High standards are contagious. Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they’ll quickly adapt. The opposite is also true. — Jeff Bezos

" Unless we know what stirs us, what provokes a longing deep in our belly, on what basis can we make decisions about how to lead our lives? Until we know what we deeply, truly want, we are at the mercy of externally defined obligations, which keep us docile and obedient." - Tiago Forte

“It is better to follow your own path, however imperfectly, than to follow someone else’s perfectly.” - Bhagavad-Gita

"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Stop crying. Start smiling. Keep building. - Sebastian Marshall

Art is the generous act of making things better by doing something that might not work. - Seth Godin

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” — Herbert Simon

My guess is that anything that looks like an increase in raw willpower is probably the result of streamlining your environment (nudges) your brain (habits) and your identity (values) to the point where you need less of it in the first place. - Richard Meadows

"Over the years, as I’ve gradually grown dumber relative to my peers through a combination of aging and making smarter friends, one of the main ways I’ve compensated has been through dialing up my agency, which I think of as something like “manifest determination to make things happen.”" - Cate Hall

"If you ask informed Filipinos why the street food is mediocre, they will tell you that Philippines lacks a “culture of excellence”. It seems that some kind of “culture of doing things really well” has very persistent and generalizable effects. South Korea and Japan have developed much more rapidly than many Asian countries, despite many others adopting relatively free “Washington Consensus”-style trade policies. Russia still has higher GDP per capita than Mexico despite Mexico’s economic policies having been much better than Russia’s for many, many decades at this point. How should we think about cultures of excellence?" - Morgan Housel

By specializing in something, you automatically get top-of-mind-status in whatever it is you do, and can command a lot higher fees, prices, etc. Plus, certain customers will naturally (and eagerly) gravitate towards you, where nobody else will be trusted or good enough (in their minds, at least) to get the job done. - Ben Settle

“There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit.” —Ronald Reagan

What advice would I love to hear from an all-knowing sage?

What’s great about this?

You won't be understood once you step off into the abyss. The more you do it, the more people won't understand. - Sebastian Marshall

Success-minded people have no trouble at all following proven instructions. We all would be happy to follow a map if the map came with a guarantee. There is no guarantee, though. There are no maps. They’ve all been taken, and their value is not what it used to be, because your competitors have maps, too. The opportunity lies in pursuing your curiosity instead. Curiosity is not allergic to failure. Curiosity drives us to the haunted house because the thrills lie in what we don’t expect, not in what’s safe. Curiosity can start us down the path to shipping, to bringing things to the world, to examining them, refining them, and repeating the process again (and again). - Seth Godin

"Smell brings back the most elusive and yet most visceral memories. The emotional memories we have almost no language for. " - Jason Wilson

“Way to stack the odds is just simply to build more. Creativity is a regenerative force. It’s like a muscle. The more you use it, the more you will get out of it. And I think that’s the misconception some people sit with, is that they kind of have to conserve this creative energy. Oh, I got to make sure that I have just the right idea at just the right time before I start building. Nonsense. Just start building. And you know what? Maybe this idea isn’t the right one, but in the process of building, your neurons will be firing at a greater frequency, and that will make it more likely that you will come up with that great idea.” - Jason Fried

It’s extremely difficult to find smart people willing to start useful projects. Because sometimes what you start doesn’t work. The fact that it doesn’t work every time should give you confidence, because it means you’re doing something that frightens others. - Seth Godin

"through the act of reading my words, the patterns that form your thoughts become an imitation of the patterns that once formed mine. And in that way I live again, through you." - Exhalation by Ted Chiang

“Technology happens because it is possible.” - Robert Oppenheimer

People love to hear about their symptoms so to speak. You know, they love to hear about other people who went through the challenges they’re going through now and how they got through it and you’re not doing them a disservice by telling them. You’re doing them a favor; I mean they want you to give them the solution. They want to know how you got out of it so they can too. - Ben Settle

Outcomes are what count; don’t let good process excuse bad results. - Sam Altman

What have I strongly wanted for the longest time?

Successful people don’t wish for success; they decide to pursue it. And to pursue it effectively, they need a system. Success always has a price, but the reality is that the price is negotiable. - Scott Adams

"We are not just our pains, not just our fears, and not just our thoughts. We are entire systems wired for pleasure, and we can learn how to say yes from the inside out.” - adrienne maree brown

“Thoreau wrote, "the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation." This is as true today as it was back then. How many men stand on a balcony and wonder what happened?... He wanted adventure and he got two weeks' vacation. He wanted a mission and he got a lawn that needs mowing. He wanted purpose and he got a cubicle. He wanted a mighty steed and he got a minivan. He wanted a castle and he got a mortgage. He wanted a battle to fight and he got televised sports. He wanted wisdom and he got talking heads on TV. He wanted treasure and he got endless debt. He wanted every part of his life to be wonderful, and here he is... standing on a balcony, in bleak, ruminating hesitation.” ― Zan Perrion, The Alabaster Girl

How many men stand on a balcony and wonder what happened? How many men cast blame? Why has the world not provided a man with what he wanted? He wanted adventure and he got two weeks’ vacation. He wanted a mission and he got a lawn that needs mowing. He wanted a purpose and he got a cubicle. He wanted a mighty steed and he got a minivan. He wanted a castle and he got a mortgage. He wanted a battle to fight and he got televised sports. He wanted wisdom and he got talking heads on TV. He wanted treasure and he got endless debt. He wanted every part of his life to be wonderful, and here he is… standing on a balcony, in bleak, ruminating hesitation. - Zan Perrion

Your marketing should be so valuable that your target market would pay you to receive it. While you may price it at no cost, there should be a genuine potential to turn it into a paid product in its own right. - Allan Dib

" In general, the best ad for one audience is the best ad for all audiences." - Samuel Brealey

"We all have the power to reach across the world through our networks, to make a difference with our technology, and thus the responsibility to do so." - Tiago Forte

Looking at a hundred examples of garden designers redoing the layout of a garden gives you a mental representation much richer than the descriptions in the garden books.

