say, ‘It’s $ 5,000? This is outrageous.’ I’d say, ‘What did you expect?’ and he’d say, ‘I expected like $ 2,000 or $ 3,000.’ I’d say, ‘Let me talk to my guy because he’s really the masonry expert, but I can beat him down for you a little bit. Let me soften the meat.’ Then I would go to Franco and we would start arguing in German. ‘[ Content in German]!!!’ This would be going on and on, and he was screaming back at me in Italian. Then, all of a sudden, he would calm down, and I would go to the guy and say, ‘Phew . . . okay, here it is. I could get him as low as $ 3,800. Can you go with that?’ He says, ‘Thank you very much. I really think that you’re a great man’ and blah, blah, blah and all this stuff. I’d say, ‘Give us half down right now and we’ll go right away and get the cement and the bricks and everything we need for here and we’ll start working on Monday.’ The guy was ecstatic. He gave us the money and we immediately went to the bank and cashed the check. We had to make sure the money was in the bank account, and then we went out and got the cement, the wheelbarrow, and all the stuff that we needed and went to work. We worked like that very successfully.
“In negotiation, he who cares the least wins.” — remember to diversify so you are less dependent on a specific outcome (Arnold was already a millionaire before audtioning for movies through real estate investment so he could avoid bit parts)”
On deal making and negotiation: “This reminded me of the deal that George Lucas crafted for Star Wars, in which the studio effectively said, “Toys? Yeah, sure, whatever. You can have the toys.” That was a multi-billion-dollar mistake that gave Lucas infinite financing for life (an estimated 8,000,000,000 + units sold to date). When deal-making, ask yourself: Can I trade a short-term, incremental gain for a potential longer-term, game-changing upside? Is there an element here that might be far more valuable in 5 to 10 years (e.g., ebook rights 10 years ago)? Might there be rights or options I can explicitly “carve out” and keep? If you can cap the downside (time, capital, etc.) and have the confidence, take uncrowded bets on yourself.”
Using an Anchor — Donald Trump: “Check your facts” is what I call the ‘high ground maneuver.’ It’s the same thing Jobs did when he explained away Antennagate just by saying, ‘All smart phones have problems. We’re trying to make our customers happy.’ He made a national story go away in less than 30 seconds with those two sentences.” It’s a negotiating technique. You throw down an anchor, you divert everybody.
On Love / Relationships
On Successful Relationships: “There’s only one thing that everybody had in common, no matter what the dynamic. What is it? The man respected the woman. The number one thing.”
On Consoling the Dying: “I think I’ve gotten in trouble when I’ve tried to come in with some predetermined idea of advice-giving. Oftentimes, that’s not really what’s needed. It’s more just the camaraderie and bearing witness. So to answer your question, when I do go into folks’ rooms, I’m there and I’ll avail myself to any questions they have. But I think most of the power of the visit is just visiting, I’ve realized that people knowing you’re listening — valuing them, collectively — is more important than responding to everyone.
“If you spend 2 hours a day without an electronic device, looking your kid in the eye, talking to them and solving interesting problems, you will raise a different kid than someone who doesn’t do that. That’s one of the reasons why I cook dinner every night. Because what a wonderful, semi-distracted environment in which the kid can tell you the truth. For you to have low-stakes but super important conversations with someone who’s important to you.” .. This will work for all relationships. Cook dinner, cook breakfast = and talk”
“You can’t be afraid to show your scars. — on why vulnerability is the best way to build rapport”
“The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.”
“The World Doesn’t Need Your Explanation On Saying “No”
Steven Hawking Quote: ‘When you complain, nobody wants to help you,’.. It’s the simplest thing and so plainly spoken. Only he could really say that brutal, honest truth, but it’s true, right? If you spend your time focusing on the things that are wrong, and that’s what you express and project to people you know, you don’t become a source of growth for people, you become a source of destruction for people. That draws more destructiveness. “Because I was thinking about how I was in pain, it started a direction that was negative in my life. So, I put myself on a complaining diet where I said, Not only am I not going to say anything negative about the situation I’m in, but I’m not going to let myself think anything negative about it.’
