shelf / quotes

"reset. reflect. restart. refocus. release. recenter."

"Figure out what you want, ignore the opinion of others and do so much volume that it will unreasonable to be un successful."

"Ask specific questions - Vague questions could mean anything, so they mean nothing."

"Work less. Focus more"

"Puzzle > Problem - An easy way to increase agency is to remove "problem" from your vocabulary and replace it with "puzzle". It sounds absurd, but "problem" activates my amygdala and "puzzle" activates my prefrontal cortex. Try it. Self-induced placebo that works."

"Rule of thumb: Fix hardware (sleep, exercise, diet) before software (psychology). 95% of my software problems seem to magically get fixed when I take care of my hardware."

"success really just boils down to this. You gotta want it more than you hate what it takes to get it. If you're willing to suck at anything for 100 days in a row, you can beat most people at most things."

"The problem is to achieve the highest levels, you have to give up proportional amounts of the things you hoped the achievements would get you"

"Figure out what you want, ignore the opinions of others, do so much work, it would be unreasonable that you fail, realize it never mattered to begin with, help others. Once you get there, you've already achieved the things you said would make you successful."

"do hard things"

"You sit on a rowing machine, you row 2000 meters as hard as you can. And the saying is, if you get done with that ERG test and you can pull one more stroke, you didn't pull hard enough."

"First, if you want to have an asymmetric life, do hard things."

"Second principle, if you want to have an asymmetric life, do your thing. Do your thing."

"Life is suffering, and so choose something worth suffering for."

"There is no obstacle that will not yield to you. Excited for a decade."

"If they lack a bias for action, they'll never move their ideas from theory into the real world."

"The human brain is a question-answering machine. If you ask it: "What's good in my life?" — it will find answers. If you ask it: "What's bad in my life?" — it will find answers."

"The 'adults' aren't going to save you — they don't even exist."

"One of the biggest killers of high agency is a desire to be normal: To fit in and be liked by others."

"If you're hiding your weird individualism to make the tribe like you, remember: They'll soon forget everything you did or said."

"The past no longer exists — it's just a memory appearing in the now. The future does not yet exist — it's a dream of a future now appearing in the now. Life is just a series of nows."

"Specific question: What does my dream week look like hour by hour? What does my nightmare week look like hour by hour? What's the gap between my current week and the dream/nightmare week?"

"Rumination can be reframed as a smoke alarm for action. If you catch yourself ruminating, reply with How can I take action on this?"

"The Turning Bullshit Into Reality Exercise Try this simple exercise: Step 1 - Write down esoteric things you value. E.g. Value 1 - High Agency. **Step 2 - Write down 10 specific ways you can display that vague value in reality with specific action. Don't think. Just dump. Step 3 - Pick one. If you want to play hardcore mode: Pick the one that gives you the strongest sense of fear. E.g. Write thank you letter to teacher who stopped me being bullied when I was 15 years old. **Step 4 - Write down every micro step you need to take. * Find the teachers email * Write the letter * Hit send Step 5 - Do each micro step now. Step 6 - Feel the emotion of being a live player. The goosebumps on your arms, the tears running down your face, the dry mouth. Those are high agency side effects: You're alive. ****Step 7 - Come back tomorrow and repeat. Keep stacking evidence of turning bullshit into reality. The beauty of this exercise is it shifts your mind from a "to-do list" model of the world where you do things in short term memory -- to a creative model of the world where you pick your values, let your creativity do it's magic -- and change your self identity by doing high agency things."

"Often simply laying out a problem will present a solution. Make "explaining the problem" part of your troubleshooting process."

"Optimism states the glass is half full. Pessimism states the glass is half empty. High agency states you're a tap. You look in the mirror and see a giant tap staring back at you."

"The one big thing everyone in that high agency room has in common: They are happening to life. They don't view the future as a static entity. They view it as something to be shaped by human action."

"The biggest lie we tell ourselves is "I dont need to write this down because I will remember it.""

"Three things you need: The ability to not give up something till it works, the ability to give up something that does not work, and the trust in other people to help you distinguish between the two."

"A wise man said, "Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates. At the first gate, ask yourself, "Is it true?" At the second gate ask, "Is it necessary?" At the third gate ask, "Is it kind?""

"Habit is far more dependable than inspiration. Make progress by making habits. Dont focus on getting into shape. Focus on becoming the kind of person who never misses a workout."

"About 99% of the time, the right time is right now."

"Anything you say before the word "but" does not count."

"Because I just want to keep bringing this point to life that like, once you find the thing, what kinds of things does it then take to make the thing great?"

"He said, if you don't guard your time, greatness will disappear. Another way to think about that is, like, if you lose your focus, greatness will disappear."

"I didn't succeed in life because of intelligence. I succeeded because I had a long attention span."

"There's nobody coming. There's nobody coming to save you."

"You're not living the best life that you want to live. You're not the person you want to be. You're not the person the eight year old you wanted to be. And I bet you you're not even taking steps to become that person, are you? And that's what's wrong with the world,"

"I'm going to control what I eat, I'm going to control what I drink, I'm going to control how I move, I'm going to control the information I put in my brain. I'm going to control how I treat people and who I surround myself with."

"Real knowledge is intrinsic, and it's built from the ground up"

"the mind itself is a muscle and it can be trained and it can be conditioned. It has just been haphazardly conditioned by society out of our control."

"The modern flavor is that the individual is getting more powerful because they're becoming more leverage."

"You're operating in a highly leveraged intellectual domain, so the outcomes are going to be non linear."

"You iterate on a closed time frame"

"inspiration is perishable. Act on it immediately."

"find what feels like play to you, you, but looks like work to others, so it looks like work to them, but to you, it feels like play."

"You escape competition through authenticity by being your own self. If I had to summarize how to be successful in life in two words, I would just say productize yourself. That's it."

"Life is going to play out the way it's going to play out. There will be some good and some bad. Most of it is actually just up to your interpretation. You're born, you have a set of sense from three experiences, and then you die. How you choose to interpret those experiences is up to you."

"And different people interpret them in different ways. Yeah, it's the old line about two people walking down the street, they're having the exact same experience. One is experience, one is happy, one is sad. Right. It's a narrative in their heads."

"Tiny changes in our habits can change the trajectory of our lives in ways that we can't even notice until many years into the future."

"Most of your current habits are so automatic that you don't even realize them. You must first become aware of your habits before you can change them."

"You can better shape your behavior by designing your environment."

"if you're not 100% into it, somebody else might be 100% into it and they're going to outperform you"

"I think you need to be super "obsessed" to do great things —not just be disciplined."

"Discipline is what you need to maintain the speed of the rocket, but obsession is what gets it off the ground."

"Today's most interesting opportunities exist at the intersections - where different domains collide and create new possibilities. The people who thrive aren't the ones who went deep in a single direction, but those who built unique combinations of capabilities that let them navigate complexity and create value in unexpected ways."

"Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be produced and consumed at variable speeds. It is asynchronous. It can be compared, diffed, clustered, corrected, summarized and filtered algorithmically. It permits multiparty editing. It permits branching conversations, lurking, annotation, quoting, reviewing, summarizing, structured responses, exegesis, even fan fic. The breadth, scale and depth of ways people use text is unmatched by anything. There is no equivalent in any other communication technology for the social, communicative, cognitive and reflective complexity of a library full of books or an internet full of postings. Nothing else comes close. So this is my stance on text: always pick text first. As my old boss might have said: always bet on text. If you can use text for something, use it. It will very seldom let you down."