Hereâs a random collection of quotes that Iâm saving
âMake something people want.â
â Paul Graham
âPeople can admit when theyâre logically wrong. They will never admit when theyâre emotionally wrong.â
â Paul Portesi
âMaking a mistake is a net positive if you learn more from it than it cost you.â
â Pedro Domingos
âAn idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity.â
â Terry A. Davis.
âThe most important part of every plan is planning on your plan not going according to plan.â
â Morgan Housel
âFriends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.â
â Kevin Kelly
âThe luckier you are, the nicer you should be.â
â Morgan Housel
“That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.”
â P.C. Hodgell
âDonât try to maximize happiness. Minimize misery, and youâll be happy.â
â Paul Portesi
âIâd like to live as a poor man with lots of money.â
â Pablo Picasso
âIt is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.â
â Nassim Taleb
âSocial anxiety results from being around people who are resolutely opposed to who you are.â
â Stefan Molyneux
âEverybody on LinkedIn appears happy, smiling, wears a tie, and signals docility, conformity, and optimism while they rot inside.â
â Marin Zhelezov
âWhenever I see a woman whoâs happy, sheâs married. And whenever I see a man whoâs happy, heâs single.â
â Larry David
âA taste of freedom can make you unemployable.â
â Naval
âNo other success can compensate for failure in the home.â
â J.E. McCulloch
âScience has emerged as new religion & citing âstudiesâ has become like quoting religious verses.â
â Zachariah Brown
âBig companies and repeat entrepreneurs struggle to go from zero to one because they refuse to restart at zero.â
â Naval
âTo gain status in the world, we do all we can to appear as if we had already gained it.â
â François de La Rochefoucauld
âNormies are nice in words but hateful in deeds. I am nice in deeds but for them I appear hateful in words. And they deserve it.â
â Marin Zhelezov
âTo make mistakes is human. To own your mistakes is divine. Nothing elevates a person higher than quickly admitting and taking personal responsibility for the mistakes you make and then fixing them fairly. If you mess up, fess up. Itâs astounding how powerful this ownership is.â
â Kevin Kelly
âThink of the process of inflation as a very tall ladder that has been set on fire from the bottom. If you donât climb fast enough, youâll eventually be consumed in flames.â
â Craig Rowland
âSuccess is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.â
â Nassim Taleb
âThose who make conversations impossible, make escalation inevitable.â
â Stefan Molyneux
âI would gladly give up my life for two brothers or eight cousins.â
â John Haldane (geneticist)
âThe only part of you that hurts when youâre given the truth is the part that lives on lies.â
â Stefan Molyneux
âThe same traits needed for huge success are the same traits that increase the odds of failure, so we should be careful praising winners or criticizing failures because they often made similar decisions with different degrees of luck.â
â Morgan Housel
âA populist is a smart person pretending to be dumb, and a liberal is a dumb person pretending to be smart.â
â Norwegian saying
âI have a sworn duty to my shareholders to maximize profit.â
â Martin Shkreli
âSome of this decadeâs greatest heroes will never be known, and some of its most beloved people are basically shams.â
â Sam Bankman-Fried
âYou know how they say no two snowflakes are ever alike? Well, I donât think thatâs true. I think a lot of snowflakes are alike⌠and I think a lot of people are alike too.â
â Patrick Bateman
âEntertaining characters are often deeply flawed.â
â Pixar training video on the art of storytelling
âThe weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.â
â Nassim Taleb
âWhen someoneâs response is angrier than the question you asked warrants, they probably have something to hide. However, they may not only be hiding it from youâŚthey may also be hiding it from themselves.â
â Neil Strauss
âThe beauty of doing nothing is that you can do it perfectly. Only when you do something is it almost impossible to do it without mistakes. Therefore people who are contributing nothing to society, except their constant criticisms, can feel both intellectually and morally superiorâ
â Thomas Sowell
âThereâs nothing on the internet anymore. It has become like TV. They deplatformed all the interesting people.â
â Roosh V
âThe more neatly you fit into society, the less free you actually are.â
â Naval
âResearch shows itâs almost impossible to become a drug addict without having a prior history of childhood traumaâ
â Bessel van der Kolk
âWhy does it feel like the people most convinced they know the truth are the least likely to have actually found it?â
â Sharif Aly
âThe truth fears no investigation.â
â Unkown
âSomeone who has been employed for a while is giving you the evidence of submissionâ
â Nassim Taleb
