The first rule of handling conflict is don’t hang around people who are constantly engaging in conflict.

Debate rather than dictate.

Signaling virtue is a vice.

Anything deep is interesting.

Guard your time. Forget the money.

Eventually you will get what you deserve.

Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being.

Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.

Let us train our minds to desire what the situation demands.

Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

The firm, the enduring, the simple, and the modest are near to virtue.

Busy is the death of productivity.

Desire is just fear by another name.

To be honest, speak without identity.

The heart decides, the head rationalizes.

No matter how high your bar is, raise it.

Spend your time doing only what you can uniquely do.

Ideally you want to end up specializing in being you.

No one in the world is going to beat you at being you.

Good entrepreneurs don’t fail because they stay at it.

Ego is false confidence, self-respect is true confidence.

Life is good when we think it’s good. Life is bad when we don’t think.

Drop all your scientific attitudes. Become a little more fluid, more melting, more merging.

Instead of asking ‘what do I want from life?’, a more powerful question is, ‘what does life want from me?’

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

To a tree, there is no right or wrong. There is no good or bad.

Only through suffering do you have change and self-improvement.

Art is just creativity, it’s just anything done for its own sake.

I want to see truth. I want to see the world the way it is. Not through my filters. Not through my desires. Not through the way that other people want me to see it. And I want to accept it the way it is.

Today in society you get rewarded for creative work, for creating something brand new that society didn’t even know that it wanted that it doesn’t yet know how to get, other than through you.

The best way to prepare for the future 20 years is find something you love to do, to have a shot at being one of the best people in the world at it. Build an independent brand around it, with your name, not a company’s name or other people’s names around it. Try to make a creative work, so you’ll stay interesting, stay ahead of the game.

Figure out what you’re good at and start helping other people with it; give it away. Pay it forward. Karma sort of works because people are very consistent. On a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project.

A contrarian isn’t one who always objects – that’s a conformist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently, from the ground up, and resists pressure to conform.

Asymmetric opportunities: Invest in startups. Start a company. Create a book, podcast, video. Create a (software) product. Go on many first dates. Go to a cocktail party. Read a Lindy book. Move to a big city. Buy Bitcoin. Tweet.

Once you’ve truly controlled your own fate, for better or for worse, you’ll never let anyone else tell you what to do.

There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.

No one can compete with you if you love to do it. Be authentic and then figure out how to map that to what society actually wants, apply some leverage, put your name on it so you take the risks but you gain the rewards, have ownership and equity in what you do, and then just crank it out.

Being a founder is brutally difficult. It takes a long time and in the long run, the people who succeed are just the ones who persevere.

On who he considers successful: to me the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don’t even play the game; who rise above it. Those are the people who have such internal mental and self control and self awareness that they need nothing from anybody else.

No one can compete with you on being you, no one can compete with me on being me, so when I think about what my profession, what my job, what my work is, it’s just being me.

You’re meant to do something. You’re not just meant to lie there in the sand and meditate all day long. You should self-actualize. You should do what you are meant to do.

The best way, perhaps the only way, to change others is to become an example.

If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it’s a distraction. Keep looking.

‘Consensus’ is just another way of saying ‘average’.

Guard your time. It’s all you have.

As long as you can keep taking shots on goal, and you keep getting back up, eventually you’ll get through. Just stick at it.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.