1 Aesop’s Fables (by Aesop)

• Self-help is the best help.

• Slow but steady wins the race.

• The greatest kindness will not bind the ungrateful.

• Misfortune tests the sincerity of friends.

• Old friends cannot with impunity be sacrificed for new ones.

• Whatever you do, do with all your might.

2 Brave New World (by Aldous Huxley)

• worthlessness of friends who could be turned upon so slight a provocation into persecuting enemies.

• One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

• Happiness has got to be paid for.

3 Brave New World Revisited (by Aldous Huxley)

• City life is anonymous and, as it were, abstract. People are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as the embodiments of economic functions or, when they are not at work, as irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence ceases to have any point or meaning.

• In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.

• most of us are half asleep all the time and go through life as somnambulists obeying somebody else’s suggestions.

• whatever their mental and physical diversity, love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; and finally the value of intelligence, without which love is impotent and freedom unattainable.

4 Lifehacked (Allen Wong) (by Allen Wong)

• True failure is never getting started in the first place.

• “Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.”

• Becoming wealthy should be a side effect of your work.

• When I code, I don’t quit because the programming is too difficult. I quit because I fell asleep on the keyboard.

5 Choose Yourself! (by Altucher, James)

• And obsessing on the things we can’t control is useless.

• Success comes from continually expanding your frontiers in every direction—creatively, financially, spiritually, and physically.

• avoid people who bring you down.

• The past and future don’t exist. They are memories and speculation,

• People fool themselves into thinking that the currency of unhappiness will buy them happiness. That

• don’t stay at the job for safe salary increases over time. That will never get you where you want—freedom from financial worry. Only free time, imagination, creativity, and an ability to disappear will help you deliver value that nobody ever delivered before in the history of mankind.

• The only way to create value for yourself is to create value for others.

• It’s the external manifestation of if you better yourself, you better the lives of the people around

• Procrastination could also be a strong sign that you are a perfectionist.

• The Gift of Imperfection, but I’ll summarize it here: perfectionism is sometimes the most dangerous set of thoughts you can let make their home in your head.

• It is through silence that sound, activity, and action erupts.

• Wake up early. Avoid distractions. Work three to five hours a day and then enjoy the rest of the day. Be as perfectionist as you can, knowing that imperfection will still rule. Have the confidence to be magical and stretch the boundaries of your medium. Combine the tools of the medium itself with the message you want to convey. Don’t get stuck in the same rut—move forward, experiment, but with the confidence built up over experience. Change the rules but learn them first.

• When we were kids and took a bad test, everyone would yell, “I want a redo!” We’re not in school. We’re in life. You have your redo.

• The day and age of the massive corporations that take care of us from beginning to end are over.

• if you don’t make courageous choices for yourself, nobody else will.

• I never blame anyone but myself.

• Every second I am manipulated and coerced and beaten down it’s because I’ve allowed it.

• The idea that we need to “pay our dues” is a lie told to us by people who wanted our efforts and labor on the cheap.

• Too many people die while climbing the perilous mountain of their goals.”

• You can only make money doing what you love.

• Not only did he identify the next step, but he took it.

• DON’T LEAD A DOUBLE LIFE. Everything you do takes up space in your brain. If you live a double life (and you know what I mean if I’m talking to you), then that extra life takes up neurons and synapses working overtime.

• And your finances, which are a reflection of the health of your brain, will fall straight into the sewer with it.

• DO WHAT YOU SAY YOU ARE GOING TO DO.

• Competent people move forward and do what they do.

• third will like you, a third will hate you, a third won’t care…no matter what you

6 The Power of No (by Altucher, James, Altucher, Claudia Azula)

• being clear about which relationships and which people we let into our lives is the key to access our creative forces.

7 2010: Odyssey Two (by Arthur C. Clarke)

• (he had abandoned Remembrance of Things Past for the third time, Dr Zhivago for the second),

8 3001: The Final Odyssey (by Arthur C. Clarke)

• religion was the by-product of fear - a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe.

9 Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (by Ashlee Vance)

• “When Elon gets into something, he develops just this different level of interest in it than other people. That is what differentiates Elon from the rest of humanity.”

• “My mentality is that of a samurai. I would rather commit seppuku than fail.”

• “You don’t get to where Elon is now by always being a nice guy, and he was just so driven and sure of himself.”

• Do or die but don’t give up.”

10 The Fountainhead (by Ayn Rand)

• most people take most things because that’s what’s given them, and they have no opinion whatever?

• Men are important only in relation to other men, in their usefulness, in the service they render.

• That was what made a man happy—to sit looking dreamily into a fire, at his own hearth, in his own home; that’s what he had always heard and read.

• it doesn’t matter what we are or do, if we help others?

• what makes people unhappy is not too little choice, but too much,”

• “Worry is a waste of emotional reserves. Very foolish. Unworthy of an enlightened person.

• One loses everything when one loses one’s sense of humor.”

• the sin that can’t be forgiven—that I hadn’t done what I wanted.

• A truly selfish man cannot be affected by the approval of others. He doesn’t need it.”

• I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men.

• It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings.

• “Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. Creation comes before distribution—or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement.

• “Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man’s independence, initiative and personal love for his work determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn’t done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.

• The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.

11 Doctor Zhivago (by Boris Pasternak, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

• Pasternak portrays happening as it happens, which is what Tolstoy also set out to do.

12 Losing My Virginity (by Branson, Richard)

• ‘Live for the present –’ I heard my parents’ old maxim in the back of my head ‘– and the future will look after itself.’ My

• fun is the secret of Virgin’s success. I

• It’s just a matter of scale, but first you have to believe you can make it happen.

• lists of people to call, lists of ideas, lists of companies to set up, lists of people who can make things happen. Each day I work through these lists, and it is that sequence of calls that propels me forward.

• just how slim the line is between genius and insanity and between determination and stubbornness.

13 How To Win Friends and Influence People (by Dale Carnegie)

• I would rather walk the sidewalk in front of a person’s office for two hours before an interview than step into that office without a perfectly clear idea of what I was going to say and what that persob - from my knowledge of his or her interests and motives - was likely to answer.

• Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.

14 Infinite Jest (by David Foster Wallace)

• ‘There’s more to life than sitting there interfacing,

• Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive.

15 Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (by Diamandis, Peter H.;Kotler, Steven)

• Today the shift from “I’ve got a neat idea” to “I run a billion-dollar company” is occurring faster than ever.

• Recognizing when a technology is exiting the trough of disillusionment and beginning to rise up the slope of enlightenment is critical for entrepreneurs.

16 I Am a Strange Loop (by Douglas R. Hofstadter)

• Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain and who are gathered to remember and reactivate the spirit of the departed, a collective corona that still glows. This is what human love means.

17 Into the Wind: My Six-Month Journey Wandering the World for Life’s Purpose (by Ducey, Jake)

• “Most of us are busy gambling on the most dangerous risk of all—living our whole life not doing what we want on the bet that we can buy the freedom to do it later.”

18 The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement (by Eliyahu Goldratt)

• productivity is meaningless unless you know what your goal is,’’

19 The Escape Manifesto: Quit Your Corporate Job. Do Something Different! (by Escape The City)

• “I’d rather be a failure at something I love than a success at something I hate.”

• Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

• you’ll always either be too young and not have enough experience, savings or contacts or too old and feel that it’s too late

• “How much better to know that we have dared to live our dreams than to live our lives in a lethargy of regret.”

• There is an instruction manual for the conventional life. It involves keeping your head down and doing what you’re told. We are probably the most over-qualified and over-educated working generation in the history of humankind.

• Your friends, family and other people in your life will discourage you from a decision that they perceive as being risky precisely because they care about you.

• Comfort Kills Ambition. It’s so easy to cruise through your years – achieving little, risking little – just existing.