âScream for attention and Iâll cover my ears. Whisper and I will listen.â
â Pedro Domingos
âOnline life must serve the offline lifeâ
â Jash Dholani
âSchools should include a class called Truth Is Hard, where u get bombarded with examples of confused eyewitnesses, incorrect public outrages, studies that failed to replicate, super convincing arguments that fall apart with one additional fact u didnât expect, etc.â
â Aella
âThe more secrets you have, the less happy youâre going to be.â
â Naval
âLearned helplessness is when you have failed, lost, or got defeated so many times that you stop even trying.â
â Marin Zhelezov
âWhen something has no prestige, the people who like it are more likely to have honest motives.â
â Paul Graham
âBad luck is easy to identify when you fail, but good luck is easy to ignore when you succeed.â
â Morgan Housel
âMany women think that if they put out too quickly, their partner won’t respect them. This is not the case. It’s not about waiting for a certain quantity of time before having sex, it’s about waiting for a certain quality of connection.â
â Neil Strauss
âI use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.â
â Adolf Hitler
âPrescribing antidepressants without addressing the root cause is like spraying deodorant over a pile of shit.â
â Marin Zhelezov
âMy whole adult life has been a search for quiet. Iâve had 3 different buildings soundproofed.â
â Paul Graham
âNo school could teach being a great investor. It would be the most popular school with an impossibly high tuition.â
â Michael Burry
âNetflix could have been anything: personalized shampoo, custom dog food, one-of-a-kind baseball bats. I pitched all these ideas to my co-founder Reed Hastings on our daily commutes to work before we finally hit on the idea of video rental by mail.â
â Marc Randolph
âThe education of today is humiliating. It produces an inferiority complex and artificially lowers the powers of man. Its very organization sets a limit to knowledge well below the natural level. It supplies men with crutches when they could run on swift feet.â
â Maria Montessori
âYouâre only as smart as the smartest person in your community.â
â Jacob Lund Fisker
âI have always hated employment and the associated dependence on someone elseâs arbitrary opinion, particularly when much of whatâs done inside large corporations violates my sense of ethics.â
â Nassim Taleb
âThe cruelest thing the elite do is lie about how they became successful.â
â Glenn Loury
âRich people like quiet because quiet is better for thinking, and thinking is how you get rich.â
â Paul Graham
âI was always ready to share, but before external success, nobody cared to listen.â
â Naval
âNothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolutionâ
â Theodosius Dobzhansky
âMost people (and companies) need a near-death experience before they can really change.â
â Tony Fadell
âLots of people were in the right place at the right time but failed because they were the wrong person.â
â Rob Henderson
âIf you donât have or want kids, I generally donât care what you have to say about society. Youâre not part of its continuation.â
â Stefan Molyneux
âThe selfish reason to be ethical is that it attracts the other ethical people in the network.â
â Naval
âPersonally, I enjoy hanging out with a mix of young, old, foreign, uneducated, and weird people.â
â Jeremy Howard
âWeâve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. Weâve made life better for adults but worse for children.â
â David Brooks
âI like to buy things second-hand. Old things are more interesting, often better made, and much cheaper. I got into this habit when I had no choice, but I kept it up because I prefer it.â
â Paul Graham
âI donât care if the person I hire has a Computer Science degree. In fact, itâs a red flag usually. They overengineer and are slow. I like to hire auto didacts: fast and lean.â
â Pieter Levels
âI still have launch PTSD from early Falcon days. My limbic system twists my guts into a knot as we get closer to launch.â
â Elon Musk
âA bottom is a great place to grow from.â
â Neil Strauss
âI loath DSM diagnoses, the conceptualization of âmental illnessâ and how easy it is for a mental health professional to frame a reality for a person who is struggling emotionally. Future generations will look back at this time period with utter horror.â
â Dr. Roger McFillin
âYou donât know the true price of something until you try to sell it.â
â Nick Maggiulli
âExcuses are a promise of repetition.â
â Stefan Molyneux
âEducation is cheap. Itâs university that is expensive.â
â Nzube Olisaebuka Udezue
âDonât maximize your intelligence; minimize your stupidity.â
â Paul Portesi
âSocializing for 3 hours a day is the 10,000 steps of mental health.â
â Anu Atluru
âI must find a way to become independent or die trying.â
â Cyrus Yari
âOne can spend oneâs whole life climbing the ladder, only to realize itâs been placed against the wrong wall.â
