Find What You're Best At

• "Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for...Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now. Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others."
• "Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true."
• "When I talk about specific knowledge, I mean figure out what you were doing as a kid or teenager almost effortlessly. Something you didn't even consider a skill, but people around you noticed. Your mother or your best friend growing up would know."
• "Apply specific knowledge with leverage and eventually, you will get what you deserve."
• "You can only achieve mastery in one or two things. It's usually things you're obsessed about."
• "No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most."
• "Figure out what you're good at, and start helping other people with it. Give it away. Pay it forward. Karma works because people are consistent. On a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project."

Building Wisdom and Judgment

• "You cannot hide anything from yourself. Your own failures are written within your psyche, and they are obvious to you. If you have too many of these moral shortcomings, you will not respect yourself."
• "The more desire I have for something to work out a certain way, the less likely I am to see the truth."
• "It's actually really important to have empty space. If you don't have a day or two every week in your calendar where you're not always in meetings, and you're not always busy, then you're not going to be able to think."
• "It's only after you're bored you have the great ideas. It's never going to be when you're stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time."
• "Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are." -Buddhist saying
• "The direction you're heading in matters more than how fast you move, especially with leverage...Just pick the right direction to start walking in, and start walking."
• "I try not to have too much I've pre-decided. I think creating identities and labels locks you in and keeps you from seeing the truth...To be honest, speak without identity."
• "I used to identify as libertarian, but then I would find myself defending positions I hadn't really thought through because they're a part of the libertarian canon. If all your beliefs line up into neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious."
• "Decision-making is everything. In fact, someone who makes decisions right 80 percent of the time instead of 70 percent of the time will be valued and compensated in the market hundreds of times more."
• "The more you know, the less you diversify."
• "Simple heuristic: If you're evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term."

Building Happiness

• "Happiness is the state when nothing is missing."
• "The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be."
• "Every desire is a chosen unhappiness."
• "The mistake over and over and over is to say, 'Oh, I'll be happy when I get that thing,' whatever it is. That is the fundamental mistake we all make, 24/7, all day long. Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. I don't think most of us realize that's what it is. I think we go about desiring things all day long and then wonder why we're unhappy."
• "Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose."
• "Confucius says you have two lives, and the second one begins when you realize you only have one. When and how did your second life begin?"
• "You can get almost anything you want out of life, as long as it's one thing and you want it far more than anything else."
• "I don't think life is that hard. I think we make it hard. One of the things I'm trying to get rid of is the word 'should.' Whenever the word 'should' creeps up in your mind, it's guilt or social programming. Doing something because you 'should' basically means you don't actually want to do it. It's just making you miserable, so I'm trying to eliminate as many 'shoulds' from my life as possible."
• "My most surprising discovery in the last five years is that peace and happiness are skills."
• "There's the 'five chimps theory' where you can predict a chimp's behavior by the five chimps it hangs out with the most. I think that applies to humans as well...The people who are the most happy and optimistic choose the right five chimps."
• "If you can't see yourself working with someone for life, don't work with them for a day."
• "To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something."
• "An emotion is our evolved biology predicting the future impact of a current event. In modern settings, it's usually exaggerated or wrong."
• "If there's something you want to do later, do it now. There is no 'later.'"

Random Nuggets

• "If you have nothing in your life, but you have at least one person that loves you unconditionally, it'll do wonders for your self-esteem."
• "The best jobs are neither decreed nor degreed. They are creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets."
• "Basically, if someone is using a lot of fancy words and a lot of big concepts, they probably don't know what they're talking about. I think the smartest people can explain things to a child. If you can't explain it to a child, then you don't know it."
• "You absolutely need habits to function. You cannot solve every problem in life as if it is the first time it's thrown at you."
• "When everyone is sick, we no longer consider it a disease."
• "Impatience with actions, patience with results."