Select notes and quotes:

• "We ignore the real diamonds of simplicity, seeking instead the illusory rhinestones of complexity."
• "In business, we place too much emphasis on what can be counted and not nearly enough on trusting and being trusted. When we should be doing exactly the opposite, we allow—indeed we almost force—our professions to behave more like businesses."
• "...we think more like managers, whose task is to do things right, than as leaders, whose task is to do the right thing."
• "We focus too much on things and not enough on the intangibles that make things worthwhile; too much on success (a word I’ve never liked) and not enough on character, without which success is meaningless."
• "As William Penn pointed out, 'We pass through this world but once, so do now any good you can do, and show now any kindness you can show, for we shall not pass this way again.' "
• "Today, if fund managers can claim to be wizards at anything, it is in extracting money from investors."
• "I know of not one academic study that has systematically attempted to calculate the value extracted by our financial system from the returns earned by investors."
• "The stock market is a giant distraction from the business of investing."
• "Imagine, for example, what would happen if National Football League quarterbacks or National Basketball Association centers were allowed to bet on their own teams’ pregame spreads. Yet CEOs do exactly that, which is one reason why stock-option compensation creates huge distortions in our financial system."
• "Daily swings in market returns have nothing to do with the long-term accretion of investment values."
• "In fact, while there have been numerous black swans in our short-term-oriented and speculative financial markets, there have been no black swans in the long-term investment returns generated by U.S. stocks."
• "A lifetime of experience in this business makes me profoundly skeptical of all forms of speculation, market timing included. I don’t know anyone who can do it successfully, nor anyone who has done so in the past. Heck, I don’t even know anyone who knows anyone who has timed the market with consistent, successful, replicable results."
• "Financial institutions operate by a kind of reverse Occam’s razor. They have a large incentive to favor the complex and costly over the simple and cheap, quite the opposite of what most investors need and ought to want."
• "Vanguard’s market share, as I’ve said countless times, must be a measure, not an objective; it must be earned, not bought."
• "To paraphrase Upton Sinclair: 'It’s amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he’s paid a small fortune not to understand it.' "
• "Until we pay CEOs on the basis of corporate performance rather than on the basis of corporate peers, CEO pay will, almost inevitably, continue on its upward path."
• "Small wonder that the engineering wonder of our age is financial engineering."
• "In 1951, the average fund investor held his or her shares for about 16 years. Today, that holding period averages about four years. To make matters worse, fund investors don’t trade very successfully."
• "Funds are born to die. Whereas 13 percent of all funds failed during the 1950s, the failure rate for the present decade is running at near 60 percent." (The book came out in the 2000s.)
• "As H. L. Mencken once observed, 'the chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world where it is overestimated.' "
• "If you carry nothing else away from your reading of this book, remember this: The great game of life is not about money; it is about doing your best to join the battle to build anew ourselves, our communities, our nation, and our world."

Select notes and quotes:

• "The rules of an infinite game must change in the course of play."
• "The rules of an infinite game are changed to prevent anyone from winning the game and to bring as many persons as possible into the play."
• "Because infinite players prepare themselves to be surprised by the future, they play in complete openness."
• "To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated."
• "The paradox of infinite play is that the players desire to continue the play in others."
• "Infinite players play best when they become least necessary to the continuation of play."
• "Therefore, for infinite players, politics is a form of theatricality. It is the performance of roles before an audience, according to a script whose last scene is known in advance by the performers."
• "Patriotism in one or several of its many forms (chauvinism, racism, sexism, nationalism, regionalism) is an ingredient in all societal play."
• "Culture, on the other hand, is an infinite game. Culture has no boundaries. Anyone can be a participant in a culture—anywhere and at any time."
• "Unrepeatability is a characteristic of culture everywhere. Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony cannot be composed again, nor could Rembrandt’s self-portraits be painted twice."
• "Culture, however, does not consider the works as the outcome of a struggle, but as moments in an ongoing struggle—the very struggle that culture is."
• "Culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition."
• "The purpose of property is to make our titles visible."
• "[In an infinite game], one does not win by power; one wins to be powerful."
• "The more powerful we consider persons to be, the less we expect them to do, for their power can come only from that which they have done."
• "Artists do not create objects, but create by way of objects."
• "Whoever takes possession of the objects of art has not taken possession of the art."
• "Since art is never possession, and always possibility, nothing possessed can have the status of art."
• "Artistry can be found anywhere; indeed, it can only be found anywhere."
• "The creative is found in anyone who is prepared for surprise. Such a person cannot go to school to be an artist, but can only go to school as an artist."
• "Every move an infinite player makes is toward the horizon." Pair with Neil Gaiman's commencement speech.
• "The Renaissance, like all genuine cultural phenomena, was not an effort to promote one or another vision. It was an effort to find visions that promised still more vision."
• "Finite players go to war against states because they endanger boundaries; infinite players oppose states because they engender boundaries."
• "True poets...do not display their art so as to make it appear real; they display the real in a way that reveals it to be art."
• "My parents may have wanted a child, but they could not have wanted me."
• "I am both the outcome of my past and the transformation of my past."
• "No family is united by natural or any other kind of necessity. Families can convene only out of choice."
• "For an infinite player there is no such thing as an hour of time. There can be an hour of love, or a day of grieving, or a season of learning, or a period of labor."
• "A finite player puts play into time. An infinite player puts time into play."
• "If, however, the observers see the poiesis (my note: emergent properties of art) in the work they cease at once being observers. They find themselves in its time, aware that it remains unfinished, aware that their reading of the poetry is itself poetry. Infected then by the genius of the artist they recover their own genius, becoming beginners with nothing but possibility ahead of them."
• "The silence of obedience is an unheard silence. It is the silence of death. For this reason the demand for obedience is inherently evil."
• "Machines do not, of course, make us into machines when we operate them; we make ourselves into machinery in order to operate them."
• "Because we make use of machinery in the belief we can increase the range of our freedom, and instead only decrease it, we use machines against ourselves."
• "Radios and films allow us to be where we are not and not be where we are." (Applies to all media, including news.)
• "The genius in you stimulates the genius in me."
• "Human trash is not an unfortunate burden on a society, an indirect result of its proper conduct; it is its direct product."
• "Waste is the antiproperty that becomes the possession of losers."
• "Whole civilizations rise from stories—and can rise from nothing else."
• "There is but one infinite game."

Select notes and quotes:

• "Presenting an inexpensive product first and following it with an expensive one will cause the expensive item to seem even more costly as a result—hardly a desirable consequence for most sales organizations."
• "If, instead of paying for them herself, a woman allows a man to buy her drinks, she is immediately judged (by both men and women) as more sexually available to him."
• "The truly gifted negotiator, then, is one whose initial position is exaggerated enough to allow for a series of reciprocal concessions that will yield a desirable final offer from the opponent, yet is not so outlandish as to be seen as illegitimate from the start."
• "Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision."
• "The tactic of starting with a little request in order to gain eventual compliance with related larger requests has a name: the foot-in-the-door technique."
• "Because they had innocently complied with a trivial safe-driving request a couple of weeks before, these homeowners became remarkably willing to comply with another such request that was massive in size."
• "Be very careful about agreeing to trivial requests."
• "Once a person’s self-image is altered, all sorts of subtle advantages become available to someone who wants to exploit that new image."
• "What those around us think is true of us is enormously important in determining what we ourselves think is true."
• "Once jurors had stated their initial views publicly, they were reluctant to allow themselves to change publicly, either. Should you ever find yourself as the foreperson of a jury under these conditions, then, you could reduce the risk of a hung jury by choosing a secret rather than public balloting technique."
• "One study of fifty-four tribal cultures found that those with the most dramatic and stringent initiation ceremonies were those with the greatest group solidarity. The severity of an initiation ceremony significantly heightens the newcomer’s commitment to the group."
• "Wise parents will know which kind of reason will work on their own children. The important thing is to use a reason that will initially produce the desired behavior and will, at the same time, allow a child to take personal responsibility for that behavior. Thus, the less detectable outside pressure such a reason contains, the better. Selecting just the right reason is not an easy task for parents. But the effort should pay off. It is likely to mean the difference between short-lived compliance and long-term commitment."
• "The principle of social proof says...the greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more the idea will be correct."
• "With everyone thinking that someone else will help or has helped, no one does."
• "In general, then, your best strategy when in need of emergency help is to reduce the uncertainties of those around you concerning your condition and their responsibilities. Be as precise as possible about your need for aid."
• "Thus the most influential leaders are those who know how to arrange group conditions to allow the principle of social proof to work maximally in their favor."
• "Once again we can see that social proof is most powerful for those who feel unfamiliar or unsure in a specific situation and who, consequently, must look outside of themselves for evidence of how best to behave there."
• "Using what he termed the 'luncheon technique,' he found that his subjects became fonder of the people and things they experienced while they were eating."
• "It is possible to attach [a] pleasant feeling, this positive attitude, to anything (political statements being only an example) that is closely associated with good food."
• "People seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value."
• "For instance, homeowners told how much money they could lose from inadequate insulation are more likely to insulate their homes than those told how much money they could save."
• "When our freedom to have something is limited, the item becomes less available, and we experience an increased desire for it. However, we rarely recognize that psychological reactance has caused us to want the item more; all we know is that we want it."
• "The irony is that for such people—members of fringe political groups, for example—the most effective strategy may not be to publicize their unpopular views, but to get those views officially censored and then to publicize the censorship."
• "Revolutionaries are more likely to be those who have been given at least some taste of a better life. When the economic and social improvements they have experienced and come to expect suddenly become less available, they desire them more than ever and often rise up violently to secure them."
• "I would recommend extending this aggressive stance to any situation in which a compliance professional abuses the principle of social proof (or any other weapon of influence) in this manner. We should refuse to watch TV programs that use canned laughter. If we see a bartender beginning a shift by salting his tip jar with a bill or two of his own, he should get none from us. If, after waiting in line outside a nightclub, we discover from the amount of available space that the wait was designed to impress passersby with false evidence of the club’s popularity, we should leave immediately and announce our reason to those still in line. In short, we should be willing to use boycott, threat, confrontation, censure, tirade, nearly anything, to retaliate."

