Book Generator

This is as good as it gets - the best ideas from every book I have ever read. Enjoy! 

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2024

• "But wine cannot blunt the biggest anxieties. One of these, I realized, was dependency. The more I watched and listened and lunched and drank with those around me, the more I saw that for many of them, their lives, happiness, and very identities hinged on things and people entirely outside their control. In many instances their very identities seemed continent and relational, hinging on their relationships—to their friends and in-laws and parents and husbands and children. Many of the women I knew suffered from the strange, culturally specific anxiety of being an extension of and reflection of someone else.",

• "Lily’s relationship to beautiful, expensive things—she wants them spectacularly and desperately because she, too, wants—she needs—to be a wanted thing. Going after and procuring something precious and scarce, we are trying to rejuvenate our own scarcity, to reinvigorate the sense of everyone in our society of our own value.",

• "The fundamental struggle of life is recognizing we have a body and a mind. If you can’t handle the dual, you’re in trouble. The body is 'creatureliness', yet you are ‘A worm and a God’",

• "Need to be important not to die -> need to be important for this most important person (parent, lover, culture). Feeling important -> self esteem -> feeling good about oneself.",

• "What man needs most is his sense of self worth / self-esteem. In childhood we see the struggle for self-esteem at its least disguise. But his natural narcissism is too all absorbing and relentless to be an aberration, it expresses the heart of the creature: the desire to stand out, to be the one in creation. This is the reason for the daily and usually excruciating struggle with siblings: the child cannot allow himself to be second-best or devalued, much less left out. 'You gave him the biggest piece of candy!' 'You gave him more juice!' 'You let her light the fire in the fireplace and not me.' 'Okay, you light a piece of paper.' 'But this piece of paper is smaller than the one she lit.' He is a creature with a name who lives in a world of symbols and dreams and not merely matter. His sense of self-worth is constituted symbolically, his cherished narcissism feeds on symbols, on an abstract idea of his own worth, an idea composed of sounds, words, and images, in the air, in the mind, on paper. When we appreciate how natural it is for man to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, how openly he shows it as a child, then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need. To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.",

• "We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality within finitude. Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew.  Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heartpumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. This is mad because, as we shall see, everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness—agreed madness, shared madness, disguised and dignified madness, but madness all the same. Name, identity, traits are forever. Your body is almost nothing. How to reconcile the two? The child's victory in this kind of battle is truly Pyrrhic: character is a face that one sets to the world, but it hides an inner defeat. The child emerges with a name, a family, a play-world in a neighborhood, all clearly cut out for him. But his insides are full of nightmarish memories of impossible battles, terrifying anxieties of blood, pain, aloneness, darkness; mixed with limitless desires, sensations of unspeakable beauty, majesty, awe, mystery; and fantasies and hallucinations of mixtures between the two, the impossible attempt to compromise between bodies and symbols. The body, then, is one’s animal fate that has to be struggled against in some ways. At the same time, it offers experiences and sensations, concrete pleasure that the inner symbolic world lacks. life is a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his 'ideas' are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality",

• This fear of realizing one’s own fullest powers is 'partly a justified fear of being torn apart, of losing control, of being shattered and disintegrated, even of being killed by the experience.' The result is what we would expect a weak organism to do: to cut back the full intensity of life. So often people in… ecstatic moments say, 'It’s too much,' or 'I could die'…. Delirious happiness cannot be borne for long. Our organisms are just too weak for any large doses of greatness….  There is the terror of the world, the feeling of over-whelming awe, wonder, and fear in the face of creation—the miracle of each single thing, of the fact that there are things at all. Man has a natural feeling of inferiority in the face of the massive transcendence of creation; this real creature feeling before the crushing and negating miracle of Being. The great cause of much psychological illness is the fear of knowledge of oneself—of one’s emotions, impulses, memories, capacities, potentialities, of one’s destiny. We have discovered that fear of knowledge of oneself is very often isomorphic with, and parallel with, fear of the outside world. This fear is a protection of our self-esteem, of our love and respect for ourselves. We tend to be afraid of any knowledge that could cause us to despise ourselves or to make us feel inferior, weak, worthless, evil, shameful. A sense of value and support is something that nature gives to each animal by the automatic instinctive programming and in the pulsating of the vital processes. But man has to build and earn inner value and security. He must repress his smallness in the adult world, his failures to live up to adult commands and codes. He must repress his own feelings of physical and moral inadequacy, not only the inadequacy of his good intentions but also his guilt and his evil intensions: the death wishes and hatreds that result from being frustrated and blocked by the adults. He must repress his parents’ inadequacy, their anxieties and terrors, because these make it difficult for him to feel secure and strong. He must repress his own anality, his compromising bodily functions that spell his mortality, his fundamental expendability in nature.  And with all this, he must repress the primary awesomeness of the external world which poses a threat to him. Thus the child has to avoid too much thought, too much perception, too much life. And at the same time, how he has to avoid the death that rumbles behind and underneath every carefree activity, that looks over his shoulder as he plays. The result is that we now know that the human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death. The basic anxiety of man is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. The deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.",

• "In order to control your life and death you must at least be somebody - not just a trembling accident germinated on a hothouse planet. Being somebody gives us hope of being able to control life and death. We don’t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. It need not be overtly a god or openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. Like a tree that needs a rock to grow on. You’re climbing up music, and career, and value-adding, and games, and etc. etc. to be a tall tree. Like two vines climbing up eathother to get higher. Or a vine on a wall - nature splits itself to play with and support itself. Both can be true. That without it you can be nothing. And in this environment you have all of these things to be a great fit. Your everything would be wiped away and you would be nothing without x and y and z that your tree is built on BUT your tree is great and grows tall with x and y and z in this environment to build on. In another environment you would be building on other things and be different, or without an environment you would be nothing, AND in this environment you are THIS. You have to be able to sit there and visualize all your values sliding off and you becoming nothing, or someone completely different, without those things that ‘you’ are built on. But you are also that tree built high on those things and that’s ok. Your mind must be ok with both. We enter symbiotic relationships in order to get the security we need, in order to get relief from our anxieties, our aloneness and helplessness; but these relationships also bind us, they enslave us even further because they support the lie we have fashioned. The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die. Illusion changes all this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way. We seek stress, we push our own limits, but we do it with our screen against despair and not with despair itself. ",