"Experts can rarely articulate the behaviors that allow them to perform at a high level. The knowledge is tacit. The explanations are post-hoc rationalizations; they do not produce the results."

If you really do think that your product is better, then you should do everything you can to take their money and prevent them from spending it on lesser quality or inferior products. - Michael Killen

Success is an inside job. Put yourself together, and your world falls into place. When you bring purpose to your life, know your priorities, and achieve high productivity on the priority that matters most every day, your life makes sense and the extraordinary becomes possible. - Gary Keller

Your partner’s purpose is not to be value-add forever. As your company grows, you will likely find people with far greater skills whom you will hire. That’s okay. Your co-founder’s purpose is to help you achieve success in your march to product-market fit. Once you get there and begin the blitzscaling process, be pleased if they continue to add value beyond that point. - Matt Mochary

“The highest form of creativity is found by improvising within a set of restrictions.” – Christopher Nolan

“As a society we like complex solutions because we think if something has more steps, involves processes, or costs more then it must be better.” - Obvious Adams

When McDonald's first started, they only offered hamburgers. When Amazon first started, they only offered books. The real reason most agencies can't scale is because every client is custom. - Frankie Fihn

“When you make 10x your target, 80 percent of your current clients and relationships become impediments.” - Benjamin Hardy

"A lot of the opportunities I got were just from being a familiar face." - Brendon Lemon

“The secret of persuasion is simply finding out what people want and then showing them how to get it.” It’s no more complicated than that, you don’t need any black hat dark arts stuff. You just need to find out what they want. Get in their world, talk to them about their problems and show them a solution to it. That’s really all it comes down to. - Ben Settle

"Most good ideas that end up blowing up, they cannot actually be analyzed rationally upfront because if they could, someone already would have. You would have gotten the rational market hypothesis already working it’s way through the obviously good ideas.” - Jason Fried

What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

“If you write a problem down clearly, and specifically, you have already solved half of it” - Kidlin’s Law

“Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions.” - Elizabeth King

It’s good to be optimistic in the general and skeptical in the specific. It’s very dangerous to be pessimistic in the general and optimistic in the specific. – Naval Ravikant

What would I do if I knew I couldnt fail?

Only 50% of our job is to build a great house (result). The other 50% is to proactively communicate every little step in building the house. - Frankie Fihn

"In my way of thinking, radical agency is about finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying or unpleasant. These don’t always surface in awareness to the point one is actually choosing -- often they live in a cloud of aversion that strategically obscures the tradeoff." - Cate Hall

I’ve had long debates about this with people, ask “How can you test your open rate, how can you test your click-thrus?” I don’t care about my open rates or click-thrus. I’m like the lone wolf in the wilderness when I say this, but I honestly think that if you want to test those things fine, use html. I test sales, if something brought on sales; I know it was a good email. If it didn’t, I probably don’t want to repeat what I did and the thing with plain text is it looks like a regular email. - Ben Settle

“Until we know we are wrong, being wrong feels exactly like being right.” – David McRaney

How can I reduce the downsides?

Authenticity is a piece of cake if you don’t mind alienating others and possibly being friendless. - Bill Plotkin

It’s really a simple process: You ask a great question, then you seek out a great answer. - Gary Keller

“We are living in perhaps the most complicated time in human history (the external world), and the happiest and most fulfilled people are those who uncomplicate it and seek simplicity.” - Obvious Adams

“There’s a way to do it better. Find it.” - Thomas Edison

What’s the opposite of what I usually do?

The opposite of nice is not to be mean, cruel, harsh, attacking, careless, heartless, or bad. The opposite of nice is power, boldness, and authenticity.- Aziz Gazipura

"Watching television is not a difficult task, so doing it for extended periods of time causes you to lose respect for yourself. The longer you sit around doing nothing, the less you respect yourself and the harder it will be to do tasks. " - Brendon Lemon

Everyone has a “good reason” for their actions and words, and a “real reason.” - Brendon Lemon

The future is here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

Ronald Reagan once told this story. There were two brothers. One was a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist. The other an incurable optimist. The parents thought both kids were so unrealistic that they talked to a psychiatrist, who came up with an idea for Christmas: Give the pessimistic boy a roomful of the most incredible toys and tell them they're all for him. Give the optimistic boy a roomful of horse manure and tell him that's all he's getting. That should cure them. The parents did it. When they checked on their boys, the pessimist with all the toys was crying. "Someone is going to take all of these away from me," he said. The optimistic kid with a roomful of horseshit had never been happier. He was digging frantically. "There's got to be a pony in here somewhere," he said. Optimists and pessimists don't respond to the information they see as much as they do an interpretation of what they want to see.

More time you spend in silence, more conditioning falls away More conditioning falls away, more you get in touch with your authentic mission More you get in touch with your mission, more you discover the note only you can play More you play this note, more rich(er) you get. - Tej Dosa

"When it comes to truth and justice there is no difference between the small and great problems. Whosoever fails to take small matters seriously in a spirit of truth cannot be trusted in greater affairs." —Albert Einstein

What choices I am making do enlarge me and which diminish me?

Instead of avoiding mistakes, how can I make more to learn faster?

“Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.” — Arthur Koestler

"If you have an idea but think someone has already done that," just remember there are 1,010 published biographies of Winston Churchill

Go after your Mission without apology, excuse, or hesitation. If you need guidance, pick your advisors carefully. (i.e. people who have achieved what you are trying to achieve.) And, ignore sheep: the naysayers and unsolicited feedback-givers who try to tell you to do things that are not in line with your goals and strategy. - Ben Settle

Jerry Seinfeld recently said: Audiences are now flocking to stand-up because it's something you can't fake. It's like platform diving. You could say you're a platform diver, but in two seconds we can see if you are or you aren't. That's what people like about stand-up. They can trust it. Everything else is fake. His advice: "Get good at something. That's it. Everything else is bullshit."

"I think there's a profound benefit of revisiting simple ideas and then saying, am I doing those? I don't look for new ideas as much as I look for ideas I've already heard that I haven't fully actualized yet." - Shaan Puri

“Only once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, can you make your highest contribution toward the things that really matter.” —Greg McKeown

Why focus on a question when what we really crave is an answer?” It’s simple. Answers come from questions, and the quality of any answer is directly determined by the quality of the question. Ask the wrong question, get the wrong answer. Ask the right question, get the right answer. Ask the most powerful question possible, and the answer can be life altering. - Gary Keller

"The only problem is that often the obvious doesn’t appear so obvious because people are searching for complexity. Too many leaders, managers, executives, and coaches think solving a problem should require a complicated solution.” - Obvious Adams

W. Clement Stone, who built an insurance empire worth hundreds of millions dollars, would make all his employees recite the phrase, “Do it now!” again and again at the start of each workday. Whenever you feel the tendency towards laziness taking over and you remember something you should be doing, stop and say out loud, “Do it now! Do it now! Do it now!”

Get comfortable sharing things about yourself and your life, perhaps outside of the realm of your niche but also more personal, in order to bring attention to the person behind the brand and foster meaningful connections with your audience. - Pat Flynn

Our species is 300,000 years old. For the first 290,000 years, we were foragers, subsisting in a way that’s still observable among the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the Sentinelese of the Andaman Islands. Even after Homo Sapiens embraced agriculture, progress was painfully slow. A person born in Sumer in 4,000BC would find the resources, work, and technology available in England at the time of the Norman Conquest or in the Aztec Empire at the time of Columbus quite familiar. Then, beginning in the 18th Century, many people’s standard of living skyrocketed. What brought about this dramatic improvement, and why? Marian Tupy

Jeff Bezos once said: Every startup company is unlikely to work. It's helpful to be in reality about that, but that doesn't mean you can't be optimistic. So you have to have this duality in your head. On the one hand, you know what the baseline statistics say about startup companies, and the other hand, you have to ignore all of that and just be 100% sure it's going to work, and you're doing both things at the same time. You're holding that contradiction in your head.

"We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works." - Douglas Adams

Working with great people is one of the best parts of life. - Sam Altman

“You will get all you want in life, if you help enough other people get what they want.” - Zig Ziglar

When I was at my happiest, what was I doing?

Leaders set the pace. People sometimes ask to get back to me in a week, and I ask, why not tomorrow or the next day? Start compressing cycle times. We can move so much quicker if we just change the mindset. Once the cadence changes, everybody moves quicker, and new energy and urgency will be everywhere. Good performers crave a culture of energy. - Frank Slootman

Initiative is scarce. Hence valuable. - Seth Godin

How can I blame no one, and see this as nobody’s fault?

Everyone filters what they say for reasons that range from social norms to embarrassment to the inability to articulate how they feel. Everything you know about people – everything everyone knows about people – comes from what someone was willing to say, or write down, or that was observed in action. What percentage of what goes through people’s heads falls into one of those categories? It has to be way less than 1%. If you could actually see what people were thinking – not just saying, but thinking – you’d find that the world is 100x wilder and more diverse than you assumed.

In his 1818 poem Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley writes about coming across the rubble of a destroyed, millennia-old monument in the middle of nowhere. Nothing about the monument can be identified, except the base, with an inscription that reads: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" No one will remember you in 100 years, and it's helpful to remember that when making big life decisions

“Ben Graham used to talk about Class 1 and Class 2 truths. Class 1 truths were absolutes. Class 2 truths became truths by conviction. If enough people thought a company’s stock was worth X, it became worth X until enough people thought otherwise.” – Buffett

“Life is not a problem to be solved. It’s a paradox to experience. You can believe one thing and also believe its opposite.” – Derek Sivers

People respond to energy in others. If you show how much you love a particular form of entertainment, it will be easier to persuade others to try it. Energy is contagious. People like how it feels. If you show enthusiasm, others will want to experience the same rush. - Scott Adams

What happens if I ignore it and do nothing?

One of the fundamental rules of marketing is that “a confused mind always says no.” - Russel Brunson

“The more I am around horse racing the more I think that the most underrated thing is the horse and that it is us trainers and jockeys and owners who are overrated.” – Leroy Jolley

"Admit to yourself that if you had to choose one or the other, the perfect intimate relationship or achieving your highest purpose in life, you would choose to succeed at your purpose." - David Deida

Who can help?

"Ads are not written to entertain. When they do, those entertainment seekers are little likely to be the people whom you want. That is one of the greatest advertising faults. Ad writers abandon their parts. They forget they are salesmen and try to be performers. Instead of sales, they seek applause. " - Claude Hopkins

Courage is a willingness to go forward in spite of not feeling confident. The opposite of courage isn’t fear; it’s cowardice. All of us experience fear, but we can respond to it in different ways. - Dan Sullivan

An experiment conducted by the economist Steven Levitt, for example, found that when people volunteered to put major life decisions such as whether to stay at a job or in a relationship up to the outcome of a coin flip, they were happier on average when they made a change.