• You may even explain why other people can do certain things but you can’t (a very easy trap to fall into).

• The number one regret was “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

• just go with whatever feels right at the time and stay confident that things will work out.

• Randy Komisar (author of The Monk and The Riddle) calls it “The Biggest Risk of All” (the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later).

• It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

• It is easy to get so bound up in the race to climb your career ladder that you can often forget to ask whether you are climbing the right one.

• If you were to die right now, how would you feel about your life?

• Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

• Once you realize that there is no one higher up than you whose job you want it should then become a question of “when do I leave?” not “if”.

• the purpose of work is to allow you to create and contribute a meaningful, useful, and beautiful body of work to the world and along the way, take care of your financial needs.

• Life On Air

• you can’t just run away from something, you also need to run towards something.

• Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.

• “Ask yourself: ‘If I had unlimited, time, talent, money, ability, self-confidence and support from my family, what would I do?’ Then, list the steps necessary to achieve these goals.”

• “Money frees you from doing things you dislike.

20 Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (by Eyal, Nir)

• If you only build for fame or fortune, you will likely find neither. But build for meaning and you can’t go wrong.

21 The Now Habit (by FIORE, PH.D., NEIL)

• the fear of being imperfect (perfectionism),

• If you are threatening yourself with self-hatred and a life of unhappiness unless you achieve your goal, it’s impossible to concentrate on the work in front of you now.

• terror of being overwhelmed, the fear of failure, and the fear of not finishing. These

• Be alert to when preparation becomes procrastination.

• value of real, completed, imperfect work versus late, incomplete, ideal work.

• Acknowledge that valuable time is being wasted on polishing in an attempt to ensure perfection.

• What distinguishes a champion from others of comparable ability is the learned skill of bouncing back from disappointing performances.

• Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.

• There is no path in life that requires no effort.

22 The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue (by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

• Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself. A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn’t it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain out of a pea—he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility

• I think that whatever one does one ought to do well,

• So do not be like everyone else; even if you are the only one left who is not like that, still do not be like that.”

• Love will satisfy only the moment of life, but the very awareness of its momentariness will increase its fire, inasmuch as previously it was diffused in hopes of an eternal love beyond the grave’

• let us all seize the favorable moment of our being together in order to say a good word to each other as well. And so I do; while I am in this place, I make the best of my moment.

• It is better to let ten who are guilty go, than to punish one who is innocent—

• You must know that there is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from the parental home. You hear a lot said about your education, yet some such beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man stores up many such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life. And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation.

23 The Surpisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results (by Gary Keller)

• (“Toss a frog into a pot of hot water and it will jump right back out. But if you place a frog in lukewarm water and slowly raise the temperature, it will boil to death.”)

• Not everything matters equally, and success isn’t a game won by whoever does the most.

• Long hours spent checking off a to-do list and ending the day with a full trash can and a clean desk are not virtuous and have nothing to do with success.

• law of gravity, and yet most people fail to see the gravity of it. It’s not just a theory—it is a provable, predictable certainty of nature and one of the greatest productivity truths ever discovered.

• Extraordinary results are disproportionately created by fewer actions than most realize.

• multiple tasks being done simultaneously by one resource

• It’s not that we have too little time to do all the things we need to do, it’s that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have.

• success is about doing the right thing, not about doing everything right.

• Habits, on average, take 66 days to form.

• When we tie our success to our willpower without understanding what that really means, we set ourselves up for failure.

• Pursuing a balanced life means never pursuing anything at the extremes.

• When you’re supposed to be working, work, and when you’re supposed to be playing, play.

• Start leading a counterbalanced life. Let the right things take precedence when they should and get to the rest when you can.

• “We are kept from our goal, not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.”

• To live great, you have to think big.

• Don’t fear big. Fear mediocrity. Fear waste. Fear the lack of living to your fullest.

• prime condition of success, the great secret—concentrate your energy, thought and capital exclusively upon the business in which you are engaged.

• Anyone who dreams of an uncommon life eventually discovers there is no choice but to seek an uncommon approach to living it.

• What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

• “People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.”

• Highly successful people choose to live at the outer limits of achievement.

• Highly successful people choose to live at the outer limits of achievement. They not only dream of but deeply crave what is beyond their natural grasp.

• building block of all business profit. The two are inseparable. A business can’t have unproductive people yet magically still have an immensely profitable business.

• lays out life as a series of connected choices,

• you’d do with it.” I believe that financially wealthy people are those who have enough money coming in without having to work to finance their purpose in life.

• Sticking with something long enough for success to show up is a fundamental requirement for achieving extra-ordinary results.

• hyperbolic discounting—the further away a reward is in the future, the smaller the immediate motivation to achieve it.

• It’s why most people never get close to their goals. They haven’t connected today to all the tomorrows it will take to get there. Connect today to all your tomorrows. It matters.

• “Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.”

• where you are and where you want to go.

• Block an hour each week to review your annual and monthly goals.

• Don’t break the chain.”

• “Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another.”

• Your most important work deserves 100 percent of your attention.

• With your priorities clear, the only logical course is to go to work.

• “Nobody who ever gave his best regretted it.”

• Nothing is more futile than doing your best using an approach that can’t deliver results equal to your effort.

• “Are you doing this to simply do the best you can do, or are you doing this to do it the best it can be done?”

• Too many people reach a level where their performance is “good enough” and then stop working on getting better.

• When life happens, you can be either the author of your life or the victim of it. Those are your only two choices— accountable or unaccountable.

• Highly successful people are clear about their role in the events of their life. They don’t fear reality. They seek it, acknowledge it, and own it.

• “Focus is a matter of deciding what things you’re not going to do.”

• the more things you do, the less successful you are at any one of them.

• Learning to say no isn’t a recipe for being a recluse. Just the opposite. It’s a way to gain the greatest freedom and flexibility possible.

• “If you don’t take care of your body, where will you live?”

• Extraordinary results require you to go small.

• Your life is like this. You don’t get a fully mature one. You get a small one and the opportunity to grow it—if you want to. Think small and your life’s likely to stay small. Think big and your life has a chance to grow big. The choice is yours.

• It’s only when you have faith in your purpose and priorities that you’ll seek out your ONE Thing. And once certain you know it, you’ll have the personal power necessary to push you through any hesitancy to do it.

• “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

• Go live a life worth living where, in the end, you’ll be able to say, “I’m glad I did,” not “I wish I had.”

• A life worth living might be measured in many ways, but the one way that stands above all others is living a life of no regrets.

• live your life to minimize the regrets you might have at the end.

• feelings weighed too heavy to handle; I wish I hadn’t worked so hard—too much time spent making a living over building a life caused too much remorse.

• I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself not the life others expected of me.

• “Most people had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.”

• So make sure every day you do what matters most. When you know what matters most, everything makes sense. When you don’t know what matters most, anything makes sense. The best lives aren’t led this way.

• “When people look back on their lives, it is the things they have not done that generate the greatest regret…. People’s actions may be troublesome initially; it is their inactions that plague them most with long-term feelings of regret.”

• When you bring purpose to your life, know your priorities, and achieve high productivity on the priority that matters most every day, your life makes sense and the extraordinary becomes possible.

• Time block with yourself to make sure the things that matter get done and the activities that matter get mastered.

• that the secret to extraordinary results is to ask a very big and specific question that leads you to one very small and tightly focused answer.

• If you try to do everything, you could wind up with nothing. If you try to do just ONE Thing, the right ONE Thing, you could wind up with everything you ever wanted.

24 The Complete Novels Of George Orwell (by George Orwell)

• Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.

25 The Richest Man in Babylon (by George S. Clason)

• good luck waits to come to that man who accepts opportunity,"

• “he accepts not opportunity when she comes. He waits. He says I have much business right now. Bye and bye I talk to you. Opportunity, she will not wait for such slow fellow. She thinks if a man desires to be lucky he will step quick.

