In the novel Fight Club, the character Jack’s apartment is blown up. All of his possessions—every stick of furniture, which he pathetically loved—were lost. Later it turns out that Jack blew it up him...
In life, it doesn’t matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you’ve been given. And the only way you’ll do something spectacular is by using...
In actuality, the will has a lot more to do with surrender than with strength. Try God willing over the will to win or willing it into existence, for even those attributes can be broken. True will is...
If your purpose is something larger than you—to accomplish something, to prove something to yourself—then suddenly everything becomes both easier and more difficult.
If you want momentum, you’ll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.
If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity. Just
If you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.
If we can focus on making clear what parts of our day are within our control and what parts are not, we will not only be happier, we will have a distinct advantage over other people who fail to realiz...
If ego is the voice that tells us we’re better than we really are, we can say ego inhibits true success by preventing a direct and honest connection to the world around us. One
If action is what we do when we still have some agency over our situation, the will is what we depend on when agency has all but disappeared.
IN THE INTRODUCTION I EXPLAINED A SCAM I CALL trading up the chain. It’s a strategy I developed that manipulates the media through recursion. I can turn nothing into something by placing a story with...
I can’t call a person a hard worker just because I hear they read and write, even if working at it all night. Until I know what a person is working for, I can’t deem them industrious. . . . I can if t...
How you do anything is how you can do everything. We can always act right.
How we interpret the events in our lives, our perspective, is the framework for our forthcoming response—whether there will even be one or whether we’ll just lie there and take it. Where the head goes...
How can anyone maintain their sanity when everything you read, see, and hear is designed to make you stop whatever you're doing and consume because the world is supposedly ending?
His path was in some ways traditional—Stanford to Stanford Law to judicial clerkship to high-powered law firm—but it was also marked by bouts of rebellion. At Stanford he created and published a radic...
Heraclitus called self-deception an awful disease and eyesight a lying sense. —DIOGENES LAERTIUS, LIVES OF THE EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS,
Hello, shitstorm of press. Hello, number one on the New York Times bestseller list. I pulled this off with no connections, no money, and no footsteps to follow.
He was inclined to see the opportunity in every disaster. To that
Hate at any point is a cancer that gnaws away at the very vital center of your life and your existence. It is like eroding acid that eats away the best and the objective center of your life.