“We are built with an almost infinite capacity to believe things because the beliefs are advantageous for us to hold, rather than because they are even remotely related to the truth.” – Dee Hock

"It’s tempting to think that once you’ve figured out an optimal behavior, it’s done. However, that’s actually the easy part. The hard part is making it effortless; minimizing the amount of time you need to spend thinking about them. This enables you to level up again." - Bryan Johnson

one of the biggest reasons why most businesses never lift off is because of an obsession with ‘little chores’. Little chores are things that keep you busy but don’t make you any money… or even worse, lose you money." - Sabri Suby

Former navy captain David Marquet says that in too many organizations, the people at the top have all the authority and none of the information, while the people on the front line have all the information and none of the authority.

"People tend to stick with what they’ve got. If you meet someone a little better than your wife or husband, it’s really not worth making the switch, what with attorneys’ fees and dividing up the house and kids." - The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

Most people take weak, half swings. They make a couple calls. send a couple emails. They rarely follow up or follow through. Don't strike out looking. Winners follow up. They double down on what works. They get on the next flight out. Intensity IS the strategy. - Shann Puri

Ultimately, we’re transferring enthusiasm about something which can help people. Then working out if we’re a good fit for each other – that, is selling - Michael Killen

Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, said the main motivation of his life was, “To be a good ancestor.”

Sales is working out if it makes sense for two parties to work together. - Michael Killen

“The best relationships are the ones that take the least effort.” “You make the other person happy being yourself. They make you happy by being themselves, everyone is honest, and no one is putting on an act that they can’t carry on for the next decade.” Naval

“Life will present you with people and circumstances to reveal where you're not free.” ~ Peter Crone

“you cannot create change that you yourself have not experienced.” You cannot create freedom for others through your own bondage. You cannot empower others through your own demoralization. You cannot create a fulfilling life for others by draining your own of its color. You are a seed, and that is not how seeds work." - adrienne maree brown

‘I don’t need a manager; my whole thing is about being fast and out of control!’ - from Accelerando by Charles Stross

Environment matters. A lot. You can get pretty big pushes from moving your environment around to suit your goals and life. - Sebastian Marshall

When asking for feedback about himself as a manager, Lachy Groom of Stripe asks, “What feedback are you afraid to give because you think it might hurt my feelings? Please tell me that.”

If you are hesitating about pitching or publishing a new piece of content, ask yourself why you are hesitant. Is it because you’re worried about what others will think? Is it because you’re worried about offending someone, maybe even the customer? We must move away from trying to satisfy everyone, by leading the least offensive and least impactful life possible. Towards helping the few, and risking offending the many. - Michael Killen

"What we really need is to elevate our commitment to pleasure. To no longer be satisfied with the cheap knockoffs of sugar, Netflix, and social media." - Tiago Forte

Advertisers know that the single best way to make an advertising campaign work is to run the ads a lot. By all means, be sure to reach every possible consumer. But it’s far more important to deliver advertising with frequency. Drill it home again and again. - Seth Godin

"People with intelligence will use it to fashion things both true and false, and will try to push through whatever they want with clever reasoning. This is injury from intelligence. Nothing you do will have effect if you do not use truth." —Hagakure

"It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent." - Charlie Munger

"Oftentimes we’ll want to do something, and we’ll give multiple reasons for it without thinking hard about them. If you can’t give a single reason that justifies doing something on its own, you should be very wary that you aren’t exercising sufficient intellectual discipline." - Joe Lonsdale

"In most knowledge industries, companies have nothing better than highly subjective measures (i.e., supervisors’ assessments) of worker productivity. In theory, it seems significant improvements should be possible. In the short term, is it possible to measure the productivity or efficacy of individual managers, software engineers, educators, scientists? How about teams, and what size of team? And can we do so without creating Goodhart’s Law problems?" - Morgan Housel

"In many contexts, the way to get good feedback is to give people a way to provide it anonymously. Anything else creates friction by layering on social dynamics. To get honest feedback, you want to make it as comfortable as possible for people to give it. " - Cate Hall

Things are never perfect. Acknowledge things as they are, always. Discontent and despair don't serve you. When bad feelings come over you, acknowledge them and dismiss them. Thinking, reflection, and self-control reigns. Keep building. Win. - Sebastian Marshall

Any niche is better than not deciding. We can always refine later. Decide now. Steer later. - Frankie Fihn

Some acts of imagination are best done in a crowded café sipping espresso, and some are helped by a cold beer on the couch. - Jonah Lehrer -

Chances are, you already know how to get more sales, you’re just looking to do it without upsetting people. - Michael Killen

"One study showed that the best managers in the world tend to have an extremely high tolerance for ambiguity. In other words, they are able to act boldly on partial and/or conflicting data. Many industries today have accelerated to such a rapid pace that by the time you have perfect data with which to make any decision, the opportunity is probably long gone. Where you have no data to fall back on, rely on your own personal experience and intuition. If a decision can be made right away, make the decision as soon as it comes up. If you can’t make a decision right away, set aside a time where you will consider the options and make the decision. Pour the bulk of your time into action, not deciding. The state of indecision is a major time waster. " - Steve Pavlina

"The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly." - Friedrich Nietzsche

10x is easier because there is less competition. Everyone is convinced they can’t accomplish big things, so everyone tries to do small things. Hence there is much tougher competition for small goals.

"The tools we use mean absolutely nothing if we don’t understand the market itself or how people buy and react to things – often in ways that seem totally irrational and non-sensical."

“A man is about as big as the things that make him angry.” ― Winston Churchill

"My marketing actions (and those of our tiny team) aren’t driven by provable attribution, but by a belief that conversions journeys are long, complex, and mostly unworthy of measurement investment."