• attract good luck to oneself, it is necessary to take advantage of opportunities.

• Good luck can be enticed by accepting opportunity.

• “Gold is reserved for those who know its laws and abide by them.”

• THE FIVE LAWS OF GOLD

• If you desire to help thy friend, do so in a way that will not bring thy friend’s burdens upon thyself."

• BETTER A LITTLE CAUTION THAN A GREAT REGRET

• WE CANNOT AFFORD TO BE WITHOUT ADEQUATE PROTECTION

• If a man has in himself the soul of a slave will he not become one no matter what his birth, even as water seeks its level? If a man has within him the soul of a free man, will he not become respected and honored in his own city in spite of his misfortune?’

• the soul of a free man looks at life as a series of problems to be solved and solves them, while the soul of a slave whines, ‘What can I do who am but a slave?’

• WHERE THE DETERMINATION IS, THE WAY CAN BE FOUND

26 No More Mr. Nice Guy (by Glover, Robert)

• Nice Guys tend to analyze rather than feel. They may see feelings as a waste of time and energy. They frequently try to keep their feelings on an even keel.

• Nice Guys are frequently isolated.

• Nice Guys are usually only relatively successful.

• Almost without exception though, they fail to live up to their full potential.

• An integrated male doesn’t strive to be perfect or gain the approval of others. Instead he accepts himself just as he is, warts and all. An integrated male accepts that he is perfectly imperfect.

• Nice Guys believe they should be able do everything on their own. They have a difficult time asking for help and try to hide any signs of imperfection or weakness.

• Breaking free from the Nice Guy Syndrome involves a radical change in perspective and behavior. Trying to do it halfway will only result in needless suffering.

• “If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always had.”

• By trying to please everyone, Nice Guys often end up pleasing no one — including themselves.

• “If a man is talking in the forest and no woman is there to hear him, is he still wrong?”)

• If you were not concerned with getting the approval of women, how would your relationships with the opposite sex be different?

• cover it up. As stated above, everything a Nice Guy does is calculated to try to win approval or avoid disapproval.

• Nice Guys build walls that prevent others from getting too close. Understandably, this affects their ability to be intimate, but it also protects them from the consequences of being found out. These walls might include: Addictions (food, sex, t.v., alcohol, work, etc.), humor, sarcasm, intellectualism, perfectionism, and isolation.

• While desiring love and connection, his behaviors serve as an invisible force field that keeps people from being able to get close to him.

• Nice Guys have a difficult time comprehending that in general, people are not drawn to perfection in others. People are drawn to shared interests, shared problems, and an individual’s life energy.

• Humans connect with humans. Hiding one’s humanity and trying to project an image of perfection makes a person vague, slippery, lifeless, and uninteresting. I often refer to Nice Guys as Teflon Men. They work so hard to be smooth, nothing can stick to them. Unfortunately, this Teflon coating also makes it difficult for people to get close. It is actually a person’s rough edges and human imperfections that give others something to connect with.

• By shedding their chameleon skin and learning to please themselves, recovering Nice Guys begin to experience the intimacy and connection they have always desired.

• Nice Guys often believe it is a virtue to have few needs or wants.

• Nice Guys are extremely uncomfortable when they actually do get what they want.

• mature people make getting their needs met a priority.

• Putting the self first is essential for getting what one wants in love and life.

• Having needs is part of being human.

• This world is a place of abundance.

• Nice Guys have believed a myth that promises them that if they give up themselves and put others first, they will be loved and get their needs met.

• trying to create a predictable life in which everything always goes as planned is an exercise in futility.

• As a consequence of playing it safe, Nice Guys experience a lot of needless suffering.

• Telling the truth is not a magic formula for having a smooth life. But living a life of integrity is actually easier than living one built around deceit and distortion.

• Life won’t always be smooth, it may not always be pretty, but it will be an adventure — one not to be missed.

• It seems that each successive generation of men are becoming more and more passive.

• Many women have shared with me that due to the absence of any discernible life energy in Nice Guys, there is little to be attracted to.

• Most women do not want a man who tries to please them — they want a man who knows how to please himself. Women consistently share with me that they don’t want a passive, pleasing wimp. They want a man — someone with his balls still intact.

• if you want an undesirable behavior to go away, you stop paying attention to it.

• the nicer the guy, the darker the sexual secrets.

• Sex is a basic human drive.

• The Nice Guy’s sexuality doesn’t go away, it just goes underground.

• Getting good sex is dependent on recovering Nice Guys bringing their shame and fear out of the closet and into the open were they can be looked at and released. This step cannot be skipped!

• “No one was put into this world to meet your needs but you.”

• Good sex consists of two people taking full responsibility for meeting their own needs. It has no goal. It is free of agendas and expectations. Rather than being a performance, it is an unfolding of sexual energy. It is about two people revealing themselves in the most intimate and vulnerable of ways. Good sex occurs when two people focus on their own pleasure, passion, and arousal, and stay connected to those same things in their partner. All of these dynamics allow good sex to unfold in unpredictable, spontaneous, and memorable ways.

• As you look at the reality of your life, ask yourself two questions: First, are you creating the life you want? Second, if not, why not?

• Fear Prevents Nice Guys From Getting the Life They Want

• Striving for perfection keeps Nice Guys focused on their imperfections.

• Seeking external validation and approval keeps Nice Guys stuck in mediocrity.

• Because they believe they have to do it all themselves, Nice Guys rarely live up to their full potential.

• Because they believe they have to do it all themselves, Nice Guys rarely live up to their full potential. Nobody can be good at everything or succeed all on their own.

• many Nice Guys developed a deep-seated sense of inadequacy.

• Most folks — Nice Guys included — do not consciously take responsibility for creating the kind of life they want. Most people just accept where they are and act as if they have little power in shaping an exciting, productive, and fulfilling life.

• A conscious decision to not settle for mediocrity.

• The only thing stopping you from having the kind of life you really want is you.

• How does your perfectionism or need to do it right get in the way of realizing your passion and potential?

• A major reason Nice Guys frequently fail to live up to their potential is that they believe they have to do everything themselves.

• As mentioned earlier in the chapter, Nice Guys find numerous creative ways to sabotage their success in life. They waste time, they procrastinate, they start things but don’t finish, they spend too much time fixing other people’s problems, they distract themselves with trivial pursuits, they create chaos, they make excuses.

• In order to start getting what they want in life, work, and career, recovering Nice Guys have to make the conscious decision to get out of their own way.

• Accept “good enough” rather than “perfect”

• Don’t star t new projects until the old ones are completely finished

• Finish what you start

• Due to their early life experiences, Nice Guys tend to be ruled by deprivation thinking. They believe there is only so much to go around, and if someone else already has a lot, there is less for them.

• what one man can do another man can do.

• If one man can make a million dollars, why can’t you? If one man can start the business of his dreams, why can’t you? If one man can drive a Mercedes, why can’t you? If one man can quit a crummy job and find a better one, why can’t you? If one man can be a snowboarding instructor, why can’t you?

• Mature, successful people establish their own rules. These rules are measured by only one standard: Do they work?

• Don’t settle. Every time you settle, you get exactly what you settled for.

• If it frightens you, do it.

• If you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always got.

• Remove yourself from a bad situation instead of waiting for the situation to change.

• Stop blaming. Victims never succeed.

• Don’t do anything in secret.

• Have fun. If you are not having fun, something is wrong.

27 The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) (by Godin, Seth)

• You really can’t try to do everything, especially if you intend to be the best in the world.

• Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations.

• the real success goes to those who obsess. The

• the real success goes to those who obsess.

• Quitting requires you to acknowledge that you’re never going to be #1 in the world.