• "If there’s freedom, anything could happen - even bad things. The more afraid we are of bad things happening, the more we become slaves. Like many prisoners they are comfortable in their limited and protected routines, and the idea of a parole into the wide world of accident and choice terrifies them. The prison of one’s character is painstakingly built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one’s creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror. What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression—and with all this yet to die.",

• “'Hate' transference: helps us to fix ourselves in the world. hate, too, blows the other person up larger than he deserves. As Jung put it, the 'negative form of transference in the guise of resistance, dislike, or hate endows the other person with great importance from the start….' We need a concrete object to control us, and we get one in whatever way we can. We can even use our own body as a transference object. The pains we feel, the illnesses that are real or imaginary give us something to relate to, keep us from slipping out of the world, from bogging down in the desperation of complete loneliness and emptiness. In a word, illness is an object. We take our helplessness, our guilt, our conflicts, our cares, and we fix them to a spot in the environment. If we look at the basic problems of human slavishness it is always them that we see. If we have pain we know we are alive. When the leader dies the device that one has used to deny the terror of the world instantly breaks down; what is more natural, then, than to experience the very panic that has always threatened in the background? Regarding obsessions, compulsions, phobias of all kinds: Here we see the result of too much fetishization or partialization, too much narrowing-down of the world for action. The result is that the person gets stuck in the narrowness. No wonder that one cannot give it up: that would release all by itself the whole flood of terror that one is trying to deny and overcome. When you put all your eggs in one basket you must clutch that basket for dear life. It is as though one were to take the whole world and fuse it into a single object or a single fear. It must be clear that the despair and anguish of which the patient complains is not the result of such symptoms but rather are the reasons for their existence. The particular phobia or obsession is the very means by which man eases the burden of his life’s tasks and is able to assuage his sense of insignificance…. Neurotic symptoms serve to reduce and narrow—to magically transform the world so that he may be distracted from his concerns of death, guilt, and meaninglessness. Neurosis allows him to take control of his destiny by transforming the whole of life’s meaning into the simplified meaning emanating from his self-created world. The only secure truth men have is that which they themselves create and dramatize; to live is to play at the meaning of life.",

• "Sin and neurosis are both man making the meaning of life HIM. His inability to create illusions or understand historical significance is punished not only by his unreal self-inflation in the refusal to admit creatureliness but also a penalty of intensified self-consciousness. The sinner is hyper-conscious of the very thing he tries to deny: his creatureliness, his miserableness and unworthiness.",

• "One must pay with life and consent daily to die, to give oneself up to the risks and dangers of the world, allow oneself to be engulfed and used up. Otherwise one ends up as though dead (depressed) in trying to avoid life and death. The melancholic patient which has failed to take responsibility for all those possibilities of relating to the world which actually would constitute his own genuine self. Consequently, such an existence has no independent standing of its own but continually falls prey to the demands, wishes and expectations of others. Such patients try to live up to these foreign expectations as best they can, in order not to lose the protection and love of their surroundings, but they go more deeply into debt.",

• "Humans are primarily status driven. And the status of one human comes from how the other humans treat them. If your product or service changes how other people treat your customer, which it does in some way, it pays to show how. And talking about the value elements from someone else’s perspective shows all the ways it'll improve the status of your customer. So we want to outline two groups of people. The first group is the people gaining status, your customers. The second group is the people giving it to them: Spouse, Kids, Parents, Extended Family, Colleagues, Bosses, Friends, Rivals, Competitors, etc.

• As in, if you lose weight, do your kids have a new role model? Does your spouse now decide to get healthy too? Are you more likely to get promoted at work? Science says - yes. Does

  your frenemy no longer make those little jabs at dinner? I’d talk about how their competitors notice their phones don’t ring as much because all their customers are flowing to your new customer. How their business owner buddies say 'business must be good' when they pull up in their new car at the golf range.",

• “The virtue of prosperity is temperance; the virtue of adversity is fortitude”,

• "If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them; if he be compassionate towards the afflictions of others, it shows that his heart is like the noble tree that is wounded itself when it gives the balm; if he easily pardons and remits offenses, it shows that his mind is planted above injuries, so that he cannot be shot; if he be thankful for small benefits, it shows that he weighs men’s minds, and not their trash",

• "It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire, and many things to fear. Yet that commonly is the case of kings, who—being at the highest—have nothing to desire, which makes their minds more languishing; and have many representations of perils and shadows, which makes their minds less clear",

• "It is good to commit the beginnings of all great actions to Argus with his hundred eyes, and the ends to Briareus with his hundred hands, first to watch and then to speed",

• "When Plutus (which is riches) is sent from Jupiter, he limps and goes slowly; but when he is sent from Pluto, he runs and is swift of foot; meaning that riches acquired by good means and just labour grow slowly; but when they come by the death of others—Pluto being the king of the realm of the dead—·(as by the course of inheritance, testaments, and the like), they come tumbling upon a man. But it might be applied likewise to Pluto, taking him for the devil; for when riches come from the devil (as by fraud and oppression, and unjust means), they come at speed.",

• "The greatness of an estate does fall under measure of bulk and territory; and the greatness of finances and revenue does fall under computation. The kingdom of heaven is compared not to any great kernel or nut, but to a grain of mustard-seed, which is one of the least grains, but has in it a property and spirit hastily to get up and spread. So there are some states that are great in territory yet not apt to become larger or take command of more territory, and •some that have only a small dimension of stem and yet apt to be the foundations of great monarchies.",

• "It is a secret both in nature and state that it is safer to change many things than to change one.",

