Select notes & quotes:

• "Life is mostly boring. Behind the red façade of war and politics, misfortune and poverty, adultery and divorce, murder and suicide, were millions of orderly homes, devoted marriages, men and women kindly and affectionate, troubled and happy with children."

Select notes & quotes:

• "For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony."
• "The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true."
• "On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it."
• "This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the 'bullshit artist.' "
• "The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it."
• "It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it."
• "He [The bullshitter] does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

Select quotes & notes:

• There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
• "What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task."
• "What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence."

Select notes & quotes:

• "Man's search for individuality conflicts with his desperate need not to be alone."
• "Just as a new house immediately begins to break down (entropy), so do newly won freedoms."
• "The United States has shown itself resistant against all totalitarian attempts to gain influence."
• "The possibility of being left alone is necessarily the most serious threat to the child’s whole existence."
• "[Prior to the enlightenment] ...although a person was not free in the modern sense, neither was he alone and isolated. In having a distinct, unchangeable, and unquestionable place in the social world from the moment of birth, man was rooted in a structuralized whole, and thus life had a meaning which left no place, and no need, for doubt."
• "...the structure of modern society affects man in two ways simultaneously: he becomes more independent, self-reliant, and critical, and he becomes more isolated, alone, and afraid."
• "Economic activity and the wish for gain for its own sake appeared as irrational to the medieval thinker as their absence appears to modern thought."
• "Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity."
• "The meaning of his life and the identity of his self are determined by the greater whole into which the self has submerged."
• "The feature common to all authoritarian thinking is the conviction that life is determined by forces outside of man’s own self, his interest, his wishes."
• "I can escape the feeling of my own powerlessness in comparison with the world outside of myself by destroying it."
• "The right to express our thoughts, however, means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own."
• "To be sure, thinking without a knowledge of facts remains empty and fictitious; but “information” alone can be just as much of an obstacle to thinking as the lack of it."
• "In school they want to have good marks, as adults they want to be more and more successful, to make more money, to have more prestige, to buy a better car, to go places, and so on. Yet when they do stop to think in the midst of all this frantic activity, this question may come to their minds: “If I do get this new job, if I get this better car, if I can take this trip—what then? What is the use of it all? Is it really I who wants all this? Am I not running after some goal which is supposed to make me happy and which eludes me as soon as I have reached it?”
• "Yet all this bespeaks a dim realization of the truth—the truth that modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want."
• "...one can be sure of oneself only if one lives up to the expectations of others."
• "Modern man is starved for life. But since, being an automaton, he cannot experience life in the sense of spontaneous activity he takes as surrogate any kind of excitement and thrill: the thrill of drinking, of sports, of vicariously living the excitements of fictitious persons on the screen."
• "The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal."
• "The basic dichotomy that is inherent in freedom—the birth of individuality and the pain of aloneness—is dissolved on a higher plane by man’s spontaneous action."
• "The inability to act spontaneously, to express what one genuinely feels and thinks, and the resulting necessity to present a pseudo self to others and oneself, are the root of the feeling of inferiority and weakness."
• "Men are born equal but they are also born different."
• "The cultural and political crisis of our day is not due to the fact that there is too much individualism but that what we believe to be individualism has become an empty shell."
• "We believe that man is primarily a social being, and not, as Freud assumes, primarily self-sufficient and only secondarily in need of others in order to satisfy his instinctual needs."
• "We cannot afford to lose any of the fundamental achievements of modern democracy—either the fundamental one of representative government, that is, government elected by the people and responsible to the people, or any of the rights which the Bill of Rights guarantees to every citizen. Nor can we compromise the newer democratic principle that no one shall be allowed to starve, that society is responsible for all its members, that no one shall be frightened into submission and lose his human pride through fear of unemployment and starvation. These basic achievements must not only be preserved; they must be fortified and expanded."

Select notes & quotes:

• "We needn’t reach out and touch an ember to know that it will hurt to do so...but we do need to experience fire to avoid this."
• "Despite what we read in the popular press, the only known symptom of “empty nest syndrome ”is increased smiling. Interestingly, this pattern of satisfaction over the life cycle describes women (who are usually the primary caretakers of children) better than men. Careful studies of how women feel as they go about their daily activities show that they are less happy when taking care of their children than when eating, exercising, shopping, napping, or watching television."
• "Just as our eyes sometimes lead us to see things as they are not, our imaginations sometimes lead us to foresee things as they will not be."
• "Whatever amount of pain a one-day wait entails, that pain is surely the same whenever it is experienced; and yet, people imagine a near-future pain as so severe that they will gladly pay a dollar to avoid it, but a far-future pain as so mild that they will gladly accept a dollar to endure it."
• "Indeed, studies show that the parts of the brain that are primarily responsible for generating feelings of pleasurable excitement become active when people imagine receiving a reward such as money in the near future but not when they imagine receiving the same reward in the far future."
• "Because it is easier to compare a vacation package’s price with its former price than with the price of other things one might buy, we end up preferring bad deals that have become decent deals to great deals that were once amazing deals."
• "As much as we all despise racism and sexism, these isms have only recently been considered moral turpitudes, and thus condemning Thomas Jefferson for keeping slaves or Sigmund Freud for patronizing women is a bit like arresting someone today for having driven without a seat belt in 1923."
• As one group of researchers noted, “Resilience is often the most commonly observed outcome trajectory following exposure to a potentially traumatic event. Indeed, studies of those who survive major traumas suggest that the vast majority do quite well, and that a significant portion claim that their lives were enhanced by the experience."
• "Studies show that about nine out of ten people expect to feel more regret when they foolishly switch stocks than when they foolishly fail to switch stocks, because most people think they will regret foolish actions more than foolish inactions. But studies also show that nine out of ten people are wrong. Indeed, in the long run, people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did, which is why the most popular regrets include not going to college, not grasping profitable business opportunities, and not spending enough time with family and friends."
• "Because we do not realize that our psychological immune systems can rationalize an excess of courage more easily than an excess of cowardice, we hedge our bets when we should blunder forward."
• "Intense suffering triggers the very processes that eradicate it, while mild suffering does not, and this counterintuitive fact can make it difficult for us to predict our emotional futures."
• "We are more likely to generate a positive and credible view of an action than an inaction, of a painful experience than of an annoying experience, of an unpleasant situation that we cannot escape than of one we can. And yet, we rarely choose action over inaction, pain over annoyance, and commitment over freedom."
• "The processes by which we generate positive views are many: We pay more attention to favorable information, we surround ourselves with those who provide it, and we accept it uncritically."
• "Because we tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times instead of the most likely of times, the wealth of experience that young people admire does not always pay clear dividends."
• "[Adam] Smith believed that people want just one thing — happiness — hence economies can blossom and grow only if people are deluded into believing that the production of wealth will make them happy. If and only if people hold this false belief will they do enough producing, procuring, and consuming to sustain their economies."
• "Despite what we read in the popular press, the only known symptom of 'empty nest syndrome' is increased smiling."
• "...thus the belief that children are a source of happiness becomes a part of our cultural wisdom simply because the opposite belief unravels the fabric of any society that holds it..."
• "My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it."
• "Imagination’s third shortcoming is its failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen — in particular, that bad things will look a whole lot better."
• "Because if you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like most people. Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn’t see herself as average."
• "This tendency to think of ourselves as better than others is not necessarily a manifestation of our unfettered narcissism but may instead be an instance of a more general tendency to think of ourselves as different from others — often for better but sometimes for worse."
• "*Because we value our uniqueness, it isn’t surprising that we tend to overestimate it."
• "It doesn’t always make sense to heed what people tell us when they communicate their beliefs about happiness, but it does make sense to observe how happy they are in different circumstances."
• "Wealth may be measured by counting dollars, but utility must be measured by counting how much goodness those dollars buy. Wealth doesn’t matter; utility does. We don’t care about money or promotions or beach vacations per se; we care about the goodness or pleasure that these forms of wealth may (or may not) induce."

Select quotes & notes:

• "Your work is too important to be left to how you feel today."
• "The practice is not the means to the output, the practice is the output, because the practice is all we can control."
• "Flow is a symptom of the work we’re doing, not the cause of it."
• “ 'Do what you love' is for amateurs."
• “Love what you do” is the mantra for professionals.

Select notes & quotes:

• "Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion."
• "Our habitual identification with thought—that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as appearances in consciousness—is a primary source of human suffering."
• "Being able to stand perfectly free of the feeling of self is the start of one’s spiritual journey, not its end."
• "If you are anxious before giving a speech, become willing to feel the anxiety fully, so that it becomes a meaningless pattern of energy in your mind and body."
• "The aims of spirituality are not exactly those of science, but neither are they unscientific."
• "Most people still believe that religion provides something essential that cannot be had any other way."
• "The conventional self is a transitory appearance among transitory appearances, and it vanishes when looked for."