“No matter what the situation may be, the right course of action is always compassion and love.”
“Be the silence that listens.”
“When people seem like they are mean, they’re almost never mean. They’re anxious.” When we’re handling babies and the baby is kicking and crying, we almost never once say, ‘That baby’s out to get me’ or ‘She’s got evil intentions.’
“‘People-pleasing is a form of assholery,’ which I just loved, because you’re not pleasing anybody. You’re just making them resentful because you’re being disingenuous, and you’re not giving them the dignity of their own experience and assuming they can’t handle the truth.”
“Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive.”
“To blame somebody for not understanding you fully is deeply unfair, because first of all, we don’t understand ourselves and even if we do we have such a hard time communicating to other people. Therefore, to be furious and enraged and bitter that people don’t get all of who we are is really a cruel piece of immaturity.”
“Anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else (Buddhist saying).”
“Anything negative you say could at the very least ruin someone’s day, or worse, break someone’s heart, or simply change someone from being a future ally of yours to someone who will never forget that you were unkind or unfairly critical. It’s so common today to complain or criticize others’ work on social media, or dogpile on someone for a perceived offense. I won’t do it. It’s not my job to be the world’s critic, and I’d rather not rule out any future allies.”
“Looking somebody in the eye . . . is often the antidote for what is ailing us.”
‘Say less.’ That’s it. Just say less.”
“It doesn’t matter how many people don’t get it. What matters is how many people do. 10% of people will find a way to take anything personally. Expect it and treat it as math. Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity. You’ll avoid the tough decisions, and you’ll avoid confronting the people who need to be confronted. To do anything remotely interesting, you need to train yourself to handle — or even enjoy — criticism.”
Start with I Love You: “And I think ultimately, sometimes when we judge other people, it’s just a way to not look at ourselves; a way to feel superior or sanctimonious or whatever. My trauma therapist said every time you meet someone, just in your head say, ‘I love you’ before you have a conversation with them, and that conversation is going to go a lot better. I would just assume everybody is doing the best they can with what they have, which is really hard for a lot of us to accept.”
“Honesty was such a strong virtue between them that even when they were ready to kill each other, they would take each other’s word for things. It went above everything.”
“Praise specifically, criticize generally.” (Warren Buffett)
“Love is given, not received.”
“It was the first time somebody said to me “You’re smart enough — you can do it” That changed my world. I wish it hadn’t, in some ways. I wish it didn’t mean so much to me. But I’ve learned from that, now in my position, to say that to people. Because there’s something stupid in us that just makes us feel like we’re not good enough, we’re not smart enough.”
“You can’t really earn trust over time with people without being somewhat vulnerable [first].”
“Don’t go for funny. Go for the truth, and you’ll hit funny along the way.”
‘Always tell the truth. It’s the easiest thing to remember.’
On Cooking to Connect with People: “There’s so little overlap with most people that I meet, [which makes cooking great] because it creates this context where everybody is on equal footing, and everybody has a different skill set. It becomes a real task [where you become interdependent]. I find I have endless patience to spend time with people I don’t know very well, if you’re working on a really intimate cooking project. Then at the end, we all serve it together, and we really feel like we fought a war together. It’s a great bonding thing.”
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. Each morning, express heartfelt gratitude to one person you care about, or who’s helped or supported you. Text, message, write, or call.”
On Inspiration / Altruism / Purpose / Success
“What do you think about that really gets you excited?’ Because I would say to have no fear. I mean, you’ve got one chance here to do amazing things, and being afraid of being wrong or making a mistake or fumbling is just not how you do something of impact. You just have to be fearless.”
