This doesn’t mean you want to spend your time doing it. If you spend your time, worth $20–25 per hour, doing something that someone else will do for $10 per hour, it’s simply a poor use of resources....
Thinking of what makes me happy doesn’t give me the same clarity as thinking about what gives me bliss. For me, it’s the freedom I feel on top of a mountain or the breeze I feel laying on a catamaran...
These world-class performers don’t have superpowers. The rules they’ve crafted for themselves allow the bending of reality to such an extent that it may seem that way, but they’ve learned how to do th...
These two books are actually parts one and two of a six-part collection called Rationality: From AI to Zombies, sourced from Yudkowsky’s blog posts from the site LessWrong.com over the last decade.
There’s the instant, unconscious, automatic thinking and then there’s the slower, conscious, rational, deliberate thinking.
Therefore, to be furious and enraged and bitter that people don’t get all of who we are is a really a cruel piece of immaturity.
There were three reasons why we survived: We had no money, we had no technology, and we had no plan. Every dollar, we used very carefully.
There is no way to happiness—happiness is the way. –THICH NHAT HANH Vietnamese Buddhist monk and Nobel
There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803–1882)
The worst that could happen wasn’t crashing and burning, it was accepting terminal boredom as a tolerable status quo. Remember—boredom is the enemy, not some abstract failure.
The top 1% often succeed despite how they train, not because of it. Superior genetics, or a luxurious full-time schedule, make up for a lot.
The superheroes you have in your mind (idols, icons, titans, billionaires, etc.) are nearly all walking flaws who’ve maximized 1 or 2 strengths.
The student who elects to risk it all—which is nothing—to establish an online video rental service that delivers $5,000 per month in income from a small niche of Blu-ray aficionados, a two-hour-per-we...
The stars will never align
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: T...
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...
The perfect day is caffeine for 10 hours, alcohol for 4. It balances everything out perfectly.
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 muscl...
The key to that satisfaction is to reach the nirvana in which love of practice for its own sake (intrinsic) replaces the original goal (extrinsic) as our grail. The antithesis of mastery is the pursui...
The immediate answer that comes to mind is ‘humility.’ Because you’ve got to be humble, and you’ve got to be coachable. . . . Later, when I was running training, we would fire a couple leaders from ev...