• If the journey you started was worth doing, then quitting when you hit the Dip just wastes the time you’ve already invested.

• Quit in the Dip often enough and you’ll find yourself becoming a serial quitter, starting many things but accomplishing little.

• If you can’t make it through the Dip, don’t start.

• When you’re the best in the world, you share the benefits (the income, the attention, the privileges, the respect) with just a handful of people or organizations or brands.

• the big benefits accrue to those who don’t quit.

• If you’re going to quit, quit before you start.

• Which is precisely why so few people end up as the best in the world.

• The next time you catch yourself being average when you feel like quitting, realize that you have only two good choices: Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.

• The temptation to be average is just another kind of quitting…the kind to be avoided. You deserve better than average.

• Do you know an entrepreneur-wannabe who is on his sixth or twelfth new project? He jumps from one to another, and every time he hits an obstacle, he switches to a new, easier, better opportunity. And while he’s a seeker, he’s never going to get anywhere.

• Persistent people are able to visualize the idea of light at the end of the tunnel when others can’t see it.

• The only reason to stay is the short-term pain associated with quitting. Winners understand that taking that pain now prevents a lot more pain later.

• The decision to quit or not is a simple evaluation: Is the pain of the Dip worth the benefit of the light at the end of the tunnel?

• You should quit if you’re on a dead-end path. You should quit if you’re facing a Cliff. You should quit if the project you’re working on has a Dip that isn’t worth the reward at the end. Quitting the projects that don’t go anywhere is essential if you want to stick out the right ones.

• The time to look for a new job is when you don’t need one. The time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable.

• Mediocre work is rarely because of a lack of talent and often because of the Cul-de-Sac. All coping does is waste your time and misdirect your energy. If the best you can do is cope, you’re better off quitting.

• “Never quit something with great long-term potential just because you can’t deal with the stress of the moment.”

• changing someone’s mind is difficult, if not impossible.

• Quitting a job is not quitting your quest to make a living or a difference or an impact. Quitting a job doesn’t have to mean giving up. A job is just a tactic, a way to get to what you really want. As soon as your job hits a dead end, it makes sense to quit and take your quest to a bigger marketplace—because every day you wait puts your goal further away.

• So, there’s tool number one. If quitting is going to be a strategic decision that enables you to make smart choices in the marketplace, then you should outline your quitting strategy before the discomfort sets in.

• If I like my job, is it time to quit?

• Are you avoiding the remarkable as a way of quitting without quitting?

• If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.

• We fail when we give up too soon.

• We succeed when we are the best in the world at what we do.

• We fail when we get distracted by tasks we don’t have the guts to quit.

28 The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future (by Guillebeau, Chris)

• There’s no rehab program for being addicted to freedom. Once you’ve seen what it’s like on the other side, good luck trying to follow someone else’s rules ever again.

• shopper. I knew what I wanted, and it didn’t exist, so I built

• Build something that people want and give it to them.

• the secret to a meaningful new career was directly related to making people feel good about themselves.

• “An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”

• “If you make your business about helping others, you’ll always have plenty of work.”

• “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”

• There’s nothing wrong with planning, but you can spend a lifetime making a plan that never turns into action.

• Solution—your solution must be different or better.

• Understand that what we want and what we say we want are not always the same thing.

29 The Happiness of Pursuit: Finding the Quest That Will Bring Purpose to Your Life (by Guillebeau, Chris)

• these individuals were successful not because of innate talent, but because of their choices and dedication.

• What excites you? What bothers you? If you could do anything at all without regard to time or money, what would it be?

• Quests bring meaning and fulfillment to our lives.

• “It’s so much more important to do what your heart’s telling you,” he said to the handheld camera. The quest was under way.

• Properly examined, feelings of unease can lead to a new life of purpose.

• “the sense of being at the reins of my life.”

• Add action to discontent: Find a way to do something about the uncertainty you feel.

• Here is a test to find out whether your mission in life is complete. If you’re alive, it isn’t.

• “When a person is really happy they don’t have to tell people about it. It just shows.”

• Everyone dies, but not everyone truly lives.

30 Secrets of the Millionaire Mind (by Harv Eker)

• believe that you are at the steering wheel of your life,

• if you don’t think money is important, you simply won’t have any.

• Wanting alone is useless.

• “a person who solves problems for people at a profit.”

• focus on making, keeping, and investing your money.

• get in the game with whatever you’ve got, from wherever you are.

• if you resent what people have, in any way, shape, or form, you can never have it.

• leaders earn a heck of a lot more money than followers!

• you have a big problem in your life, all that means is that you are being a small person!

• Living based in security is living based in

• to get rich you will need to be paid based on results.

• the more your money works, the less you will have to work.

• ‘If you are willing to do only what’s easy, life will be hard. But if you are willing to do what’s hard, life will be easy.’

• “No thought lives in your head rent-free.”

• “Talk is cheap.”

31 Walking (by Henry David Thoreau)

• What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?

32 Play It Away: A Workaholic’s Cure for Anxiety (by Hoehn, Charlie)

• No one forces them to work on things they don’t care about, or tells them how to spend their time

• Instead of grinding it out in jobs they hate, these people become passionate and highly skilled at what they do. They team up with other great players and collaborate on interesting projects. Then one day, they’re making magic. Their mastery shines through in everything they create, society reaps the benefits of their gifts, and our world changes.

• Take the job you would take if you were independently wealthy. You’re going to do well at it.

• A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

• The information you allow into your conscious awareness determines the quality of your life.

• you are what you think.

• You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

• Stop doing work that doesn’t matter to you

• Work shouldn’t feel like indentured servitude; it should feel like a game you would willingly play because it’s rewarding and it energizes you.

• Continually putting up with work that you hate is a path that leads to unhappiness and regret. If you find yourself spending months or years working on things you dislike — due to your fear of quitting someone else’s game — it’s probably time to rethink how you want to live your life.

• My brain was operating at a higher level because it was happy, playful, and recharged.

• make time for guilt-free fun with good people.

• Isolating yourself from people erodes your health, and sitting in a chair all day long is a recipe for neuroses.

• Instead of killing myself for future success, I work to feel alive right now.

• You don’t need more free time. You don’t need more money. You can change the world when you change how you see it. It’s only a choice.

33 Family Happiness (by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy)

• the proper object of life was happiness, and I promised myself much happiness ahead.

• the only certain happiness in life is to live for others.

• I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor – such is my idea of happiness. And then, on the top of all that, you for a mate, and children perhaps – what more can the hear of man desire?"

• le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.

34 Celebrating Time Alone (by Lionel Fisher)

• “The way to be happy is to develop an unshakable sense of worth in yourself.”

• The American Dream isn’t fame or fortune—never was, never will be, not for most of us. It’s taking control of our lives.

• Time, I’ve come to realize, is the most precious possession I own: vast, uncluttered, open-ended, with a core of deep white silence like the storms that shroud this winter shore.

• “Give yourself the gift of time,”

• Whole worlds can rise and fall while I sit at my desk gazing out the window.

• “It’s not solitude itself we hermits love, but what solitude gives us. Solitude is a means to an end, not an end in itself. It brings us things nobody else can give us.”

• “We each have within ourselves what we need for our own journey. The answers aren’t out there, out in the world, but within us. And we will only hear those answers if we are quiet enough.”

• I found you can’t change anyone.

• Nothing external is going to make you happy.

• “When you are washing the dishes,” he counsels, “washing the dishes must be the most important thing in your life. Just as when you are drinking tea, drinking tea must be the most important thing in your life.”

• Choose one thing. Do it to the best of your ability. Let it go. Pick something else. Repeat endlessly.

• How much of our regret comes from wasting so many of our moments wanting something better, something different, something other than what we have at the moment that we have it?