• "At first let him practice with helps, as swimmers do with inflated bladders; but, after a time, let him practice with disadvantages, as dancers do with thick shoes; for it breeds great perfection if the practice is harder than the use.",

• "Men’s thoughts are much according to their inclination. Their discourse and speeches according to their learning and acquired opinions. Their deeds follow what they are accustomed to. There is no trusting of words unless corroborated by custom (habits). Machiavelli said for executing a conspiracy, a man should not rely on the fierceness of any man’s nature, or his resolute undertakings, but should take one who has had his hands formerly in blood. The predominancy of custom is everywhere visible, so that it is wonderful to hear men profess, protest, engage, give great words, and then do just as they have done before, as if they were dead. . . . engines moved only by the wheels of custom. See the reign or tyranny of custom for what it is. Let men try by all means to acquire good customs.",

• "If you would work any man, you must know either a) His nature and fashions, and so lead him; or b) His ends, and so persuade him; or c) His weakness and disadvantages, and so awe him (or those who have interest in him) and so govern him.",

• "If he is a cunning flatterer he will follow the arch-flatterer, which is a man’s self, and wherein a man thinks best of himself, therein the flatterer will uphold him most",

• "All negotiations arise from weakness. In the end, 'the balance of weakness' almost always decides the issue. Serious negotiations imply a weakness in the position of at least one of the parties involved in the negotiations, unlike day-to-day bargaining, where no such weakness need exist. The first thing to be done, perhaps the most vital thing, is to establish exactly where those weaknesses lie. Just how much might the elephant be willing to pay to be rid of you, or to buy you out? Especially if your business, however small, is growing and the elephant's business is not? Because the elephant has a master, a mahout. And his master is an unforgiving son-of-a-bitch with a nasty barbed iron stick and an elephant gun. He is otherwise known as an institutional investor. All start-up entrepreneurs should say their prayers for institutional investors, those fabulous beasts, every night. 'Dear Lord, thank you, thank yon for institutional investors in big companies.' For the elephant must show his master that he is an up-to-date elephant. A savvy elephant. An elephant that knows what's just round the corner and what the next big thing is going to be in his patch of jungle. Otherwise he risks his share price dropping and being hurt by the nasty iron stick, or even shot by the fierce institutional investor, who will then acquire a new elephant, leaving the bones of the old one to rot on the jungle floor. You have nurtured it with your little company and it is now a reality, however tiny. Better still, it looks like it's already working, or might work soon. The elephant is concerned that his master may hear of this little flea's idea and that he might well be punished for not having thought of it himself. (Most elephants are a trifle lazy, you know.) The elephant knows what he must do then. He lumbers over to meet you. He has done it many times before, with many other fleas. (in his monstrous, corporate heart he would really like everything to stay the same), but usually because he fears his mahout more than he despises the flea. But never forget why he came calling in the first place. He does not love you. He is not your friend, although he may pretend to be. He might not hate you, he may even admire you a little. He will certainly flatter you. But remember he had to come. His fear drove him. His fear of his master, the institutional investor. The flea has introduced a rogue element (the trade magazine) into the negotiations - Choose a rogue element to your advantage and bring it into the negotiation at a late stage. You'll be amazed at how often this tactic produces results. Their need will outweigh everything, even greed.",

• "Share the annual pie, not the LLC",

• "Why do you want anything? Because you’re missing something. If you’ve wanted something and gotten something before and are still missing something, maybe that’s not the way. You’ve decided you want a new car. Why do you want it? It may be that you expect to be free of the mechanical problems that bothered you with the old car. Or you may expect to receive more respect with a new car. Or you may expect driving to be more enjoyable. Whatever the reason, it’s a means to a further end: You believe that getting a new car will lead to a greater feeling of well-being. You believe you’ll feel better with the new car than you would without it.",

• "A positive decision is one in which you choose among alternatives to maximize your happiness. An example would be deciding whether you’ll be happier going to a movie or a football game. A negative decision is one in which you choose among alternatives to minimize your unhappiness. An example would be deciding whether to let your roof leak or to deplete your savings account to get it fixed. Neither choice will increase your happiness; you’re trying to decide which choice would be the least unpleasant. A free person spends most of his time making positive decisions — choosing among attractive alternatives. Most people, however, spend most of their time making negative decisions — deciding which alternatives would be the least unpleasant, trying to keep things from getting worse. As time passes, such a person settles for less and less, believing that it isn’t possible to be free and profoundly happy.",

• "The first Identity Trap is the belief that you should be someone other than yourself. You necessarily forfeit your freedom by requiring yourself to live in a stereotyped, predetermined way that doesn’t consider your own desires, feelings, and objectives. We know you are different. Just as no two persons’ fingerprints are identical, no two people are identical in terms of their knowledge, understanding, attitudes, likes, and dislikes. You have to determine for yourself who you are, what makes you happy, what you’re capable of doing, and what you want to do. Until you discover and accept yourself fully, you won’t have the conviction or the courage to be free. You’re in the Identity Trap if you allow others to define labels and impose them upon you — such as going to PTA meetings because that’s what a 'good parent' is supposed to do, or going to visit your parents every Sunday because a 'good child' would never do less. You deny your own self when you suppress desires that aren’t considered 'legitimate,' or when you try to appear to be having fun because everyone else is, or when you settle for a certain life because you’ve been told that’s all you should expect in the world. You’re in the Intellectual Trap when you try to deny your bad feelings — such as hate, fear, jealousy, or guilt. You’re in the trap when you try to deny good feelings — such as infatuation for someone who’s “wrong for you,” or enjoyment of something that’s frowned upon. You’re also in the trap when you believe you should be happy simply because you’re doing what you’ve been told will make you happy. A good example is the businessman who has to keep reminding himself that his $70,000-a-year job and carpeted office are what he’s always wanted. Or the woman who keeps telling herself she must be happy, now that she finally has a husband, four children, and a home in suburbia. Each of them is living a life he’s been told should make him happy; but if it doesn’t, he attempts to make his emotions respond.",

