When everything and everyone is failing, what is the cost of a little experiment outside of the norm? Most often, nothing.

Greatness is setting ambitious goals that your former self would have thought impossible, and trying to get a little better every day.

When — despite your best efforts — you feel like you’re losing at the game of life, remember: Even the best of the best feel this way sometimes.

Pure hell forces action, but anything less can be endured with enough clever rationalization.

Learn from your mistakes until you succeed. It’s that simple.

When I’m in the pit of despair, I recall what iconic writer Kurt Vonnegut said about his process: “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”

Role models who push us to exceed our limits, physical training that removes our spare tires, and risks that expand our sphere of comfortable action are all examples of eustress—stress that is healthful and the stimulus for growth.

With routines, you don’t want your threshold for “success” to be checking 100% of the boxes. Look for 3/5 wins or 2/5 wins. Otherwise, the human inclination is self-sabotage with “Well, I miss A or B, so I failed today,” or “Now today is going to be harder” and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

On how to get over analysis paralysis: set deadlines for decisions (put them in your calendar or they aren’t real) and break large intimidating actions/projects into tiny mini-experiments that allow you to overcome fear of failure.

Sometimes it pays to model the outliers, not flatten them into averages. This isn’t limited to business.

Every time I find myself stressed out, it’s because I do things primarily driven by growth.

I encourage active skepticism – when people are being skeptical because they’re trying to identify the best course of action. They’re trying to identify the next step for themselves or other people.

I discourage passive skepticism, which is the armchair variety where people sit back and criticize without ever subjecting their theories or themselves to real field testing.

Rehearsing the worst case scenarios or negative visualization is a very powerful tool, which paradoxically allows you to become more relaxed and therefore, more response-able, i.e., able to chose your response if you get thrown a curveball question or if you flub and make a mistake in the middle of a live broadcast.

Anyone you have in your mind as an icon is an imperfect, flawed creature, just like all humans on the planet.

My goal is to learn things once and use them forever.

Much like you would train your body, you can train your mind.

To learn is to live. I see no other option. Once the learning curve flattens out, I get bored.

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

Focus on an obsession that makes you a bit weird.

Make it fun for you and you will find an audience.

It’s never too late to begin a new chapter, add a surprise twist, or change genres entirely.

Listen to other experiences, and start forming questions that you can journal.

If you sit down in a negative state, you will be thinking first and foremost of problems, and not solutions.

The question, ‘what is the worst thing that can happen?’ is a very powerful question.

If someone’s criticism is completely unfounded on data, then I don’t want to hear it. It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Bloggers are uniquely positioned to create bestsellers.

It has never been easier to create content self-published, but it has never been harder to get the attention you want, or need, to really put something into orbit.

I have built my blog traffic and book buzz using mostly offline activities, and I recommend others do the same.

The top stories all polarize people. Do not try to appeal to everyone. Instead, take a strong stance and polarize people: make some love you and some hate you.

If you make it threaten people’s 3 Bs — behavior, belief, or belongings — you get a huge virus-like dispersion.

Success, however you define it, is achievable if you collect the right field-tested beliefs and habits.

You don’t “succeed” because you have no weaknesses; you succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them.

Sometimes, peculiar routines are the key to sanity and productivity.

One of my greatest joys in life is trying things that haven’t been done before.

I specialize in pattern recognition and accelerated learning. So taking a subject that seems very complex or that can be presented in a very complex way, and distilling it down into the fewest number of moving pieces that really matter.

My art, if I have an art, is deconstructing things that really scare the living hell out of me.

The goal is not only the eliminate the bad, which does nothing more than leave you with a vacuum, but to pursue and experience the best in the world.

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms.

Flavor is, counterintuitively, less than 10% taste and more than 90% smell.

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

Persistence overshadows even talent as the most valuable resource shaping the quality of life

Nothing in life has any meaning except the meaning we give it.

The only reasons we don’t have what we want in life are the reasons we create why we can’t have them.

Goals are like magnets. They’ll attract the things that make them come true.

Success is buried on the other side of rejection.

Where focus goes, energy flows.

Create a vision and never let the environment, other people’s beliefs, or the limits of what has been done in the past shape your decisions.

One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular

Identify your problems, but give your power and energy to solutions.