• “Life is too short to be taking care of the wrong details.”

• “One of the ironies of being a successful solitary is that people are drawn to me. They perceive a solidity, a central, peaceful core that most of them don’t have. And I find myself fending them off, because if I give in to the constant barrage of interaction and motion and noise that most people endure, I would lose the quality they find so compelling.

• “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth over-doing.”

• How sad, the god of solitude teaches, that we spend our entire lives auditioning for others—parents, teachers, employers, suitors, spouses, lovers, strangers, friends—only to realize that we should have put ourselves at the head of the line, earned our own love, respect, and affection first. And everything else would have taken care of itself.

35 Learned Optimism (by Martin E. Seligman)

• Curing the negatives does not produce the positives.

• depression is a disorder of the “I,” failing in your own eyes relative to your goals.

• The very thought “Nothing I do matters” prevents us from acting.

• people with pessimistic habits of thinking can transform mere setbacks into disasters.

• individuals can choose the way they think.

• depression, the ultimate expression of pessimism.

• Severe depression is ten times more prevalent today than it was fifty years ago.

• In more than 90 percent of cases, depression is episodic: It comes and then it goes.

• What if you can have all the talent and desire necessary—yet, if you are a pessimist, still fail?

• We had taken the central premise of learning theory—that learning occurs only when a response produces a reward or a punishment—and proved it wrong.

• was counterintuitive (that is, it ran against common sense). The behaviorists insisted that all of a person’s behavior was determined only by his lifelong history of rewards and punishments.

• He concluded that the way people think about the causes of successes and failures was what really mattered.

• Your explanatory style stems directly from your view of your place in the world—whether you think you are valuable and deserving, or worthless and hopeless. It is the hallmark of whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.

• PEOPLE WHO give up easily believe the causes of the bad events that happen to them are permanent: The bad events will persist, will always be there to affect their lives. People who resist helplessness believe the causes of bad events are temporary.

• If you think about bad things in always’s and never’s and abiding traits, you have a permanent, pessimistic style. If you think in sometimes’s and lately’s, if you use qualifiers and blame bad events on transient conditions, you have an optimistic style.

• People who believe good events have permanent causes try even harder after they succeed. People who see temporary reasons for good events may give up even when they succeed, believing success was a fluke.

• A pessimistic explanatory style is at the core of depressed thinking.

• Depressed people cannot decide among alternatives.

36 Bigger Leaner Stronger: The Simple Science of Building the Ultimate Male Body (The Build Muscle, Get Lean, and Stay Healthy Series Book 1) (by Matthews, Michael)

• Just remember, somewhere, a little Chinese girl is warming up with your max.

• most effective way to build a big, strong body is with systemic overload, not localized training.

• Packing on slabs of rock-solid lean mass is, in essence, just a matter of following these three laws religiously: lift hard and heavy, get sufficient rest, and feed your body correctly

• Working primarily with 80 to 85 percent of your 1RM optimizes strength gains and muscle growth.

• The road to nowhere is paved with excuses.

• Losing fat requires that you keep your body burning more energy than you’re feeding it,

• we need to stay at or under 10 percent for the look

• For me, life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.

• If you’re planning on getting below 10 percent body fat, I can pretty much guarantee that you’re going to need to include some cardio in your routine to get there.

• Discipline is doing what you hate to do, but nonetheless doing it like you love it.

• The more stress we feel, the more likely we are to overeat, overspend, and do the many other things we regret shortly thereafter.

• If we wander through life chasing “good feelings,” we’ll figure out plenty of ways to not feel bad about every “little” bout of procrastination, overeating, overspending, and what have you, and, one day we’ll wonder why the hell we’re so fat, broke, lazy, and ignorant.

• we need to remember why we’ve committed to doing the “hard” things like exercising, following a budget, working overtime, and so on.

• the goal isn’t a good workout or day of proper eating: it’s a radically transformed physique.

• Whenever you’re struggling with a willpower challenge, review your whys.

• We simply give our future selves too much credit, counting on them to be able to do whatever we can’t bring ourselves to do now.

• Avoid the trap of viewing Future You as some abstract entity whose emotions and desires will be different than Present You’s.

• wait 10 minutes before acting on a craving or other impulsive urge to do something you know you shouldn’t.

• Anticipating the shame and disapproval from others that comes with failure can also help you stay strong in the face of temptation,

• while you may not always be able to control where your mind wanders, you can always control your actions.

• wait 10 minutes before acting on a craving or other impulsive urge to do something you know you shouldn’t.

• Proper nutrition boils down to just two things: 1. Supplying your body with the nutrients needed to efficiently recover from your workouts. 2. Manipulating your energy intake to lose, maintain, or gain weight as desired.

• there are seven aspects of nutrition are of primary concern when trying to build muscle and lose fat and stay healthy. They are calories, protein, carbohydrates, fats, water, vitamins and minerals, and fiber.

• Regardless of the source, 1 gram of protein contains 4 calories, 1 gram of carbohydrate contains 4 calories as well, and 1 gram of fat contains 9 calories.

• A high-protein diet is absolutely vital for building muscle and preserving it when you’re dieting for fat loss. A low-protein diet is absolutely good for nothing. End of story.

• One of the easiest ways to get stuck in a rut is to simply not pay attention to how much protein you eat on a day-to-day basis or miss meals and figure it’s no big deal.

• 10 to 35 percent of our daily calories should come from protein.

• “Protein needs for energy-restricted resistance-trained athletes are likely 2.3-3.1g/kg of FFM

• If it drops too low (below 1 gram per pound of body weight, in my experience), the loss of strength and muscle is noticeably accelerated.

• your best choices are meat, dairy products, and eggs; second to those are certain plant sources like legumes, nuts, and high-protein vegetables such as peas, broccoli, and spinach.

• Protein from meat is particularly helpful when you’re weightlifting,

• whey is a semi-clear, liquid by-product of cheese production.

• It is abundant in leucine, which is an essential amino acid that plays a key role in initiating protein synthesis.12

• You can take whey protein anytime, but it’s particularly effective as a post-workout source of protein because it’s rapidly digested, which causes a dramatic spike in amino acids in the blood (especially in leucine).13 This, in turn, stimulates more immediate muscle growth than slower-burning proteins.

• Casein is a good protein to have before you go to bed, which can help with muscle recovery.

• As you know, the human body absorbs different proteins at different rates. According to one review, whey clocks in at 8 to 10 grams absorbed per hour, casein at 6.1, soy at 3.9, and egg at 1.3.34

• research has also shown that eating about 30 to 40 grams of protein in a meal maximally stimulates protein synthesis rates

• Each protein feeding should contain at least 30 to 40 grams of protein.

• When you lift weights, you rapidly drain your muscles’ glycogen stores, and you replenish those stores when you eat carbohydrates.

• By doing this and keeping your muscles “full” of glycogen, you improve performance and reduce exercise-induced muscle breakdown.

• There are three forms of carbohydrate: • monosaccharides, • oligosaccharides, and • polysaccharides.

• As you’ve probably noticed, all forms of carbohydrate we eat are either metabolized into glucose or are left indigested, serving as dietary fiber.

• there is no direct connection between added sugars intake and obesity unless excessive consumption of sugar-containing beverages and foods leads to energy imbalance and the resultant weight gain.”

• you’ll probably notice better all-around energy levels by getting the majority of your carbs from complex, lower-GI foods. These foods are often more nutritious as well.

• If you don’t eat enough protein when dieting to lose weight, you can lose quite a bit of muscle,

• Several studies conclusively show that high-carbohydrate diets are superior to low-carbohydrate varieties for building muscle and strength.

• The type of fat that you want to avoid at all costs is trans fat.

• children and adults should consume 14 grams of fiber for every 1,000 calories of food eaten.116

• A high-protein diet is absolutely vital for building muscle and preserving it when you’re dieting for fat loss.

