The Wisdom Wall

“the reality is life is a single player game. You're born alone. You're going to die alone. All your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. And you're gone three generations. Nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It's all single player.”

“I think that's why the smartest and most successful people I know started out as losers. Um, if you view yourself as a loser, as someone who has been cast out by society and has no role in normal society, then you will do your own thing, and you're much more likely to find a winning path.”

“the smartest people can explain things to a child, and if you can't explain it to a child, then you don't know it.”

“generally, at least in the tech business in Silicon Valley, great people have great outcomes. You just have to be patient. Uh, every person that I met at the beginning of my career, 20 years ago, where I looked at it and said, wow, that guy or that gal is super capable. They're so smart and dedicated and blah, blah,…”

“I really want to break away from this idea of 40 hour weeks, or 60 hour weeks, or 80 hour weeks, or nine to five, or roles, or jobs, or identities. Uh, it just all feels like a straitjacket.”

“Um, to some extent, you know, our attitude in life, our mood, our happiness levels, depression levels, these are also habits.”

“In some sense, the, the, uh, people chasing thrills and action sports or flow states or, uh, orgasm or any of these states that people really strive to get to, a lot of these are basically just trying to get out of your own head. They're trying to get away from that voice in your head and this overdeveloped sense of…”

“I don't believe in the words like never and always. Uh, because I think that's, uh, that's a way of, uh, limiting yourself and self-discipline yourself makes you less free and less happy at some level.”

“all the benefits in life come from compound interests, whether in money or in relationships or love or health or activities or habits. So I only want to be around people that I know I'm going to be around with for the rest of my life. Uh, and I only want to work on things that I know have the longterm, uh, uh, payout.”

“Generally I find that if people are fighting or quarreling about something, it's because their values don't line up because their values lined up, the little things wouldn't matter.”

“if you have a criticism of someone, then don't criticize the person, criticize the general approach or criticize kind of that Class of, uh, activities. Um, but if you have to praise somebody, then always try and find the person who best, uh, who's the best example of what you're praising, and then praise that person…”

“all of these people that I was jealous of, I couldn't just cherry pick and choose a little aspects of their life. I couldn't say, I want his body. I want her money. I want, uh, his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family,…”

“if all of your beliefs line up into neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious, uh, because they're pre-packaged and put together.”

“You never change a system by taking the existing thing and reworking it. I don't believe I've been in Silicon Valley and tech business long enough to know that you're better off changing it just by creating something brand new.”

“science is to me, it's a study of truth. Um, it is the only true discipline because it makes falsifiable predictions. Actually changes the world.”

“I think almost everything that people read these days is designed for social approval. Um, you know, all the best sellers are about social improvement, social conditioning. Um, if you really wanted to be successful, happy, blah, blah, blah, all those external metrics, you're looking for a non-average outcome, and so…”

“So I think taking notes is the same as taking photos when you're on a trip. All it's doing is taking you out of the moment.”

“if someone is going around and talking about how honest they are, they're probably dishonest. That's just like a little telltale indicator I've learned. When someone spends too much time talking about their own values or talking themselves up, they're covering for something.”

“working on your values is longterm selfish, although short term, it's absolutely false sacrifices. If, if being ethical or profitable, everybody would do it. And we wouldn't have to have a separate concept. We wouldn't talk about it. There would be no books on it. There'd be no, no one would ever talk about values…”

“I think it's the mark of a charlatan to try and explain simple things in complicated ways. And it's the mark of a genius to explain complicated things in simple ways.”

“you can never predict the outside successes, but what you can predict are the failures. You can say, oh, this person doesn't know this field at all. They're way out of their depth. Or this person, they're a short-term thinker. They're not going to last”

“There's no fundamental, intrinsic, purposeful meaning to the universe. Because if there was, then you would just ask the next question. You'd say, well, why is that the meaning? Right? So it would just be, as Richard Feynman said, it'd be turtles all the way down. The why's would just keep accumulating.”

“The reality is I just read a lot that by today's standards would be considered mental junk food. Uh, but eventually you just get to like reading, you run out of the junk food and then you start eating the healthy food, right? Or your tastes kind of graduate.”