Select notes & quotes:

• "Risk is what you don’t see."
• "So, in personal finance, the right amount of savings is when it feels like it’s a little too much."
• "Your happiness depends on your expectations more than anything else. So in a world that tends to get better for most people most of the time, an important life skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving. It’s also one of the hardest."
• "There is no such thing as objective wealth—everything is relative, and mostly relative to those around you."
• "Today’s economy is good at generating three things: wealth, the ability to show off wealth, and great envy for other people’s wealth."
• From ninety-eight-year-old Charlie Munger: "The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you’re going to be miserable your whole life."
• From historian Stephan Zweig: “History reveals no instances of a conqueror being surfeited by conquests.”
• "People don’t want accuracy. They want certainty."
• Daniel Kahneman once said, “Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.”
• "There are about eight billion people on this planet. So if an event has a one-in-a-million chance of occurring every day, it should happen to eight thousand people a day, or 2.9 million times a year, and maybe a quarter of a billion times during your lifetime. Even a one-in-a-billion event will become the fate of hundreds of thousands of people during your lifetime. And given the news media’s insatiable appetite for shocking headlines, the odds are nearly 100 percent that you will hear about these events when they happen."
• "The decline of local news has all kinds of implications. One that doesn’t get much attention is that the wider the news becomes the more likely it is to be pessimistic."
• "The world breaks about once every ten years, on average—always has, always will."
• "Every investment price, every market valuation, is just a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow."
• "A lack of recessions actually plants the seeds of the next recession, which is why we can never get rid of them."
• "Modern life in general is about as safe as it’s ever been. And effectively all the improvement over the last century has come from a decline in infectious disease."
• "So if you put up a sign that says 'There might be an opportunity in this box,' somebody will always open the box. Which is to say: we have to identify where the top is. That’s why markets don’t stay within the limits of sanity, and why they always overdose on pessimism and optimism. They have to."
• "Growth by acquisition often occurs when management wants faster growth than customers think the business deserves.*
• Entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson said, “Most successful people are just a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.”
• Yuval Noah Harari writes: “To enjoy peace, we need almost everyone to make good choices. By contrast, a poor choice by just one side can lead to war.”
• "Good news is the deaths that didn’t take place, the diseases you didn’t get, the wars that never happened, the tragedies avoided, and the injustices prevented. But bad news is visible. More than visible, it’s in your face. It’s the terrorist attack, the war, the car accident, the pandemic, the stock market crash, and the political battle you can’t look away from."
• "That’s the real lesson from evolution: If you have a big number in the exponent slot, you do not need extraordinary change to deliver extraordinary results. It’s not intuitive, but it’s so powerful."
• "If you understand the math behind compounding you realize the most important question is not 'How can I earn the highest returns?' It’s 'What are the best returns I can sustain for the longest period of time?' "
• "Most things worth pursuing charge their fee in the form of stress, uncertainty, dealing with quirky people, bureaucracy, other peoples’ conflicting incentives, hassle, nonsense, long hours, and constant doubt. That’s the overhead cost of getting ahead."
• "...most dominant creatures tend to be huge, but the most enduring tend to be smaller..."
• "It’s so easy to underestimate how two small things can compound into an enormous thing. Take the way Mother Nature works: A little cool air from the north is no big deal. A little warm breeze from the south is pleasant. But when they mix together over Missouri you get a tornado. That’s called emergent effects, and they can be wildly powerful."
• "This may be most common in investing, law, and medicine, when “do nothing” is the best answer, but 'do something' is the career incentive. Sometimes it’s amoral, but it can be an innocent form of 'cover your butt.' Mostly, though, I think an advisor just feels useless if they tell a client 'we don’t need to do anything here.' "
• "The point, then, isn’t that you should read less news and more books. It’s that if you read good books you’ll have an easier time understanding what you should or shouldn’t pay attention to in the news."
• "In finance, spending less than you make, saving the difference, and being patient is perhaps 90 percent of what you need to know to do well."
• "Complexity gives a comforting impression of control, while simplicity is hard to distinguish from cluelessness."
• "Things you don’t understand create a mystique around people who do."
• "My theory is that length [of writing] indicates the author has spent more time thinking about a topic than you have, which can be the only data point signaling they might have insights you don’t. It doesn’t mean their thinking is right."
• "It’s uncomfortable to think that what you haven’t experienced might change what you believe, because it’s admitting your own ignorance. It’s much easier to assume that those who disagree with you aren’t thinking as hard as you are."
• "When you focus on what never changes, you stop trying to predict uncertain events and spend more time understanding timeless behavior."
• "I try not to give advice to people I don’t know, because everyone’s different and universal guidance is rare."