Select notes and quotes:

• "Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement."
• "Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees."
• "Change can take years—before it happens all at once."
• "Winners and losers have the same goals."
• "Habits are like the atoms of our lives. Each one is a fundamental unit that contributes to your overall improvement."
• "The process of building habits is actually the process of becoming yourself."
• "Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it."
• " 'Disciplined' people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control."
• "For years, scientists assumed dopamine was all about pleasure, but now we know it plays a central role in many neurological processes, including motivation, learning and memory, punishment and aversion, and voluntary movement."
• "Gambling addicts have a dopamine spike right before they place a bet, not after they win."
• "Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive. All day long, you are making your best guess of how to act given what you’ve just seen and what has worked for you in the past. You are endlessly predicting what will happen in the next moment."
• "Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be in the future."
• "Saving money is often associated with sacrifice. However, you can associate it with freedom rather than limitation if you realize one simple truth: living below your current means increases your future means. The money you save this month increases your purchasing power next month."
• "It is human nature to follow the Law of Least Effort, which states that when deciding between two similar options, people will naturally gravitate toward the option that requires the least amount of work."
• "We are motivated to do what is easy."
• "The difference between a good day and a bad day is often a few productive and healthy choices made at decisive moments."
• "The point is to master the habit of showing up. The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved. If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, then you have little hope of mastering the finer details."
• "Behavioral economists refer to this tendency as time inconsistency. That is, the way your brain evaluates rewards is inconsistent across time. You value the present more than the future. Usually, this tendency serves us well. A reward that is certain right now is typically worth more than one that is merely possible in the future. But occasionally, our bias toward instant gratification causes problems."
• "The costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future."
• "Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit."
• "Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit."
• "Lost days hurt you more than successful days help you. If you start with $100, then a 50 percent gain will take you to $150. But you only need a 33 percent loss to take you back to $100. In other words, avoiding a 33 percent loss is just as valuable as achieving a 50 percent gain."
• "It’s not always about what happens during the workout. It’s about being the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts."
• "People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them."
• "Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck."
• "Pick the right habit and progress is easy. Pick the wrong habit and life is a struggle."
• "The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us."
• "In the words of investor Paul Graham, 'keep your identity small.' The more you let a single belief define you, the less capable you are of adapting when life challenges you."
• "Can one tiny change transform your life? It’s unlikely you would say so. But what if you made another? And another? And another? At some point, you will have to admit that your life was transformed by one small change."
• "It’s remarkable the friendships you can build if you don’t stop caring. Small habits don’t add up. They compound."
• "That’s the power of atomic habits. Tiny changes. Remarkable results."
• "As Caed Budris says, 'Happiness is the space between one desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming.' "
• "This is the wisdom behind Seneca’s famous quote, 'Being poor is not having too little, it is wanting more.' "

Select notes and quotes:

• "One of my very few regrets is that I spent far too much time worrying about how things might work out. It’s a huge waste, but it is a bit hardwired into me."
• "It is simply not possible to time the market, regardless of all the heavily credentialed gurus on CNBC and the like who claim they can."
• "You can’t pick winning stocks. Don’t feel bad. I can’t either."
• "The market always recovers. Always. And, if someday it really doesn’t, no investment will be safe and none of this financial stuff will matter anyway."
• "What is the worst possible performance a bad stock can deliver? It can lose 100% of its value and have its stock price drop to zero."
• "What is the best performance a stock can deliver? 100% return? Certainly that’s possible. But so is 200%, 300%, 1,000%, 10,000% or more. There is no upside limit. The net result is a powerful upward bias."
• "You’ve heard the expression, 'Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket.' You’ve likely also heard the variation, 'Keep all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket very closely.' Forget it. Here’s what your kindly old Uncle Jim says: ‘Put all your eggs in one basket and forget about it.' "
• "[Jack] Bogle points to research Vanguard has done comparing stock and bond portfolios that were annually rebalanced and those not rebalanced at all. The results show the rebalanced portfolios outperformed but by a margin so slight it can be attributed to noise as much as the strategy. His conclusion: 'Rebalancing is a personal choice, not a choice that statistics can validate. There’s certainly nothing the matter with doing it (although I don’t do it myself), but also no reason to slavishly worry about small changes in the equity ratio.' "
• "We still rebalance annually, but were I to make a change it would be to not bother with it at all."
• "As an investor in Vanguard funds, your interest and that of Vanguard are precisely the same. The reason is simple. The Vanguard funds—and by extension the investors in those funds—are the owners of Vanguard."
• "No one at Vanguard has access to your money and therefore no one at Vanguard can make off with it."
• "Advisors are only as good as the investments they recommend. Since those are mostly actively managed funds—as opposed to the index funds this book suggests—how often do those outperform? As we saw in Chapter 8, very rarely. You’ll recall the research shows ~20% outperform in any given year and looking at a 30-year period that drops to less than 1%. Statistically speaking that’s a rounding error; just so much noise."
• "The great irony of successful investing is that simple is cheaper and more profitable. Complicated investments only benefit the people and companies that sell them."
• "The idea that individuals can readily outperform the market is, to steal a phrase from my dad, horse hockey."
• "Houses are not investments, they are expensive indulgences."
• On retirement: "If you absolutely, positively want a sure thing and your yearly inflation raises, keep your withdrawal rate under 4%. And hold 75% stocks/25% bonds."

Select notes and quotes:

• "Only when your brain starts expecting the reward—craving the endorphins or sense of accomplishment—will it become automatic to lace up your jogging shoes each morning. The cue, in addition to triggering a routine, must also trigger a craving for the reward to come."
• Coach Tony Dungy said, " 'Champions don’t do extraordinary things,' Dungy would explain. 'They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habit they’ve learned.' ”
• "We know that a habit cannot be eradicated—it must, instead, be replaced."
• "When people are asked to do something that takes self-control, if they think they are doing it for personal reasons—if they feel like it’s a choice or something they enjoy because it helps someone else—it’s much less taxing. If they feel like they have no autonomy, if they’re just following orders, their willpower muscles get tired much faster. In both cases, people ignored the cookies. But when the students were treated like cogs, rather than people, it took a lot more willpower.”
• "For companies and organizations, this insight has enormous implications. **Simply giving employees a sense of agency—a feeling that they are in control, that they have genuine decision-making authority—can radically increase how much energy and focus they bring to their jobs."
• "This is the real power of habit: the insight that your habits are what you choose them to be."
• "The small win of dropping even half a pound can provide the dose of momentum we need to stick with a diet. We need to see small victories to believe a long battle will be won."
• "Studies suggest that this process of experimentation—and failure—is critical in long-term habit change. Smokers often quit and then start smoking again as many as seven times before giving up cigarettes for good. It’s tempting to see those relapses as failures, but what’s really occurring are experiments."
• "Any habit, we know, can change. Any pattern can be disrupted."

Select notes and quotes:

• "Just being reminded of wealth can propel people to distance themselves from others, undermining happiness."
• "The benefits of giving emerge among children before the age of two."
• "Because experiences often elude easy comparisons, experiential purchases seem to inoculate us against the pernicious negative emotion of regret."
• "We are happy with things, until we find out there are better things available."
• "At the same time that money increases our happiness by giving us access to all kinds of wonderful things, knowing we have access to wonderful things undermines our happiness by reducing our tendency to appreciate life’s small joys."
• "If abundance is the enemy of appreciation, scarcity may be our best ally."
• "We may have more success at maximizing our happiness when treats are only available for a limited time."
• "The more countries people have visited, the more they self-identify as 'world travelers.' This in turn undermines their motivation to savor trips to enjoyable-but-unextraordinary destinations."
• "We too often sacrifice our free time just to save a little money."
• "While it’s mildly disappointing that we’re still without flying cars and sassy robot maids, it is more surprising that rising incomes have not led Americans to use their time in happier ways over the past four decades."
• "Around the world, wealthier individuals are more likely to say they felt stressed on the previous day. Greater material affluence may fail to yield more happiness in part because of the diminished time affluence it often brings."
• "Buying time sounds easy. But it isn’t. Part of the problem stems from an important difference between time and money. If you’re tight on money this week, you’re likely to assume that you’ll be similarly constrained a couple of weeks or months from now. Time constraints, however, feel relatively temporary. Sure, this Tuesday you’re too busy to vacuum the house because you’ve got a dentist appointment, and fifty new emails, and a deadline coming up at work, and a birthday present to buy, and the big game to watch on TV. By contrast, the Tuesdays of the future look remarkably open, with only the occasional activity marked on the calendar. Because the future looks free, we’re less inclined to use our money to buy time. But the funny thing about Tuesdays (and the other days of the week) is that they tend to fill up as they get closer."
• "Faced with a decision between multiple products that differ in their features and price tags, ask yourself whether the differences in features will alter how you spend your time. If the answer is no, go cheap."
• "By focusing less on money and more on time, it’s easier to use both resources in happier ways."
• "Anything we can do to separate payment from consumption can enhance the pleasure of the purchase."
• "When it comes time for consumption, having paid long ago brings a final payoff: freedom from the tyranny of sunk costs."
• "It’s difficult to overcome the power of now, but it’s possible to harness this force. As the pleasures and pains of the present appear particularly intense in the mind’s eye, we are most reluctant to make purchases when the pain of paying is immediate and the pleasure of consuming distant. Businesses recognize this psychological phenomenon, which has driven the development of financial and technological innovations that enable people to consume sooner and pay later. By putting this fundamental principle into reverse, you can buy more happiness while spending less money."
• "We simply don’t care as much about our future selves as we do about our present selves."
• "People who report donating money to charity feel wealthier than those who do not, even controlling for how much money they make. And giving as little as $1 away can cause you to feel wealthier."
• "One of the largest material purchases people ever make is their home, yet home purchases usually fail to make people any happier. By encouraging people to buy houses, the United States government implicitly encourages people to buy stuff."

Select notes & quotes:

• "Life is mostly boring. Behind the red facade of war and politics, misfortune and poverty, adultery and divorce, murder and suicide, were millions of orderly homes, devoted marriages, men and women kindly and affectionate, troubled and happy with children."
• "Generations of men establish a growing mastery over the earth, but they are destined to become fossils in its soil."
• "So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition."
• "Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization."
• "A nation with a low birth rate shall be periodically chastened by some more virile and fertile group."
• "History is color-blind, and can develop a civilization (in any favorable environment) under almost any skin."
• "It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people."
• "Society is founded not on the ideals but on the nature of man."
• "Evolution in man during recorded time has been social rather than biological."
• "Probably every vice was once a virtue."
• "History as usually written (peccavimus) is quite different from history as usually lived: the historian records the exceptional because it is interesting—because it is exceptional."
• "Only when priests used [fear] and rituals to support morality and law did religion become a force vital and rival to the state."
• "There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion."
• "As long as there is poverty there will be gods."
• "We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
• "The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints."
• "The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction;…dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy."
• "The American Revolution was not only a revolt of colonials against a distant government; it was also an uprising of a native middle class against an imported aristocracy."
• "Free land is gone, though home ownership spreads—with a minimum of land."
• "Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign."
• On contemporary art: "The producers of such nonsense are appealing not to the, general public—which scorns them as lunatics, degenerates, or charlatans—but to gullible middle-class purchasers who are hypnotized by auctioneers and are thrilled by the new, however deformed."
• "In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war."
• "Have we given ourselves more freedom than our intelligence can digest?"
• "We should not be greatly disturbed by the probability that our civilization will die like any other."
• "Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again. So our finest contemporary achievement is our unprecedented expenditure of wealth and toil in the provision of higher education for all."