"People can be coaxed but not driven. Whatever they do they do to please themselves. Many fewer mistakes would be made in advertising if these facts were never forgotten. " - Claude Kopkins

“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.” - Voltaire

The pattern I noticed was this: Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way. - Scott Adams

"Millions of people make risotto around the world every week. But, only 0.1% of them are searching Google for “best rice to make risotto.” If we wanna know how to influence those millions of people, we need to uncover ALL the sources that influence them. We need to know all the ways they’re nudged to buy one particular brand or kind of rice or another. We want the websites risotto searchers visit. We wanna know the social networks and social accounts that they use and follow. We want to know the podcasts and the Youtube channels and the subreddits that they visit."

“I’m just a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone else expects of me.” – Rollo May

Take some time, get outside or away from your normal workplace and environment, and craft a 3- to 10-page overview of exactly where you’ll be three years from now. - Austin Netzley

“You know how a dog will run around a room sniffing anything interesting? Sam Altman does that with technology, just as constantly and automatically,” - Paul Graham

Raise your standard. You do deserve it. What you want to say and share matters. It is interesting. Own it. Expect more. - Aziz Gazipura

“I've always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need x number of hours alone. Now, what that x represents I don't really know, whether it be two and seven-eights or seven and two-eights, but it's a substantial ratio.” ― Glenn Gould

"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." - Friedrich Nietzsche

“2x is trying to optimize the horse and buggy, getting millimeters and inches for your efforts. 10x is stepping back and inventing the car, like Henry Ford did, where you’re getting miles for the same efforts.” - Benjamin Hardy

"To catch your dream customers, you simply need to throw out enough hooks in an area where your dream customers are congregating." - Russel Brunson

"Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause." - Voltaire

“People are silently begging to be led” - Jay Abraham

Optimists make themselves an easy target for luck to find them. - Scott Adams

"The future doesn't just happen. We create it." - Joseph Jaworski

“What do you despise? By this are you truly known.” ― Frank Herbert, Dune

“I wanna see your best work. I’m not interested in your new work.” – Jerry Seinfeld

“A man who can make fun of himself is a man at peace with himself, completely and unapologetically being himself, never shy about being put on the spot, with nothing to prove and no fear of ridicule.” ― Zan Perrion, The Alabaster Girl

"Whatever the specifics of a man’s purpose, he must always refresh the transcendental element of his life through regular meditation and retreat. " - David Deida

A lion doesn’t lose sleep over the opinion of sheep.

“You can’t have insights about things you don’t know anything about.”

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” — Amos Tversky

Starting means you’re going to finish. If it doesn’t ship, you’ve failed. You haven’t poked the box if the box doesn’t realize it’s been poked. To merely start without finishing is just boasting, or stalling, or a waste of time. I have no patience at all for people who believe they are doing their best work but are hiding it from the market. If you don’t ship, you actually haven’t started anything at all. At some point, your work has to intersect with the market. At some point, you need feedback as to whether or not it worked. Otherwise, it’s merely a hobby. - Seth Godin

"The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts." - Marcus Aurelius

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” A. N. Whitehead

"It doesn’t matter if your product or service saves lives, transforms businesses, heals relationships, or just makes you outrageously wealthy. It cannot and will not make an ounce of difference to anyone until you decide to aggressively sell it." - Overdeliver by Brian Kurtz

“There is no strategic advantage of being the second lowest price leader in town. But there is a huge strategic advantage of being the most expensive” - Dan Kennedy

There are three parts to expanding your ability to see people more clearly: seeing your own reflection in the window, seeing the elephants in the room, and seeing the water.

“You can make a good wine anywhere. You just have to pick the right grape.”

"Progress is not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be." - Khalil Gibran

80% of your audience won’t even care. 99.9% of the entire population of the planet won’t care. They will be completely apathetic to your actions and intentions. But there will be a tiny segment of your audience who dislike you and even hate what you do and what you stand for. However, we must risk that in order to help the portion that does value your help and does want your input. - Michael Killen

"There's a well-known idea in real estate that you earn the highest ROI on the ugliest properties no one wants to own. The same is true for so many things in life: The unsexy work, where there's little competition, is where some of the biggest ideas are found." - Morgan Housel

"Being nice does not come out of goodness or high morals. It comes out of a fear of displeasing others and receiving their disapproval." - - Aziz Gazipura

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” - Thoreau

“The human race is governed by its imagination.” - Napoleon Bonaparte

Clients don’t actually want custom solutions. They just want results. Customization also creates more consistent client results. There are less moving pieces to figure out. - Frankie Fihn

“I believe no man was ever scolded out of his sins.” — William Cowper

How can I begin without waiting for anything?

"Life expectancy in Hong Kong is 84.23 years, more than five years longer than the US and the highest in the world. Hong Kong is not that wealthy (median household income is $38,000 USD); it’s somewhat polluted; people don’t obviously eat what seems like a healthy diet; and they don’t seem to exercise a great deal. What should we learn from this?" - Morgan Housel

Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and really think about how you’d answer it. •If you had all the confidence in the world, what would you do? •If you knew you could not fail, what would you try? •If all work paid the same, how would you most want to spend your day? •If you could design your ideal day, what would you do? How would you start the day? What activities would you fill it with? •How much time do you want to spend with your family? Your spouse? Your friends? By yourself? •How much money do you want to earn? - Aziz Gazipura

You can skip all the parties, all the conferences, all the press, all the tweets. Build a great product and get users and win. - Sam Altman

Never read a book that can be adequately summarized -Nassim Nicholas Taleb

James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life: ‘Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?’