Select notes & quotes:

• "What’s important is that the routine exists. Cobble together your own routine, stick to it most days, break from it once in a while for fun, and modify it as necessary."
• "My writing teacher used to joke that the first rule of writing is to 'apply ass to chair.' "
• "You can’t wait around for someone to call you an artist before you make art."
• "We’re now trained to heap praise on our loved ones by using market terminology. The minute anybody shows any talent for anything, we suggest they turn it into a profession. This is our best compliment: telling somebody they’re so good at what they love to do they could make money at it."
• "A free creative life is not about living within your means, it’s about living below your means."
• "You do not need to have an extraordinary life to make extraordinary work. Everything you need to make extraordinary art can be found in your everyday life."
• "Because drawing is really an exercise in seeing, you can suck at drawing and still get a ton out of it."
• "Your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess, which is why everyone wants to steal it from you. First you must protect it, and then you must point it in the right direction."
• "None of us know how many days we’ll have, so it’d be a shame to waste the ones we get."
• “None of us know what will happen. Don’t spend time worrying about it. Make the most beautiful thing you can. Try to do that every day. That’s it.” —Laurie Anderson
• “The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning, we cannot begin to see. Unless we see, we cannot think.” —Thomas Merton

Select notes & quotes:

• "Intellectual advancement has traditionally progressed through discord and dissent, as a diversity of views ensures that ideas survive because they are correct, not because they are popular."
• "...our identity as a person must be kept separable from the ideas we happen to endorse at a given time."
• "It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error..."
• "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that."
• "...not only the grounds of the opinion are forgotten in the absence of discussion, but too often the meaning of the opinion itself."
• "...every opinion which embodies somewhat of the portion of truth which the common opinion omits, ought to be considered precious, with whatever amount of error and confusion that truth may be blended."

Select quotes & notes:

• "You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work."
• "if you not only eliminate shallow work, but also replace this recovered time with more of the deep alternative, not only will the business continue to function; it can become more successful."
• "You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it."
• "People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy."
• "Don’t waste mental energy figuring out what you need in the moment."
• "Put more thought into your leisure time."
• "The notion that all messages, regardless of purpose or sender, arrive in the same undifferentiated inbox, and that there’s an expectation that every message deserves a (timely) response, is absurdly unproductive."
• “Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.” 

Select notes & quotes:

• "Our public discourse [has] become dangerous nonsense."
• "As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it."
• "The 'news of the day' is a figment of our technological imagination. It is, quite precisely, a media event."
• "The telegraph may have made the country into 'one neighborhood,' but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other."
• "This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the 'information-action ratio.' "
• "For the photograph gave a concrete reality to the strange-sounding datelines, and attached faces to the unknown names. Thus it provided the illusion, at least, that 'the news”'had a connection to something within one’s sensory experience. It created an apparent context for the “news of the day.” And the 'news of the day' created a context for the photograph."
• "As Susan Sontag has observed, a photograph implies 'that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it.' But, as she further observes, all understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears."
• "...television is nothing less than a philosophy of rhetoric."
• "Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations."
• "And so, I raise no objection to television’s junk. The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it.
• "I will say once again that I am no relativist in this matter, and that I believe the epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist."
• "Our culture’s adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all but complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge, and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane."
• "But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience."
• "A news show, to put it plainly, is a format for entertainment, not for education, reflection or catharsis..."
• "Thinking does not play well on television."
• "Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images."
• "We have become so accustomed to its discontinuities that we are no longer struck dumb, as any sane person would be, by a newscaster who having just reported that a nuclear war is inevitable goes on to say that he will be right back after this word from Burger King; who says, in other words, 'Now . . . this.' "
• "All information is disinformation in a screen-driven world because the image belies complexity."
• "Walter Lippmann, for example, wrote in 1920: 'There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.' "
• "Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions."
• "In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial."
• "The commercial asks us to believe that all problems are solvable, that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable fast through the interventions of technology, techniques and chemistry."
• "For example, a person who has seen one million television commercials might well believe that all political problems have fast solutions through simple measures—or ought to. Or that complex language is not to be trusted, and that all problems lend themselves to theatrical expression."
• "This is why I think it accurate to call television a curriculum. As I understand the word, a curriculum is a specially constructed information system whose purpose is to influence, teach, train or cultivate the mind and character of youth. Television, of course, does exactly that, and does it relentlessly. In so doing, it competes successfully with the school curriculum. By which I mean, it damn near obliterates it."
• "Television does not ban books, it simply displaces them."

Pairs well with Paul Graham quote, "Build something users love and spend less than you make."