• "An emotion is an involuntary response to something that happens. It isn’t intentional; you can’t command yourself to feel something. But when it happens, your body reacts — a warm prickling at the back of your neck, or a twist in your stomach, or a tightening of your chest. And there’s usually an urge to express yourself outwardly — through laughter, tears, talk, hitting or hugging someone. The two basic emotions are happiness and unhappiness — the feelings of mental well-being and mental discomfort. Happiness is an emotion. You can’t turn it on at will. You feel it as an involuntary response to the conditions in your life at a given moment. To find happiness, you must know how your unique emotional nature responds to things. You must observe and take seriously your own emotional reactions. For example, it may bother you if you’re attracted to a woman other than your wife. You may feel that since you’re married, you’re going to stay married, and that you don’t want anything to interfere with that. But the recognition that you feel something for another woman isn’t a command that you get a divorce or commit adultery. It can be a signal to alert you to deficiencies in your marriage — things you’re missing. Make use of the signal; look for ways to fill in what’s missing within the context of your marriage. Negative emotions can act as signals to you, letting you know there’s a part of your life that needs attention. For example, if you feel jealous about someone, it may mean you’re not sure the relationship you have is really right for you, and you’re afraid it can be taken from you easily. If you hate, it might mean you’ve made yourself vulnerable to someone whose desires are in conflict with yours, and he’s using that power in ways that hurt you. And if you’re afraid, you may have put yourself in a dangerous position you’re not equipped to handle.",

• "The second Identity Trap is the assumption that others will do things in the way you would. When you expect someone to have the same ideas, attitudes, and feelings you have, you expect him to act in ways that aren’t in keeping with his nature. As a result, you’ll expect and hope that people will do things they’re not capable of doing. You’re in the Identity Trap when you assume an individual will react to something as you would react or as you’ve seen someone else react. You’re in this form of the Identity Trap if you expect your wife to act in certain ways because your mother acted that way, or when you assume someone will see the same logic you see Solution: You can’t control the natures of other people, but you can control how you’ll deal with them. And you can also control the extent and manner in which you’ll be involved with them.",

• "There are four basic principles whose recognition can help to avoid the Identity Trap: 1) You are a unique individual — different from all other human beings. Recognize each person you deal with as a different, distinct, individual entity, and you won’t have identity problems. Try to avoid labeling individuals and then expecting them to live up to your labels. 2) Each individual is acting from his own knowledge in ways he believes will bring him happiness. 3) You have to treat things and people in accordance with their own identities in order to get what you want from them. You don’t expect a stone to be a fish. Everything you do will produce an effect or consequence of some kind. The consequences you get will depend upon the identities of things and people and how you deal with them. To be able to foresee those consequences depends upon your ability to perceive the true identities of things and people. You recognize the identity of each thing you deal with; you use it in a way that’s consistent with its nature. For example, a stone is called a stone because of certain characteristics that distinguish it from what we call a peanut-butter sandwich. You can’t eat a stone; but, because of what it is, you can use it to build something. Certain things can produce certain effects and no others — that’s outside your control. What you do control is your choice of things that will be the appropriate means to the end you seek. Each person will act in keeping with his own identity. This means he’ll be bound by the limits of his own knowledge and experience — even if he wishes he weren’t. You can’t entrust your investments to an individual who knows nothing about money. 4) You view the world subjectively — colored by your own experience, interpretation, and limits of perception. Sometimes a thing turns out to be different from what you’d thought it was. Sometimes you want something to be a certain way so you are more likely to read into things you expect or wish to find. Sometimes you must look past time, effort, and money spent in the past to see things clearly going forward",

• "The Emotional Trap is typified by the assumption that one’s feelings of the moment will be permanent. Solution: it’s a good rule to never make an important decision when your emotions are in control. I try to program myself in advance to remember this rule when I need it. When I’m in an emotional state (either positive or negative), I try to keep just enough intellect working to tell me one thing: don’t decide now. This inspires actions that produce consequences that still have to be dealt with after the feelings have passed. Your intellect and your emotions are both essential, real parts of you. You’re in the Intellectual Trap if you let your intellect tell you what you should feel. You’re in the Emotional Trap if you let your emotions make important decisions for you. You have to know what you’re doing and why. The Emotional Trap blinds you to what you’re doing because you can’t see the consequences clearly. And the Intellectual Trap cuts you off from the only important why connected with your actions — knowing that what you’re doing will lead to what you know will create happiness",

• "Sometimes people’s desires are the same — like going to a movie together. Sometimes people’s desires are different — like trading your money for someone’s house. In either case, it’s the compatibility of the desires that makes the exchange possible. Because desires vary from person to person, it’s possible to create exchanges between individuals in which both parties benefit. For example, if you buy a house, you do so because you’d rather have the house than the money involved. But the seller’s desire is different — he’d rather have the money than the house. When the sale is completed, each of you has received something of greater value than what you gave up — otherwise you wouldn’t have entered the exchange. Who, then, has had to sacrifice for the other? An efficiently selfish person is sensitive to the needs and desires of others. But he doesn’t consider those desires to be demands upon him. Rather, he sees them as opportunities — potential exchanges that might be beneficial to him. He doesn’t sacrifice himself for others, nor does he expect others to be sacrificed for him. He takes the third alternative — he finds relationships that are mutually beneficial so that no sacrifice is required. Why should you feel guilty for seeking your own happiness when that’s what everyone else is doing, too? The demand that you be unselfish can be motivated by any number of reasons: that you should help create a better world, that you give up your happiness to the selfishness of someone else, or that the person demanding it has just never thought it out. It will create much less pressure on you if you realize that it’s his selfish reason. And you can eliminate the problem entirely by looking for more compatible companions. If someone finds happiness by doing 'good works' for others, let him. That doesn’t mean that’s the best way for you to find happiness - when someone accuses you of being selfish, just remember that he’s upset only because you aren’t doing what he selfishly wants you to do.",