Colonel Sanders started KFC with a single secret chicken recipe. The Adolph Coors Company grew 1,500 percent from 1947 to 1967 with only one product, made in a single brewery. Microprocessors generate the vast majority of Intel’s net revenue. And Starbucks? I think you know. - Gary Keller

The cure for loneliness is abundant hosting. Someone with charisma, resources and generosity can host a good party, make introductions, and lubricate the formation of social networks. The best way to meet the love of your life is at your friend's dinner party. Good culture is made from good f

Your work is too important to be left to how you feel today. - Seth Godin

What is my one top priority now?

"The next big thing is the one that makes the last big thing usable." - Blake Ross

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” — Anne Lamott

Even after growing my own email list to 200,000 people, I still make an effort to have conversations with at least ten new subscribers every single month. I’ll pick ten random people from my email list and send them a quick note asking if they’ll hop on a video call with me for fifteen minutes to talk about what they’re going through and how I can help. It is essential for me to stay connected to who the people in my audience are, how I can help them, and the language they use. - Pat Flynn

"Offering a powerful person something they can’t do is the best way to try to gain powerful alliances and ascend into hierarchies quickly. " - - Brendon Lemon

If you ask a billionaire the secret of his success, he might say it’s passion because that sounds like a sexy answer that is suitably humble. - Scott Adams

What is the one obvious thing that should exist I can put into the world??

“The way to figure out if the idea is any good for the market is to make it and ship it, and then you’ll find out.” - Jason Fried

“There is no deficit in human resources, the deficit is in human will.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

Me: Hey brain, I notice that I can see stuff. How does that work? Brain: Oh, there are things in the world, and then I peek out through my eyes and see them. Me: Cool, sounds good. Overcoming this expertly-maintained illusion requires a big push, which is perhaps why we didn't do it until a German guy stared directly into the sun.

It’s often only at this point, after we’ve stopped searching for the answer, that the answer often arrives. - Jonah Lehrer

‘You teach best what you most need to learn.’ - Richard Bach

Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas. - Scott Adams

"The most common form of despair is not being who you are." - Søren Kierkegaard

People who seem to have good luck are often the people who have a system that allows luck to find them. - Scott Adams

"In many other areas of life (spending money, taking drugs, having sex) the long-term effects of your actions are often the opposite’ of the short-term effects."- The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

“If you truly believe that what you have is useful and valuable to your clients, then you have a moral obligation to try to serve them in every way possible.” - Jay Abraham

"It is easier for a team to do a hard thing that really matters than to do an easy thing that doesn’t really matter; audacious ideas motivate people." - Sam Altman

“Every next level of your life will require a different you.” - Leonardo DiCaprio

Dan Kennedy, taught me this golden principle: a buyer is a buyer is a buyer. If someone is willing to buy from you once, they’ll continue to buy from you as long as you keep offering value. So as soon as someone fills out their name and email address and clicks the Submit button, they should land on a sales page that offers them your first premium offer. - Russel Brunson

“If you haven’t offended someone by noon each day, then you’re not marketing hard enough.” - Dan Kennedy

“Schopenhauer’s ideal is to be wealthy enough to have expansive free time and the intellectual capabilities to fill it with contemplation and activity in the service of mankind.” – Derren Brown

The fear of being disliked by people is, in my opinion, the number one reason why people fail to take action. - Michael Killen

When you name an idea of your own creation, you release that idea into the world with its own force of gravity. A name anchors an idea in its own place in a listener’s mind, and pulls other, related ideas and stories towards it. When this happens, the idea can grow and evolve organically in the minds of new readers, taking on a life of its own, shared between new people.

Taking money away from immoral salespeople who were delivering a substandard product? It's no different from teaching children to invest money and save money wisely, - Michael Killen

We must insert ourselves into people’s lives if we want to connect with them. Once you’ve had that initial conversation, if you want to pursue some sort of relationship, whether it’s for business, a friendship, or a date, you must be willing to reach out numerous times until there is a clear “no” signal. That means repeatedly inviting that person to connect. - Aziz Gazipura

“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.” — Alfred North Whitehead

A coach once described the rule of thirds for athletes: When training, one-third of your days should feel good, one-third should feel OK, and one-third should feel terrible. That's a good, balanced, routine. It's when you know you're pushing yourself, but not too hard. Taking risks, but not overdoing it. Have challenging goals, but not unrealistic ones.

‘Krishnamurti suddenly paused, leaned forward, and said, almost conspiratorially, “Do you want to know what my secret is?” Almost as though we were one body, we sat up … I could see people all around me lean forward, their ears straining, their mouths slowly opening in hushed anticipation.’ Then Krishnamurti ‘said in a soft, almost shy voice, “You see, I don’t mind what happens.”’

"As a general matter, a lot of oral knowledge in the world is still not readily available, and reflection on this fact might lead one in many interesting directions. One obvious application is helping people more readily understand the present state of affairs in different domains. If I want to know “how we’re doing” in, say, antiviral drug development, I could spend a few hours hunting for top researchers, email a few, and perhaps get on calls to obtain their candid assessments. Are we making good progress? What are the most important open problems? What’s holding things back? And so on. How can we make all of this knowledge publicly available across all fields?" - Morgan Housel

A genius is the one most like himself. - Thelonious Monk

Who could you pay to accelerate your progress?

