Nobody wants to make me a rich man. In fact, most people want to make me a very poor man. I can guarantee some people fantasize at night about how poor they can make me.

You're the average of the five people you spend your time with.

Don't sweat it if you are stuck in the corporate job right now. But begin to plan ahead. I know from much personal experience that it takes 1-3 years to transition from total scratch to making a living from home in any career you want.

I want every idea I have to make me money. I want every post I write to have 10,000 Facebook likes. I want every talk I give to have people laughing at all the right jokes. I want everyone to like me all the time.

Read every book, blog, website, whatever, about what you want to be an expert in.

I'm a big believer in minimalism. Not materialist minimalism, although that's part of it, but time and energy minimalism. The body is given only so much energy a day.

The people who don't know personal finance have TV shows about it.

The reality is: when you're slouched over, not only are you not using the full potential of your brain, but you look untrustworthy.

Branding jails corporate America, but honesty sets entrepreneurs free.

I saw 'Star Wars' when I was seven years old, and it changed my life.

We all have faith in something: usually a mixture of some personal beliefs with modern science. I am not like that. Mostly I just believe in what personally has worked for me.

How great is it to just rest and be happy and not move when you don't have to.

In every business I had ever started, even ones that had totally failed, I had kept good relations with the investors.

Every successful business, even Google, Facebook, Twitter, started with a combination of manual improvements and friends of the founders using the site.

Don't forget: when you start a website, it's not yet a trusted site. So you have to bring people from a trusted site to your site to build up the trust in your site.

I've had to change careers several times. Sometimes because my interests changed. Sometimes because all bridges have been burned beyond recognition, sometimes because I desperately needed money. And sometimes just because I hated everyone in my old career or they hated me.

Do what you do with love, and success is a natural symptom.

Poor speakers create an artificial divide between themselves and the audience. They feel they need to do this in order to establish their own credibility.

Ultimately, the best speakers are the ones who have put 10,000 hours into listening.

Honesty is about the scars. It's about the blemishes. But it's more than just bragging about failure, which could be a form of ego. It's about truly helping people.

I'm invested in about 13 private companies. I've advised probably another 50 private companies.

You'll have to hire people to expand your business. But it's a good discipline to really question if you need each and every hire.

Don't buy into the 20-hours-a-day entrepreneur myth. You need to sleep 8 hours a day to have a focused mind.

Whenever things are good, I always worry about what could go wrong.

You can't make money without selling something real. You can't make something real without first imagination manifesting itself in your head. You can't have imagination without surrendering yourself to an idea that you want to create something of value to other human beings.

Become a beacon of enhancement, and then, when the night is gray, all of the boats will move towards you, bringing their bountiful riches.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, an employee, a student, a homemaker, a writer, it's time to start forgetting about all the ways the world has promised you safety and comfort.

If you introduce person A to person B, and then person B is able to solve a pain point in his life, then you just made a good connection.

My feeling, based on my own experience, is that aiming for grandiosity is the fastest route to failure.

I made so many mistakes in my first successful business I'm almost embarrassed to recount them.

When I give away a book for free, it gets my name out there. That has lifelong value for me that goes way beyond the few dollars I could maybe charge.

You can only make money doing what you love.

I love being honest and intimate with people. I love building community. I love emailing with readers.

Mistakes I've made in the past make me afraid to try new things in the future. I want to be perfect.

I can tell you this: Everything in my life that I am happy about it is the product of a huge mistake.

My grandfather was an illegal immigrant for the 60 or so years he was in the United States. I had another great-great-grandmother on my mom's side who snuck in in a suitcase.

America is a country of fighters. People who fought their way in and then continued fighting.

I keep track of my blog stats, Facebook subs, my Amazon rank, Twitter followers, Facebook likes per posts, my chess ranking. I get stressed when they all don't go up.

It's hard to know which stars in the sky will turn into black holes. And which ones will open up worm holes into entire new universes.

Read every sentence you write out loud. If it sounds boring, kill it.

A lot of times, people send me emails, and then I forget about them, or I never respond to them, or I respond to them weeks later.

Help is a conversation. If one side talks too much, the other side will get bored. So make sure you help back when you can.

When I was 22, I was thrown out of graduate school and then fired from three jobs in a row at higher and higher salaries where I saved nothing.

Buying coffee on the street instead of in a Starbucks is the poor man's way to get rich. In other words, you will never get rich by scratching out ten cents from your dollar.

Being a leader doesn't mean you are the guy who runs things.

Being a leader doesn't mean you created something or you did something great in the past or some other person has given you any kind of authority.

I always imagine a good leader is surrounded by people who call their mothers at the end of the day and tell them, 'Mom, you can't believe what I did today. Let me tell you about it.'

People unconsciously know when you are not listening to them. Then they say 'No' to you.

You can say no to people who make you feel bad about yourself. To people who backstab you or make you feel anxious in any way.

Life is better when your sinuses are clean, when your arteries are clean, and when your digestive tract is clean.