It is common for conversations to consist of people sharing their conclusions rather than exploring the reasoning that led to those conclusions. As a result, there is an overabundance of confidently expressed bad opinions.
I learned that creative genius and insanity can be quite close to each other, that the same chemistry that creates insights can cause distortions, and that being stuck in one’s own head is terribly dangerous.
Know that the most constant struggle is between feeling and thinking.
You will either learn valuable lessons from your mistakes and press on, better equipped to succeed – or you won’t and you will fail.
Organisms, organizations, and individual people are always highly imperfect but capable of improving. So rather than getting stuck hiding our mistakes and pretending we’re perfect, it makes sense to find our imperfections and deal with them.
Escalate when you can’t adequately handle your responsibilities.
Evolving is life’s greatest accomplishment and its greatest reward.
Everyone should be up-front in expressing how confident they are in their thoughts.
Problems would be hidden instead of brought to the surface where they could be resolved.
The most valuable habit I’ve acquired is using pain to trigger quality reflections.
I urge you to be curious enough to want to understand how the people who see things differently from you came to see them that way. You will find that interesting and invaluable, and the richer perspective you gain will help you decide what you should do.
In the future, artificial intelligence will have a profound impact on how we make decisions in every aspect of our lives – especially when combined with the new era of radical transparency about people that’s already upon us.
Make your passion and your work one and the same and do it with people you want to be with.
Think of every decision as a bet with a probability and a reward for being right and a probability and a penalty for being wrong. Normally a winning decision is one with a positive expected value, meaning that the reward times its probability of occurring is greater than the penalty times its probability of occurring, with the best decision being the one with the highest expected value.
Understand how people came by their opinions.
Most people see the things around them without considering the forces that created them. In most cases those forces were specific people with specific qualities who worked in specific ways. Change the people and you change how things develop; replace creators with noncreators and you stop having creations.
For all those reasons, I cannot say that having an intense life filled with accomplishments is better than having a relaxed life filled with savoring, though I can say that being strong is better than being weak, and that struggling gives one strength.
When a problem stems from your own lack of talent or skill, most people feel shame. Get over it. I cannot emphasize this enough: Acknowledging your weaknesses is not the same as surrendering to them. It’s the first step toward overcoming them. The pains you are feeling are “growing pains” that will test your character and reward you as you push through them.
Don’t design jobs to fit people; over time, this almost always turns out to be a mistake.
Learning to meditate helped too.