• "We call something that is desirable but just out of reach 'tantalizing' after his name. The story goes that Tantalus was banished to the underworld by his father, Zeus, as a punishment. There he found himself wading in a pool of water while a tree dangled ripe fruit above his head. The curse seems benign, but when Tantalus tried to pluck the fruit, the branch moved away from him, always just out of reach. When he bent down to drink the cool water, it receded so that he could never quench his thirst. Tantalus’s punishment was to yearn for things he desired but could never grasp",

• "Even when we think we're seeking pleasure, we're actually driven by the desire to free ourselves from the pain of wanting. Epicurious said 'by pleasure, we mean the absence of pain in the body and trouble in the soul'",

• "Participant said they would pay not to get shocked. When left alone for 1h with nothing to do, 67% shocked themselves. The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself",

• “'Fun is the aftermath of deliberately manipulating a familiar situation in a new way'",

• "Think of all the ways people steal your time. The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, 'People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.' Though Seneca was writing more than two thousand years ago, his words are just as applicable today. Think of all the locks, security systems, and storage units we use to protect our property and how little we do to protect our time.",

• "Understand the 3 types of costs 1. Baseline costs - food, rent fade into the background. 2. Unexpected costs - decrease happiness (paying for the engine repair on your Porsche). 3. Planned new spending - changing your baseline with: a) Experiences, b) Things. Things - create an initial bump in happiness that then it fades, and if that possession is expensive, you worry about it. If it breaks, you have to spend money to fix it. Possessions convert splurges into Unexpected Costs. You buy something and get happier. You acclimate. You will have an unexpected cost of repair or maintenance that will make you unhappy. Is the net effect the effect you want or the opposite effect? High baseline and unexpected costs are the recipe for unhappiness. Aim for a goal of low baseline costs, no unexpected costs, and lots of happiness-producing splurges.",

• "When you spend time or money on experiences, they are not only enjoyable in the moment—they pay an ongoing dividend, the memory dividend. We wake up every morning preloaded with a bunch of memories that we can access at any time—mainly to get around and navigate the world. When you face a large rectangular panel, there’s a huge dividend from having once learned what a door is—think of all the doors you can open! You see the person making coffee in your kitchen and you don’t start from scratch with them, as if you’re meeting a stranger. You know this is a person you love, and you know why you love this person. All the history that went into your relationship, all your past conversations and shared experiences, built the current feeling you have toward this person. So every time you remember the original experience, you get an additional experience from mentally and emotionally reliving the original experience. It’s why people keep photo albums—and why, if their house is on fire, they usually grab their albums before trying to save just about any other possession. If you stack up all those little bars—all the ongoing memory dividends from an experience—you get a second bar that might be as tall as the bar that represents the original experience. In fact, sometimes the second bar is even taller. One way this can happen is through compounding. You retire on your memories.",

• "Generally enjoyment and fulfillment from an experience is proportional to the amount of time and money invested. // When you’re a baby, there’s no greater happiness than Mom and the crib. In a way, the amount of utility that babies get from money is very similar to what the elderly get. Money is nearly worthless at the very beginning and the very end of life. // When my daughters were little, we loved watching Pooh’s Heffalump Movie together. I think it’s the most wonderful kids’ movie there is—a sweet, innocent story about friendship. We watched it many times. But then one day, when my younger daughter was ten, I suggested we watch the Heffalump movie and, to my astonishment, she just wasn’t interested anymore. All of a sudden, she thought she was too old for it! If someone had told me that by this date my kid would stop wanting to watch the Heffalump movie, I probably would have watched it with her a lot more. Unfortunately, in real life you rarely get an exact date for when you will no longer be able to do something—these things just seem to fade away. We ourselves die many deaths in our lives - the teenager in us dies, the single unattached you dies, the parent to an infant dies, etc.",

• "Relationships will be far more rewarding for you if you recognize identities, find those that are compatible, and arrange matters in ways that appeal to the self-interest of each person involved. There are wide differences in tastes and desires. This is fortunate. For these differences make the world orderly. If everyone wanted the same things, we would all be struggling against each other to acquire what little was available. Diversity is the source of harmony in human relationships. Because our tastes are different, we can exchange with each other in a way that is mutually beneficial. If you and I have exactly the same values, there is no way we can trade. One of us will have what each of us wants most — and he won’t give it up. Human wants are limitless. We each want a multitude of things — far more than we could ever obtain with our limited resources. So to state a desire for something doesn’t specify how much that thing is desired by the individual. Only when he offers to give up something in order to get it do we know how much he values it.",

• "When you don’t understand a situation, it helps to stand back for a minute, think of each person involved, and ask yourself, 'What is he trying to do? How does he believe he’s furthering his own well-being?' That can make his actions much more understandable and predictable. Always try to determine the self-interest of anyone you deal with. And the best way to discover that is to ask him. What does he need?",