Select notes and quotes:

• "The vast majority of people will never find a job that can be an unending source of fulfillment, so that is not the goal here; to free time and automate income is."
• "These individuals have riches just as we say that we 'have a fever,' when really the fever has us." —Seneca
• "If everyone is defining a problem or solving it one way and the results are subpar, this is the time to ask, What if I did the opposite? Don’t follow a model that doesn’t work. If the recipe sucks, it doesn’t matter how good a cook you are."
• "Eustress—stress that is healthful and the stimulus for growth. People who avoid all criticism fail. It’s destructive criticism we need to avoid, not criticism in all forms. Similarly, there is no progress without eustress, and the more eustress we can create or apply to our lives, the sooner we can actualize our dreams. The trick is telling the two apart. The New Rich are equally aggressive in removing distress and finding eustress."
• "What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do."
• "Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear. I got into this habit by attempting to contact celebrities and famous businesspeople for advice."
• "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." —George Bernard Shaw
• "The question you should be asking isn’t, 'What do I want?' or 'What are my goals?' but 'What would excite me?' "
• "To have an uncommon lifestyle, you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decisions, both for yourself and for others."
• "Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away." —Antoine De Saint-Exupery
• "Make no mistake, maximum income from minimal necessary effort (including minimum number of customers) is the primary goal. I duplicated my strengths, in this case my top producers, and focused on increasing the size and frequency of their orders."
• "There should never be more than two mission-critical items to complete each day."
• "Lifestyle design is based on massive action—output. Increased output necessitates decreased input. Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals, and outside of your influence. I challenge you to look at whatever you read or watched today and tell me that it wasn’t at least two of the four."
• "Develop the habit of nonfinishing that which is boring or unproductive if a boss isn’t demanding it."
• "It is your job to train those around you to be effective and efficient. No one else will do it for you."
• "Do not work harder when the solution is working smarter."
• "Delegation is to be used as a further step in reduction, not as an excuse to create more movement and add the unimportant. Remember—unless something is well-defined and important, no one should do it. Eliminate before you delegate."
• "Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined."
• "Principle number one is to refine rules and processes before adding people."
• "The Main Benefit Should Be Encapsulated in One Sentence. People can dislike you—and you often sell more by offending some—but they should never misunderstand you."
• "Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth."
• "If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it."
• "What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task." —Viktor Frankl
• "There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living; there is nothing harder to learn." —Seneca
• "Learn to make nonfatal or reversible decisions as quickly as possible."
• "Embrace the choice-minimal lifestyle."

Select notes & quotes:

• "For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony."
• "The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true."
• "On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it."
• "This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the 'bullshit artist.' "
• "The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it."
• "It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it."
• "He [The bullshitter] does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

Select quotes & notes:

• There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
• "What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task."
• "What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence."
• "What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms."
• "I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast. "
• "A human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy."
• "Today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness."
• "Most important, he realized that, no matter what happened, he retained the freedom to choose how to respond to his suffering."
• "A positive attitude enables a person to endure suffering and disappointment as well as enhance enjoyment and satisfaction."
• "A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes—within the limits of endowment and environment—he has made out of himself."
• "The world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best."

Select notes & quotes:

• "Man's search for individuality conflicts with his desperate need not to be alone."
• "Just as a new house immediately begins to break down (entropy), so do newly won freedoms."
• "The United States has shown itself resistant against all totalitarian attempts to gain influence."
• "The possibility of being left alone is necessarily the most serious threat to the child’s whole existence."
• "[Prior to the enlightenment] ...although a person was not free in the modern sense, neither was he alone and isolated. In having a distinct, unchangeable, and unquestionable place in the social world from the moment of birth, man was rooted in a structuralized whole, and thus life had a meaning which left no place, and no need, for doubt."
• "...the structure of modern society affects man in two ways simultaneously: he becomes more independent, self-reliant, and critical, and he becomes more isolated, alone, and afraid."
• "Economic activity and the wish for gain for its own sake appeared as irrational to the medieval thinker as their absence appears to modern thought."
• "Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity."
• "The meaning of his life and the identity of his self are determined by the greater whole into which the self has submerged."
• "The feature common to all authoritarian thinking is the conviction that life is determined by forces outside of man’s own self, his interest, his wishes."
• "I can escape the feeling of my own powerlessness in comparison with the world outside of myself by destroying it."
• "The right to express our thoughts, however, means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own."
• "To be sure, thinking without a knowledge of facts remains empty and fictitious; but “information” alone can be just as much of an obstacle to thinking as the lack of it."
• "In school they want to have good marks, as adults they want to be more and more successful, to make more money, to have more prestige, to buy a better car, to go places, and so on. Yet when they do stop to think in the midst of all this frantic activity, this question may come to their minds: “If I do get this new job, if I get this better car, if I can take this trip—what then? What is the use of it all? Is it really I who wants all this? Am I not running after some goal which is supposed to make me happy and which eludes me as soon as I have reached it?”
• "Yet all this bespeaks a dim realization of the truth—the truth that modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want."
• "...one can be sure of oneself only if one lives up to the expectations of others."
• "Modern man is starved for life. But since, being an automaton, he cannot experience life in the sense of spontaneous activity he takes as surrogate any kind of excitement and thrill: the thrill of drinking, of sports, of vicariously living the excitements of fictitious persons on the screen."
• "The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal."
• "The basic dichotomy that is inherent in freedom—the birth of individuality and the pain of aloneness—is dissolved on a higher plane by man’s spontaneous action."
• "The inability to act spontaneously, to express what one genuinely feels and thinks, and the resulting necessity to present a pseudo self to others and oneself, are the root of the feeling of inferiority and weakness."
• "Men are born equal but they are also born different."
• "The cultural and political crisis of our day is not due to the fact that there is too much individualism but that what we believe to be individualism has become an empty shell."
• "We believe that man is primarily a social being, and not, as Freud assumes, primarily self-sufficient and only secondarily in need of others in order to satisfy his instinctual needs."
• "We cannot afford to lose any of the fundamental achievements of modern democracy—either the fundamental one of representative government, that is, government elected by the people and responsible to the people, or any of the rights which the Bill of Rights guarantees to every citizen. Nor can we compromise the newer democratic principle that no one shall be allowed to starve, that society is responsible for all its members, that no one shall be frightened into submission and lose his human pride through fear of unemployment and starvation. These basic achievements must not only be preserved; they must be fortified and expanded."

Select notes & quotes:

• "Much of what I say is still controversial. Yet there is always hope. The U.S. biologist and geologist Louis Agassiz once said about new scientific insights: 'First people say it conflicts with the Bible. Next, they say it has been discovered before. Lastly, they say they have always believed it.' "
• "Harry Markowitz received a Noble Prize in Economics for his pathbreaking work on optimal asset allocation, [yet] when he made his own retirement investments...he used a simple heuristic, the 1/N rule: Allocate your money equally to each of N funds. Ordinary folks rely on the same rule intuitively—invest equally."
• "As Warren Buffett, the billionaire financier, put it, the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune-tellers look good."
• "Procter and Gamble reduced the number of versions of Head and Shoulders shampoo from twenty-six to fifteen, and sales increased by 10 percent."
• "Less is more contradicts two core beliefs held in our culture: More information is always better. More choice is always better."
• "...the association between intuition and women has been, for much of the time, one between what were viewed as a lesser virtue and a lesser sex.*
• "Yet women’s intuitive judgments were not better than men’s; [in a study] they identified the real smile correctly in 71 percent of cases, whereas men did so in 72 percent."
• "It is a common credo that in predicting the future, one should use as much information as possible and feed it into the most sophisticated computer. A complex problem demands a complex solution, so we are told. In fact, in unpredictable environments, the opposite is true."
• "Computers would seem to be the ideal tool for finding the best solution to a problem. Yet paradoxically, the advent of high-speed computers has opened our eyes to the fact that the best strategy often cannot be found."
• "...our minds are not built (for whatever reason) to work by the rules of probability..."
• "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." —Max Planck
• "It has been said that researchers are like sleepwalkers whose creative intuition guides them to intellectual destinations they could never clearly see beforehand. Instead, I had been like a sleepwalker who had failed to understand the creative hunches of the intuitive mind."
• "intuitions based on one good reason not only are efficient but can also be highly accurate."
• "Recall that in an uncertain world, a complex strategy can fail exactly because it explains too much in hindsight."
• "Complex analysis, by contrast, pays when one has to explain the past, when the future is highly predictable, or when there are large amounts of information."
• "The good old-fashioned gut feeling “If you see a white coat, trust it” has done much good. But it cannot work as well when physicians fear lawsuits, overmedication and overdiagnosis have become a lucrative business, and aggressive direct-to-consumer advertising has become legal."
• "So what do you do if your mother is sick and you want to know what your doctor really thinks? Here is a helpful rule: Don’t ask your doctors what they recommend. Ask them what they would do if it were their mother."
• "My first principle of moral intuitions states that people are often unaware of the reasons for their moral actions. In these cases, deliberate reasoning is the justification for, rather than the cause of, moral decisions."
• "As an American rifleman recalls about comradeship during World War II: 'The reason you storm the beaches is not patriotism or bravery. It’s that sense of not wanting to fail your buddies. There’s sort of a special sense of kinship.' "
• "The difference between intuition and moral deliberation is that the reasons underlying moral intuitions are typically unconscious. Thus, the relevant distinction is not between feelings and reasons, but between feelings based on unconscious reasons and deliberate reasoning."

