My preferred quotes
Consistency, Discipline & Hard Work
"The single biggest thing that separates people is the consistent ability to show up and do the work. The consequences of failing to show up consistently are getting the results you deserve but not the ones you want." Brain Food
"What looks like skill is often just a lot of work that no one sees." Brain Food
"Knowledge accumulates in drips and gets leveraged in buckets." Brain Food
“The person who is consistent outperforms the person who is intermittent every time. While inconsistent effort works for some things, for the things that really matter you need to be consistent. If you want to be consistent, you need strategies to keep you going when things are hard." Brain Food
"The longer the time frame for results, the less you need intensity and the more you need consistency.""Consistency isn't simply willpower, which comes and goes."
"Consistency is doing it when you don't feel like doing it."
"If you want advantageous divergence, you have to do the things that matter on your best day and your worst day." Brain Food
"Try things until something comes easily." 2:24:18 James Clear
"Never miss twice”. [keep your streak] James Clear.
"It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop." Confucius.
"The key to doing something you know you should do when you don’t feel like doing it is telling yourself that you can quit tomorrow but not today.” Brain Food
Habits
"Habits don't restrict freedom, they create it." 2:17:40 James Clear
"Some of the processes of mastering good habits is learning how to fall in love with boredom. […] Another way to master good habits is to find a new detail of your craft to be interested in (get a new detail of the habit to get fascinated about it). The more the habit gets boring, the more you need to find new details to master (maybe the real trick of mastery is being able to find something new to get excited about while still doing the same “reps” [repetitions] you always did before." 1:43:50 to 1:46:25 James Clear
"Rewards are the end goal of every habit. The cue is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting the reward. The response is about obtaining the reward. Changing habits. Adopting new ones: make it OBVIOUS (cue), make it ATTRACTIVE (craving), make it EASY (response), make it SATISFYING (reward). Breaking habits: make it INVISIBLE, make it NON-ATTRACTIVE, make it DIFFICULT, make it UNSATISFYING." James Clear
"Habits that are immediately satisfied are more likely to be repeated. Pretty much any behaviour produces multiple outcomes across time. Generally, bad habits provide immediate favourable outcomes and long-term unfavourable outcomes and good habits provide immediate unfavourable outcomes and long-term favourable outcomes. Identity-based habits: For good habits, the ultimate form of immediate gratification is the reinforcement of your desired identity that aligns with your values and principles (When you're practicing the good habit of thinking that "I'm a type of person that doesn't miss a workout, or write every day, or etc"). Any behaviour cast votes for your identity." James Clear
Productivity, Process & Quality
"Slow productivity philosophy: do fewer things; work at a natural pace; obsess over quality." Cal Newport
"Do your best". Bear Grylls
“Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions.” Elizabeth King
Overcoming Inertia
"If you let motivation dictate your actions, inertia conspires to keep you in place."
Little forks on the road. Few decisions and moments in the day defines the rest. 1:57:13 James Clear
"Visualize "the best scenario and what your work and life would be". If the image attracts you, go ahead. Do not over-weight the failures and problems over the case of success. Do not sabotage yourself." MB
Long-Term Perspective
"Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years." Bill Gates
"One of the notable aspects of compound growth is that the furthest out years are the most important. In a world where almost no one takes a truly long-term view, the market richly rewards those who do." Sam Altman
"Impactful innovation can be discovered by not thinking about the resources available today and how they can improve things. But thinking first about a desirable future and then in how to achieve it." MB
"I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote." Sam Altman
Planning and Preparation
"Finish the day by making or reviewing a plan for the next day. Don't give a chance to start the following day without knowing what to do." MB
"We drive into the future using only our rear view mirror." Brain Food
"Visualization training/preparation: Visualize the process, not the result."
"Strengths, weakness/risk = weakest link, speed constraint = slowest process."