• "Many people hide their identity, tolerate restrictions, and remain in bad relationships because they’re afraid of being lonely. But I wonder what they mean by 'lonely.' Aren’t they very lonely when they deal with people who don’t understand and appreciate them? There are many, many people in the world. You don’t have to please any one person. There are other employers, other business prospects, other potential friends, lovers and spouses. Go looking where you would be -> a night college or a piano debut. Second, since you could also run into potential friends almost anywhere, it’s important to display your standards openly and honestly wherever you are. Only then can others recognize you as a kindred soul. For if you wear a “socially acceptable” mask, those whom you seek will walk right by you. And those whom you do attract with the mask will only add to the pressure that you be something other than yourself. If you make your own actions consistent with the standards you really admire, you’ll know which people are compatible — just by their reactions to you. Again - let others tell you about themselves through their reactions to what you are. Ask for what you want. Sure, someone may laugh at you, deny you, or even condemn you. But is that the person who can fulfill your dreams? One of these times someone’s going to respond enthusiastically and gratefully — and you’ll know you’ve found someone wonderful. Emphasize your differences. Try to reveal frequently the things about yourself that distinguish you from most others. What is commonly thought of as good advertising is usually not very effective advertising. Superlatives — words like “best,” “quality,” or “sensational” — have little impact. Most people know intuitively that it may not mean “best” for the prospect. Simply learn to reveal your qualities as they are appropriate to the situation. I simply let them be known, one at a time, as appropriate. Of course, I could join in the usual conversational interest in the prevailing social issues. But where would that get me? My competition would be overwhelming and my rewards inappropriate to me. When you find the lover who’s been looking for you, you won’t need to restrict competition in any way — for no one else will be able to provide what that person needs most. Any exposure to others will only point up your unique value by comparison. Do you want to grow a beard or have longer hair? Do it. If your employer objects, look for a job where that’s not a problem. Don’t expect your employer to forsake his self-interest for you; but neither is there any reason for you to forsake yours for him. Do some people get upset when you express your emotions — if you cry when you’re moved, laugh when you see something ridiculous? Don’t be bullied by those who say you shouldn’t be so emotional. Find those who understand such things and appreciate your honesty. Do those in your social circle make you feel pressured to live up to certain intellectual standards? If so, you may be in the wrong place. It might be that you haven’t yet accurately identified your own beliefs and standards — and these people seemed to be of the type you wanted. One way to tell is by noticing if that kind of pressure exists. If it does, keep trying to recognize yourself more clearly, and then look for people like that. It’s an easy life. Why complicate it by trying to be all things to all people? Adopt the image that’s most effective — your own.",

• "The biggest relationship problem probably stems from the ease with which you can label a relationship and then, in effect, treat the individual as if he were the label. One is called a 'friend' or 'partner'. The labels imply subtle expectations concerning the role the person is expected to play in your life. For example, a 'friend' is someone who’ll lend you money when you’re in trouble. What the label requires may not be in the self-interest of the person involved, so conflicts can result. Your definition of a 'friend' may be considerably different from the one your friend has. When you find a friend who’s intellectually stimulating, enjoy him for the excellent discussions you can have. But don’t expect him to help rearrange your furniture or lend you money. Relationships can be fruitful only when they’re in the self-interest of each person. Limit the relationship to what you have in common. For example, if A expects B and C to help him paint his garage ('What’s a friend for?'), it will probably be a loss to all three. For one thing, B and C may be lousy garage painters; Mr. A might lose by not paying the necessary price to have it done right. And for B and C, the relationship is no longer just good beer and good conversation. Now it includes duties and obligations. No one will be able to relax completely any longer, for he’ll never know when he’ll be called upon to set aside his own self-interest. Even if he refuses such requests, it will be a strain on the relationship. Let the relationship evolve as it will — as mutual self-interest leads it. If you can accept the differences that exist between you and those you care for, you can make the most of what you have together. If you try to overcome the differences, you’ll only make it harder to enjoy the things you do have together. Let others be free. Make it your policy that you don’t expect anyone to do what isn’t in his self-interest. If you let others be free, you’ll be a rare person — and a valuable one. You’ll be in demand because you won’t create the conflicts and arguments that so many people have had from others. I think it’s a general rule that if you feel you’re being exploited, the person you’re dealing with is usually the last person you should blame. Why does he permit it?  Obviously, the individual permits it because he believes it’s the best alternative available to him. But because he seems to offer you something, you want to be involved with him. And if there’s something about him you don’t like, you can be tempted to try to change him. But it won’t work. Each person is what he is. To try to change him is to frustrate yourself with an indirect alternative. Your only direct alternatives are to look for someone better, or to change the nature of the relationship so that his differences don’t have to get in the way. You can change the relationship so that the other person’s drawbacks don’t affect you; or you can withdraw from the relationship and look for better alternatives. Only the last two alternatives offer any hope for a better life.",

• "Property is as important as your time — because, in fact, it’s the same thing as your time. When someone destroys your property or steals it or usurps your decision- making control over it, he has taken from your life the amount of time necessary to earn that property or to replace it.",

• "Jealousy is the negative emotion caused by the fear of losing someone (or something) to someone else. Envy is of a different character; it’s the desire for something possessed by someone else.",

• "The child should have his own world where he is clearly the sovereign. If he doesn’t take care of it, he’ll learn the consequences of that sooner or later. But if he’s forced to keep it as his parents wish, he’ll never discover for himself the consequences of alternative courses of action. If you want your child to understand that he lives in a world in which his future will be of his own making, encourage that by letting him deal directly with the world as much as possible. Let him experience the consequences of his own actions. Be available to let him know your opinions — without implying that your opinions are binding on him. Let him think of you as a wiser, more experienced person — but not as a moral authority. In effect, you’re inviting a stranger to live in your home for eighteen years or more.",

• "The three forms of security most often sought are financial security (the assurance that one will never be poor), intellectual security (the assurance that one is right in his beliefs), and emotional security (the assurance that one will always be loved). Most people look for security where it can’t be found — and in the process they become even more insecure. They hope that someone outside themselves can guarantee security and end their need to be concerned about it. But all they do is make themselves more vulnerable, and hence more insecure, by becoming dependent upon someone else. Security comes from your ability to deal with the world, not from a guarantee by someone else. When you know you’re capable of dealing with whatever comes, you have the only security the world has to offer. Your ability to deal with the world depends upon three assets: self-reliance, vigilance, and honesty with yourself. To be self-reliant is to recognize that no one else is as concerned about your future as you are and that no one knows as much about you as you do. A secure individual knows that the responsibility for anything concerning his life remains with himself — and he accepts that responsibility. To be vigilant is to recognize that there will be constant change in the world. There are always unknown factors that can affect your plans. So the secure individual is always mentally prepared for changes and surprises. He doesn’t necessarily have a plan in mind to handle those changes and surprises, but he’s aware that they can happen and is prepared to deal with them as they arise. To be honest with yourself means to acknowledge mistakes as they become known. If you can accept your mistakes, you can correct them, pay for them, learn from them, and see that they don’t interfere with your security. The individual who can’t acknowledge his mistakes will remain vulnerable and be doomed to repeat them. If you’re loved now, you’ll continue to be loved only if you continue to satisfy the values of the person who loves you. That fact should bother someone only if he doesn’t feel that he is genuinely worthy. Chances are that he’s tried to live with an identity that isn’t his own, and he’s constantly afraid that he won’t live up to it — afraid that he’ll be found out and deserted. Insecurity comes from vulnerability. The insecure person relies upon protectors — institutions and people who will guarantee results for him. Because he knows intuitively that his interests can’t possibly be the paramount interest in someone else’s life, he’s vulnerable and he knows it. Security can come only from the willingness to handle whatever comes and the knowledge that you can do so.",

