Happy new year to my crew! I hope you all had a safe and relaxing and fun holiday season. Next week we’ll be back to the Weekly Reads with some FIRE and amazing end-of-year posts but this week I’d like to share a wonderful podcast interview I did in front of a live audience in … Read more
* My Favorite Year-End Lessons Learned Post: “These are the major things I’ve learned this year, in no particular order…”
* On Cultivating and Sustaining Love: “Love is losing yourself in the process of caring about and showing undivided attention to someone or something, through ups and downs. It’s as simple and as hard as that.”
* On Planning For The Ups and Downs of Happiness: “There are time when all the lies you have told yourself about yourself just fall away.”
* On Attention Being A Valuable Resource: “In many ways, we are what we pay attention to. The things that we work on also work on us. Everything we take in has an effect on the taker-inner, on us. Our attention is perhaps the most precious resource there is. We need to use it as skillfully as we can.”
* On Fake Versus Real Toughness: “The strongest people we know tend to be caring, considerate, and calm. The people we know who want to be strong and tough — but who are not — tend to be loud, defensive, and overly proud.”
* On the Ups and Downs of Happiness: “There are time when all the lies you have told yourself about yourself just fall away.”
* On the Value of Taking Pay Cuts: “You’ll make your own calculations. But you will be making a mistake if all of those calculations are financial.”
* How to Remember What You Learn: “There is a way to slow down the process of forgetting. We are not taught how to learn in school, we are taught how to pass tests.”
* Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones: “We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended.”
* On the Value of Writing For Yourself Versus An Audience: “Many of the good writers you enjoy probably aren’t much smarter than you. They’ve just forced themselves through the process of transferring vague feelings into words and the clarity that generates.”
* A Practical System for Reading More Daily: “Regardless of what unit of reading you choose, the math will still work out: In six months, or a year, or five years, or ten years, you’ll have digested a large swath of human wisdom.”
* On the Power of Rituals and Routines: “Routines power your day, but rituals help you get through them. The structure of routine comforts us, and the specialness of ritual vitalizes us.”
* On the Value of Making Irrational Decisions: “Rational is hard. Being reasonable is often the most practical goal.”
* On Happiness and Enjoying Life: “We can easily spend nine-tenths of our lives trying to appreciate the free time, hammocks, bike rides, and coffee breaks to come, or we can spend that time—which amounts to decades—appreciating what is already happening. And there’s nothing subtle about the difference it makes.”
* On Regret: “We all have joys, hopes, fears, and longings that never go away no matter how old we get.”
* On Asking Not Telling: “We put tasks and achievements before relationships, without recognizing the damage it does to our colleagues or families. ”
* On What You Can’t Buy: ” All of the money in the world can’t satisfy your soul. Wealth can’t satisfy the need to belong to something bigger than yourself. As someone who writes about finance every single week, I can tell you that there are some things that money can’t buy. Things like character. Things like integrity. Things like beliefs. ‘
* On Impostor Syndrome: “All that separates an impostor from a real person is the willingness to grow. As long as you push your comfort zone a little bit each day, you’re never an impostor.”
* You Probably Won’t Make it to the Top: “Making it to the top isn’t the game you should be focused on.”
* Why Boredom Is So Powerful in Your Life: “Boredom is neutral — it’s up to you turn into something positive or negative.”
* On Human Nature, Confidence and Worship: “No matter how complicated the problem, you have an absolutely overwhelming belief that you are infallibly right in your solution.”
* On Humble Exits and The Value of Leaving When On Top: “In each case it’s the actual success – not bad luck, not a mistake, not unfortunate timing – that sets up the potential downfall.”
* On Why We Often Remember Bad Memories Rather Than Good: “Memories are fallible. Long-term memories are nearly always wrong.”
* On the Importance of Long Term Thinking in a Society Dominated by Instant Gratification: “The information you consume will likely one day provide you with some benefit, you just don’t know where yet. It just takes time.”
* When a Stress Expert Battles Mental Illness: “It’s hard to reconcile being an ‘expert’ on performance and experiencing what I’m experiencing. At times, I feel like a fraud and an impostor, fragile and scared.”
* On Taking Risk and Timing: “Isn’t that what drives us? The desire to acquire more, even if not necessarily more things but more knowledge, more skills, more experiences, more praise, more power.”
* How Nostalgia Can Help Us Find Our Meaning in Life (PODCAST): What exactly nostalgia is, what it feels like, and what induces nostalgic feelings
* On Living a Perfectly Imperfect Life: “It’s about being compassionate with yourself as you are, and building on whatever that is — not feverishly trying to rebuild yourself in order to pose as something else entirely.”
* On Strategy and Execution: “Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it’s about deliberately choosing to be different. The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
* On The Advantages of Being Underemployed: “It’s not about working less – it’s the opposite.”
* On Stories That Saved a Prisoner’s Life: “I didn’t just live for that library. I lived because of that library. The Patuxent prison library saved me from crushing despair. It saved hundreds of other guys, too.”
On Figuring Out Your Flaws: “No one is crazy, including you. But everyone justifies actions based on poor reasoning, including you.”
On Self-Reflection and Gratitude: “Money and career are important but they’re not everything.”
On Being Good Not Great: “ ‘Trust comes from vulnerability.’ Recent experimental data suggests that this is because deep down inside, most everyone dislikes having to pretend they’ve got all their shit together. When you let your guard down and get real, others feel relieved and gain the confidence to do the same.”
How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape our Reality: “We can select truths that engage people and inspire action, or we can deploy truths that deliberately mislead. Truth comes in many forms, and experienced communicators can exploit its variability to shape our impression of reality.”
On Endurance and Time Horizons: “One is how much time you have to achieve your goals. The other is …”
On the Value of Irrational Thinking: “You are always explaining to yourself the motivations for your actions and the causes ….”
On the Relationship Between Dogs and Man: “The dog is a result of fear transformed into love. When we look …”
On Living a Meaningful Life: “Nothing could be more self-defeating than scrutinizing one’s life purpose. We ask ourselves if …”
