The Wisdom Wall

“So this is the, this is the second kind of insight, which is when something goes well, usually it goes pretty well from the beginning.”

“you can beat the market, but you will lose your life. Um, and so what I mean is that it is possible to get outsized returns, but you have to spend all your time doing it.”

“It seems that responsibilities, uh, and obligations tend to increase throughout life. Each day that goes by is an opportunity for, um, A responsibility to come into play or an obligation or an obstacle that you didn't foresee to come up. And so if you're waiting till your forties or fifties to start a company, again,…”

“You cannot outwork the person who's working on a better thing. And so, um, it is possible if you really grind, maybe you can work 10% harder or 20% harder than you are now. But if you work on the right thing, you get a hundred X of the results or a thousand X of the results. And so what you need, I, I almost feel like…”

“I actually think that is a good measure for what makes a great nonfiction book is how many other books can you make irrelevant by writing this?”

“So certainly some of it is the returns, but a lot of it is the social status and the praise.”

“I went to the three star reviews on Amazon, one star review. Everybody hates it often for some stupid reason, like the book showed up and it was dirty on the dust jacket or whatever. Um, five-star review. Everybody loves it. Um, but the three-star reviews or the four-star reviews, those are pretty useful. You know,…”

“I feel like the two timeframes that matter most in life are 10 years and one hour, you know, so like 10 years is just shorthand for the big, meaningful things that you want to do in life. Where do you want to be in a decade? You know, I, sometimes I like to encourage people to don't let a day pass without doing…”

“that work is not being wasted. It's just being stored. You know, it's kind of like complaining about heating an ice cube up a little bit and not melting yet. It's like, well, you just haven't hit the phase transition.”

“one of the big quests for life is to experiment enough to find what comes easy for you and then work really hard on what comes easy. Because if you work hard on the thing that you have some skill set for some strength for some natural aptitude for, then you're very hard to compete with.”

“Try a number of things, right? So experiment with a number of things, run a number of small experiments. Once you find something that works, double down on it and then keep doing it until it stops working, which is the step that a lot of people skip. Um, and then once it stops working, go back to the start and try a…”

“And so a little bit of friction can sometimes go a long way in shaping a behavior.”

“Anytime you do something new, by definition, you are doing something you're unqualified for. It can't, it can't be, if you've already done it, if you already have some type of qualification or skillset or experience, then you're qualified for it. It can't be new. It's just something you're repeating that you've done…”

“In a lot of ways, I actually think the most powerful form of mental toughness, the most powerful or resilient form of preparation is a mindset that can handle uncertainty.”

“if you just keep sticking with it, what you're going to find is that guys will drop off each year, you know? And so by, just by, there's this power of longevity of staying in the game that will benefit you.”

“The lens should be mostly focused on the reader, not on yourself. I think if you, if you think a lot about reputation and you're trying to like cultivate this image, that's the energy is focused in the wrong direction.”

“Any product, the way that it is positioned and packaged is probably 50% of its success.”

“A lot of the really iconic book titles, they are phrases that you do not hear elsewhere in life.”

“Almost every thought that you have is downstream from what you consume.”

“The act of writing is forcing you to clarify your thoughts. The act of lifting the weight is forcing your muscles to get stronger. And so it only works because it is hard. If it was easy, it would not require much thought. Which means it also doesn't require much reorganization in your mind, and you're not learning…”

“If you're really successful and things are going well, then every year your opportunity cost should increase. But what that also means is every year you should be saying no to things that you were saying yes to the previous year.”

“I like to say that sharing your work publicly is like a magnet and it just draws other people to you who are interested in the same thing. It's probably one of the most useful things you can do for networking. Is it's not actually networking. It's just sharing your knowledge and trying to be useful in public.”

“And what you find is that like early in your life, a lot of the solutions that you come up with are just things that you either inherited from your parents or saw modeled and started to repeat. And you get to be about 22 or 25 or something like that. And what are the odds that your current solution is the best…”

“Broadly speaking, I think there are four things that you should do if you want to build a habit... So roughly speaking, what you want is your habit to be obvious... You want it to be attractive... you want it to be easy, simple, frictionless... And you want it to be satisfying. The more enjoyable or satisfying a habit…”

“rather than making it attractive, make it unattractive. That one is the most difficult of the four and probably the place that I would recommend focusing on the least because it's hard to change your desires.”

“A habit must be established before it can be improved. You know, it has to become the standard in your life before you can scale it up and optimize and turning into something more. You need to standardize before you optimize.”

“procrastination is not always a bad thing. If you're procrastinating on something, something, sometimes it's a signal that you don't actually want that thing, uh, which is fine.”

“If you need that label, then you are beholden to doing it that way. But if you can release yourself from the label and instead ask yourself, what type of lifestyle do I want? Or what type of impact do I want to make? Regardless of what the actual label is now, all of a sudden a ton of options open up.”

“Every word that you write is actually an obstacle that the reader does not want to have to go through. Your book is an obstacle between them and the result that they want.”

“Especially in the beginning, the primary bottleneck to results are, are you doing the obvious things? You know, do, do the obvious stuff first. There's probably only two or three pieces that you just need to do. Like, are you showing up consistently? Are you doing, you know, just do the obvious things and that will get…”

“intensity makes for a good story, but consistency makes progress.”

“A lot of the time, the desire to belong overpowers the desire to understand.”

“So you, you just do these really broad data sets and then you have a really tight funnel for what, uh, for what gets through and you end up with some really high quality stuff that way.”

“One of the, there are a lot of things in life that are like this, but one of the challenging things about the really important stuff in life is that they're endless battles. You know, if you do a good job focusing today and prioritizing today, you pick the right thing to focus on. It earns you no bonus points for…”

“finding ways to visualize your progress as you go through your habits, um, is important because a hallmark of almost any compounding process is that the greatest returns are delayed.”

“So one of the core lessons of atomic habits is that Every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”

“When you start to take pride in being that type of person, you will fight to maintain the habit.”

“I found that a lot of the time when I'm struggling or I'm facing some sort of, uh, I feel like I'm facing a lot of friction. It's because I'm trying to force fit old habits into a new season.”

“the cost of your good habits is in the present. The cost of your bad habits is in the future.”

“really what you're seeing when the book comes out is the release of potential energy that was built over like five years prior. You know, it's not like it happened overnight. It was The five years of building an audience of hundreds of thousands of people, meeting other authors, going on podcasts and doing interviews,…”

“And if you start with the position that I am already wrong, I don't know everything. I'm getting something that I believe right now is off, but I'm trying to become less wrong. Then you're, you're more in a position where you're trying to learn and less in a position where you're trying to defend.”

“the tighter you cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it.”

“I think the short version is success is having power over my days. That's, you know, if I, if I have the, the freedom and the ability to choose how I'm spending my days, that sounds, that sounds great. What more could you want than that? You know, that means I would get to choose to spend time with my kids. If I have…”