“a really good book costs 10 or 20 dollars, and it can change your life, uh, in a meaningful way. So it's not something I believe in saving money on. And this is even back when I was broken. I had no money. I always spend money on books. I never viewed that as an expense. Uh, that's an investment to me.”

“And these days I find myself rereading as much or more as I do reading. Uh, because I, I think this was a tweet from an account on, um, on Twitter that I saw. This guy, Illus Sirtis. And he basically said, you know, I don't want to read everything. I just want to read the hundred great books over and over again. And I…”

“that can be good when you're doing long range planning. It can be good when you're solving problems. It's good for the survival and replication machines that we are. But I think it's actually very bad for your happiness.”

“when you're working out every day, you can checkpoint yourself very easily, like, oh, well, this exact thing that I do every single morning is suddenly harder, so therefore I'm weakened from the alcohol from last night. So the morning workout checkpoint really helped me understand the consequences of, uh, consuming…”

“and I don't have time. It's just another way of saying it's not a priority. So what you really have to do is to say, is it a priority or not? And if, if something is your number one priority, then you will get it. Uh, that's just the way life works. But if you've got a fuzzy basket of 10 or 15 different priorities,…”

“today I believe that, uh, happiness is, uh, it's really a default state. It's what's there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life.”

“So I think that the mind itself is a muscle, and it can be trained, and it can be conditioned. It has just been haphazardly conditioned by society out of our control, and if you look at it with awareness and intent, and it 24 seven job. You're working at every moment of every day. I think you can unpack your own mind…”

“because if I disconnect what I'm thinking from what I'm saying, that creates multiple threads in my mind. Uh, that means that I'm no longer in the moment. That means that I now have to work future planning or past regretting every time I'm talking to somebody.”

“The moment you have a child, it's this really weird thing, but it's sort of, it answers the built in meaning of life, purpose of life question. And all of a sudden, the most important thing in the universe moves from being in your body into being moving into the child's body.”

“My old definition was freedom to, freedom to do anything I want. Freedom to do whatever I feel like whenever I feel like. And now I would say that the freedom that I'm looking for is internal freedom. So it's freedom from, it's freedom from reaction. It's freedom from feeling angry. It's freedom from being sad. It's…”

“the advantage of meditation is not that you're suddenly going to gain the superpower to control your internal state. It's that you will recognize just how out of control your mind is.”

“microeconomics and game theory are fundamental. Uh, I don't think you can be successful in business or even navigating through most of our modern capital society without an extremely good understanding of supply and demand and, uh, labor versus capital and, um, game theory and, um, uh, tit for tat and those kinds of…”

“the means of learning, the tools of learning are abundant and infinite. It's a desire to learn that's incredibly scarce.”

“Life is mostly about applying the basics, and only doing the advanced stuff in the things that you truly love, and where you understand the basics inside out.”

“And in fact, someone who makes decisions right, 80% of the time instead of 70% of the time will be valued and compensated in the market hundreds of times more.”

“If it works out, you know, the angel bets and venture bets are great because they have nonlinear outcomes in the positive, but on the downside, you can only lose one X, but on the upside, you can make 10,000 X.”

“negotiations with high integrity people are usually very easy. You're giving each other things to make sure the other person's happy enough that the deal survives, because unhappy deals get unwound, and they become short-term relationships which don't have any compounding benefits.”

“Go find the thing you can commit to for 10 years, because that's how long it's going to take minimum to get a good outcome, and you have to enjoy the journey, because there's no guarantee on the outcome”

“my philosophy falls down to, and one pole is evolution as a binding principle, because it explains so much about humans, uh, and the near side is Buddhism, which is the oldest, most time-tested spiritual philosophy, uh, on the internal state of being inside each of us. And I think those are absolutely reconcilable.”

“if I commit to doing something, then I commit to doing it right now. If I'm not willing to do it right now, then don't do it. Don't commit to it.”

“you go through life through an exploration phase, and then you switch to an exploitation phase, and I'm very much in the exploitation phase, not looking for more exploration.”

“Um, so I think the hard thing here is seeing the truth and to see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn't want to face the truth. Um, so the smaller you can make your ego, the less condition you can make your reactions, the less desires you can have about the outcome you want, the…”