"Tips on achieving goals: Values, goals, boundaries (what I'm willing to sacrifice and what I'm not) - chunk into month and week deliveries; track use of my time; instead of fragmenting the time or the day into many items, reserve days for longer work in a specific matter. Where my attention really is. Learn as you go (don't try to figure out everything before). Know why I'm on a specific journey (is it aligned with my values?), what are the gains that can be reached even if I don't achieve the ultimate goal (have a clear answer about why for the moments the negative thoughts come and what my response should be). Figure out a way to make it a joyful experience (connect with joy). Weekly deliverables (weekly priorities with celebrations), quarterly key results. Set blocked times (until X am/pm). Visualize how bad it would be if I don't achieve my goals - as a motivation process. I can also visualize how good it would be (in the beginning) or from time to time. But use foreshadowing of the failure as a motivator (be effective in avoiding failure). Moderate level of difficulty (realistic and challenging). Limited options (set a maximum of two major goals to not get distracted -don't contaminate mental and visual space with too many goals). Set a different space and time to pursue different goals. Having a concrete plan is essential (have a specific set of actions and steps - write down the details about how success would look like). Assess progress weekly. Don't focus on the finish line (place milestones for dopamine release - and celebrate/cognitive reward- why I'm doing something - asses sometimes daily, mostly weekly - be consistent). Think about failure, but don't think of yourself as a failure - reward yourself that I'm on the right track." Andrew Huberman
“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” Steve Jobs
Focus
"You can focus on: what you have or what you don't have; what you can control or what you can't control; past, present or future."
"Focusing on the outcome makes the gap between now and the finish line seem larger than it is." Brain Food
"On any given day, Huh does about three hours of focused work. He might think about a math problem, or prepare to lecture a classroom of students, or schedule doctor’s appointments for his two sons. “Then I’m exhausted,” he said. “Doing something that’s valuable, meaningful, creative” — or a task that he doesn’t particularly want to do, like scheduling those appointments — “takes away a lot of your energy.”" [use your best time of the day to do things that generates the higher value] QuantaMagazine
Prioritization
“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing” (The rules of the organization). Ryan Holiday - 33:39min
"Knowing what to ignore saves you time, reduces stress, and improves your decision-making." FS
"Feel comfortable saying no to ordinary things to have more space for extraordinary ones."
"If you say no to a thing, you say no to one thing. If you say yes to a thing, you actually say no to every other thing you could have done during this period of time." Tobi Lutke
Understanding Motives
"Failing to prioritize stupidity over malice causes things like paranoia. Always assuming malice puts you at the center of everyone else’s world. This is an incredibly self-centered approach to life. In reality, for every act of malice, there is almost certainly far more ignorance, stupidity, and laziness." The Great Mental Models Vol. 1
Failure & Mistakes
"The undignifying thing is not being wrong. It is being predictably wrong." Eliezer Yudkowsky - 37:30min
"What would you do if you knew you would fail? What would be worth doing even though it is not gone work? […] Ironically, those are the things that are most likely to work." Seth Godin - 1:13:32h
"A common misconception about quitting is that it will slow your progress or stop it altogether. But it is the reverse that is actually true. If you stick to a path that is no longer worth pursuing, whether it’s a relationship that isn’t going well, or a stock that you’re invested in that’s losing money, or an employee that you’ve hired who isn’t performing, that is when you lose ground. By not quitting, you are missing out on the opportunity to switch to something that will create more progress toward your goals. Anytime you stay mired in a losing endeavor, that is when you are slowing your progress." Annie Duke
Decision-making
"Make more decisions with less confidence in significantly less time." First, recognize that in most cases, you can course correct and treat fast decisions as a kind of asset and capability. The second thing is not treating all decisions in a uniform way. Break them down in degrees of reversibility and impact/magnitude. Things with low reversibility and great impact/magnitude are those you want to deliberate over and try to get right. In the other three quadrants, you can afford to be more flexible and fluid (prioritize speed). If it is very reversible by definition, you can correct it later. If it is low important, who cares? The third thing is to try to make fewer decisions (delegate). Why am I making decisions? For some kinds of decisions, there are good reasons for that. But there are some decisions if I am making that probably suggest that there is something else in the organization that is broken. Forth, when I realize I would make a decision differently from how someone else is making it, dig into what is the difference in our models. Have different parts of the organization write down what they are optimized for (what their mission is, what their long key metrics are, who their customer are - internally and externally). Hopefully, once there is agreement on those long-term things, then maybe a difference in any particular decision might just be we differ on the most instrumentally effective way to achieve the outcomes, but we are most unified in what the desired instead is. Once you have the foundation agreement, the superficial disagreement is less important." Patrick Collison - 48:10 to 57:02min
"What decision would I make if I was twice as confident or twice as strong." - Robin Arzón - 1:06:30h