• "I find it valuable to test my honesty periodically. To do so, I pick a period of thirty minutes or so when I’m talking on the telephone or in person with others. I observe closely everything I say. Did I speak the absolute truth as I know it — or did I say what I felt I 'ought' to say in the circumstances? Instead of checking your statements after you say them, think twice about them before speaking. Stop your first impulse to speak, and check what you were about to say. Is it the truth? If it isn’t, determine what is and say that. I’ve found that suppressing embarrassing things about myself costs me far too much freedom to be worth it. So, if I feared that a given person might discover something I had been trying to hide, I went to him and told it to him myself. The experience never failed to give me a wonderful sense of freedom. I no longer had to worry about it; the price had been paid once and for all. He uses the word 'I' dishonestly. He begins statements with 'I think . . .' but he’s only repeating what he’s heard. He says, 'I will. . .' but he doesn’t really know what he’s going to do. Integrity is knowing yourself well enough to be able to mean what you say. The person with integrity can use the word 'I' with authority. He knows what he thinks — for he’s thought it out for himself.",

• "The most important part of the quest for freedom is discovering yourself. What you are is revealed mostly by how you react to things around you — what pleases you and what causes you discomfort. These are the signals that let you know what kind of life you crave, what will bring you happiness. There are three basic sources of information to tell you what you want most — past experiences, daydreams, and new experiences. Suppose, for example, that you discover that you have an urge to steal. You might find your urge to steal is only a superficial symptom of a more basic desire — perhaps the desire to have money, or the desire to get away with something, or the desire to rebel against standards that you’ve seen advocated in a smug, self-righteous way. Don’t feel that to find some desire in yourself is to be compelled to a given course of action. Once you know what you are, you can find ways to make the most of that without getting into trouble. But you’ll never find those ways if you don’t first accept what you see in yourself. The signals become distorted if you’ve lived most of your life in involved relationships. If you’ve grown up living with your parents, then lived with a roommate, and then married, the people around you may have played a large part in determining your tastes and values.",

• "Routines in your life can continue long after they’ve ceased to be valuable. It’s important to periodically recheck your assumptions, reappraise your activities, and reexamine your goals to see how much relevance they still have to your happiness. Don’t be too justify activities that contribute nothing to your happiness as being necessary to long-term goals. The future has an annoying habit of forgetting its appointments — or arriving too late for them. I’ve always found it hard to understand why so many people live so much for the future — especially when the present is such a lovely place. Who made your life complicated? You did, of course. It wasn’t society, the economic system, the people you consider to be nuisances, your parents, or anyone else. Every complication in your life today is the result of something you’ve allowed to happen. You initiated it, or you consented to it, or you’ve allowed it to continue. You are where you are today because you’ve chosen to be there. And you can choose not to be there. You’ll have to pay for past mistakes.",

• "Create projects - our management team came up with a list of every aspect of the restaurant that could benefit from some attention, including linens, side work, and educational training. These were less shiny, but they would make a real difference in the experience of those who worked there, and on our bottom line. These were things people could take ownership of as a project. (On a volunteer basis) An example: the guy who took over CGS (which stands for "china, glass, and silver"- sexy as it gets, right?) dedicated himself to reducing breakage. He discovered the racks in the dish room were half an inch too short, so the stems poked up above the top when the glasses went through the dishwasher. A couple of new glass racks later, and he'd eliminated loss by 30 percent. That's serious money, and a major morale booster, as it also meant that we no longer ran out of water glasses in the middle of service. And a onetime presentation was much less of an obligation than taking over an ownership program-and it was fun, because the people who worked for us loved food and wine. When they'd tasted a sherry that wasn't like sneaking a sip at their grandmother's bridge game, we wanted to hear it.",

• "A seemingly small but extraordinarily significant idea, one that changed our culture: if you made eye contact with a colleague and touched your lapel, it meant "I need help." This is now used in restaurants around the country.",

• "When you're going for four stars, you're aiming for perfection, so we did everything in our power to make Frank Bruni’s experience perfect even when he wasn't there. Because every night that Bruni wasn't in the restaurant, which was most of them that year, we designated one random table as the Critic of the Night and used those tables as a dress rehearsal. These make-believe critics ate at our best table. They were served by our best team and advised on their wine choices by our wine director. When it came time to reset the table for their next course, we didn't pull forks out of a drawer, no matter how meticulously those had been polished before service-no, there was a separate box of silverware set aside, every piece of which had been checked and buffed by a manager. Re-polished glasses sat on a separate tray, and every plate for that table was scrutinized for chips and smudges. The kitchen fired doubles of every dish that the Critic of the Night's table ordered, just as they would when the real critic was in the house, so Daniel could send out whichever one had been ever-so-slightly more perfectly cooked. We assigned our two best food runners to take the food out—two, because you don't want a critic to see the same person over and over again and suspect that you're hand-selecting the people delivering the food to them (which, of course, we were).",

• "Make everyone a VIP - We created a a chef's table with no chairs - our guests stood while enjoying a single course with an expansive view of the thirty precision-trained cooks working with laser focus and in near silence in our immaculate kitchen. Because it was only a single course, we could offer that special experience to lots of people everyone who showed interest in experiencing it. (This course was neutral-never a dessert-so it could happen at any point in the meal; the first one we did was a liquid nitrogen cocktail.) Not everyone wanted to see the kitchen; some people had come to the restaurant to negotiate a deal, or to stare passionately into each other's eyes, or simply to eat-and the staff was tuned in enough to leave those folks alone. But for those who wanted it, the experience was yours to have.",