Select notes & quotes:

• "We needn’t reach out and touch an ember to know that it will hurt to do so...but we do need to experience fire to avoid this."
• "Despite what we read in the popular press, the only known symptom of “empty nest syndrome ”is increased smiling. Interestingly, this pattern of satisfaction over the life cycle describes women (who are usually the primary caretakers of children) better than men. Careful studies of how women feel as they go about their daily activities show that they are less happy when taking care of their children than when eating, exercising, shopping, napping, or watching television."
• "Just as our eyes sometimes lead us to see things as they are not, our imaginations sometimes lead us to foresee things as they will not be."
• "Whatever amount of pain a one-day wait entails, that pain is surely the same whenever it is experienced; and yet, people imagine a near-future pain as so severe that they will gladly pay a dollar to avoid it, but a far-future pain as so mild that they will gladly accept a dollar to endure it."
• "Indeed, studies show that the parts of the brain that are primarily responsible for generating feelings of pleasurable excitement become active when people imagine receiving a reward such as money in the near future but not when they imagine receiving the same reward in the far future."
• "Because it is easier to compare a vacation package’s price with its former price than with the price of other things one might buy, we end up preferring bad deals that have become decent deals to great deals that were once amazing deals."
• "As much as we all despise racism and sexism, these isms have only recently been considered moral turpitudes, and thus condemning Thomas Jefferson for keeping slaves or Sigmund Freud for patronizing women is a bit like arresting someone today for having driven without a seat belt in 1923."
• As one group of researchers noted, “Resilience is often the most commonly observed outcome trajectory following exposure to a potentially traumatic event. Indeed, studies of those who survive major traumas suggest that the vast majority do quite well, and that a significant portion claim that their lives were enhanced by the experience."
• "Studies show that about nine out of ten people expect to feel more regret when they foolishly switch stocks than when they foolishly fail to switch stocks, because most people think they will regret foolish actions more than foolish inactions. But studies also show that nine out of ten people are wrong. Indeed, in the long run, people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did, which is why the most popular regrets include not going to college, not grasping profitable business opportunities, and not spending enough time with family and friends."
• "Because we do not realize that our psychological immune systems can rationalize an excess of courage more easily than an excess of cowardice, we hedge our bets when we should blunder forward."
• "Intense suffering triggers the very processes that eradicate it, while mild suffering does not, and this counterintuitive fact can make it difficult for us to predict our emotional futures."
• "We are more likely to generate a positive and credible view of an action than an inaction, of a painful experience than of an annoying experience, of an unpleasant situation that we cannot escape than of one we can. And yet, we rarely choose action over inaction, pain over annoyance, and commitment over freedom."
• "The processes by which we generate positive views are many: We pay more attention to favorable information, we surround ourselves with those who provide it, and we accept it uncritically."
• "Because we tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times instead of the most likely of times, the wealth of experience that young people admire does not always pay clear dividends."
• "[Adam] Smith believed that people want just one thing — happiness — hence economies can blossom and grow only if people are deluded into believing that the production of wealth will make them happy. If and only if people hold this false belief will they do enough producing, procuring, and consuming to sustain their economies."
• "...thus the belief that children are a source of happiness becomes a part of our cultural wisdom simply because the opposite belief unravels the fabric of any society that holds it..."
• "My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it."
• "Imagination’s third shortcoming is its failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen — in particular, that bad things will look a whole lot better."
• "Because if you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like most people. Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn’t see herself as average."
• "This tendency to think of ourselves as better than others is not necessarily a manifestation of our unfettered narcissism but may instead be an instance of a more general tendency to think of ourselves as different from others — often for better but sometimes for worse."
• "*Because we value our uniqueness, it isn’t surprising that we tend to overestimate it."
• "It doesn’t always make sense to heed what people tell us when they communicate their beliefs about happiness, but it does make sense to observe how happy they are in different circumstances."
• "Wealth may be measured by counting dollars, but utility must be measured by counting how much goodness those dollars buy. Wealth doesn’t matter; utility does. We don’t care about money or promotions or beach vacations per se; we care about the goodness or pleasure that these forms of wealth may (or may not) induce."

Select notes and quotes:

• "Most of us do our most important work when we traffic in emotions, not commodities."
• "The first step on the path to make things better is to make better things."
• "If you want to make change, begin by making culture. Begin by organizing a tightly knit group. Begin by getting people in sync. Culture beats strategy—so much that culture is strategy."
• "The smallest viable market is the focus that, ironically and delightfully, leads to your growth."
• "Show up, often. Do it with humility, and focus on the parts that work."
• "Sonder is defined as that moment when you realize that everyone around you has an internal life as rich and as conflicted as yours."
• "If we can accept that people have embraced who they have become, it gets a lot easier to dance with them. Not transform them, not get them to admit that they were wrong. Simply to dance with them, to have a chance to connect with them, to add our story to what they see and add our beliefs to what they hear."
• "You’re here to serve."
• "The goal isn’t to personalize the work. It’s to make it personal."
• "But without a doubt, the heart and soul of a thriving enterprise is the irrational pursuit of becoming irresistible."
• "The foolish thing to do is pretend your features are so good that nothing else matters. Something else always matters."
• "Always be wondering, always be testing, always be willing to treat different people differently. If you don’t, they’ll find someone who will."
• "When you find someone who is eager to talk about what you do, give him something to talk about. When you find someone who is itching to become a generous leader, give her the resources to lead."
• "You’ll serve many people. You’ll profit from a few. The whales pay for the minnows. It can work out. But in order to do your best work, you’ll need to seek out and delight the few."
• "The most important lesson I can share about brand marketing is this: you definitely, certainly, and surely don’t have enough time and money to build a brand for everyone. You can’t. Don’t try. Be specific. Be very specific. And then, with this knowledge, overdo your brand marketing. Every slice of every interaction ought to reflect the whole. Every time we see any of you, we ought to be able to make a smart guess about all of you."
• "Marketers forget this daily. Because we get bored with our stuff. Our story, our change. We’ve heard it before. We remember it. But we’re bored. And so we change it."
• "The market has been trained to associate frequency with trust (there, I just said it again). If you quit right in the middle of building that frequency, it’s no wonder you never got a chance to earn the trust."
• "Low price is the last refuge of a marketer who has run out of generous ideas."
• "Real permission works like this: If you stop showing up, people are concerned. They ask where you went."
• "People aren’t going to spread the word because it’s important to you. They’ll only do it because it’s important to them."
• "The goal is to be known to the smallest viable audience."
• "Invest in the lifetime value of a customer, building new things for your customers instead of racing around trying to find new customers for your things."
• "Stick with your tactics long after everyone else is bored with them. Only stop when they stop working."
• "Marketing is powerful when it sells a product to someone who discovers more joy or more productivity because he bought it."
• "Marketing works for society when the marketer and consumer are both aware of what's happening and are both satisfied with the ultimate outcome."

Select quotes & notes:

• "Your work is too important to be left to how you feel today."
• "The practice is not the means to the output, the practice is the output, because the practice is all we can control."
• "Flow is a symptom of the work we’re doing, not the cause of it."
• “ 'Do what you love' is for amateurs."
• “Love what you do” is the mantra for professionals.

This book reminds us that ordinary people can still become wealthy by spending less than they earn and investing simply — echoing JL Collins’ Simple Path to Wealth.

The book is broken into chapters featuring the wisdom of star investors. Here are my select notes and quotes from Green's writing about each of these investors:

On Victor Pabrai:

• “Humans have something weird in their DNA which prohibits them from adopting good ideas easily,” says Pabrai. 'What I learned a long time back is, keep observing the world inside and outside your industry, and when you see someone doing something smart, force yourself to adopt it.' ”
• "As Munger likes to say, there are two rules of fishing. Rule no. 1: 'Fish where the fish are.' Rule no. 2: 'Don’t forget rule no. 1.' "
• "Buffett is a master of this practice of high-speed sifting. “What he’s looking for is a reason to say no, and as soon as he finds that, he’s done,” says Pabrai. (This is an interesting take on Derek Sivers' idea of "Hell Yeah!" or "No.")
• "Buffett said, 'If you’re even a slightly above average investor who spends less than you earn, over a lifetime you cannot help but get very wealthy.”
• "Intelligent people are easily seduced by complexity while underestimating the importance of simple ideas that carry tremendous weight."
• "Rule 1: Clone like crazy. Rule 2: Hang out with people who are better than you. Rule 3: Treat life as a game, not as a survival contest or a battle to the death. Rule 4: Be in alignment with who you are; don’t do what you don’t want to do or what’s not right for you. Rule 5: Live by an inner scorecard; don’t worry about what others think of you; don’t be defined by external validation."
• "Finally, quoting a line of Munger’s that Pabrai often cites, I wrote, 'Take a simple idea and take it seriously.' Of all these lessons, that last one might just be the most important."

On Howard Marks:

• " 'Look, luck is not enough,' he says. 'But equally, intelligence is not enough, hard work is not enough, and even perseverance is not necessarily enough. You need some combination of all four. We all know people who were intelligent and worked hard but didn’t get lucky.' "
• "One of his favorite insights is from the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, an intellectual hero of his, who said, 'We have two classes of forecasters: Those who don’t know—and those who don’t know they don’t know.' "
• Marks often quotes an observation by Amos Tversky, an Israeli psychologist who studied cognitive biases alongside Daniel Kahneman: 'It’s frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what’s going on.'

On McLennan:

• "Buffett made a similar point after 9/11, which cost Berkshire billions of dollars in insurance losses. Writing to shareholders in 2002, he admitted, 'We had either overlooked or dismissed the possibility of large-scale terrorism losses.…In short, all of us in the industry made a fundamental underwriting mistake by focusing on experience, rather than exposure.' "

On Greenblatt:

• "As Greenblatt observes in The Little Book That Beats the Market, 'Choosing individual stocks without any idea of what you’re looking for is like running through a dynamite factory with a burning match. You may live, but you’re still an idiot.' "
• "First, you don’t need the optimal strategy. You need a sensible strategy that’s good enough to achieve your financial goals. As the Prussian military strategist General Carl von Clausewitz said, 'The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.' "

On Miller:

• “ 'Live on less than you make. Invest the difference at a positive rate of return. You cannot fail if you accomplish those two tasks.' He adds, 'If you’re living on less than your means, you’re rich right now.' "
• "Whatever their motivation, I think of the best investors as mental athletes. They strive constantly for an intellectual advantage—more information, better information, faster information, or simply a more nuanced interpretation of information that’s already out there for everyone to see..."
• "When Miller asked if it was possible to slow down as you got older, [Peter] Lynch replied, 'No. In this business, there are only two gears: overdrive and stop.' Miller agrees: 'That’s basically right. You have to be focused.' "

On Lountzis:

• "Buffett and Munger 'are not just really smart,' he says. 'They’re geniuses.' "

Final points from Green:

• "...we need to adopt daily habits that enable us to improve continuously where it truly counts—and to subtract habits that divert us."
• "But it’s equally valuable to compile a Do Not Do list, reminding us of all the ingenious ways in which we habitually distract or undermine ourselves."
• "Sir John Templeton once wrote, 'Material assets bring comfort, but help little toward happiness or usefulness.…One of the real fallacies is the popular notion that happiness depends on external circumstances and surroundings.' "
• "There’s an old saying, sometimes attributed to Philo of Alexandria: 'Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.' "
• Van Den Berg’s psychiatrist told him, 'It’s simple. If your life is more important than your principles, you sacrifice your principles. If your principles are more important than your life, you sacrifice your life.' "

Select notes & quotes:

• "Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion."
• "Our habitual identification with thought—that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as appearances in consciousness—is a primary source of human suffering."
• "Being able to stand perfectly free of the feeling of self is the start of one’s spiritual journey, not its end."
• "If you are anxious before giving a speech, become willing to feel the anxiety fully, so that it becomes a meaningless pattern of energy in your mind and body."
• "The aims of spirituality are not exactly those of science, but neither are they unscientific."
• "Most people still believe that religion provides something essential that cannot be had any other way."
• "The conventional self is a transitory appearance among transitory appearances, and it vanishes when looked for."

