If you’re going to pick 3 cards in the hand you’re dealt, take intelligence, drive, and most importantly, emotional self-discipline.

Our only security is our ability to change.

Change your thoughts and you change your world.

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.

No map is possible because life goes on changing.

A personal metric: how much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of interest?

Stop caring about the impact and just be the best version of you possible – then you’ll naturally have an impact. 

I think happiness is a skill, nutrition is a skill, diet is a skill, investing is a skill, self awareness is a skill. And skills get built up over decades with feedback loops and you just have to constantly keep working on it.

There’s no certainty in life. You can put in the hours, you can put in the time, but you can’t really expect the outcome.

You have to be pretty ruthless about saying no to things, about turning people down, and about leaving room in your life for serendipity.

If you don’t make time for people when they’re requesting time for you, yes it’s a little painful, it’s a little socially awkward, but the people aren’t going to disrespect you. If anything they want to hang out with you even more, because they realize you’re very discriminating with your time.

On his morning routines: 1 hour meditation + 1 hour workout/yoga.

It’s easier to change yourself than to change the world.

We’re genetically wired to be pessimists, but modern society is far, far safer.

It made sense to be pessimistic in the past, but it makes sense to be an optimist today.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

Change is not merely necessary to life – it is life.

We just play games in life. You grow up, you’re playing the school game, you’re playing the social game. Then you’re playing the money game; then you’re playing the status game. These games just have longer and longer and longer-lived horizons. At some point, at least I believe that these are all just games. There are games where the outcome really stops mattering once you see through a game.

Your closest friends are the ones you can have a relationship with about nothing.

Everything you’re a winner at now in your life, you were a once a loser at.

I wish I had done all of the same things but with less emotion and less anger.

I don’t think life is that hard. I think we make it hard.

Knowledge workers train, sprint, rest, and re-assess. Inspiration is perishable – act on it immediately. Be impatient with actions but patient with results.

Specific knowledge can’t be taught, but can be learned.

Giving your kids everything prevents them from finding themselves.

If you’re struggling through a subject, unless you need it for graduation, drop it. Go learn something that you want to learn.

Basically the library was my after school center.

If you want to make enemies, try to change something.

You affect your subconscious mind by verbal repetition.

When you blame others, you give up your power to change.

Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.

I don’t [try to stay focused]. I follow my interest.

The only way to truly learn something is by doing it. Yes, listen to guidance. But don’t wait.

On learning anything (happiness, losing weight, etc.): You decide it’s important to you. You prioritize it above everything else. You read everything on the topic.

If you learn how to learn, it’s the ultimate meta skill and I believe you can learn how to be healthy, you can learn how to be fit, you can learn how to be happy, you can learn how to have good relationships, you can learn how to be successful.

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.

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.