• Most champions are built by punch-the-clock workouts rather than extraordinary efforts.

• generally recommend 30 to 40 grams of protein about 30 minutes before training.

• I recommend eating 40 to 50 grams of carbohydrates 30 minutes before you train to feel a noticeable improvement in your performance.

• Instead, I much prefer getting my pre-workout carbohydrates from food. My favorite sources are rice milk (tastes great with whey protein!) and bananas, but other popular nutritious choices are instant oatmeal, dates and figs, melon, white potato, white rice, raisins, and sweet potato.

• That’s it for pre-workout nutrition: 30 to 40 grams of protein (and whey is best), and 40 to 50 grams of carbohydrate 30 minutes before training is all you need.

• I recommend that you eat the familiar number of 30 to 40 grams of protein in your post-workout meal.

• muscle growth is nothing more than protein synthesis rates exceeding protein breakdown rates,

• If you’re weightlifting regularly, keeping your muscles as full of glycogen as you can is important.

• the body will not store carbohydrates as fat until glycogen stores are replenished).

• In terms of how much carbohydrate to eat in your post-workout meal, a good rule of thumb is about 1 gram of per kilogram of body weight.

• When you restrict your calories, however, your anabolic hormone levels drop, and your body’s ability to synthesize proteins becomes impaired.

• you can cut until your intake reaches BMR, but don’t reduce your intake lower than that.

• your body’s ability to build muscle is dramatically reduced when in a calorie deficit.

• each protein feeding should contain at least 30 to 40 grams of protein.

• Eat 30 to 40 grams of protein about and 40 to 50 grams of carbohydrate 30 minutes before training.

• Eat 30 to 40 grams of protein and 1 gram of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight after your weightlifting workout.

• Consider eating 0.5 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight 2 hours after your weightlifting workout.

• The full six-pack look requires both low body fat levels and well-developed core muscles,

• A proper warm-up routine has two simple goals: to introduce blood into the muscles to be trained and to progressively acclimate them to heavy weight without causing fatigue.

• your first warm-up set, you want to do 12 reps with about 50 percent of your heavy, 4- to 6-rep set weight and then rest for 1 minute. • In your second warm-up set, you use the same weight as the first and do 10 reps this time at a little faster pace. Then rest for 1 minute. • Your third warm-up set is 4 reps with about 70 percent of your heavy weight, and it should be done at a moderate pace. Once again, you follow this set with a 1-minute rest. • The fourth warm-up set is the final one and it’s simple: 1 rep with about 90 percent of your heavy weight. Rest 2 to 3 minutes after this final warm-up set.

• Lifting random amounts of weight for random numbers of reps every week doesn’t work nearly as well as an accurate, linear model of progression driven by real data.

• Pushing yourself in the gym is good, so long as you always maintain proper form as well.

• Static stretching

• Static stretching before exercise has been shown to impair speed and strength.

• The key to dealing with pain is treating it like an injury until it’s better

• If you experience pain, stop your set. If an exercise always bothers you, do something else. The key to dealing with pain is treating it like an injury until it’s better. Avoid exercises that aggravate it and let it heal.

• Research shows that co-ingesting creatine with carbohydrates increases creatine accumulation in the muscles.

• Furthermore, there’s research that indicates that creatine taken after a workout is more effective than creatine taken before one,

• while supplementation with glutamine may not provide an anabolic boost, its anti-stress and anti-fatigue benefits make it a worthwhile buy if you’re exercising regularly, intensely, and for prolonged periods.

• I take a multivitamin every day for these reasons, and I recommend that you do too.

• Before training, supplement with 3 to 6 milligrams of caffeine per kilogram of body weight.

• Keep your daily intake at or below 6 milligrams per kilogram of body weight.

• taken with food, 5-HTP increases feelings of fullness and thus helps you control your food intake.

• research shows that supplementation with forskolin accelerates fat loss and increases testosterone levels.96

• Thus, I recommend that you pay a bit more for a high-quality fish oil product.

• Research indicates that 1.3 to 2.7 grams of omega-3 fatty acids per day is ideal for a person eating a normal, 2,000-calorie diet

• Just like training and diet, the most important aspect of supplementing is consistency. You must take your supplements consistently to realize their full benefits.

• You’re in a process now—and yup, it has already begun—of proving to yourself that you can transform your body faster than you ever believed.

37 The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter–And How to Make the Most of Them Now (by Meg Jay)

• you can’t think your way through life. The only way to figure out what to do is to do—something.

• There is a certain terror that goes along with saying “My life is up to me.”

• “Not making choices isn’t safe. The consequences are just further away in time,

• our twenties are the capstone of this last critical period, they are, as one neurologist said, a time of “great risk and great opportunity.”

• opportunity is that never again in our lifetime will the brain offer up countless new connections and see what we make of them.

• Never again will it be so easy to become the people we hope to be.

• increased goal-setting in the twenties led to greater purpose, mastery, agency, and well-being in the thirties.

38 Flow (by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

• The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment.

• The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment.

• The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer.

• When the information that keeps coming into awareness is congruent with goals, psychic energy flows effortlessly.

• Even though we recognize that material success may not bring happiness, we engage in an endless struggle to reach external goals, expecting that they will improve life.

• achieve by a direct route what cannot be reached through the pursuit of symbolic goals.

• But if one gets to be too complacent, feeling that psychic energy invested in new directions is wasted unless there is a good chance of reaping extrinsic rewards for it, one may end up no longer enjoying life, and pleasure becomes the only source of positive experience.

• First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.

• Competition is enjoyable only when it is a means to perfect one’s skills; when it becomes an end in itself, it ceases to be fun.

• When experience is intrinsically rewarding life is justified in the present, instead of being held hostage to a hypothetical future

• Cultures are defensive constructions against chaos, designed to reduce the impact of randomness on experience.

• Compared to people living only a few generations ago, we have enormously greater opportunities to have a good time, yet there is no indication that we actually enjoy life more than our ancestors did.

• When a person cannot control psychic energy, neither learning nor true enjoyment is possible.

• In socialist countries one of the most irritating sources of alienation is the necessity to spend much of one’s free time waiting in line for food, for clothing, for entertainment, or for endless bureaucratic clearances.

• At the individual level anomie corresponds to anxiety, while alienation corresponds to boredom.

• “Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.”

• most important trait of survivors is a “nonself-conscious individualism,” or a strongly directed purpose that is not self-seeking.

• Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness.

• “The future,” wrote C. K. Brightbill, “will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.”

• This means taking each new challenge not as something to be repressed or avoided, but as an opportunity for learning and for improving skills.

• One can survive solitude, but only if one finds ways of ordering attention that will prevent entropy from destructuring the mind.

• Yet how one copes with solitude makes all the difference. If being alone is seen as a chance to accomplish goals that cannot be reached in the company of others, then instead of feeling lonely, a person will enjoy solitude and might be able to learn new skills in the process.

• To be able to experience flow, one must have clear goals to strive for.

• Few things are sadder than encountering a person who knows exactly what he should do, yet cannot muster enough energy to do it.

• If the rules of a game become too flexible, concentration flags, and it is more difficult to attain a flow experience.

• Its mind does not weigh possibilities unavailable at the moment; it neither imagines pleasant alternatives, nor is it disturbed by fears of failure.

• Dialogues

• But it seems clear that an increasing majority are not being helped by traditional religions and belief systems. Many are unable to separate the truth in the old doctrines from the distortions and degradations that time has added, and since they cannot accept error, they reject the truth as well.

39 The Unbearable Lightness of Being (by Milan Kundera)

• We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. Was it better to be with Tereza or to remain

40 The Black Swan (by Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

• Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without becoming demoralized.