Select notes and quotes:

• "Always remember that we only read what remains."
• "Control your perceptions. Direct your actions properly. Willingly accept what’s outside your control."
• "The good news is that it’s pretty easy to remember what is inside our control. According to the Stoics, the circle of control contains just one thing: YOUR MIND."
• "There is clarity (and joy) in seeing what others can’t see."
• "Marcus says to approach each task as if it were your last, because it very well could be."
• "And if some regard you as important, distrust yourself."
• "How much more time, energy, and pure brainpower would you have available if you drastically cut your media consumption?"
• "Stoicism is designed to be medicine for the soul."
• "Staring at the clock, at the ticker, at the next checkout lane over, at the sky—it’s as if we all belong to a religious cult that believes the gods of fate will only give us what we want if we sacrifice our peace of mind."
• "We have the power to hold no opinion about a thing and to not let it upset our state of mind—for things have no natural power to shape our judgments."
• "Every time you get upset, a little bit of life leaves the body. Are these really the things on which you want to spend that priceless resource?"
• “How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!” —Thomas Jefferson
• "To want nothing makes one invincible—because nothing lies outside your control."
• "Our reaction is what actually decides whether harm has occurred."
• "Take an inventory of your obligations from time to time. How many of these are self-imposed? How many of them are truly necessary? Are you as free as you think?"
• "Ask yourself about the people you meet and spend time with: Are they making me better?"
• "Nobody thinks they’re wrong, even when they are. They think they’re right, they’re just mistaken. Otherwise, they wouldn’t think it anymore!"
• “It is impossible for a person to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows.” —Epictetus
• "We can find a retreat at any time by looking inward."
• "There are two ways to be wealthy—to get everything you want or to want everything you have."
• "Uninvited guests might arrive at your home, but you don’t have to ask them to stay for dinner. You don’t have to let them into your mind."
• "It isn’t events themselves that disturb people, but only their judgments about them." —Epictetus
• “Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
• "Which will help your children more—your insight into happiness and meaning, or that you followed breaking political news every day for thirty years?"
• "There are many forms of taxes in life. You can argue with them, you can go to great—but ultimately futile—lengths to evade them, or you can simply pay them and enjoy the fruits of what you get to keep."
• "Wisdom, self-control, justice, courage. No one who achieves these quiet virtues experiences buyer’s remorse."
• "When someone points out a legitimate flaw in your belief or in your actions, they’re not criticizing you. They’re presenting a better alternative. Accept it!"
• "Today, or anytime, when you catch yourself wanting to condescendingly drop some knowledge that you have, grab it and ask: Would I be better saying words or letting my actions and choices illustrate that knowledge for me?"
• "Ignore everything else. Focus only on your choices."
• "As each day arises, welcome it as the very best day of all, and make it your own possession."
• "Don’t set your mind on things you don’t possess as if they were yours, but count the blessings you actually possess and think how much you would desire them if they weren’t already yours. But watch yourself, that you don’t value these things to the point of being troubled if you should lose them."
• "What if you read the few great books deeply instead of briefly skimming all the new books?"
• “What is your vocation? To be a good person.” —Marcus Aurelius
• "There are two kinds of people in this world. The first looks at others who have accomplished things and thinks: Why them? Why not me? The other looks at those same people and thinks: If they can do it, why can’t I?"
• "Freedom? That’s easy. It’s in your choices. Happiness? That’s easy. It’s in your choices. Respect of your peers? That too is in the choices you make. And all of that is right in front of you. No need to take the long way to get there."
• "How does it help...to make misfortune heavier by complaining about it?"
• "We should bring our will into harmony with whatever happens, so that nothing happens against our will and nothing that we wish for fails to happen.” —Epictetus
• "When you’ve done well and another has benefited by it, why like a fool do you look for a third thing on top—credit for the good deed or a favor in return?” —Marcus Aurelius
• "You don’t have to do the right thing, just as you don’t have to do your duty. You get to. You want to."
• "That’s Stoic joy—the joy that comes from purpose, excellence, and duty. It’s a serious thing—far more serious than a smile or a chipper voice."
• "Let the news come when it does. Be too busy working to care."

Select notes & quotes:

• "Risk is what you don’t see."
• "So, in personal finance, the right amount of savings is when it feels like it’s a little too much."
• "Your happiness depends on your expectations more than anything else. So in a world that tends to get better for most people most of the time, an important life skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving. It’s also one of the hardest."
• "There is no such thing as objective wealth—everything is relative, and mostly relative to those around you."
• "Today’s economy is good at generating three things: wealth, the ability to show off wealth, and great envy for other people’s wealth."
• From ninety-eight-year-old Charlie Munger: "The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you’re going to be miserable your whole life."
• From historian Stephan Zweig: “History reveals no instances of a conqueror being surfeited by conquests.”
• "People don’t want accuracy. They want certainty."
• Daniel Kahneman once said, “Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.”
• "There are about eight billion people on this planet. So if an event has a one-in-a-million chance of occurring every day, it should happen to eight thousand people a day, or 2.9 million times a year, and maybe a quarter of a billion times during your lifetime. Even a one-in-a-billion event will become the fate of hundreds of thousands of people during your lifetime. And given the news media’s insatiable appetite for shocking headlines, the odds are nearly 100 percent that you will hear about these events when they happen."
• "The decline of local news has all kinds of implications. One that doesn’t get much attention is that the wider the news becomes the more likely it is to be pessimistic."
• "The world breaks about once every ten years, on average—always has, always will."
• "Every investment price, every market valuation, is just a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow."
• "A lack of recessions actually plants the seeds of the next recession, which is why we can never get rid of them."
• "Modern life in general is about as safe as it’s ever been. And effectively all the improvement over the last century has come from a decline in infectious disease."
• "So if you put up a sign that says 'There might be an opportunity in this box,' somebody will always open the box. Which is to say: we have to identify where the top is. That’s why markets don’t stay within the limits of sanity, and why they always overdose on pessimism and optimism. They have to."
• "Growth by acquisition often occurs when management wants faster growth than customers think the business deserves.*
• Entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson said, “Most successful people are just a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.”
• Yuval Noah Harari writes: “To enjoy peace, we need almost everyone to make good choices. By contrast, a poor choice by just one side can lead to war.”
• "Good news is the deaths that didn’t take place, the diseases you didn’t get, the wars that never happened, the tragedies avoided, and the injustices prevented. But bad news is visible. More than visible, it’s in your face. It’s the terrorist attack, the war, the car accident, the pandemic, the stock market crash, and the political battle you can’t look away from."
• "That’s the real lesson from evolution: If you have a big number in the exponent slot, you do not need extraordinary change to deliver extraordinary results. It’s not intuitive, but it’s so powerful."
• "If you understand the math behind compounding you realize the most important question is not 'How can I earn the highest returns?' It’s 'What are the best returns I can sustain for the longest period of time?' "
• "Most things worth pursuing charge their fee in the form of stress, uncertainty, dealing with quirky people, bureaucracy, other peoples’ conflicting incentives, hassle, nonsense, long hours, and constant doubt. That’s the overhead cost of getting ahead."
• "...most dominant creatures tend to be huge, but the most enduring tend to be smaller..."
• "It’s so easy to underestimate how two small things can compound into an enormous thing. Take the way Mother Nature works: A little cool air from the north is no big deal. A little warm breeze from the south is pleasant. But when they mix together over Missouri you get a tornado. That’s called emergent effects, and they can be wildly powerful."
• "This may be most common in investing, law, and medicine, when “do nothing” is the best answer, but 'do something' is the career incentive. Sometimes it’s amoral, but it can be an innocent form of 'cover your butt.' Mostly, though, I think an advisor just feels useless if they tell a client 'we don’t need to do anything here.' "
• "The point, then, isn’t that you should read less news and more books. It’s that if you read good books you’ll have an easier time understanding what you should or shouldn’t pay attention to in the news."
• "In finance, spending less than you make, saving the difference, and being patient is perhaps 90 percent of what you need to know to do well."
• "Complexity gives a comforting impression of control, while simplicity is hard to distinguish from cluelessness."
• "Things you don’t understand create a mystique around people who do."
• "My theory is that length [of writing] indicates the author has spent more time thinking about a topic than you have, which can be the only data point signaling they might have insights you don’t. It doesn’t mean their thinking is right."
• "It’s uncomfortable to think that what you haven’t experienced might change what you believe, because it’s admitting your own ignorance. It’s much easier to assume that those who disagree with you aren’t thinking as hard as you are."
• "When you focus on what never changes, you stop trying to predict uncertain events and spend more time understanding timeless behavior."
• "I try not to give advice to people I don’t know, because everyone’s different and universal guidance is rare."

Select notes and quotes:

• "Financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know."
• "Physics isn’t controversial. It’s guided by laws. Finance is different. It’s guided by people’s behaviors. And how I behave might make sense to me but look crazy to you."
• "Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works."
• "The challenge for us is that no amount of studying or open-mindedness can genuinely recreate the power of fear and uncertainty."
• "Studying history makes you feel like you understand something. But until you’ve lived through it and personally felt its consequences, you may not understand it enough to change your behavior."
• "NYU professor Scott Galloway has a related idea that is so important to remember when judging success—both your own and others: 'Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.' "
• "Warren Buffett is a phenomenal investor. But you miss a key point if you attach all of his success to investing acumen. The real key to his success is that he’s been a phenomenal investor for three-quarters of a century. Had he started investing in his 30s and retired in his 60s, few people would have ever heard of him."
• "Roughly 99.9% of all companies that were created went out of business."
• "We underestimate how normal it is for a lot of things to fail."
• "There is a paradox here: people tend to want wealth to signal to others that they should be liked and admired. But in reality those other people often bypass admiring you, not because they don’t think wealth is admirable, but because they use your wealth as a benchmark for their own desire to be liked and admired."
• "Savings can be created by spending less. You can spend less if you desire less. And you will desire less if you care less about what others think of you. As I argue often in this book, money relies more on psychology than finance."
• "Every bit of savings is like taking a point in the future that would have been owned by someone else and giving it back to yourself. That flexibility and control over your time is an unseen return on wealth."
• "The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising. Not that we should use past surprises as a guide to future boundaries; that we should use past surprises as an admission that we have no idea what might happen next."
• "It sounds trivial, but thinking of market volatility as a fee rather than a fine is an important part of developing the kind of mindset that lets you stick around long enough for investing gains to work in your favor."
• "Daniel Kahneman once told me about the stories people tell themselves to make sense of the past. He said: 'Hindsight, the ability to explain the past, gives us the illusion that the world is understandable.' It gives us the illusion that the world makes sense, even when it doesn’t make sense."
• "Psychologist Philip Tetlock once wrote: 'We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need.' "
• "I love Voltaire’s observation that 'History never repeats itself; man always does.' It applies so well to how we behave with money."

