What might you do to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next 6 months, if you had a gun against your head?
What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? When I give a book, I always try to find something that I loved...
What if [you] just can’t come up with 10 ideas? Here’s the magic trick: If you can’t come up with 10 ideas, come up with 20 ideas. . . . You are putting too much pressure on yourself. Perfectionism is...
What are the biggest tech trends that you see defining the future? I don’t like talking in terms of tech ‘trends’ because I think, once you have a trend, you have many people doing it. And once you ha...
What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise? If you put ten people in a room and they have to choose an ice cream flavor, they’re gonna arrive at vanilla. There is al...
What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the real world? What advice should they ignore? If you’re really smart, you’ll drop the drivenness. It doesn’t matter what’...
Were my goals my own, or simply what I thought I should want? How much of life had I missed from underplanning or overplanning?
Well, I decided to flip it around and travel when I was really young, when I had zero money. And I had experiences that, basically, even a billion dollars couldn’t have bought.
Too much free time is no more than fertilizer for self-doubt and assorted mental tail-chasing. Subtracting the bad does not create the good. It leaves a vacuum. Decreasing income-driven work isn’t the...
Tons of people deserve to be successful because they’re supersmart and interesting and work hard, but they just haven’t had the luck.
Tomorrow becomes never. No matter how small the task, take the first step now!
To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children . . . to leave the world a bit better . . . to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived....
To do or not to do? To try or not to try? Most people will vote no, whether they consider themselves brave or not. Uncertainty and the prospect of failure can be very scary noises in the shadows. Most...
Tirando cenizas sobre el Buda (La Liebre de Marzo, 1991), del maestro zen Seung Sahn,
Three to five billion new consumers are coming online in the next 6 years. Holy cow, that’s extraordinary. What do they need?
This presents a very curious phenomenon. There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other: 1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20...
This poster, which I still have on my wall 20 years later, contains all 1,945 of the jōyō kanji , the characters designated for basic literacy by the Japanese Ministry of Education. Most
This moment in history demands that we put purpose before profit, that we take more seriously the fact that we have the tools, the imagination, and the resources to solve our toughest problems. So it...
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...
Think of them as insurance against the weaknesses of human nature—your weaknesses, my weaknesses, our weaknesses: 1. Make it conscious. 2. Make it a game. 3. Make it competitive. 4. Make it small and...