The first thing you realize when you make a bunch of money is that you’re still the same person.

We spend so much time in relationships. The average relationship probably lasts a couple years. We spend very little time deciding which relationship to get into. We spend so much time in a job, but we spend so little time deciding which job to get into. Choosing what city to live in can almost completely determine the trajectory of your life, but we spend so little time trying to figure out what city to live in.

I was very selfish with my time and I probably had the most productive year of my life.

Time is the ultimate currency and I should have been more tight fisted with it.

I think most of life is about searching, it’s not about doing. People spend too much time doing and not enough time thinking about what they should be doing.

Say no to more things to protect your time because it’s very precious. On your dying day, you will give everything you have for another day.

You literally have to free up your time because the world will assault you with its own agendas. You have to say no to everything and free up your time so you can solve the important problems.

Ruminating on the past is largely a waste of time. It’s illusory.

Schedules are so overrated. I wish I could have a completely unscheduled life; that would be something nice to shoot for.

My only schedule is my daily morning workout, and even that I’m not perfect on it, but other than that I try to be as unscheduled as possible because I want to be free.

I think it’s really worth – whenever you can in life, if you have the choice – optimizing for independence rather than optimizing for pay.

What you want to do in life is, you want to be in control of your time, so you want to get into a leveraged job, and then you want to get into one where you control your own time and you’re tracked on the outputs.

If they pay you what you’re worth, then you can get your time back, and if you get your time back, then you can be hyperefficient

I have no time for short-term things: dinners with people I won’t see again, tedious ceremonies to please tedious people, traveling to places that I wouldn’t go to on vacation.

Be ruthless about not scheduling things. You will have to disappoint people, but when they want your time, that’s their problem, not yours.

I don’t have time is just saying it’s not a priority

Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.

The path to success is to take massive, determined action.

The secret of my success is a two word answer: Know people.

Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.

It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.

The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.

The best way to read is to: Pick up a lot of books. Start reading them all. Put down any book instantly that doesn’t grab you. And just keep going until you find something that speaks to you.

The real education begins in the library, it begins with books. If you can learn to like to read, you never need to go to school.

At any given time I’m reading somewhere between ten and 20 books. I’m flipping through them. If the book is getting a little boring, I’ll skip ahead.

Sometimes I’ll start reading a book in the middle because some paragraph caught my eye and I’ll just continue from there.

I feel no obligation whatsoever to finish the book. If at some point I decide the book is boring, or if it’s got pieces of it that are incorrect so now I can’t trust the rest of the information in there, I just delete it.

Sometimes people wrap long books around simple ideas.

I no longer track books read or even care about books read. It’s about understanding concepts.

Read what you love until you love to read.

Free education is abundant, all over the Internet. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce. Cultivate that desire by reading what you want.

The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower.

Politics is the exercise of power without merit.

A good conference is a vacation that you take with really smart friends.

We are going from bread and circuses to cannabis and video games to psychedelics and VR.

If you can’t delete an email without flinching or responding, you won’t scale.

Politics is sports writ large — pick a side, rally the tribe, exchange stories confirming bias, hurl insults and threats at the other side.

It is the mark of a charlatan to explain a simple concept in a complex way.

On meditation: It’s self-therapy. Instead of paying a therapist to sit there and listen to you, you’re listening to yourself.

We’re basically monkeys on a small rock orbiting a small backwards star in a huge galaxy, which is in an absolutely staggeringly gigantic universe, which itself may be part of a gigantic multiverse.

A vacation is a very expensive way to schedule the time to read a book in peace.

Given that the main function of universities these days is filtering and signaling, the best move is to get admitted to Stanford and then drop out.

People who try to look smart by pointing out obvious exceptions actually signal the opposite.

Develop ‘strategic incompetence’ – people won’t ask you to do things you hate to do, if you’re bad at them.

Twitter is television for intellectuals.

A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought — they must be earned.

Less fear, more love

The way to retire is actually to find the thing that you know how to do better than anybody. And you know how to do it better than anybody because you love to do it.

If you don’t love yourself, who will?

True, unconditional love, is the province of parents and saints.