Select notes and quotes:

• "Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement."
• "Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees."
• "Change can take years—before it happens all at once.*
• "Winners and losers have the same goals."
• "Habits are like the atoms of our lives. Each one is a fundamental unit that contributes to your overall improvement."
• "The process of building habits is actually the process of becoming yourself."
• "Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it."
• " 'Disciplined' people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control."
• "For years, scientists assumed dopamine was all about pleasure, but now we know it plays a central role in many neurological processes, including motivation, learning and memory, punishment and aversion, and voluntary movement."
• "Gambling addicts have a dopamine spike right before they place a bet, not after they win."
• "Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive. All day long, you are making your best guess of how to act given what you’ve just seen and what has worked for you in the past. You are endlessly predicting what will happen in the next moment."
• "Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be in the future."
• "Saving money is often associated with sacrifice. However, you can associate it with freedom rather than limitation if you realize one simple truth: living below your current means increases your future means. The money you save this month increases your purchasing power next month."
• "It is human nature to follow the Law of Least Effort, which states that when deciding between two similar options, people will naturally gravitate toward the option that requires the least amount of work."
• "We are motivated to do what is easy."
• "The difference between a good day and a bad day is often a few productive and healthy choices made at decisive moments."
• "The point is to master the habit of showing up. The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved. If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, then you have little hope of mastering the finer details."
• "Behavioral economists refer to this tendency as time inconsistency. That is, the way your brain evaluates rewards is inconsistent across time.* You value the present more than the future. Usually, this tendency serves us well. A reward that is certain right now is typically worth more than one that is merely possible in the future. But occasionally, our bias toward instant gratification causes problems."
• "The costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future."
• "Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit."
• "Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit."
• "Lost days hurt you more than successful days help you. If you start with $100, then a 50 percent gain will take you to $150. But you only need a 33 percent loss to take you back to $100. In other words, avoiding a 33 percent loss is just as valuable as achieving a 50 percent gain."
• "It’s not always about what happens during the workout. It’s about being the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts."
• "People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them."
• "Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck."
• "Pick the right habit and progress is easy. Pick the wrong habit and life is a struggle."
• "The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us."
• "In the words of investor Paul Graham, 'keep your identity small.' The more you let a single belief define you, the less capable you are of adapting when life challenges you."
• "Can one tiny change transform your life? It’s unlikely you would say so. But what if you made another? And another? And another? At some point, you will have to admit that your life was transformed by one small change."
• "It’s remarkable the friendships you can build if you don’t stop caring. Small habits don’t add up. They compound."
• "*That’s the power of atomic habits. Tiny changes. Remarkable results."
• "As Caed Budris says, 'Happiness is the space between one desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming.' "
• "This is the wisdom behind Seneca’s famous quote, 'Being poor is not having too little, it is wanting more.' "

Select notes and quotes:

• "One of my very few regrets is that I spent far too much time worrying about how things might work out. It’s a huge waste, but it is a bit hardwired into me."
• "It is simply not possible to time the market, regardless of all the heavily credentialed gurus on CNBC and the like who claim they can."
• "You can’t pick winning stocks. Don’t feel bad. I can’t either."
• "The market always recovers. Always. And, if someday it really doesn’t, no investment will be safe and none of this financial stuff will matter anyway."
• "What is the worst possible performance a bad stock can deliver? It can lose 100% of its value and have its stock price drop to zero."
• "What is the best performance a stock can deliver? 100% return? Certainly that’s possible. But so is 200%, 300%, 1,000%, 10,000% or more. There is no upside limit. The net result is a powerful upward bias."
• "You’ve heard the expression, 'Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket.' You’ve likely also heard the variation, 'Keep all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket very closely.' Forget it. Here’s what your kindly old Uncle Jim says: Put all your eggs in one basket and forget about it.' "
• "[Jack] Bogle points to research Vanguard has done comparing stock and bond portfolios that were annually rebalanced and those not rebalanced at all. The results show the rebalanced portfolios outperformed but by a margin so slight it can be attributed to noise as much as the strategy. His conclusion: 'Rebalancing is a personal choice, not a choice that statistics can validate. There’s certainly nothing the matter with doing it (although I don’t do it myself), but also no reason to slavishly worry about small changes in the equity ratio.' "
• "We still rebalance annually, but were I to make a change it would be to not bother with it at all."
• "As an investor in Vanguard funds, your interest and that of Vanguard are precisely the same. The reason is simple. ==The Vanguard funds—and by extension the investors in those funds—are the owners of Vanguard."
• "Your interests and those of Vanguard are precisely the same."
• "No one at Vanguard has access to your money and therefore no one at Vanguard can make off with it."
• "Advisors are only as good as the investments they recommend. Since those are mostly actively managed funds—as opposed to the index funds this book suggests—how often do those outperform? As we saw in Chapter 8, very rarely. You’ll recall the research shows ~20% outperform in any given year and looking at a 30-year period that drops to less than 1%. Statistically speaking that’s a rounding error; just so much noise."
• "The great irony of successful investing is that simple is cheaper and more profitable. Complicated investments only benefit the people and companies that sell them."
• "The idea that individuals can readily outperform the market is, to steal a phrase from my dad, horse hockey."
• "Houses are not investments, they are expensive indulgences."
• On retirement: "If you absolutely, positively want a sure thing and your yearly inflation raises, keep your withdrawal rate under 4%. And hold 75% stocks/25% bonds."