“When you lie to someone, you’re telling yourself that they are more important than you.” - Brendon Lemon

Twenty years of research has shown me that there’s always a very small percentage of folks “buying now.” Three percent. I gave a lecture recently in front of 1,200 CEOs and said: “Let me prove this to you. How many people in the audience are in the market for a car right now?” About 30 people raised their hands. “How about tires?” A different 30 raised their hands. “How about furniture?” Thirty hands up. “How about home improvements?” Yet another 30 hands. “Office equipment?” You see my point. About 3 percent of potential buyers at any given time are buying now. Right now. That percentage drives all commerce. - Chet Holmes

“The road to hell is paved with the pursuit of volume. Volume leads to marginal products, marginal customers, and greatly increased managerial complexity . . . Hard work leads to low returns. Insight and doing what we want leads to high returns . . . Strive for excellence in few things, rather than good performance in many . . . It is not shortage of time that should worry us, but the tendency for the majority of time to be spent in low-quality ways . . . The 80/20 principle says that if we doubled our time on the top 20 percent of activities, we could work a two-day week and achieve 60 percent more than now.” — RICHARD KOCH

Be willing to make a very long-term commitment to what you’re doing. Most people aren’t, which is part of the reason they pick “easy” startups. In a world of compounding advantages where most people are operating on a 3 year timeframe and you’re operating on a 10 year timeframe, you’ll have a very large edge. - Sam Altman

"Something I’ve learned about myself, and maybe about other people, is that lasting change often comes from a new perspective. Usually it’s from a book, in my experience. Live Long Enough to Live Forever, Difficult Conversations, and Die With Zero, instantly created long lasting effects in my life. Sometimes that change can come from within, though, taking time to think about things from a different point of view and digging to find a more accurate perspective on something." - Tynan

"The art of living well and the art of dying well are one." - Epicurus

"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones." - Plato

“The people who get the worst medical care in the world are the very poor and the very rich. The rich can have any crazy thing they ask the doctor for.” – Morgan Housel

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."- Rilke

There are tons of amazing, attractive, compelling people out there. Find one that excites you and gives you the attention that you deserve. - Aziz Gazipura

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off, every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”

“I wish everyone could get rich and famous and everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that's not the answer.” - Jim Carrey

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.” - Mark Twain

Fast iteration can make up for a lot; it’s usually ok to be wrong if you iterate quickly. Plans should be measured in decades, execution should be measured in weeks. - Sam Altman

“It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?” - Henry David Thoreau

“People who are driven by demons get shit done.” – Walter Isaacson, describing Elon Musk

Does this change the goal, or the path, or nothing?

"Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what’s worth paying attention to. "- Paul Graham

Tarot is a memetic randomness generator, a way to “unlock” insights through evocative imagery.

Which of my old beliefs are not serving me?

Optimists notice more opportunities, have more energy because of their imagined future successes, and take more risks. - Scott Adams

"The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there." - Robert M. Pirsig

"Don’t think of people in the mass. That gives you a blurred view. Think of a typical individual, man or woman, who is likely to want what you sell. Don’t try to be amusing. Money spending is a serious matter. Don’t boast, for all people resent it. Don’t try to show off. Do just what you think a good salesman should do with a half-sold person before him." - Claude Hopkins

“If we didn’t have ambition—some big goal we are after—how would we know what little things, what distractions, to say no to?” — RYAN HOLIDAY

What am I doing that’s actually a distraction?

Exercise, food, and sleep should be your first buttons to push if you’re trying to elevate your attitude and raise your energy. - Scott Adams

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled." - Plutarch

"The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap." - Zhuangzi

One of the best ways to build a network is to develop a reputation for really taking care of the people who work with you. Be overly generous with sharing the upside; it will come back to you 10x. - Sam Altman

For every 100 true fans who follow you, you’ll likely get one person who doesn’t like you. And for some reason, they always seem to be the loudest. - Russel Brunson

One of the biggest misconceptions about why people don't buy, is not the money, or the price, it's the fear of making the wrong choice. Many people are worried that their decisions are permanent and will affect them for the rest of their life. - One of the biggest misconceptions about why people don't buy, is not the money, or the price, it's the fear of making the wrong choice. Many people are worried that their decisions are permanent and will affect them for the rest of their life. Michael Killen

Is helping someone worth being disliked? - Michael Killen

“I believe pretty strongly that one’s overarching aim in life and work is to always be making one’s self obsolete.” – Tim Hanson

"The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die." - Friedrich Nietzsche

If you told a third party all of your goals and aspirations –what you at least in theory care or don't care about – and then they audited how you run your life for a month, what would they say?

Our self-respect comes from actions, not rhetoric. - Brendon Lemon

“The hardest dollar to get is always that first dollar.” - Chet Holmes

" Channels with “provable” ROI are almost always claiming credit for channels whose attribution can’t be shown. Branded search in Google, and brand advertising are the biggest culprits, but affiliate links, unbranded search, performance ads, and paid social certainly contribute, too. Marketers who flip the script and shut down those “provable” channels often see an attribution shift, but no loss in conversions."

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard goes something like this: If you want success, figure out the price and then pay it. - Scott Adams

You live in a deranged age — more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing. Walker Percy

"No gifts left ungiven." - David Deida

The screenwriter William Goldman in his memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade famously declared that “the single most important fact of the entire movie industry [is that] NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.” To demonstrate his point, Goldman cited a long list of Hollywood flops and surprise successes. For instance, one of the highest-grossing movies in history, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was offered to every studio in Hollywood, and every one of them turned it down except Paramount: “Why did Paramount say yes?” Goldman asks. “Because nobody knows anything. And why did all the other studios say no? Because nobody knows anything. And why did Universal, the mightiest studio of all, pass on Star Wars…? Because nobody, nobody — not now, not ever — knows the least goddam thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.” Hollywood, in other words, is like a slot machine: every movie is a blind gamble.

The Charlie Munger formula for career success: * Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself. * Don’t work for anyone you don’t respect and admire. * Work only with people you enjoy.