“Smart people should make things. Get inside the heads of the people who made things in the past and what they were actually like, and then realize that they’re not that different from you. At the time they got started, they were kind of just like you . . . so there’s nothing stopping any of the rest of us from doing the same thing.” Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
“Success is: Do your kids remember you for being the best dad? Not the dad who gave them everything, but will they be able to tell you anything one day? Will they able to call you out of the blue, any day, no matter what? Are you the first person they want to ask for advice? And at the same time, can you hit it out of the park in whatever it is you decide to do, as a lawyer, as a doctor, as a stockbroker, as a whatever?”
“You discover your ‘dream’ (or sense of purpose) in the very act of walking the path, which is guided by equal parts choice and chance.”
“Most who’ve been successful for decades also have methods to cultivate gratitude.”
On Setting a Goal / Finding Your Vision: “My confidence came from my vision. . . . I am a big believer that if you have a very clear vision of where you want to go, then the rest of it is much easier. Because you always know why you are training 5 hours a day, you always know why you are pushing and going through the pain barrier, and why you have to eat more, and why you have to struggle more, and why you have to be more disciplined. . . . I felt that I could win it, and that was what I was there for. I wasn’t there to compete. I was there to win.”
Tony Robbins — On the most successful hedge managers he mentors (Dalio, Tudor Jones, Branson): “And the last one that I found: almost all of them were real givers, not just givers on the surface . . . but really passionate about giving. . . . It was really real.”
“It’s a belief: Life is always happening for us, not to us. It’s our job to find out where the benefit is. If we do, life is magnificent.”
“Everyone is interesting. If you’re ever bored in a conversation, the problem’s with you, not the other person.”
“We are whatever we pretend to be.”
“Forget purpose. It’s okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives.”
“I now have a very simple metric I use: Are you working on something that can change the world? Yes or no? The answer for 99.99999% of people is ‘no.’ I think we need to be training people on how to change the world.”
“The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live. The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself. The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea”
“The great temptation that people have is they want to be somebody else. To me, success is you make your own slot. You have a new slot that didn’t exist before. That’s, of course, what Jesus and many others were doing. That’s really hard to do, but I think that’s what I chalk up as success.”
“I think you should try to slay dragons. I don’t care how big the opponent is. We read about and admire the people who did things that were basically considered to be impossible.”
“Believe in yourself more deeply. You’re bigger than that. Dream bigger”
“The more you know what you really want, and where you’re really going, the more what everybody else is doing starts to diminish.”
“Ultimately, to be properly successful is to be at peace as well.”
“Passion comes from a combination of being open and curious, and of really going all-in when you find something that you’re interested in.”
The little things are the big things: “It’s such a beautiful and critical principle, and most people think they can wait around for the big moments to turn it on. But if you don’t cultivate ‘turning it on’ as a way of life in the little moments — and there are hundreds of times more little moments than big — then there’s no chance in the big moments.”
“General fame is overrated. You want to be famous to 2,000 to 3,000 people you handpick.” I’m paraphrasing, but the gist is that you don’t need or want mainstream fame. It brings more liabilities than benefits. However, if you’re known and respected by 2– 3K high-caliber people (e.g., the live TED audience), you can do anything and everything you want in life. It provides maximal upside and minimal downside.”
On Creativity / Idea Generation
On Creativity: Everything is Creative — “How you journal things, how you cross reference, how you present things, how you inspire your crew, how you inspire other people around you, how you inspire yourself — it’s all creative. If you say you’re not creative, look at how much you’re missing out on just because you’ve told yourself that. Creativity can be applied to literally everything in your life.”
On breaking through stuck points (writing, music, anything..) — The goal isn’t to get good ideas; the goal is to get bad ideas. Because once you get enough bad ideas, then some good ones have to show up.”
“Creativity is an infinite resource. The more you spend, the more you have.”
“People think they can’t do art. Because they think of art as learning to draw or learning a certain kind of self-expression. But in fact, what artists do is they learn to see.”
“It is essential to get lost and jam up your plans every now and then. It is a source of creativity and perspective.
On brainstorming dumb ideas: “To me, everything is idea and execution and, if you separate idea and execution, you don’t put too much pressure on either of them.”