Minimizing Regrets
“I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘OK, I’m looking back on my life. I want to minimize the number of regrets I have.’ And I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day.”— Jeff Bezos
"Imagine that you are 95 years old and you are just getting ready to die. Right before you take your last breath you are given a beautiful gift: the ability to come back in time and talk you yourself. What advice would the 95 years old of your give you right now? People that are dying generally mention three things: be happy now; never get too busy climbing that corporate ladder you forget the people you love; if you have a dream go for it." Marshall Goldsmith - 1:34:30h
"Try to live a life that if you have to live it infinitely many times you would be ok with that kind of life. So, try to live optimally. […] I find it's more honest and real to think about dying today, at the end of the day. That seems to me, at least to my brain, a more honest slap on the face, as supposed to I still have ten years, like today. Then I much more about the cup on the table and so on, instead of silly worldly accomplishments." Lex Fridman - 2:49:51h
"We are what we pay attention to. To pay attention we need to ignore (minimize our concerns about what isn't important). Regret teaches us about what to ignore (and it is a lot of stuff)."
"Four categories of regrets: FOUNDATION (if only I had done the work: not saving too much money, not taking care of our healthy, not working hard at school - things that build our foundation) - Majority root: inaction; BOLDNESS (if I only had taken the chance: date, business, speaking up, going to an adventure) - Majority root: inaction; MORAL (if I only had done the right thing: bullying, marrying infidelity etc) - Majority root: action; CONNECTION (If only I had reached out - all spectrum of relationships in our lives) - Majority root: inaction. The biggest category is connection regrets, the second biggest is boldness regrets. Daniel H. Pink
"Four crucial decisions in our life: how do I feel about myself; what do I do for money; who do I give my love to; how do I serve others." Jay Shetty
Positioning
"One of the most overlooked opportunities in life is how you are positioned when circumstances hit.Good positions create options, while bad positions reduce them. You don’t have to be an expert decision-maker to get better results, you only need to put yourself in a good position. Anyone looks like a genius when all the options are good." Brain Food
"Spend less time worrying about maximizing your immediate results and more time maximizing your ultimate results. Giving yourself options in the future always appears suboptimal in the moment. Putting yourself in a good position for tomorrow means paying today." Brain Food
“I suppose the role of character is for the individual to rise to a situation. If it were not for the situation, we would never have heard of him. So that you might say that character is the product of an exceptional demand by the situation upon human ability.” [historic/important figures] [Be there and be prepared when it happens, and them take complementary actions. Expose yourself to unknown situations that might come] Will Durant on fs.blog
"Do the necessary to succeed in order to increase the exposure to what is sufficient to succeed" (often luck, chance, or some other factor beyond your direct control). 44:35min - Kunal Shah
"Be so good they can't ignore you (deep work). Put in the automatic pilot the process to let people know it. Who is the THEY (from "they can't ignore you"), what they wanna see [to stand out and distinguish you from other people | figure out what will catch], and how do you get in front of them". Ryan Holiday - 47:05min
Business & Marketing
"Three questions to answer before starting a business: What resources are you willing to put into this (time, risk tolerance, money)? Who do you want your customer to be? What do you want to get out of this (something that makes every day better or winning a prize after some years)?" Seth Godin - 42:05min
"Hide the vegetables" to spread the information to a bigger audience" (beyond the specialized public). Yes Theory
"Sell the product before you build it. What are the pains we are solving? Why does it matter (to individual, family, society, company? How does it go to help them rationally (money or time saving) and emotionally? Understand your audience and these variables. Write them down before you embark. This will help to guide you and don't get off track starting building things that resonate with me but do not resonate with anyone else. Top parameters: what are the problems we are trying to solve? Whom are we talking to? How are we going to solve them? Why are we solving them? Give frequently a pitch about those parameters a get them refined. Discipline about: who our customer is; what is the product we are making; what is the timeline; how we are going to take the product to the market." Tony Fadell
"Take the red pill (discover a reality that no one or few have seem), generate content about it" (even simple things/routines, e.g. where a keep my backpack while on hostels or walking around), gain reputation/authority on the topic, build a business around one or more of the opportunities that spin off). Hosters deciphering Pieter Levels - 14min
While you have access to the same iPhone as Jeff Bezos, that doesn't mean you'll get the same results. Technology transforms small differences in skill into asymmetrically different results. Brain Food
“Why can’t we go back to the moon, given that the Artemis program has taken the same amount of time and money that the Apollo program did, and didn’t need to have any new ideas at all? It’s because the roadblocks, red tape, virtue signaling, and so forth have become the major proportion of the problem.” Work in Progress
Life Stages
"In adolescence we spend the most time with our parents, siblings, and friends; as we enter adulthood we spend more time with our co-workers, partners, and children; and in our later years we spend an increasing amount of time alone."