The #1 benefit that all customers are looking for is a reliable supplier. That’s it. A reliable supplier who lives up to their expectations. A reliable supplier that delivers on a promise. - Michael Killen

“If you ask yourself why you are in business and can find no answer other than ‘I want to make money,’ you will save money by getting out of business and going to work for someone.” – Harvey Firestone

"The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

All the real money is made in retaining and up-selling. - Frankie Fihn

“Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you’re accountable on your output, as opposed to your input – that’s the dream.” – Naval

The concept that someone can sell an idea to somebody else and both parties must agree it’s the best route, is literally the entire ethos behind human civility and progress. Michael Killen

“Never leave the scene of a goal without taking a massive action.” - Tony Robbins

How can I use this to my advantage?

" If you’re in finance, getting the right data is often easy: just pull it up on your Bloomberg terminal. But there is no practical way to ask “what most correlates with life expectancy in Hong Kong?” (See above on that topic.) Figure out a way to build a growing corpus of structured data across the broadest variety of domains." - Morgan Housel

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone” -Blaise Pascal

"The basic issue in marketing is creating a category you can be first in. It’s the law of leadership: It’s better to be first than it is to be better. It’s much easier to get into the mind first than to try to convince someone you have a better product than the one that did get there first." - The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

If you want to have a successful life, expose yourself to as much high-upside low-downside probability as you can. - Sebastian Marshall

"The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new." - Socrates

"Courage is in far shorter supply than genius." - Peter Thiel

“Study most of the men who are getting salaries of upward of one hundred thousand dollars a year. They are nearly all doers of the obvious.” - Obvious Adams

"Getting things even somewhat right is hard enough. Probabilities are usually the best you can do." - Nate Silver

“I will have to remember ‘I am here today to cross the swamp, not to fight all the alligators.’” — From The Art of Possibility by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander

Mr. Beast -- the most successful YouTube creator -- said it's easier to make one video that gets 10 million views than it is to make 100 videos that get 100,000 views. Why? Because the best content is evergreen. It will be as relevant 10 years from now as it is today -- and still getting views -- which is so much more powerful than trying to get people's attention with an idea that might be relevant today but no one will care about next Tuesday.

How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?

“With unrealistic, impossible, or “10x”-level goals, the competition is lowest, the excitement is highest, and the pathway forward becomes simple and non-linear.” - Benjamin Hardy

Kim Stanley Robinson wrote, “We live in a present mixed with various futures overshadowing us. In essence, we live in a science fiction novel we all write together.”

“When two people meet, the person in a greater state of certainty will always influence the other one. Assuming, of course, they are in rapport.” - Tony Robbins

“A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.” – Kevin Kelly

The most impressive people I know spent their time with their head down getting shit done for a long, long time. - Sam Altman

"We buy shit we don't need, with money we don't have, to impress people we don't like." - George Carlin

"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." - Democritus

What is my one top priority now?

“Bro, anyone telling you there’s some secret is trying to sell you something. We just put out as much as we possibly can. Pull up your Instagram and pull up my Instagram… Look. You’ve posted once today. I posted three times. Pull up your LinkedIn … Look. You posted once this week. I posted five times today.” - Alex Hormozi

Nassim Taleb once wrote about how publishers always try to push authors to write about topics specific to recent news events. “No, no; it’s the exact opposite,” he wrote. “If you want to be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past. We have no idea of what’s in the future, but we have some knowledge of what was in the past … I speculated that books that would have been relevant twenty years in the past (conditional of course of being relevant today) would be interesting twenty years in the future.”

These are variations on a very old idea: that constraints can be liberating. By restricting your choices along one dimension, you can create more freedom along a dimension that’s more important to you. Almost every life philosophy—minimalism, Christianity, the Paleo diet, whatever—boils down to this kind of trade-off. Do this and not that, and you get to retire early, or lose weight, or ascend to heaven. - Richard Meadows

If you have a product that can help someone, or a service that can make someone's life better, would you not argue that it is your moral obligation to get that product or service into the hands of somebody else? - Michael Killen

“People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.” —F. M. Alexander

"Trying to build a CRM and lead-management tool for a solo independent business that lives on 5-10 leads a year feels a lot like catching butterflies. If you’re looking for a hobby and like spending hours alone with dead insects then… fine? But otherwise - I’d encourage you to focus your time and energies on building networks over tracking each lead minutely."

How can I be OK no matter what happens?

What I learned is that 90% of people are never ever ever going to care or even hear about you. 5% will love you. 5% will hate you. - Michael Killen

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." - Marcel Proust

2x means doing more volume, grinding harder, inching forward. 10x jumps are unlocked by qualitative improvements not by doing more of the same.

"Neither woman nor world can be second-guessed, or fooled. They know when you are just dicking around. They want to receive you for real." - David Deida

"Where there is power, there is resistance." - Michel Foucault

Should I learn a lesson from this, or just move on?

What were you doing as a kid that other kids weren’t doing?

The life of a pessimist is easy but dreary. The life of an optimist is hard but exciting. Pessimism is easy because it costs nothing. Optimism is hard because it must be constantly reaffirmed. In the face of a hostile, cynical world, it takes effort to show that positivity has merit.

Danny Meyer's management style made it cool to care" - Will Guidara

“This is a fundamental reason why 10x goals and vision are simpler, easier, and more practical than 2x goals. With a 2x goal, there are too many potential pathways to reach the desired destination. This creates paralysis-by-analysis and makes it extremely difficult to know where to focus your best energy and effort.” - Benjamin Hardy

What matters is you make a significant contribution to something you feel proud o

“To yell at your creativity, saying, ‘You must earn money for me!’ is sort of like yelling at a cat; it has no idea what you’re talking about, and all you’re doing is scaring it away.” — Liz Gilbert

“Leave good evidence of yourself. Do good work.” - Rogowski