Scratch Your Own Itch: “The second you start doing it for an audience, you’ve lost the long game because creating something that is rewarding and sustainable over the long run requires, most of all, keeping yourself excited about it.”
Paulo Coehlo: “There are only four stories: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power, and the journey. Every single book that is in the bookstore deals with these four archetypes, these four themes.”
“The best art divides the audience. If half the people love it and half the people hate it, you are pushing the boundaries. This applies to everything — people shouldn’t understand what you’re doing.”
“The only way to use the inspiration of other artists is if you submerge yourself in the greatest works of all time.”
“Books are not here to show how intelligent and cultivated you are. Books are out there to show your heart, to show your soul, and to tell your fans, readers: You are not alone.”
“I cultivate empty space as a way of life for the creative process.”
“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
“Even if I didn’t know what to do, I just had to begin. For a lot of people, that’s the part that keeps them back the most. They think, ‘Well, I don’t have an idea, so I can’t start.’ I know you’ll only get the idea once you start. It’s this totally reverse thing. You have to act first before inspiration will hit.”
On Original Thought
Andressen on Original Thinking and Buffett: We’re wired completely opposite in that sense. Basically, he’s betting against change. We’re betting for change. When he makes a mistake, it’s because something changes that he didn’t expect. When we make a mistake, it’s because something doesn’t change that we thought would. We could not be more different in that way. But what both schools have in common is an orientation toward, I would say, original thinking in really being able to view things as they are as opposed to what everybody says about them, or the way they’re believed to be.”
“To do original work: It’s not necessary to know something nobody else knows. It is necessary to believe something few other people believe.”
‘When you think of the word “successful,” who’s the third person that comes to mind? Why are they actually more successful than the first person that came to mind? — example of asking “why” three times.. After thinking about this — Derek’s third answer was that you cant know who the most successful person was without knowing their aims (ie. if Richard Branson (his first example) set out to live a quiet life but cant stop creating companies like a compulsive gambler then maybe he isn’t successful after all). The Third Person or “why” method can help unleash new ways of thinking / more informed thought.
On following formal plans: “The standard pace is for chumps. The school has to organize its curricula around the lowest common denominator, so that almost no one is left out. They have to slow down, so everybody can catch up.”
There is something very odd about a society where the most talented people all get tracked toward the same elite colleges, where they end up studying the same small number of subjects and going into the same small number of careers. “That strikes me as sort of a lack of diversity in our thinking about the kinds of things people should be doing. It’s very limiting for our society as well as for those students. I certainly think I was very much guilty of this myself, if I look back on my Stanford undergraduate and law school years. It’s possible I would do it again. But if I had to do something over, I would think about it much harder. I would ask questions. Why am I doing this? Am I doing this just because I have good grades and test scores and because I think it’s prestigious? Or am I doing this because I’m extremely passionate about practicing law?
What do people agree merely by convention, and what is the truth?’ There’s a consensus of things that people believe to be true. Maybe the conventions are right, and maybe they’re not. And we never want to let a convention be a shortcut for truth. We always need to ask: Is this true? And this is always what I get at with this indirect question: ‘Tell me something that’s true that very few people agree with you on.’
“I think of problems as gold mines. The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.”
“The biggest mistake you can make is to accept the norms of your time.’
Why looking for patterns is bad advice: “I try to learn from the past without being inspired by it. My big question is always, ‘What did they try, and why did it work?’ When I hear stories of success and failure, I look for the little things that made a big difference. What conventional wisdom was shunned? . . . I avoid using a past success as a proxy for the future.
On growing 10x vs. 10%: “First, when you’re trying to grow 10%, you are competing against everybody — at 10x bigger you’re there by yourself. The second thing is, when you are trying to go 10 times bigger, you have to start with a clean sheet of paper, and you approach the problem completely differently. I’ll give you my favorite example: Tesla. How did Elon start Tesla and build from scratch the safest, most extraordinary car, not even in America, but I think in the world? It’s by not having a legacy from the past to drag into the present. “The third thing is when you try to go 10 times bigger versus 10% bigger, it’s typically not 100 times harder, but the reward is 100 times more.”