Select notes and quotes:

On work

• "Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true."
• "The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet."
• "The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone."
• "Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most."
• "The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner."
• "You can only achieve mastery in one or two things. It’s usually things you’re obsessed about."
• "Compound interest also happens in your reputation."
• "The people who have the ability to fail in public under their own names actually gain a lot of power."
• "There’s not really that much to fear in terms of failure, and so people should take on a lot more accountability than they do."
• "I think the meaning of life is to do things for their own sake."
• "If they can replace you, then they don’t have to pay you a lot."
• "If you have independence and you’re accountable on your output, as opposed to your input—that’s the dream."
• "You’re not doing meetings for meetings’ sake, you’re not trying to impress other people, you’re not writing things down to make it look like you did work. All you care about is the actual work itself."
• "Forty hour work weeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes—train and sprint, then rest and reassess."
• "No one is going to value you more than you value yourself."
• "Set a very high hourly aspirational rate for yourself and stick to it. It should seem and feel absurdly high."
• "When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired."
• "The way to get out of the competition trap is to be authentic, to find the thing you know how to do better than anybody."
• "You know how to do it better because you love it, and no one can compete with you."
• "Apply some leverage and put your name on it."
• "Most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term."

On clear thinking and learning

• "Hard work is really overrated. Judgment is underrated."
• " 'Clear thinker' is a better compliment than 'smart.' "
• "Clear thinkers appeal to their own authority."
• "A contrarian reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure to conform."
• "Decision-making is everything. In fact, someone who makes decisions right 80 percent of the time instead of 70 percent of the time will be valued and compensated in the market hundreds of times more."
• "I don’t believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I try to eliminate what’s not going to work. I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It’s not about having correct judgment. It’s about avoiding incorrect judgments."
• "For you to believe something is true, it should have predictive power, and it must be falsifiable."
• "Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term."
• "Explain what you learned to someone else. Teaching forces learning."
• "You know that song you can’t get out of your head? All thoughts work that way. Careful what you read."

On wealth

• "Wealth creation is an evolutionarily recent positive-sum game. Status is an old zero-sum game. Those attacking wealth creation are often just seeking status."
• "Literally, being anti-wealth will prevent you from becoming wealthy."
• "I’m much more interested in solving problems than I am in making money."
• "In a long-term game, it seems that everybody is making each other rich."
• "I have a much more comfortable philosophy: Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you."
• "Always pay it forward. And don’t keep count."
• "Amazing how many people confuse wealth and wisdom."
• "You don’t get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money."

On leverage

• "One form of leverage is labor—other humans working for you. It is the oldest form of leverage, and actually not a great one in the modern world. I would argue this is the worst form of leverage that you could possibly use."
• "Money is good as a form of leverage. It means every time you make a decision, you multiply it with money."
• "The final form of leverage is brand new—the most democratic form. It is: 'products with no marginal cost of replication.' This includes books, media, movies, and code. All you need is a computer—you don’t need anyone’s permission."

On happiness

• "It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive."
• "The three big [keys to life] in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse."
• "Maybe happiness is not something you inherit or even choose, but a highly personal skill that can be learned, like fitness or nutrition."
• "Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life."
• "There are no external forces affecting your emotions—as much as it may feel that way."
• "A happy person isn’t someone who’s happy all the time. It’s someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don’t lose their innate peace."
• "I think the most common mistake for humanity is believing you’re going to be made happy because of some external circumstance."
• "Looking outside yourself for anything is the fundamental delusion."
• "The mistake over and over and over is to say, “Oh, I’ll be happy when I get that thing,” whatever it is. That is the fundamental mistake we all make, 24/7, all day long."
• "Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want."
• "One thing I’ve learned recently: it’s way more important to perfect your desires than to try to do something you don’t 100 percent desire."
• "Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose."
• "If you’re a peaceful person, anything you do will be a happy activity."
• "I don’t think life is that hard. I think we make it hard."

Select notes and quotes:

• "The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own."
• "People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media."
• "A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact."
• "If you use color, you are more likely to be believed if your text is printed in bright blue or red than in middling shades of green, yellow, or pale blue."
• "The aphorisms were judged more insightful when they rhymed than when they did not."
• "Knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern."
• "The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way."
• "You may not realize that the target question was difficult, because an intuitive answer to it came readily to mind."
• "The present state of mind looms very large when people evaluate their happiness."
• "You should assume that any number that is on the table has had an anchoring effect on you, and if the stakes are high you should mobilize yourself (your System 2) to combat the effect."
• "A professor at UCLA found an ingenious way to exploit the availability bias. He asked different groups of students to list ways to improve the course, and he varied the required number of improvements. As expected, the students who listed more ways to improve the class rated it higher!"
• "Frightening thoughts and images occur to us with particular ease, and thoughts of danger that are fluent and vivid exacerbate fear."
• "Jonathan Haidt said in another context, 'The emotional tail wags the rational dog.' "
• "Anchor your judgment of the probability of an outcome on a plausible base rate."
• "This is a trap for forecasters and their clients: adding detail to scenarios makes them more persuasive, but less likely to come true."
• "To teach students any [subject] they did not know before, you must surprise them."
• "You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general."
• "Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance."
• "We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact. There is a clear outcome bias."
• "Because of the halo effect, we get the causal relationship backward: we are prone to believe that the firm fails because its CEO is rigid, when the truth is that the CEO appears to be rigid because the firm is failing."
• "Marital stability is well predicted by a formula: frequency of lovemaking minus frequency of quarrels."
• "[John] Gottman estimated that a stable relationship requires that good interactions outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1."
• "Do not simply trust intuitive judgment—your own or that of others—but do not dismiss it, either." See Gut Feelings for more.
• "Do not trust anyone—including yourself—to tell you how much you should trust their judgment."
• "The proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with a public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person’s judgment."
• Loss aversion: Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce."
• "The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news."
• "Our brains are not designed to reward generosity as reliably as they punish meanness."
• "Consistent overweighting of improbable outcomes—a feature of intuitive decision making—eventually leads to inferior outcomes."
• "The effect of the frequency format is large. In one study, people who saw information about 'a disease that kills 1,286 people out of every 10,000' judged it as more dangerous than people who were told about 'a disease that kills 24.14% of the population.' "
• "Professional golfers putt more successfully when working to avoid a bogey than to achieve a birdie."
• "The sunk-cost fallacy keeps people for too long in poor jobs, unhappy marriages, and unpromising research projects."
• "We can recognize System 1 at work. It delivers an immediate response to any question about rich and poor: when in doubt, favor the poor."
• "The best single predictor of whether or not people will donate their organs is the designation of the default option that will be adopted without having to check a box."
• "What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self."
• "Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me." For an antidote, consider the book Waking Up.
• "Not surprisingly, a headache will make a person miserable, and the second best predictor of the feelings of a day is whether a person did or did not have contacts with friends or relatives. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you."
• "A disposition for well-being is as heritable as height or intelligence."
• "Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it."
• "Californians enjoyed their climate and the Midwesterners despised theirs. But climate was not an important determinant of well-being. Indeed, there was no difference whatsoever between the life satisfaction of students in California and in the Midwest."
• "The focusing illusion is a rich source of miswanting. In particular, it makes us prone to exaggerate the effect of significant purchases or changed circumstances on our future well-being."
• "The focusing illusion creates a bias in favor of goods and experiences that are initially exciting, even if they will eventually lose their appeal. Time is neglected, causing experiences that will retain their attention value in the long term to be appreciated less than they deserve to be."
• "The mind is good with stories, but it does not appear to be well designed for the processing of time."
• "Faith in human rationality is closely linked to [a Chicago School] ideology in which it is unnecessary and even immoral to protect people against their choices. Rational people should be free, and they should be responsible for taking care of themselves."
• "For behavioral economists, however, freedom has a cost, which is borne by individuals who make bad choices, and by a society that feels obligated to help them. The decision of whether or not to protect individuals against their mistakes therefore presents a dilemma for behavioral economists."
• From Kahneman himself: "Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues. I have improved only in my ability to recognize situations in which errors are likely."

Select notes & quotes:

• "What’s important is that the routine exists. Cobble together your own routine, stick to it most days, break from it once in a while for fun, and modify it as necessary."
• "My writing teacher used to joke that the first rule of writing is to 'apply ass to chair.' "
• "You can’t wait around for someone to call you an artist before you make art."
• "We’re now trained to heap praise on our loved ones by using market terminology. The minute anybody shows any talent for anything, we suggest they turn it into a profession. This is our best compliment: telling somebody they’re so good at what they love to do they could make money at it."
• "A free creative life is not about living within your means, it’s about living below your means."
• "You do not need to have an extraordinary life to make extraordinary work. Everything you need to make extraordinary art can be found in your everyday life."
• "Because drawing is really an exercise in seeing, you can suck at drawing and still get a ton out of it."
• "Your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess, which is why everyone wants to steal it from you. First you must protect it, and then you must point it in the right direction."
• "None of us know how many days we’ll have, so it’d be a shame to waste the ones we get."
• “None of us know what will happen. Don’t spend time worrying about it. Make the most beautiful thing you can. Try to do that every day. That’s it.” —Laurie Anderson
• “The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning, we cannot begin to see. Unless we see, we cannot think.” —Thomas Merton

Select notes and quotes:

• "We are actually awash with time and profligate in its abuse."
• "Most important decisions have never been made by analysis and never will be, however clever our computers become."
• "For every step in your business process, ask yourself if it adds value or provides essential support. If it does neither, it’s waste. Cut it."
• "Identify, treasure, and multiply the few productive costs, and get rid of the rest."
• "A simple business will always be better than a complex business."
• "Marketing, and the whole firm, should focus on providing a stunning product and service in 20 percent of the existing product line—that small part generating 80 percent of fully costed profits."
• "Marketing, and the whole firm, should devote extraordinary endeavor toward delighting, keeping forever, and expanding the sales to the 20 percent of customers who provide 80 percent of the firm’s sales and/or profits."
• "Delisting marginal products boosts profits while not harming customer perceptions one iota."
• "The only way to stand a reasonable chance of noticing critical turning points is to stand above all your data and analysis for one day a month and ask questions like: What uncharted problems and opportunities, that could potentially have tremendous consequences, are mounting up without my noticing? What is working well when it shouldn’t or at least was not intended to? What are we unintentionally providing to customers that for some reason they seem to appreciate greatly? Is there something going badly astray, where we think we know why but where we might be totally wrong?"
• "Margins—between value and cost, between effort and reward—are always highly variable. High-margin activities constitute a small part of total activities but a majority of total margins."
• "Exploit 80/20 arbitrage. Whenever you can, move resources from 80 percent activities to 20 percent activities."
• "Linear thinking is attractive because it is simple, cut and dried. The trouble is that it is a poor description of the world and an even worse preparation for changing it. Scientists and historians have long ago abandoned linear thinking. Why should you cling to it?"
• "Not only is happiness not money, it is not even like money. Money not spent can be saved and invested and, through the magic of compound interest, multiplied. But happiness not spent today does not lead to happiness tomorrow. Happiness, like the mind, will atrophy if not exercised. 80/20 thinkers know what generates their happiness and pursue it consciously, cheerfully, and intelligently, using happiness today to build and multiply happiness tomorrow."
• "Hard work leads to low returns. Insight and doing what we ourselves want lead to high returns."
• "Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least." —Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
• "Focus your attention on nurturing the key alliances of your life."
• "Obtain the four forms of labor leverage. First, leverage your own time. Second, capture 100 percent of its value by becoming self-employed. Third, employ as many net value creators as possible. Fourth, contract out everything that you and your colleagues are not several times better at doing."
• "Goals are a potential source of tyranny if you don’t truly want to realize them, but you just think you ought to have them. Maybe if you don’t have a goal or goals shouting at you, you should wait until you do."
• "As the influence of networks rises, so does that of 80/20."
• "At work, what is the one constraint that, if it were removed, would make us five, ten or twenty times as productive?"

Select notes and quotes:

• "Just don’t pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don’t. Stay open to them. It’s teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It’s that simple."
• "Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor."
• "Getting all of one’s addictions under control is a little like putting an octopus to bed."
• "You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. So I keep trying gently to bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen, maybe to be seen and noted with a kind of reverence. Because if I don’t learn to do this, I think I’ll keep getting things wrong."
• "There is ecstasy in paying attention."
• "To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass."
• "For instance, I used to think that paired opposites were a given, that love was the opposite of hate, right the opposite of wrong. But now I think we sometimes buy into these concepts because it is so much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality. I don’t think anything is the opposite of love. Reality is unforgivingly complex."
• "Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly. There will be many mistakes, many things to take out and others that need to be added."
• "Money won’t guarantee these writers much of anything, except that now they have a much more expensive set of problems."
• "I was raised in a culture that promotes this competitiveness, this insatiability, this fantasy of needing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and then, in the next breath, shames you for any feelings of longing or envy or fear that it will always be someone else’s turn."
• "I think that if you have the kind of mind that retains important and creative thoughts—that is, if your mind still works—you’re very lucky and you should not be surprised if the rest of us do not want to be around you."
• "There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver."

Select notes and quotes:

• "So the unwanting soul sees what’s hidden, and the ever-wanting soul sees only what it wants."
• "Everybody knowing that goodness is good makes wickedness."
• "To bear and not to own; to act and not lay claim; to do the work and let it go: for just letting it go is what makes it stay."
• "When you do not-doing, nothing’s out of order."
• "You can only be kind or cruel if you have, and cherish, a self."
• "You can’t even be indifferent if you aren’t different."
• "True goodness is like water. Water’s good for everything. It doesn’t compete."
• "Hollowed out, clay makes a pot. Where the pot’s not is where it’s useful."
• A note from Le Guin about the text: "He sees sacrifice of self or others as a corruption of power, and power as available to anybody who follows the Way. This is a radically subversive attitude."
• "The disordered family is full of dutiful children and parents."
• "The disordered society is full of loyal patriots."
• "Need little, want less."
• "Be broken to be whole."
• "Be empty to be full."
• "Have little and gain much. Have much and get confused."
• "Even the best weapon is an unhappy tool. Hateful to all living things."
• "It is right that a victor in war be received with funeral ceremonies."
• "Knowing other people is intelligence, knowing yourself is wisdom."
• "Contentment is wealth."
• "The Way never does anything, and everything gets done."
• "Obedience to law is the dry husk of loyalty and good faith."
• "A multiplicity of riches is poverty."
• "The height of power seems a valley."
• "The great thought can’t be thought."
• "What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world."
• "All you hoard will be utterly lost."
• "To be comfortable in the cold, keep moving; to be comfortable in the heat, hold still; to be comfortable in the world, stay calm and clear."
• "The worst luck: discontent. Greed’s the curse of life. To know enough’s enough is enough to know."
• A note from Le Guin about the text: "We tend to expect great things from 'seeing the world' and 'getting experience.' A Roman poet remarked that travelers change their sky but not their soul."
• "To run things, be undiplomatic. No diplomat is fit to run things."
• "To have without possessing, do without claiming, lead without controlling: this is mysterious power."
• "People wearing ornaments and fancy clothes, carrying weapons, drinking a lot and eating a lot, having a lot of things, a lot of money: shameless thieves. Surely their way isn’t the way."
• "Who knows doesn’t talk. Who talks doesn’t know."
• "The more restrictions and prohibitions in the world, the poorer people get."
• "The more experts the country has the more of a mess it’s in."
• "The louder the call for law and order, the more the thieves and con men multiply."
• "The ten-thousand-mile journey begins beneath your foot."
• "Mind the end as the beginning, then it won’t go wrong."
• "That’s why the wise want not to want."
• "And people don’t get tired of enjoying and praising one who, not competing, has in all the world no competitor." Pairs nicely with the thesis of Zero to One.
• "All greatness is improbable. What’s probable is tedious and petty."
• "So the wise do without claiming, achieve without asserting, wishing not to show their worth."
• "Nothing in the world is as soft, as weak, as water; nothing else can wear away the hard, the strong, and remain unaltered."
• "Soft overcomes hard, weak overcomes strong. Everybody knows it, nobody uses the knowledge."
• "People whose power is real fulfill their obligations; people whose power is hollow insist on their claims."

Select notes and quotes:

• "What if society stopped telling us to buy more stuff and instead allowed us to create more space to breathe and think?"
• "There are three deeply entrenched assumptions we must conquer to live the way of the Essentialist: 'I have to,' 'It’s all important,' and 'I can do both.' To embrace the essence of Essentialism requires we replace these false assumptions with three core truths: 'I choose to,' 'Only a few things really matter,' and 'I can do anything but not everything.' "
• "Sure the THINGS we choose may be limited - they always are - but we always retain our ability to choose how we perceive our options."
• "The reality is, saying yes to any opportunity by definition requires saying no to several others."
• "When I say focus, I don’t mean simply picking a question or possibility and thinking about it obsessively. I mean creating the space to explore one hundred questions and possibilities. An Essentialist focuses the way our eyes focus; not by fixating on something but by constantly adjusting and adapting to the field of vision."
• "I am simply saying everyone is selling something—an idea, a viewpoint, an opinion—in exchange for your time. Simply being aware of what is being sold allows us to be more deliberate in deciding whether we want to buy it."
• "Curiously, people will admit to having a tendency to underestimate while simultaneously believing their current estimates are accurate."
• "What is the obstacle that, if removed, would make the majority of other obstacles disappear?"
• "The way of the Nonessentialist is to go big on everything: to try to do it all, have it all, fit it all in. The Nonessentialist operates under the false logic that the more he strives, the more he will achieve, but the reality is, the more we reach for the stars, the harder it is to get ourselves off the ground."
• "Instead of spending our limited supply of discipline on making the same decisions again and again, embedding our decisions into our routine allows us to channel that discipline toward some other essential activity."
• "When faced with so many tasks and obligations that you can’t figure out which to tackle first, stop. Take a deep breath. Get present in the moment and ask yourself what is most important this very second—not what’s most important tomorrow or even an hour from now. If you’re not sure, make a list of everything vying for your attention and cross off anything that is not important right now."

Select notes & quotes:

• "Intellectual advancement has traditionally progressed through discord and dissent, as a diversity of views ensures that ideas survive because they are correct, not because they are popular."
• "...our identity as a person must be kept separable from the ideas we happen to endorse at a given time."
• "It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error..."
• "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that."
• "...not only the grounds of the opinion are forgotten in the absence of discussion, but too often the meaning of the opinion itself."
• "...every opinion which embodies somewhat of the portion of truth which the common opinion omits, ought to be considered precious, with whatever amount of error and confusion that truth may be blended."

Select notes and quotes:

• "People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable."
• "Let’s face it, checking your 'likes' is the new smoking."
• “We’re social beings who can’t ever completely ignore what other people think of us.” 
• "The best digital life is formed by carefully curating their tools to deliver massive and unambiguous benefits."
• "The cumulative cost of the noncrucial things we clutter our lives with can far outweigh the small benefits each individual piece of clutter promises."
• "Follow Lincoln’s example and give your brain the regular doses of quiet it requires to support a monumental life."
• "Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be."
• "Regular doses of solitude, mixed in with our default mode of sociality, are necessary to flourish as a human being."
• "90 percent of your daily life, the presence of a cell phone either doesn’t matter or makes things only slightly more convenient. They’re useful, but it’s hyperbolic to believe its ubiquitous presence is vital."
• "The default network, in other words, seems to be connected to social cognition."
• "When given downtime, in other words, our brain defaults to thinking about our social life."
• "[Lieberman] believes 'believes we are interested in the social world because we are built to turn on the default network during our free time.' " We are comparison machines. Social media leverages this in a way that is not conducive to living a rich life.
• "Instead of seeing these easy clicks as a fun way to nudge a friend, start treating them as poison to your attempts to cultivate a meaningful social life. Put simply, you should stop using them. Don’t click 'Like.' Ever."
• "This point is crucial because many people fear that their relationships will suffer if they downgrade this form of lightweight connection. I want to reassure you that it will instead strengthen the relationships you care most about."
• As an academic who studies and teaches social media explained to me: 'I don’t think we’re meant to keep in touch with so many people.' "
• "A life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates."
• "The big companies want 'use' to be a simple binary condition—either you engage with their foundational technology, or you’re a weirdo."
• "You don’t have to quit these services; you just have to quit accessing them on the go."
• "The vast majority of regular social media users can receive the vast majority of the value these services provide their life in as little as twenty to forty minutes of use per week."
• "Approach social media as if you’re the director of emerging media for your own life."
• "Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value—not as sources of value themselves."