“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” - Maria Robinson
Anxiety
“Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance”. […] Anxiety and worry are almost never in service of someone else. It is in service of our need for the status quo and reassurance. And […] reassurance is futile, because we never have enough of it." Seth Godin - 42:05min
"Most successful people are just an anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.” Andrew Wilkinson
"The willingness to do things can sometimes be overwhelming (especially when new demands come), leading to anxiety that, if increased, can lead to paralysis, resulting in the opposite desired effect desired - inertia. So, keep yourself calm, do what needs to be done (prioritize what is most important, whenever possible), and emphasize consistency over urgency and intensity." MB
Progress, Motivation & Positive Thinking
"Action creates progress. Progress creates momentum. Momentum creates motivation." Brain Food
“The way to improve your defaults isn’t by willpower but by creating an artificial environment where your desired behaviour becomes the default behaviour.Joining groups whose defaults are your desires is an effective way to create an artificial environment. If you want to read more, join a book club. If you want to run more, join a running club." Brain Food
“What if this goes right.” Roelof Botha - 1:42:55h
"We don’t react to what happens. We react at an interpretation of what happens.” Dr. Gabor Mate - 41:36m (47:10m inheritance of de sensibility)
"You only have to know three things about your mind: 1) the way you feel about anything is down to the picture you make in your head and the words you tell yourself; 2) your mind is hardwired to keep returning to what is familiar while running us away about what is unfamiliar; 3) the mind does what it thinks it wants." Marisa Peer
"Pleasure is not the cause of happiness; rather, it is the effect."
Self-Worth
"Never made your value as a human being condition on the results of what are you trying to achieve. It is a fool's game for two reasons: one, you don't control the outcomes; two, what happens if you do achieve stuff?" Marshall Goldsmith - 26:15min
"Never focus on results at all. Focus on the process and do your best. If you do your best, be proud. If you lose, be proud. If you win, be proud. If you don't do your best, you have nothing to be proud of." Marshall Goldsmith - 38:22min
"Be aware of what you are feeling and accept it (instead of trying to suppress it with coping mechanisms). Triple-A: I'm aware, I accept, I articulate." Marisa Peer
"Who you are is defined by what you're willing to struggle for." Mark Manson
"Stop beating yourself. Change the “I should” for “I wish” or “I want”." Jay Shetty
"Be comfortable with rejection. Get over the fear of judgment."
"The cost of being who you are is conflict with those who want you to be someone else. The cost of being what others want you to be is conflict with yourself." Brain Food
Resilience
"I like to remind myself that my track record for getting through bad days is 100 percent, and that’s pretty good." — Hudson, San Diego
"Every storm runs out of rain."
"Action produces information."
"The greatest risk is not taking one."
"Shit happens. Be emotionally prepared
Writing and Thought
“If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.” - Leslie Lamport
"The way you develop expertise is by writing about, researching, and testing/practicing."
"Ways to end a presentation: contributions of your work; call to action; telling that you are glad or appreciate something about the people that were present."