“This feeling that everyone calls ‘I’ — is an illusion that can be disconfirmed in a variety of ways… its vulnerable to inquiry and that inquiry can take many forms. The unique power of psychedelics is that they are guaranteed to work on some level to show you the illusion of “I”.”
“Don’t believe everything that you think.”
“Guilt [is] interesting because guilt is the flip side of prestige, and they’re both horrible reasons to do things.”
On Starting to use psychedelics after 40: “It wasn’t until I started meeting some of the most intellectually gifted people in the sciences and beyond… I realized that this was sort of the open secret of what I call the hallucinogenic elite, whether it’s billionaires, or Nobel laureates, or inventors and coders. A lot of these people were using these agents either for creativity or to gain access to the things that are so difficult to get access to through therapy and other conventional means.”
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.”
“We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.”
“Finding the Best Recipes for Life: Look for the details and the doers — When something is described in an extreme level of detail, you know the person has been through it (he references looking for a recipe for pound cake that would describe to a quarter inch the size of the pan)”
“What if I did the opposite for 48 hours? “What if I did the opposite?”: What if I only asked questions instead of pitching? What if I studied technical material, so I sounded like an engineer instead of a sales guy? What if I ended my emails with “I totally understand if you’re too busy to reply, and thank you for reading this far”
On Long Term Travel as a Way of Life
(this is also something important to reread to think about how you are living and how meaningless attachment to “things” can be): Travel isn’t just for changing what’s outside, it’s for reinventing what’s inside. The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. In reality, long-term travel has nothing to do with demographics — age, ideology, income — and everything to do with personal outlook. Long-term travel isn’t about being a college student — it’s about being a student of daily life. Long-term travel isn’t an act of rebellion against society — it’s an act of common sense within society. Long-term travel doesn’t require a massive “bundle of cash”; it requires only that we walk through the world in a more deliberate way. “with its wealth of time, its unregimented days, its latitude of choice . . . such freedom seems more rare, more difficult to attain, more remote with each new generation.”
Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility. For all the amazing experiences that await you in distant lands, the “meaningful” part of travel always starts at home, with a personal investment in the wonders to come.
Work is not just an activity that generates funds and creates desire: it’s the vagabonding gestation period, wherein you earn your integrity, start making plans, and get your proverbial act together. Work is a time to dream about travel and write notes to yourself, but it’s also the time tie up your loose ends. Work is when you confront the problems you might otherwise be tempted to run away from. Work is how you settle your financial and emotional debts — so that your travels are not an escape from your real life, but a discovery of your real life.
List the job skills travel has taught you: independence, flexibility, negotiation, planning, boldness, self-sufficiency, improvisation. Speak frankly and confidently about your travel experiences.
On Health
“If the best in the world are stretching their asses off in order to get strong, why aren’t you?”
“Stop drinking now. Stop drinking right now and patent all your ideas . . . and exercise compassion every day.”
“You Say “Health Is #1” . . . But Is It Really?. I’m tired of unwarranted last-minute “hurry up and sign” emergencies and related fire drills. It’s a culture of cortisol.”
“Now, I try to put love in my meals when I cook.”
On Technology and Progress
“‘Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous”
‘When it comes to the future, it’s far more important to be imaginative than to be right”
“I want to do fundamental breakthroughs, the only way to do it is to do the type of research that other people would think of as risky or even foolhardy. That’s just part of the game.”
“We call our test ‘What do the nerds do on nights and weekends?’
“Trust and attention — these are the scarce items in a post-scarcity world.”
“Three to five billion new consumers are coming online in the next 6 years. Holy cow, that’s extraordinary. What do they need? What could you provide for them, because they represent tens of trillions of dollars coming into the global economy, and they also represent an amazing resource of innovation. So I think about that a lot, and I ask that.”
