When you’re memorizing something, it’s an indication that you don’t understand it. You should be able to re-derive anything on the spot and if you can’t, you don’t know it.

Knowledge is a skyscraper. You can take a shortcut with a fragile foundation of memorization, or build slowly upon a steel frame of understanding.

I use my tweets and other people’s tweets as maxims that help compress my own learnings and be able to recall them.

The overeducated are worse off than the undereducated, for they traded common sense for the illusion of knowledge.

It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.

I think learning should be about learning the basics in all the fields and learning them really well over and over.

If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it. But school is mainly about credentialing.

On his best parenting advice: Love them unconditionally, try not to say “no”, and always reward their innate curiosity.

Identify your strengths and apply them to what you care about. Iterate at the edge of knowledge. Building it will feel like play to you, but look like work to others.

Keeping your intellectual curiosity alive is really important. The only way that’s going to happen is if you learn what you love, if you read what you love, if you do what you love.

If I’m running a grade school curriculum for children, I would probably optimize happiness, nutrition, diet, exercise, “How do you build good habits?”, “How do you break bad habits?”, “How do you have good relationships?”, “How do you find your spouse?”, meditation, “How do you build basic skills, not memorize lots of facts?”, “What kinds of books should you read?”

Your most important skill isn’t even what you majored in or even what you studied, it’s just knowing how to learn.

What’s really important is to develop a love of learning. That is more important than anything else; it’s more important than what you learn. It’s more important than what school you go to, and it’s more important than what job you have.

I think every child has the love of learning. Children are learning machines. They stop learning either because their ego gets too big and thinks that it knows everything or that it thinks it doesn’t needs to know more. Or because society somehow fails them.

Knowing something about everything allows you to navigate life. But knowing everything about something can show you what depth has to offer. It also gives you a joy and appreciation for what life has to offer.

"Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future."

There’s a whole set of things we don’t even bother trying to teach. We don’t teach nutrition. We don’t teach cooking. We don’t teach how to be in happy, positive relationships. We don’t teach how to keep your body healthy and fit. We just say sports. We don’t teach happiness. We don’t teach meditation.

The bigger problem this generation will face is adult education, not child education

Instead of memorizing, understand the basics so you can derive answers.

To me happiness is not about positive thoughts. It’s not about negative thoughts. It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things. 

The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a skill that you develop and a choice that you make. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it.

I don’t plan. I’m not a planner. I prefer to live in the moment and be free and to flow and to be happy.

A lot of happiness is just being present.

Happiness is more about peace than it is about joy.

The best exercise is the one your enjoy doing every day.

I think true happiness comes out of peace. Peace comes out of many things, but it comes from fundamentally understanding yourself.

Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.

A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside of their control.

I don’t have a preconception of a perfect day, because if I did, then it would ruin the day that I was living.

As you get older, you just realize that there’s no happiness in material possessions.

I think a lot of us learn as we get older that happiness is internal.

Yoga cultivates Peace of Body. Meditation cultivates Peace of Mind.

Internal happiness is reward from being in flow. Create, meditate, love, play. Clears the mind and leaves us in peace.

Happiness is an internal trait that comes out of being peaceful and accepting of whatever is going on around you. It’s that sense that nothing is missing in this moment.

We are born with happiness, we are intrinsically happy creatures but we become unhappy because our egos create desire. The desire pulls us out of the moment. So something is missing right now then we chase that and we wonder why we are unhappy.

Success is the child of audacity.

The success driven mentality drives you to unhappiness. 

Every moment has to be complete in and of itself.

First time you saw a sunset, it was amazing. It was jaw-dropping. You forgot yourself.

The second time you saw it, it was cool. The hundredth time you see it, it’s nothing.

The thousandth time you’re seeing it, and someone shows you a sunset, you’re like, “Well, actually, I saw this one sunset in Mexico at this time that was really cool.” You’re not even there.

Happiness is that state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and your mind stops running into the future or running into the past to regret something or to plan something.

If you’re a peaceful person, anything you do will be a happy activity.

Happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future or the past, really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is, the way it is.

Caught in a funk? Use meditation, music, and exercise to reset your mood. Then choose a new path to commit emotional energy for rest of day.

To me, peace is happiness at rest and happiness is peace in motion. You can convert peace to happiness anytime you want.

The best revenge is massive success.

A goal without a plan is just a wish.

In today’s day and age, many people think you get peace by resolving all your external problems, but there are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up the idea of having problems.

In every moment, in everything that happens, you can look on the bright side of something. There are two ways of seeing almost everything.