â Joseph Campbell
âI rebel, therefore, I exist.â
â Albert Camus
âMore than anything, I want to make lots of stuff. I want to make articles, books, websites, music, companies, systems, apps, and especially new ideas. This shapes most of my life decisions. Saying no to almost everything, so I can have lots of time for making.â
â Derek Sivers
âI hate the news. None of these stories have relevance to my life. Reading them may be enjoyable, but itâs an enjoyable waste of time. They will have no impact on my actions one way or another.â
â Aaron Swartz
âThe long-term success of a relationship depends far more on avoiding the negative than on seeking the positive.â
â Daniel Kahneman
âA habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers.â
â Bertrand Russell
âI donât know a single person who watches the Super Bowlâ
â Steve Jobs
âThe master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.â
â Stephen McCranie
âI yearn for a simple life well lived, that lets me be available for the people I care about.â
â Shreyas Deshpande
âDonât meet your heroes until they want to meet youâ
â Anu Atluru
âThe disgust a man gets when hearing a girl has 100 bodies is the same disgust a girl feels when she hears a man is an incelâ
â Jake Shields
âThose who donât build things will always complain about those who do.â
â Sean McClure
âI dive into things head first and ask questions later. This is how Iâve always learned.â
â Alex Forbes
âIf someone brags about their success or happiness, assume itâs half what they claim. If someone downplays their success or happiness, assume itâs double what they claim.â
â George Mack
âYouâre offended when you fear that it might be true.â
â Naval
âProfits are not something you take from others, but a small share you get to keep from the value you create for others.â
â Johan Norberg
âWhen making a decision, I will often stop and think: will doing this make my grandparents and my grandchildren proud of me?â
â Edmund Simms
âWe can trade baseball cards back and forth at ever growing prices. We’ll feel richer, but we aren’t.â
â Edmund Simms
âThere is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner) â likewise, there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur.â
â Nassim Taleb
âI’ve been self employed my entire life, never had to use an alarm clock for 8 years. Even laws are optional since I’ve been to 50 countries and can pick the laws I want. Basically I have no rules, so I had to make my own rules to keep my world in check.â
â Jeremy Noronha
“Things that have never happened before happen all the time.”
â Morgan Housel
âYou want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration.â
â Nassim Taleb
âFor me there are only two kinds of women, goddesses and doormats.â
â Pablo Picasso
âThe bushmen of Africa should release a test called the HQ or âhunting quotientâ and then administer it to academics with high IQs to see if they can catch a gazelle with a spear or avoid being eaten by a lion.â
â Molson Hart
âShallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.â
â Ralph Waldo Emerson.
âWhy does the US so often put Israelâs interests before its own?â
â Paul Graham
“There are two types of apologies. One by people relieving their conscience. The other is by those who are caught. Never trust those who apologize after being caught.”
â Nassim Taleb
âThe larger the group, the worse the conversation.â
â Naval
âOur money was made by controlling expenses. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation, or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if youâre too inefficient.â
â Sam Walton
âA sign of elitism is being well-rounded. Skilled in intellectual foreplay, raw athleticism, cultural literacy, grace under pressure, proper decorum, global cultural & financial literacy, ancient esoteric wisdom, steadfast integrity, discreet generosity, lifelong appetite for learning, curated networks, an appreciation for the arts, understated confidence & nonchalant elegance. Itâs not about what you see â itâs about what you donât see.â
â Shefali Manoj Patel
âI want to lose every debate. My favorite moments in life are when someone shows me a new perspective â a way of thinking I had never considered. Itâs illuminating.â
â Derek Sivers
âMastery is the best goal because the rich canât buy it, the impatient canât rush it, the privileged canât inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.â
â Derek Sivers
âHe who has a why can bear any how.â
â Friedrich Nietzsche
âIf you’re obsessed with what you’re making, you can make other people obsessed with it too.â
â Christopher Nolan
“How many billion-dollar companies were never founded because we spend the first two decades of kidsâ lives training them to slow down, to conform, and to achieve less.”
â Niels Hoven
âThe cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.â
â Henry David Thoreau, Walden
âWhen you start to walk on the way, the way appears.â
â Rumi
April, 2024