• The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can.

• get a profession that is “scalable,” that is, one in which you are not paid by the hour and thus subject to the limitations of the amount of your labor.

• Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time.

• We are social animals; hell is other people.

• What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars,

• Furthermore, just as we tend to underestimate the role of luck in life in general, we tend to overestimate it in games of chance.

• When you are employed, hence dependent on other people’s judgment, looking busy can help you claim responsibility for the results in a random environment.

• The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know.

• What matters is not how often you are right, but how large your cumulative errors are.

• Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules.

• We build toys. Some of those toys change the world.

• and that strange activity called the business meeting, in which well-fed, but sedentary, men voluntarily restrict their blood circulation with an expensive device called a necktie.

• La science et l’hypothèse,

• his philosophizing came from his witnessing the limits of the subject itself, which is what true philosophy is all about.

• If you hear a “prominent” economist using the word equilibrium, or normal distribution, do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.

• I do not know whether God exists, but I know that I have nothing to gain from being an atheist if he does not exist, whereas I have plenty to lose if he does. Hence, this justifies my belief in God.

• Standard deviation is just a number that you scale things to, a matter of mere correspondence if phenomena were Gaussian.

• Many people accepted my Black Swan idea but could not take it to its logical conclusion, which is that you cannot use one single measure for randomness called standard deviation (and call it “risk”); you cannot expect a simple answer to characterize uncertainty.

• thought that finance and economics were just a place where one learned from various empirical phenomena and filled up one’s bank account with f*** you cash before leaving for bigger and better things.

• An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.

• mental bias I encounter on the occasion: people mistake an event with a small probability, say, one in twenty years for a periodically occurring one.

• Locke’s definition of a madman: someone “reasoning correctly from erroneous premises.”

• Elegance in the theories is often indicative of Platonicity and weakness—it invites you to seek elegance for elegance’s sake.

41 The Alchemist (by Paulo Coelho)

• The mere possibility of getting what we want fills the soul of the ordinary person with guilt.

• If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man.

• “DON’T THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU’VE LEFT BEHIND,”

• They show that, when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.”

42 Toujours Provence (by Peter Mayle)

• People are attracted to an area because of its beauty and its promise of peace, and then they transform it into a high-rent suburb complete with cocktail parties, burglar alarm systems, four-wheel-drive recreational vehicles and other essential trappings of la vie rustique.

43 Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (by Peter Thiel;Blake Masters)

• if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.

• Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.

• In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.

• All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

• either don’t throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly.

• The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors.

• Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth.

• If they don’t go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers.

• Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.

• once you think that you’re playing the lottery, you’ve already psychologically prepared yourself to lose.

• You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.

• If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.

• If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it.

• Since time is your most valuable asset, it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future together.

• how can computers help humans solve hard problems?

• A great technology company should have proprietary technology an order of magnitude better than its nearest substitute.

• Great companies have secrets: specific reasons for success that other people don’t see.

44 Marco Polo Didn’t Go There: Stories and Revelations From One Decade as a Postmodern Travel Writer (by Rolf Potts)

• The mind can be a crazy monkey that is always trying to escape from the moment. Your goal must be to find and experience the present."

• Independent travel is often an act of hope-an optimistic attempt to blur the line between cultures through somewhat random interactions.

• “They want you to write about camping toys and sports vacations. They want you to make people think adventure is something that costs $8,000 and lasts as long as a Christmas holiday. They want you to make rich people feel good for being rich.”

45 Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (by Sam Harris)

• We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy,

• wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”

• Meditation doesn’t entail the suppression of such thoughts, but it does require that we notice thoughts as they emerge and recognize them to be transitory appearances in consciousness.

• most people are simply too distracted by their thoughts to have the selflessness of consciousness pointed out directly.

46 On the Shortness of Life (Penguin Great Ideas) (by Seneca)

• People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.

• Assuredly your lives, even if they last more than a thousand years, will shrink into the tiniest span: those vices will swallow up any space of time.

• it is generally agreed that no activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied – not rhetoric or liberal studies – since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it.

• you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long.

• deceived because it is an intangible thing,

• But putting things off is the biggest waste of life:

• vices have to be crushed rather than picked at.

• Of all people only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive.

• But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.

• External goods are of trivial importance and without much influence in either direction: prosperity does not elevate the sage and adversity does not depress him. For he has always made the effort to rely as much as possible on himself and to derive all delight from himself.

• Petty is the mind which delights in earthly things: it should be led away to those things which appear everywhere equally, everywhere equally lustrous.

• If you consider that sexual desire was given to man not for enjoyment but for the propagation of the race, once you are free of this violent and destructive passion rooted in your vitals, every other desire will leave you undisturbed.

• ‘Let no one rob me of a single day who is not going to make me an adequate return for such a loss. Let my mind be fixed on itself, cultivate itself, have no external interest – nothing that seeks the approval of another; let it cherish the tranquillity that has no part in public or private concerns.’

• ‘euthymia’

• so in choosing our friends for their characters we shall take care to find those who are the least corrupted:

• Though a man’s loyalty and kindness may not be in doubt, a companion who is agitated and groaning about everything is an enemy to peace of mind.

• He will live badly who does not know how to die well.

• He who fears death will never do anything worthy of a living man.

• Know, then, that every condition can change, and whatever happens to anyone can happen to you too.

• The next thing to ensure is that we do not waste our energies pointlessly or in pointless activities: that is, not to long either for what we cannot achieve, or for what, once gained, only makes us realize too late and after much exertion the futility of our desires.

• Many people live a life like these creatures, and you could not unjustly call it busy idleness.

• So let all your activity be directed to some object, let it have some end in view.

• That is why we say that nothing happens to the wise man against his expectation.

• it is more civilized to make fun of life than to bewail it.

47 The Perks of Being a Wallflower (by Stephen Chbosky)

• At those times, you weren’t being his friend at all. Because you weren’t honest with him.”

48 The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (by Stephen Greenblatt)

• “Idleness is the enemy of the soul,”

49 Poirot and Me (by Suchet, David)

• It has always been my view that we, as human beings, go through our lives like spiders spinning our threads behind us, but only by looking backwards do we see how the past affects the present, and how those threads of our lives fit together.

50 Quiet (by Susan Cain)

• The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings.

• In business, you have to put a lot of nonsense together and present it.

• We find so many people impatient to talk. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time.

• “To thine own self be true,”

• And if we act out of character by convincing ourselves that our pseudo-self is real, we can eventually burn out without even knowing why.

• Researchers have found that intense engagement in and commitment to an activity is a proven route to happiness and well-being.

• Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you’re supposed to.

51 Technological Slavery (by Theodore J. Kaczynski)

• Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), and to Henry David Thoreau’s anti-technological musings in Walden (1850).

• “The most common lie is the lie one tells to oneself; lying to others is relatively the exception.”

• Most people have friends, but friends nowadays tend to use each other only for entertainment. They do not usually cooperate in economic or other serious, practical activities, nor do they offer each other much physical or economic security. If you become disabled, you don’t expect your friends to support you. You depend on insurance or on the welfare department.

52 Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal (by Tom Shroder)

• Imperial College London

• the idea that the dramatic psychedelic experience is rooted in the diminishment of the parts of the brain that impose a pragmatic, top-down order on the signals coming in from the world should

• we tend to overvalue Western-style rationality and undervalue the more visionary wisdom of the type accumulated over thousands of years of prehistory,

• “If there’s a splinter,” Michael said, “it’s important to get the splinter out, but there may be a scar; that is part of healing. It’s still there, but it’s healed.

53 A Thousand Tiny Failures (by Tony D)

• You are only what you do right now; your actions, and the story you leave behind.

• until you bang her, there is no relationship. You have a friendship.

