You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.
Steve Jobs: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk.
Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it – books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.
Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.
No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.
You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.
If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.
You do not want to win an argument. You want to win.
We grossly overestimate the length of the effect of misfortune on our lives. You think that the loss of your fortune or current position will be devastating, but you are probably wrong. More likely, you will adapt to anything, as you probably did after past misfortunes.
Books to me are not expanded journal articles, but reading experiences, and the academics who tend to read in order to cite in their writing – rather than read for enjoyment, curiosity, or simply because they like to read – tend to be frustrated when they can’t rapidly scan the text and summarize it in one sentence that connects it to some existing discourse in which they have been involved.
Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick is to be as smooth as possible in personal manners. It is much easier to signal self-confidence if you are exceedingly polite and friendly; you can control people without having to offend their sensitivity.
Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us.
Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.
Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.
Scars signal skin in the game.
Beware of the person who gives advice, telling you that a certain action on your part is “good for you” while it is also good for him, while the harm to you doesn’t directly affect him.
Start by being nice to every person you meet. But if someone tries to exercise power over you, exercise power over him.
More data means more information, but it also means more false information.
Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one’s profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one’s impulses. Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making.