Roger Ebert calls snarking cultural vandalism. He’s right. Snark makes culture impossible, or rather, it makes the conditions that make culture possible impossible. Earnestness, honesty, vulnerability...
Responsibility requires a readjustment and then increased clarity and purpose. First, setting the top-level goals and priorities of the organization and your life. Then enforcing and observing them.
Reminding ourselves each day that we will die helps us treat our time as a gift.
Remember that it’s not only the desire for wealth and position that debases and subjugates us, but also the desire for peace, leisure, travel, and learning. It doesn’t matter what the external thing i...
Principles are better than instructions and hacks. We can figure out the specifics later—but only if we learn the right way to approach them.
Precisely what makes us so promising as thinkers, doers, creatives, and entrepreneurs, what drives us to the top of those fields, makes us vulnerable to this darker side of the psyche. Now
Philosophy is simply asking us to pay careful attention and to strive to be more than a pawn. As Viktor Frankl puts it in The Will to Meaning, Man is pushed by drives but pulled by values.
Perspective has two definitions. Context: a sense of the larger picture of the world, not just what is immediately in front of us Framing: an individual’s unique way of looking at the world, a way tha...
People seek retreats for themselves in the country, by the sea, or in the mountains. You are very much in the habit of yearning for those same things. But this is entirely the trait of a base person,...
Paul Graham explains, The best way to increase a startup’s growth rate is to make the product so good people recommend it to their friends.
Our brains evolved for an environment very different from the one we currently inhabit.
Our actions may be impeded ... but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our a...
Or you create an alterative with so much support from other people that the opposition voluntarily abandons its views and joins your camp. The
Only in struggling with the impediments that made others quit can we find ourselves on untrodden territory—only by persisting and resisting can we learn what others were too impatient to be taught.
Once we stop thinking of the products we market as static—that our job as marketers is to simply work with what we’ve got instead of working on and improving what we’ve got—the whole game changes.
Once one forges oneself into a hammer of justice and feels the power of crushing one’s enemies, driving them before one and taking their possessions as one’s own, does one become addicted to it? It ca...
On tough days we might say, My work is overwhelming, or My boss is really frustrating. If only we could understand that this is impossible. Someone can’t frustrate you, work can’t overwhelm you—these...
On the path to successful action, we will fail—possibly many times. And that’s okay. It can be a good thing, even. Action and failure are two sides of the same coin. One doesn’t come without the other...
Noah Kagan, a growth hacker at Facebook, the personal finance service Mint.com (which sold to Intuit for nearly $170 million), and the daily deal site AppSumo (which has more than eight hundred thousa...
No one has ever said this better than Mike Tyson, who, reflecting on the collapse of his fortune and fame, told a reporter, If you’re not humble, life will visit humbleness upon you. If