Select notes and quotes:

• "Just being reminded of wealth can propel people to distance themselves from others, undermining happiness."
• "The benefits of giving emerge among children before the age of two."
• "Because experiences often elude easy comparisons, experiential purchases seem to inoculate us against the pernicious negative emotion of regret."
• "We are happy with things, until we find out there are better things available."
• "At the same time that money increases our happiness by giving us access to all kinds of wonderful things, knowing we have access to wonderful things undermines our happiness by reducing our tendency to appreciate life’s small joys."
• "If abundance is the enemy of appreciation, scarcity may be our best ally."
• "We may have more success at maximizing our happiness when treats are only available for a limited time."
• "The more countries people have visited, the more they self-identify as 'world travelers.' This in turn undermines their motivation to savor trips to enjoyable-but-unextraordinary destinations."
• "We too often sacrifice our free time just to save a little money."
• "While it’s mildly disappointing that we’re still without flying cars and sassy robot maids, it is more surprising that rising incomes have not led Americans to use their time in happier ways over the past four decades."
• "Around the world, wealthier individuals are more likely to say they felt stressed on the previous day. Greater material affluence may fail to yield more happiness in part because of the diminished time affluence it often brings."
• "Buying time sounds easy. But it isn’t. Part of the problem stems from an important difference between time and money. If you’re tight on money this week, you’re likely to assume that you’ll be similarly constrained a couple of weeks or months from now. Time constraints, however, feel relatively temporary. Sure, this Tuesday you’re too busy to vacuum the house because you’ve got a dentist appointment, and fifty new emails, and a deadline coming up at work, and a birthday present to buy, and the big game to watch on TV. By contrast, the Tuesdays of the future look remarkably open, with only the occasional activity marked on the calendar. Because the future looks free, we’re less inclined to use our money to buy time. But the funny thing about Tuesdays (and the other days of the week) is that they tend to fill up as they get closer."
• "Faced with a decision between multiple products that differ in their features and price tags, ask yourself whether the differences in features will alter how you spend your time. If the answer is no, go cheap."
• "By focusing less on money and more on time, it’s easier to use both resources in happier ways."
• "Anything we can do to separate payment from consumption can enhance the pleasure of the purchase."
• "When it comes time for consumption, having paid long ago brings a final payoff: freedom from the tyranny of sunk costs."
• "It’s difficult to overcome the power of now, but it’s possible to harness this force. As the pleasures and pains of the present appear particularly intense in the mind’s eye, we are most reluctant to make purchases when the pain of paying is immediate and the pleasure of consuming distant. Businesses recognize this psychological phenomenon, which has driven the development of financial and technological innovations that enable people to consume sooner and pay later. By putting this fundamental principle into reverse, you can buy more happiness while spending less money."
• "We simply don’t care as much about our future selves as we do about our present selves."
• "People who report donating money to charity feel wealthier than those who do not, even controlling for how much money they make. And giving as little as $1 away can cause you to feel wealthier."
• "One of the largest material purchases people ever make is their home, yet home purchases usually fail to make people any happier. By encouraging people to buy houses, the United States government implicitly encourages people to buy stuff."

