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.

True freedom is much more than having enough income and time to do what you want. 

Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective – doing less – is the path of the productive.

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.

What you do is infinitely more important that how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but is useless unless applied to the right things.

I think time management as a label encourages people to view each 24-hour period as a slot in which they should pack as much as possible.

People, even good people, will unknowingly abuse your time to the extent that you let them. Set good rules for all involved to minimize back-and-forth and meaningless communication.

Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is not laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.”

There are certain things I will automate, but when it comes to quality control, I want to keep a very close eye.

The great “deloading” phase. This is what I’m experiencing this afternoon, and it makes a Tuesday feel like a lazy Sunday morning. This is when the muse is most likely to visit. I need to get back to the slack.

I miss writing, creating, and working on bigger projects. YES to that means NO to any games of whack-a-mole.

Large, uninterrupted block of time — 3-5 hours minimum — create the space needed to find and connect the dots. And one block per week isn’t enough.

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.

The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus.

Indiscriminate action is a form of laziness.

The first thing I would do for anyone who’s trying to lose body fat, for instance, would be to remove foods from the house that he or she would consume during lapses of self-control.

Ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that symbolizes work ethic, or toughness, or some other virtue—but really, it’s a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect.

In practice, strictly making health #1 has real social and business ramifications. That’s a price I’ve realized I must be fine paying, or I could lose weeks or months to sickness or fatigue.

I would emphasize that by improving your physical machine, which includes the brain, you improve all of your performance, and the transfer is incredible to business.

Nothing breaks my heart more than seeing that person who’s struggling to lose weight who thinks that they need to run 20 miles a week. They have no desire to do it, their knees hurt, they hate it, and they’re not losing weight. And I’d like to say, ‘Well, I’ve got great news for you. You don’t ever need to run another step a day in your life, because there’s no value in that.’ “There is value in exercise, though, and I think that the most important type of exercise, especially in terms of bang for your buck, is going to be really high-intensity, heavy strength training. Strength training aids everything from glucose disposal and metabolic health to mitochondrial density and orthopedic stability. That last one might not mean much when you’re a 30-something young buck, but when you’re in your 70s, that’s the difference between a broken hip and a walk in the park.

Most losses or mistakes are really survivable.

Don’t get angry, don’t get even – focus on living well and that will eat at them more than anything you can do.

Information without emotion isn’t retained.

Though you can upgrade your brain domestically, traveling and relocating provides unique conditions that make progress much faster.

Learning is such an addiction and compulsion of mine that I rarely travel somewhere without deciding first how I’ll obsess on a specific skill.

It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.

Thinking is mostly just asking yourself questions and answering them.

I know nothing. I am a beginner. But I ask a lot of questions.

BrainQuicken was a real learning on the job MBA.

Language learning deserves special mention. It is, bar none, the best thing you can do to hone clear thinking.

Quite aside from the fact that it is impossible to understand a foreign culture without understanding its language, acquiring a new language transforms the human experience and makes you aware your own language: your own thoughts.

Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it.

For overcoming fear, I think that an exercise called “fear-setting” is extremely helpful.

Measure the cost of inaction, realize the unlikelihood and repairability of most missteps, and develop the most important habit of those who excel and enjoy doing so: action.

For years, I set goals, made resolutions to change direction, and nothing came of either. I was just as insecure and scared as the rest of the world.

Overanalysis has been my life story. It can be far worse than laziness, as overanalysis leads to the same lack of action but also self-loathing.

If the challenge we face doesn’t scare us, then it’s probably not that important.

If you want great mentors, you have to become a great mentee. If you want to lead, you have to first learn to follow.

Top academic institutions are wonderful, but there are unrecognized benefits to not coming out of one. Grads from top schools are funneled into high-income 80-hour-per-week jobs, and 15–30 years of soul-crushing work has been accepted as the default path. How do I know? I’ve been there.

The superheroes you have in your mind (idols, icons, titans, billionaires, etc.) are nearly all walking flaws who’ve maximized 1 or 2 strengths.

Here are a few books that have affected me or made me think differently in the last few years. None of them are directly related to business: Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach — this is an important book, originally recommended to me by a neuroscience PhD who benefited from it. The Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda. The Body Keeps The Score by Van Der Kolk.

Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear. I got into this habit by attempting to contact celebrities and famous businesspeople for advice.