Select quotes & notes:

• "You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work."
• "if you not only eliminate shallow work, but also replace this recovered time with more of the deep alternative, not only will the business continue to function; it can become more successful."
• "You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it."
• "People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy."
• "Don’t waste mental energy figuring out what you need in the moment."
• "Put more thought into your leisure time."
• "The notion that all messages, regardless of purpose or sender, arrive in the same undifferentiated inbox, and that there’s an expectation that every message deserves a (timely) response, is absurdly unproductive."
• “Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.” 

Select notes & quotes:

• "Our public discourse [has] become dangerous nonsense."
• "As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it."
• "The 'news of the day' is a figment of our technological imagination. It is, quite precisely, a media event."
• "The telegraph may have made the country into 'one neighborhood,' but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other."
• "This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the 'information-action ratio.' " (The numerator has increased substantially.)
• "For the photograph gave a concrete reality to the strange-sounding datelines, and attached faces to the unknown names. Thus it provided the illusion, at least, that 'the news' had a connection to something within one’s sensory experience. It created an apparent context for the 'news of the day.' And the 'news of the day' created a context for the photograph."
• "As Susan Sontag has observed, a photograph implies 'that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it.' But, as she further observes, all understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears."
• "Television is nothing less than a philosophy of rhetoric."
• "Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations."
• "And so, I raise no objection to television’s junk. The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it."
• "I will say once again that I am no relativist in this matter, and that I believe the epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist."
• "Our culture’s adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all but complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge, and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane."
• "But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience."
• "A news show, to put it plainly, is a format for entertainment, not for education, reflection or catharsis..."
• "Thinking does not play well on television."
• "Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images."
• "We have become so accustomed to its discontinuities that we are no longer struck dumb, as any sane person would be, by a newscaster who having just reported that a nuclear war is inevitable goes on to say that he will be right back after this word from Burger King; who says, in other words, 'Now . . . this.' "
• "All information is disinformation in a screen-driven world because the image belies complexity."
• "Walter Lippmann, for example, wrote in 1920: 'There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.' "
• "Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions."
• "In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial."
• "The commercial asks us to believe that all problems are solvable, that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable fast through the interventions of technology, techniques and chemistry."
• "For example, a person who has seen one million television commercials might well believe that all political problems have fast solutions through simple measures—or ought to. Or that complex language is not to be trusted, and that all problems lend themselves to theatrical expression."
• "This is why I think it accurate to call television a curriculum. As I understand the word, a curriculum is a specially constructed information system whose purpose is to influence, teach, train or cultivate the mind and character of youth. Television, of course, does exactly that, and does it relentlessly. In so doing, it competes successfully with the school curriculum. By which I mean, it damn near obliterates it."
• "Television does not ban books, it simply displaces them."

Select notes and quotes:

• "It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it."
• "Life, if you know how to use it, is long."
• "Look at those whose prosperity men flock to behold; they are smothered by their blessings."
• "In guarding their fortune men are often close-fisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most prodigal."
• "All those who summon you to themselves, turn you away from your own self."
• "But no one sets a value on time; all use it lavishly as if it cost nothing."
• "Life will follow the path it started upon, and will neither reverse nor check its course; it will make no noise, it will not remind you of its swiftness. Silent it will glide on; it will not prolong itself at the command of a king, or at the applause of the populace."
• "Busy men find life very short."
• "Life is divided into three periods — that which has been, that which is, that which will be. Of these the present time is short, the future is doubtful, the past is certain."
• "Present time is very brief, so brief, indeed, that to some there seems to be none; for it is always in motion, it ever flows and hurries on."
• "In a word, do you want to know how they do not 'live long'? See how eager they are to live long!"
• "The wise man will not hesitate to go to meet death with steady step."
• It is more difficult for men to obtain leisure from themselves than from the law. Meantime, while they rob and are being robbed, while they break up each other's repose, while they make each other wretched, their life is without profit, without pleasure, without any improvement of the mind."
• "We are wont to say that it was not in our power to choose the parents who fell to our lot, that they have been given to men by chance; yet we may be the sons of whomsoever we will."
• "Unless we are most ungrateful, all those men, glorious fashioners of holy thoughts, were born for us; for us they have prepared a way of life."
• "No one of these [philosophers] will be 'not at home.' "
• "All the greatest blessings are a source of anxiety, and at no time is fortune less wisely trusted than when it is best."
• "It is better to have knowledge of the ledger of one's own life than of the corn-market."
• "And so when you see a man often wearing the robe of office, when you see one whose name is famous in the Forum, do not envy him; those things are bought at the price of life."

This book pairs well with Paul Graham quote, "Build something users love and spend less than you make." It also pairs well with Peter Thiel's Zero to One.

Here are my select notes and quotes:

• "Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently promoting what’s not working."
• "Instead of trying to create demand, you’re managing the huge demand."
• "Make yourself unnecessary to the running of your business."
• "When you’re onto something great, it won’t feel like revolution. It’ll feel like uncommon sense."
• "Don’t waste years fighting uphill battles against locked doors. Improve or invent until you get that huge response."
• "If you’re ever unsure what to prioritize, just ask your customers the open-ended question, 'How can I best help you now?' Then focus on satisfying those requests."
• "It’s counterintuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone."
• "To me, ideas are worth nothing unless they are executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions."
• "Stay focused on helping people today."
• "Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?"
• "That’s the Tao of business: Care about your customers more than about yourself, and you’ll do well."
• "But please know that it’s often the tiny details that really thrill people enough to make them tell all their friends about you."
• "There’s a big difference between being self-employed and being a business owner. Being self-employed feels like freedom until you realize that if you take time off, your business crumbles. To be a true business owner, make it so that you could leave for a year, and when you came back, your business would be doing better than when you left."
• "Never forget that you can make your role anything you want it to be. Anything you hate to do, someone else loves. So find that person and let her do it."

Select notes and quotes:

• "Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: 'What important truth do very few people agree with you on?' "
• "Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can."
• "The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself."
• "The history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents."
• "All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition."
• "More than anything else, competition is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking."
• "The wealthy Boomers who shape public opinion today see little reason to question their naïve optimism. Since tracked careers worked for them, they can’t imagine that they won’t work for their kids, too."
• "While a definitely optimistic future would need engineers to design underwater cities and settlements in space, an indefinitely optimistic future calls for more bankers and lawyers."
• "In an indefinite world, people actually prefer unlimited optionality; money is more valuable than anything you could possibly do with it."
• "Only in a definite future is money a means to an end, not the end itself."
• "We are more fascinated today by statistical predictions of what the country will be thinking in a few weeks’ time than by visionary predictions of what the country will look like 10 or 20 years from now."
• "Indefinite optimism seems inherently unsustainable: how can the future get better if no one plans for it?"
• "Every university believes in 'excellence,' and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that 'it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.' That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future."
• "So when thinking about what kind of company to build, there are two distinct questions to ask: What secrets is nature not telling you? What secrets are people not telling you?"
• "This is why physics PhDs are notoriously difficult to work with—because they know the most fundamental truths, they think they know all truths."
• "Secrets about people are relatively underappreciated. Maybe that’s because you don’t need a dozen years of higher education to ask the questions that uncover them: What are people not allowed to talk about? What is forbidden or taboo?"
• "In practice, there’s always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody—and that’s a company."
• "A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator."
• "What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy."
• "Watson, Deep Blue, and ever-better machine learning algorithms are cool. But the most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?"
• "The best sales is hidden. There’s nothing wrong with a CEO who can sell, but if he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech."
• "Every entrepreneur should plan to be the last mover in her particular market. That starts with asking yourself: what will the world look like 10 and 20 years from now, and how will my business fit in?"
• "Jobs’s return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business—the creation of new value—cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals."

Select notes & quotes:

• "Confidence is critical for a great competitor, but overconfidence is brittle."
• One of the most critical strengths of a superior competitor in any discipline—whether we are speaking about sports, business negotiations, or even presidential debates—is the ability to dictate the tone of the battle."
• "When we have worked hard and succeed at something, we should be allowed to smell the roses. The key, in my opinion, is to recognize that the beauty of those roses lies in their transience."
• "There were a few powerful moments that reinforced my young notion that glory had little to do with happiness or long-term success. I’ll never forget walking out of the playing hall of the 1990 Elementary School National Championships after winning the title game. There were over 1,500 competitors at the event, all the strongest young players from around the country. I had just won the whole thing...and everything felt normal. I stood in the convention hall looking around. There was no euphoria, no opening of the heavens. The world was the same as it had been a few days before. I was Josh. I had a great mom and dad and a cute little sister Katya who was fun to play with. I loved chess and sports and girls and fishing. When I would go back to school on Monday, my friends would say 'Awright!' like they did after hitting a jump shot, and then it would be in the past and we would go play football."
• "The first mistake rarely proves disastrous, but the downward spiral of the second, third, and fourth error creates a devastating chain reaction."
• "Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential."
• "In my opinion, intuition is our most valuable compass in this world."
• "The secret is that everything is always on the line. The more present we are at practice, the more present we will be in competition, in the boardroom, at the exam, the operating table, the big stage."
• "Jim Harbaugh told me about the first time he noticed this pattern in himself. He’s a passionate guy, and liked to root on his defense when they were on the field. But after his first sessions at LGE he noticed a clear improvement in his play if he sat on the bench, relaxed, and didn’t even watch the other team’s offensive series. The more he could let things go, the sharper he was in the next drive. The notion that I didn’t have to hold myself in a state of feverish concentration every second of a chess game was a huge liberation."
• "If you are interested in really improving as a performer, I would suggest incorporating the rhythm of stress and recovery into all aspects of your life."
• "Besides adding to your psychological and physical resilience, this opens up some wonderful and surprising new possibilities. For one thing, now that your conscious mind is free to take little breaks, you’ll be delighted by the surges of creativity that will emerge out of your unconscious. You’ll become more attuned to your intuition and will slowly become more and more true to yourself stylistically."
• "If you spend a few months practicing stress and recovery in your everyday life, you’ll lay the physiological foundation for becoming a resilient, dependable pressure player."
• "To have success in crunch time, you need to integrate certain healthy patterns into your day-to-day life so that they are completely natural to you when the pressure is on."
• "First, we learn to flow with distraction, like that blade of grass bending to the wind. Then we learn to use distraction, inspiring ourselves with what initially would have thrown us off our games. Finally we learn to re-create the inspiring settings internally."
• "Once we build our tolerance for turbulence and are no longer upended by the swells of our emotional life, we can ride them and even pick up speed with their slopes."