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:

• "Much of what I say is still controversial. Yet there is always hope. The U.S. biologist and geologist Louis Agassiz once said about new scientific insights: 'First people say it conflicts with the Bible. Next, they say it has been discovered before. Lastly, they say they have always believed it.' "
• "Harry Markowitz received a Noble Prize in Economics for his pathbreaking work on optimal asset allocation, [yet] when he made his own retirement investments...he used a simple heuristic, the 1/N rule: Allocate your money equally to each of N funds. Ordinary folks rely on the same rule intuitively—invest equally."
• "As Warren Buffett, the billionaire financier, put it, the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune-tellers look good."
• "Procter and Gamble reduced the number of versions of Head and Shoulders shampoo from twenty-six to fifteen, and sales increased by 10 percent."
• "Less is more contradicts two core beliefs held in our culture: More information is always better. More choice is always better."
• "...the association between intuition and women has been, for much of the time, one between what were viewed as a lesser virtue and a lesser sex.*
• "Yet women’s intuitive judgments were not better than men’s; [in a study] they identified the real smile correctly in 71 percent of cases, whereas men did so in 72 percent."
• "It is a common credo that in predicting the future, one should use as much information as possible and feed it into the most sophisticated computer. A complex problem demands a complex solution, so we are told. In fact, in unpredictable environments, the opposite is true."
• "Computers would seem to be the ideal tool for finding the best solution to a problem. Yet paradoxically, the advent of high-speed computers has opened our eyes to the fact that the best strategy often cannot be found."
• "...our minds are not built (for whatever reason) to work by the rules of probability..."
• "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." —Max Planck
• "It has been said that researchers are like sleepwalkers whose creative intuition guides them to intellectual destinations they could never clearly see beforehand. Instead, I had been like a sleepwalker who had failed to understand the creative hunches of the intuitive mind."
• "intuitions based on one good reason not only are efficient but can also be highly accurate."
• "Recall that in an uncertain world, a complex strategy can fail exactly because it explains too much in hindsight."
• "Complex analysis, by contrast, pays when one has to explain the past, when the future is highly predictable, or when there are large amounts of information."
• "The good old-fashioned gut feeling “If you see a white coat, trust it” has done much good. But it cannot work as well when physicians fear lawsuits, overmedication and overdiagnosis have become a lucrative business, and aggressive direct-to-consumer advertising has become legal."
• "So what do you do if your mother is sick and you want to know what your doctor really thinks? Here is a helpful rule: Don’t ask your doctors what they recommend. Ask them what they would do if it were their mother."
• "My first principle of moral intuitions states that people are often unaware of the reasons for their moral actions. In these cases, deliberate reasoning is the justification for, rather than the cause of, moral decisions."
• "As an American rifleman recalls about comradeship during World War II: 'The reason you storm the beaches is not patriotism or bravery. It’s that sense of not wanting to fail your buddies. There’s sort of a special sense of kinship.' "
• "The difference between intuition and moral deliberation is that the reasons underlying moral intuitions are typically unconscious. Thus, the relevant distinction is not between feelings and reasons, but between feelings based on unconscious reasons and deliberate reasoning."

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 and quotes:

• "Financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know."
• "Physics isn’t controversial. It’s guided by laws. Finance is different. It’s guided by people’s behaviors. And how I behave might make sense to me but look crazy to you."
• "Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works."
• "The challenge for us is that no amount of studying or open-mindedness can genuinely recreate the power of fear and uncertainty."
• "Studying history makes you feel like you understand something. But until you’ve lived through it and personally felt its consequences, you may not understand it enough to change your behavior."
• "NYU professor Scott Galloway has a related idea that is so important to remember when judging success—both your own and others: 'Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.' "
• "Warren Buffett is a phenomenal investor. But you miss a key point if you attach all of his success to investing acumen. The real key to his success is that he’s been a phenomenal investor for three-quarters of a century. Had he started investing in his 30s and retired in his 60s, few people would have ever heard of him."
• "Roughly 99.9% of all companies that were created went out of business."
• "We underestimate how normal it is for a lot of things to fail."
• "There is a paradox here: people tend to want wealth to signal to others that they should be liked and admired. But in reality those other people often bypass admiring you, not because they don’t think wealth is admirable, but because they use your wealth as a benchmark for their own desire to be liked and admired."
• "Savings can be created by spending less. You can spend less if you desire less. And you will desire less if you care less about what others think of you. As I argue often in this book, money relies more on psychology than finance."
• "Every bit of savings is like taking a point in the future that would have been owned by someone else and giving it back to yourself. That flexibility and control over your time is an unseen return on wealth."
• "The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising. Not that we should use past surprises as a guide to future boundaries; that we should use past surprises as an admission that we have no idea what might happen next."
• "It sounds trivial, but thinking of market volatility as a fee rather than a fine is an important part of developing the kind of mindset that lets you stick around long enough for investing gains to work in your favor."
• "Daniel Kahneman once told me about the stories people tell themselves to make sense of the past. He said: 'Hindsight, the ability to explain the past, gives us the illusion that the world is understandable.' It gives us the illusion that the world makes sense, even when it doesn’t make sense."
• "Psychologist Philip Tetlock once wrote: 'We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need.' "
• "I love Voltaire’s observation that 'History never repeats itself; man always does.' It applies so well to how we behave with money."

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 and quotes:

• "What if society stopped telling us to buy more stuff and instead allowed us to ==create more space to breathe and think?"
• "There are three deeply entrenched assumptions we must conquer to live the way of the Essentialist: 'I have to,' 'It’s all important,' and 'I can do both.' To embrace the essence of Essentialism requires we replace these false assumptions with three core truths: 'I choose to,' 'Only a few things really matter,' and 'I can do anything but not everything.' "
• "Sure the THINGS we choose may be limited - they always are - but we always retain our ability to choose how we perceive our options."
• "The reality is, saying yes to any opportunity by definition requires saying no to several others."
• "When I say focus, I don’t mean simply picking a question or possibility and thinking about it obsessively. I mean creating the space to explore one hundred questions and possibilities. An Essentialist focuses the way our eyes focus; ==not by fixating on something but by constantly adjusting and adapting to the field of vision."
• "I am simply saying everyone is selling something—an idea, a viewpoint, an opinion—in exchange for your time. Simply being aware of what is being sold allows us to be more deliberate in deciding whether we want to buy it."
• "Curiously, people will admit to having a tendency to underestimate while simultaneously believing their current estimates are accurate."
• "What is the obstacle that, if removed, would make the majority of other obstacles disappear?"
• "The way of the Nonessentialist is to go big on everything: to try to do it all, have it all, fit it all in. The Nonessentialist operates under the false logic that the more he strives, the more he will achieve, but the reality is, the more we reach for the stars, the harder it is to get ourselves off the ground."
• "Instead of spending our limited supply of discipline on making the same decisions again and again, embedding our decisions into our routine allows us to channel that discipline toward some other essential activity."
• "When faced with so many tasks and obligations that you can’t figure out which to tackle first, stop. Take a deep breath. Get present in the moment and ask yourself what is most important this very second—not what’s most important tomorrow or even an hour from now. If you’re not sure, make a list of everything vying for your attention and cross off anything that is not important right now."

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 and quotes:

• "People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable."
• "Let’s face it, checking your 'likes' is the new smoking."
• “We’re social beings who can’t ever completely ignore what other people think of us.” 
• "The best digital life is formed by carefully curating their tools to deliver massive and unambiguous benefits."
• "The cumulative cost of the noncrucial things we clutter our lives with can far outweigh the small benefits each individual piece of clutter promises."
• "Follow Lincoln’s example and give your brain the regular doses of quiet it requires to support a monumental life."
• "Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be."
• "Regular doses of solitude, mixed in with our default mode of sociality, are necessary to flourish as a human being."
• "90 percent of your daily life, the presence of a cell phone either doesn’t matter or makes things only slightly more convenient. They’re useful, but it’s hyperbolic to believe its ubiquitous presence is vital."
• "The default network, in other words, seems to be connected to social cognition."
• "When given downtime, in other words, our brain defaults to thinking about our social life."
• "[Lieberman] believes 'believes we are interested in the social world because we are built to turn on the default network during our free time.' " We are comparison machines. Social media leverages this in a way that is not conducive to living a rich life.
• "Instead of seeing these easy clicks as a fun way to nudge a friend, start treating them as poison to your attempts to cultivate a meaningful social life. Put simply, you should stop using them. Don’t click 'Like.' Ever."
• "This point is crucial because many people fear that their relationships will suffer if they downgrade this form of lightweight connection. I want to reassure you that it will instead strengthen the relationships you care most about."
• As an academic who studies and teaches social media explained to me: 'I don’t think we’re meant to keep in touch with so many people.' "
• "A life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates."
• "The big companies want 'use' to be a simple binary condition—either you engage with their foundational technology, or you’re a weirdo."
• "You don’t have to quit these services; you just have to quit accessing them on the go."
• "The vast majority of regular social media users can receive the vast majority of the value these services provide their life in as little as twenty to forty minutes of use per week."
• "Approach social media as if you’re the director of emerging media for your own life."
• "Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value—not as sources of value themselves."

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."

Select notes & quotes:

• "Confidence is critical for a great competitor, but overconfidence is brittle."
• One of the most critical strengths of a superior competitor in any discipline—whether we are speaking about sports, business negotiations, or even presidential debates—is the ability to dictate the tone of the battle."
• "When we have worked hard and succeed at something, we should be allowed to smell the roses. The key, in my opinion, is to recognize that the beauty of those roses lies in their transience."
• "There were a few powerful moments that reinforced my young notion that glory had little to do with happiness or long-term success. I’ll never forget walking out of the playing hall of the 1990 Elementary School National Championships after winning the title game. There were over 1,500 competitors at the event, all the strongest young players from around the country. I had just won the whole thing...and everything felt normal. I stood in the convention hall looking around. There was no euphoria, no opening of the heavens. The world was the same as it had been a few days before. I was Josh. I had a great mom and dad and a cute little sister Katya who was fun to play with. I loved chess and sports and girls and fishing. When I would go back to school on Monday, my friends would say 'Awright!' like they did after hitting a jump shot, and then it would be in the past and we would go play football."
• "The first mistake rarely proves disastrous, but the downward spiral of the second, third, and fourth error creates a devastating chain reaction."
• "Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible, unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential."
• "In my opinion, intuition is our most valuable compass in this world."
• "The secret is that everything is always on the line. The more present we are at practice, the more present we will be in competition, in the boardroom, at the exam, the operating table, the big stage."
• "Jim Harbaugh told me about the first time he noticed this pattern in himself. He’s a passionate guy, and liked to root on his defense when they were on the field. But after his first sessions at LGE he noticed a clear improvement in his play if he sat on the bench, relaxed, and didn’t even watch the other team’s offensive series. The more he could let things go, the sharper he was in the next drive. The notion that I didn’t have to hold myself in a state of feverish concentration every second of a chess game was a huge liberation."
• "If you are interested in really improving as a performer, I would suggest incorporating the rhythm of stress and recovery into all aspects of your life."
• "Besides adding to your psychological and physical resilience, this opens up some wonderful and surprising new possibilities. For one thing, now that your conscious mind is free to take little breaks, you’ll be delighted by the surges of creativity that will emerge out of your unconscious. You’ll become more attuned to your intuition and will slowly become more and more true to yourself stylistically."
• "If you spend a few months practicing stress and recovery in your everyday life, you’ll lay the physiological foundation for becoming a resilient, dependable pressure player."
• "To have success in crunch time, you need to integrate certain healthy patterns into your day-to-day life so that they are completely natural to you when the pressure is on."
• "First, we learn to flow with distraction, like that blade of grass bending to the wind. Then we learn to use distraction, inspiring ourselves with what initially would have thrown us off our games. Finally we learn to re-create the inspiring settings internally."
• "Once we build our tolerance for turbulence and are no longer upended by the swells of our emotional life, we can ride them and even pick up speed with their slopes."