• view the whole process as something separate from my reality,

• practice until they master the fundamentals: body language, fashion, grooming, vocal-tonality, verbal-improvisation, eye-contact, sexual-escalation and ego.

54 Delivering Happiness (by Tony Hsieh)

• Many of our other roommates applied for banking or management consulting jobs, both of which were considered the “hot” jobs to get. To me, they both seemed incredibly boring, and I also heard that the workdays were sixteen hours long.

• But we wanted to run our own business and be in control of our own destiny. This wasn’t about the money, it was about not being bored.

• “Vest In Peace.”

• What is success? What is happiness? What am I working toward?

• I made a list of the happiest periods in my life, and I realized that none of them involved money.

• I realized that building stuff and being creative and inventive made me happy. Connecting with a friend and talking through the entire night until the sun rose made me happy. Trick-or-treating in middle school with a group of my closest friends made me happy. Eating a baked potato after a swim meet made me happy. Pickles made me happy.

• I thought about how easily we are all brainwashed by our society and culture to stop thinking and just assume by default that more money equals more success and more happiness, when ultimately happiness is really just about enjoying life.

• I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do, but I knew what I wasn’t going to do. I wasn’t going to sit around letting my life and the world pass me by.

• I had decided to stop chasing the money, and start chasing the passion.

• I made a note to myself to make sure I never lost sight of the value of a tribe where people truly felt connected and cared about the well-being of one another.

• committed to living by the philosophy that experiences were much more important to me than material things.

• “Envision, create, and believe in your own universe, and the universe will form around you,”

• Are you taking enough risks? Are you afraid of making mistakes? Do you push yourself outside of your comfort zone? Is there a sense of adventure and creativity in the work that you do?

• How do you grow personally? How do you grow professionally? Are you a better person today than you were yesterday?

• remember that at the end of the day it’s not what you say or what you do, but how you make people feel that matters the most.

• must never settle for “good enough,” because good is the enemy of great,

• Ask yourself: How can you do what you’re doing more efficiently?

• There’s never one way to do things, but an incredible amount of ways to get things done.

• now know that any issue arising in life is a welcome challenge where I can learn and grow.

• Ask yourself: Are you passionate about the company? Are you passionate about your work? Do you love what you do and who you work with? Are you happy here? Are you inspired? Do you believe in what we are doing and where we are going? Is this the place for you?

• no matter what happens, we should always be respectful of

• you never know when something you perceive as a negative will ultimately turn out to be a good thing.

• No matter what your past has been, you have a spotless future.

• “We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.”

55 Superhuman by Habit: A Guide to Becoming the Best Possible Version of Yourself, One Tiny Habit at a Time (by Tynan)

• Focusing on results, especially short term results, is an excellent way to add stress to your life, which is an excellent way to quit a habit associated with that stress, thus ensuring no long term results are ever achieved. Track your adherence to process, not your results.

56 Bang: The Pickup Bible That Helps You Get More Lays (by V, Roosh)

• let’s take a look at the average beta male. His number one defining trait is a fear of going after what he desires. He doesn’t pursue what he wants because he doesn’t think he’s capable of getting it. He worries about other people’s needs before his own.

• The alpha male doesn’t care about what other people think of him.

• The alpha male doesn’t make apologies for being a man who has sexual needs.

• As a sexual being, he expects women to be sexual as well.

• The alpha male has high expectations of women. He doesn’t do nice things for them without expecting something in return.

• He makes it clear that he’s not on this Earth to service her with free alcohol or food. Everything she gets from him must be earned.

• the alpha male is always willing to walk away.

• The willingness to walk away, above all other factors, does more to tell a woman of your high value than any amount of money can.

• that’s what the game is about—getting what you want the way you want, without having to sacrifice your beliefs or values.

• If you master only one skill, it should be the approach.

• You try more, you get more—there’s no secret to it.

• A man who doesn’t get rejected is one who isn’t reaching his true potential.

• avoid letting your historical average dictate your behavior.

57 Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy Book 1) (by VanderMeer, Jeff)

• when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you.

• The dirt and grit of a city, the unending wakefulness of it, the crowdedness, the constant light obscuring the stars, the omnipresent gasoline fumes, the thousand ways it presaged our destruction … none of these things appealed to me.

• some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.

58 Mindfulness in Plain English (by Venerable H. Gunaratana Mahathera)

• Learning to look at each second as if it were the first and only second in the universe is most essential in Vipassana meditation.

• There are three integral factors in Buddhist meditation — morality, concentration and wisdom.

• The object of Vipassana practice is to learn to pay attention.

• Feeling is one of the seven universal mental factors. The other six are contact, perception, mental formations, concentration, life force, and awareness.

• This goal has five elements to it: Purification of mind, overcoming sorrow and lamentation, overcoming pain and grief, treading the right path leading to attainment of eternal peace, and attaining happiness by following that path.

• do not change your original position, no matter how painful it is.

• There is a difference between being aware of a thought and thinking a thought.

• Somewhere in this process, you will come face-to-face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy. Your mind is a shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill, utterly out of control and hopeless.

• “I am about to tread the very path that has been walked by the Buddha and by his great and holy disciples. An indolent person cannot follow that path. May my energy prevail. May I succeed.”

• When any mental state arises strongly enough to distract you from the object of meditation, switch your attention to the distraction briefly. Make the distraction a temporary object of meditation.

• The purpose of meditation is not to concentrate on the breath, without interruption, forever. That by itself would be a useless goal.

• the meditator observes experiences very much like a scientist observing an object under the microscope without any preconceived notions, only to see the object exactly as it is. In the same way the meditator notices impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and selflessness.

• Mindfulness is participatory observation. The meditator is both participant and observer at one and the same time.

• Fully developed Mindfulness is a state of total non-attachment and utter absence of clinging to anything in the world.

• If your meditation isn’t helping you to cope with everyday conflicts and struggles, then it is shallow. If your day-to-day emotional reactions are not becoming clearer and easier to manage, then you are wasting your time.

59 Travels with Willie: Adventure Cyclist (by Weir, Willie)

• In our consumer culture, time is undervalued.

• Every one of them had enough money to travel the world several times over, but most were bankrupt of free time.

• Isn’t it ironic that we can spend hundreds of hours in front of a computer screen researching and dreaming of traveling in a distant land, then the first thing we do when we arrive there is to seek out a computer screen, only to stare at news and photos of the place we’ve just left?

• It’s hard to resist the urge to plug into the digital umbilical cord when it is available 24/7.

• “Caution keeps you aware. Fear keeps you away.”

• So plan a journey, listen to only those who have gone before you, be cautious, and have the adventure of a lifetime.

• Adventure is rarely determined by the destination you choose, but by the method of travel and route you take to get there.

• Thailand has the three ingredients that make any country a pleasure in which to travel: friendly people, beautiful scenery, and incredible food.

• “Travel now. Get on your dumpy, used bike and go somewhere, anywhere. Those people who tell you that it doesn’t get easier? They’re right.”

• “Travel now. Get on your dumpy, used bike and go somewhere, anywhere. Those people who tell you that it doesn’t get easier? They’re right.” “Go before you have debts and mortgages and kids and a career. Go. The gravitational pull of home will never be lighter.”

• “Travel now. Get on your dumpy, used bike and go somewhere, anywhere. Those people who tell you that it doesn’t get easier? They’re right.” “Go before you have debts and mortgages and kids and a career. Go. The gravitational pull of home will never be lighter.”

• “Travel now. Get on your dumpy, used bike and go somewhere, anywhere. Those people who tell you that it doesn’t get easier? They’re right.” “Go before you have debts and mortgages and kids and a career. Go. The gravitational pull of home will never be lighter.” A few of them get it. But most get a car and a wallet full of credit cards.

• “Travel is worth nothing unless you return home a better person for it.”