If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do.

If I have 10 important things to do in a day, it’s 100% certain nothing important will get done that day.

The problem with New Year’s resolutions – and resolutions to ‘get in better shape’ in general, which are very amorphous – is that people try to adopt too many behavioral changes at once. It doesn’t work. I don’t care if you’re a world-class CEO – you’ll quit.

Could it be that everything is fine and complete as is?

The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is – here’s the clincher – boredom.

Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.

I’m often asked how I define “success.” It’s an overused term, but I fundamentally view this elusive beast as a combination of two things – achievement and appreciation.

On the Jar Of Awesome: There is a mason jar on my kitchen counter with JAR OF AWESOME in glitter letters on the side. Anything something really cool happens in a day, something that made me excited or joyful, doctor’s orders are to write it down on a slip of paper and put it in this mason jar.

On the Jar Of Awesome: When something great happens, you think you’ll remember it 3 months later, but you won’t.

On the Jar Of Awesome: Cultivate the habtis of putting something in every day. Can’t think of anything? “I didn’t die today!” is a reliable winner.

The key to not feeling rushed is remembering that lack of time is actually lack of priorities.

I leaned against the wall and slid down until I was sitting on the floor. I closed my eyes, smiled, and took a deep breath. Things were about to change. Everything was about to change.

If you don’t regularly appreciate the small wins, you will never appreciate the big wins. They’ll all fall through your fingers like sand as you obsess on the next week, the next to-do, the next thing to fix.

Friction points and single points of failure happen in any given day potentially, so think in a concise, intelligent way. Out of five items to do, which one would make you satisfied with your entire day?

The question no one really seemed to be answering was: ‘Why do it all in the first place? What’s the pot of gold that justifies spending the best years of you life hoping for happiness in the last?’.

Look for the good, practice finding the good, and you’ll see it more often.

For anything approaching happiness, you have to want what you already have.

Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask. 

I’ve had a life full of doubts… mostly for no good reason.

Life would be boring if we all followed exactly the same rules.

The best results I have had in my life; the most enjoyable times, have all come from asking the simple question: What is the worst that could happen?

The 80-hour-per-week, 500 000$-per-year investment banker is less “powerful” than the employed New Rich who works 1/4 the hours for 40 000$, but has complete freedom of when, where, and how to live.

You are the author of your own life, and it’s never too late to replace the stories you tell yourself and the world.

Most of the time, “What should I do with my life?” is a terrible question.

I believe that life exists to be enjoyed, and that the most important thing is to feel good about yourself.

To enjoy life, you don’t need fancy nonsense, but you do need to control your time and realize that most things just aren’t as serious as you make them out to be.

To feel more at peace and more successful, you don’t need genius-level brain power, access to some secret society, or to his a moving target of “just” and additional X dollars. Those are all distractions.

If you make yourself laugh every once in a while, at least you will have fun. And that is perhaps the best strategy of all.

If you want confusion and heartache, ask vague questions. If you want uncommon clarity and results, ask uncommonly clear questions.

Service isn’t limited to saving lives or the environment. It can also improve life. If you are a musician and put a smile on the faces of thousands or millions, I view that as service. If you are a mentor and change the life of one child for the better, the world has been improved.

To dramitically change your life, you don’t need to run a 100-mile race, get a PhD, or completely reinvest yourself. It’s the small things, done consistently, that are the big things.

Does your life have a purpose? Are you contributing anything useful to this world, or just shuffling papers, banging on a keyboard, and coming home to a drunken existence on the weekends?

If we’re serious all the time, we’ll wear out before we get the truly serious stuff done.

This is something that is – being true to oneself – I think that most people struggle with. 

To have an uncommon lifestyle you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decisions, both for yourself and for others.

The tricky thing about life is, on the one hand having the courage to enter into things that are unfamiliar, but also having the wisdom to stop exploring when you’ve found something worth sticking around for. That is true of a place, of a person, of a vocation. Balancing those two things—the courage of exploring and the commitment to staying – and getting the ratio right is very hard. I think my 70-year-old self would say: ‘Be careful that you don’t err on one side or the other, because you have an ill-conceived idea of who you are.

For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect.

If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way.

Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.

It’s far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor.

To the pregnant void of infinite possibilities, only possible with a lack of obligation, or at least, no compulsive reactivity. Perhaps this is only possible with the negative space to – as Kurt Vonnegut put it – “fart around”? To do things for the hell of it? For no damn good reason at all?

You don’t need to go through life huffing and puffing, straining and red-faced. You can get 95% of the results you want by calmly putting one foot in front of the other.

For all their bitching about what’s holding them back, most people have a lot of trouble coming up with the defined dreams they’re being held from.

Often, all that stands between you and what you want is a better set of questions.

A large guaranteed decrease in present quality of life doesn’t justify a large speculative return.

By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable. It’s the perfect example of having your cake and eating it, too.

Once your life shifts from pitching outbound to defending against inbound, however, you have to ruthlessly say “no” as your default. Instead of throwing spears, you’re holding the shield.

The concept of lifestyle design as a replacement for multi-staged career planning is sound.

Mini-retirements are wonderful, but I’m not going to spend my entire life on the sidelines.

The major fears of modern man could be boiled down to two things: too much e-mail and getting fat.