The Perfectionism Trap
"Perfectionism “makes for a thin life, lived for what it isn’t rather than what it is” […] In the absence of intrinsic feelings of worth, a perfectionist tends to measure her own value against external measures: academic record, athletic prowess, popularity, professional achievement. When she falls short of expectations, she feels shame and humiliation. […]In 1990 Randy Frost, an American psychologist, developed 35 questions designed to measure perfectionism. His “multidimensional perfectionism scale” distinguished between three broad types of perfectionism.The first type is self-oriented perfectionism, a persecuting refrain which insists that you should do better. It breeds a highly motivating, but ultimately exhausting, obligation to become an idealised version of yourself: happier, fitter, richer (comparative adjectives are often found on the covers of self-help books). […]The second type is socially prescribed perfectionism, which leaves us trying to live up to the expectations of others. […]Third comes other-oriented perfectionism, which turns that persecutory voice outwards as we demand that those around us also live up to our impossible ideals. […]Some psychologists argue that perfectionism doesn’t need to be pathological. In 1978 D.E. Hamachek, an American psychologist, drew a distinction between normal and neurotic perfectionism. The normal perfectionist can set high standards for themselves without descending into punitive self-criticism. They can even take pleasure in striving for improvement.Subsequent researchers have questioned Hamachek’s distinction, arguing that the desire to be perfect can never be “normal”. The yearning for something that is intrinsically impossible can result only in feelings of frustration and inadequacy. […]Perfectionism may appear to spur us on to adult successes. But in truth it is a fundamentally childish attitude. It imbues us with the conviction that life in effect ends when we give up hope of becoming the best version of ourselves. On the contrary, […] that is the moment at which life can finally begin." Josh Cohen
Gratitude
"What do you have right now that you used to dream about or pray for" (gratitude filter) Robin Arzón - 47min
Faith
"Believe; take action; trust in God’s resolution; throw away concerns." MB
Relationships
"Four pillars of relationships: care, competency, consistency, and character. Your friends can fit one, maybe two, but rarely the four pillars. Have different types of friends." Jay Shetty
"Loneliness, perception, meaningfulness relationships]. Loneliness has more to do with our perceptions than how much company we have. It’s just as possible to be painfully lonely surrounded by people as it is to be content with little social contact. Some people need extended periods of time alone to recharge, others would rather give themselves electric shocks than spend a few minutes with their thoughts. [it is not about being with someone, it is about being with the right people] […] One way people have always coped with loneliness is through creativity. By transmuting their experience into something beautiful, isolated individuals throughout history have managed to substitute the sense of community they might have otherwise found in relationships with their creative outputs." FS Blog
Giving Recognition
Giving recognition. Make a list of everyone that is important in your life: friends, family, direct report colleagues. Twice a week look at the page. Did anyone on this page do something I should recognize? If they did, email, voice mail, say thank you, little note, nothing too fancy. If no one did anything, don't say anything. You don't want to be a phony. You don't have to have fancy programs to recognize people. You need to have the discipline to ask yourself: should I be recognizing people? That's is one thing. A second technique is starting to ask people a question: tell me what are you proud of. When you ask people about what they are proud of, they start to tell you things that you didn't even know. Marshall Goldsmith - 48:10min
Artificial Intelligence
"AI is going to bring a new Renaissance for Humanity, a new kind of Enlightenment because it is going to amplify everybody's intelligence. It's like everyone will have a staff of people who are smarter than us and know most things about most topics. So it's going to make us more creative, being able to produce text, art, music, and videos, without necessarily having all the technical skills that are currently required for doing those things." Yann LeCun - 59:40min
"The opportunity we have with these AI Large Language Models is this ability to collaborate. It's not just about retrieving knowledge. It's about creating, having an abstract idea in your head and turning it into a concrete one, and getting more high-quality ideas in less time, building, compounding, and moving quickly." Jack Krawczyk - 08:18min
"The current phase of the ongoing AI Revolution is that AI is gaining Mastery of language at a level that surpasses the average human ability. And by gaining Mastery of language, AI is seizing the master key, unlocking the doors of all our institutions, from Banks to Temples, because language is the tool that we use to give instructions to our banks and also to inspire Heavenly Visions in our minds. Another way to think of it is that AI
"There are three main challenges in machine learning: - AI must learn to represent the world; - AI must learn to think and plan in ways that are compatible with gradient-based learning; - AI must learn hierarchical representations of action plans. The big challenge for AI in the next decade is to figure out: How do we get machines to run predictive models of the world that deal with uncertainty and deal with the real world in all its complexity? Question for the next 10 years in AI." Yann LeCun