Recapping my skill set: I have poor art skills, mediocre business skills, good but not great writing talent, and an early knowledge of the Internet. And I have a good but not great sense of humor. I’m like one big mediocre soup. None of my skills are world-class, but when my mediocre skills are combined, they become a powerful market force.
Most important, understand that goals are for losers and systems are for winners.
Pessimism is often a failure of imagination.
When you can release on your ego long enough to view your perceptions as incomplete or misleading, it gives you the freedom to imagine new and potentially more useful ways of looking at the world.
Reality is overrated and impossible to understand with any degree of certainty. What you do know for sure is that some ways of looking at the world work better than others. Pick the way that works, even if you don’t know why.
If you see something that impresses you, a decent respect to humanity insists you voice your praise.
When politicians tell lies, they know the press will call them out. They also know it doesn’t matter. Politicians understand that reason will never have much of a role in voting decisions. A lie that makes a voter feel good is more effective than a hundred rational arguments. That’s even true when the voter knows the lie is a lie.
The great thing about reading diverse news from the fields of business, health, science, technology, politics, and more is that you automatically see patterns in the world and develop mental hooks upon which you can hang future knowledge.
Awareness does not come from receiving new information. It comes from rejecting old information.
There are three important things to know about human beings in order to understand why we do the things we do. Humans use pattern recognition to understand their world. Humans are very bad at pattern recognition. And they don’t know it.
Idiocy in the modern age isn’t an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. It’s a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time.
Accept that some days you are the pigeon and some days you are the statue.
My definition of happiness is that it’s a feeling you get when your body chemistry is producing pleasant sensations in your mind.
Pessimism is often a failure of imagination. If you can imagine the future being brighter, it lifts your energy and gooses the chemistry in your body that produces a sensation of happiness.
I’ve explained to a number of people my observations about how exercise, diet, and sleep influence mood. The usual reaction is a blank expression followed by a change of topic. No one wants to believe that the formula for happiness is as simple as daydreaming, controlling your schedule, napping, eating right, and being active every day. You’d feel like an idiot for suffering so many unhappy days while not knowing the cure was so accessible.
People are naturally drawn to the things they feel comfortable doing, and comfort is a marker for talent.
The only reasonable goal in life is maximizing your total lifetime experience of something called happiness. That might sound selfish, but it’s not. Only a sociopath or a hermit can find happiness through extreme selfishness. A normal person needs to treat others well in order to enjoy life.
We humans like to think we are creatures of reason. We aren’t. The reality is that we make our decisions first and rationalize them later... Your illusion of being a rational person is supported by the fact that sometimes you do act rationally.
If bad memories are keeping you from being happy, try crowding out the destructive memories with new and interesting thoughts. Stay busy, in mind and body, and time is on your side.
Being absolutely right and being spectacularly wrong feel exactly the same.