• "Guidara heard a table of Europeans on their way to the airport say “we’ve eaten everywhere, EMP, per se, etc., the only thing we didn’t try was a street hot dog” and Guidara went to a cart, bought a hot dog, had the kitchen plate it, and blew their mind. Hospitality is about customization. That hot dog cost two dollars, but there was probably only one table in the history of the restaurant that I could have presented it to. People often confuse hospitality with luxury, but I could have given that table a bottle of vintage Krug and a kilo of caviar, and it wouldn't have had anywhere near the same impact. Luxury means just giving more; hospitality means being more thoughtful. A table talking about a movie they miss can receive a DVD of the movie at the end of their email. For table celebrating their anniversary mentioning their hotel you cancal the hotel and set up a bottle of champagne and a handwritten note thanking the couple for their trust that special night, waiting by the time they get home. One night, a banker hustling to fund a new company teased his captain: sure, an after-dinner drink would be great, but what he really needed was a million dollars to finish his raise. Alas, our budget only stretched to a bag filled with ten 100 Grand chocolate bars, which we tucked under his chair. Good hospitality is called 'legendary,' because you tell the story the next day. Personalize to their life stage. If you're selling an apartment to a couple having a baby, get a pack of those protective plastic outlet covers and leave them in a drawer with a little note: "You've got big adventures coming up, so I took this off your to-do list." And because so many people move when they find out they're expecting, keep a case of those outlet covers in your office so you don't have to scramble. Try to find recurring items, like a Chemex coffeepot, with a box of filters and a bag of locally roasted ground coffee - I guarantee they'll think of you and your thoughtfulness every time they use it. Imagine the look a harried dad, struggling to install a booster seat, would give you if you sent him off your lot with a bag of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, so his toddler doesn't get hangry on the way home and a little DustBuster vacuum, so Dad can vacuum up all those orange crumbs and keep his brand-new car looking brand-new?",

• "I view people as phobic instead of untalented, and this changes my relationship with them. I constantly return to the first stages of the work to try to pull in students who remain in a terrified state. Volpe relaxed his phobic patients and then presented them with a very dilute form of the thing that scared them. Someone terrified of birds might be asked to imagine a bird, but one in Australia. At the same time that the image was presented, the patient was relaxed, and the relaxation was maintained (if it wasn't maintained, if the patient started to tremble, or sweat or whatever, then something even less alarming would be presented).",

• "Students use many techniques to avoid the fear of failure. Students learn to get round problems, not solve them - such as the student who learned to screw their face up and bite on their pencil to show they’re trying and hopefully the teacher writes out the answer for them. I explain to students the devices they’re using to avoid tackling the problems and the release of tension is often amazing. 1) Look inadequate and play for sympathy. However easy the problems students will start with this - starting a scene in a feeble way for example is supposed to make onlookers sympathize if they fail or bring greater results if they win. But nobody has sympathy for adults who take this attitude, even if it worked as a child. Once they realize this, students who look ill suddenly look healthy. 2) Another common ploy is to anticipate the problem and try to prepare solutions in advance - like the student who was assigned a paragraph to read aloud and starts preparing early. I ask students to have an empty head and just watch, not try to control the future or win.",

• "If I'm playing with my three-year-old son and I smack him, he looks at me for signals that will turn the sensation into either warmth or pain. A very gentle smack that he perceives as 'serious' will have him howling in agony. A hard 'play' slap may make him laugh. When I want to work and he wants me to continue playing he will give very strong 'I am playing' signals in an attempt to pull me back into his game. All people relate to each other in this way but most teachers are afraid to give 'I am playing' signals to their students. If they would, their work would become a constant pleasure.",

• "An exercise: fix your eyes on some object, and attend to something at the periphery of your vision. You can see what you're attending to, but actually your mind is assembling the object from relatively little information. Now look directly, and observe the difference. This is one way of tricking the mind out of its habitual dulling of the world.",

• "To make scenes real, 'Try to get your status just a little above or below your partner's,' I said, and I insisted that the gap should be minimal. If someone asked a question we didn't bother to answer it, we concentrated on why it had been asked. No one could make an 'innocuous remark without everyone instantly grasping what lay behind it. In the park we'll notice the ducks squabbling, but not how carefully they keep their distances when they are not.",

• "We found that people will play one status while convinced that they are playing the opposite and many of us had to revise our whole idea of ourselves. In my case I thought I was being friendly but I was actually being hostile when someone said 'I like your play', I said 'Oh, it's not up to much', perceiving myself as 'charmingly modest' but In reality I would have been implying that my admirer had bad taste.",

• "Keep your head still when you speak. You can talk and waggle your head if you play the gravedigger, but not Hamlet. Keep hands away from face. Slow, smooth movements. Long 'er' at the beginning of speaking to hold your space.",

• "Your body takes up more space than the surface of your body. When I panic, this parabola crushes in, the space is like a plastic skin pressing on to you and making your body rigid and bound. The opposite of this is seen when a great actor makes a gesture, and it's as if his arm has swept right over the heads of the people sitting at the back of the audience.",

• "Those who say 'Yes' are rewarded by the adventures they have, and those who say 'No' are rewarded by the safety they attain.",

• "Interesting - If you'll stop reading for a moment and think of something you wouldn't want to happen to you, or to someone you love, then you'll have thought of something worth staging or filming. We don't want to walk into a restaurant and be hit in the face by a custard pie, and we don't want to suddenly glimpse Grannie's wheelchair racing towards the edge of the cliff, but we'll pay money to attend enactments of such events.",

• "Good improvisers accept all offers made—something no 'normal' person would do. Also they may accept offers which weren't really intended. I tell my actors never to think up an offer, but instead to assume that one has already been made. Groucho Marx understood this: a contestant at his quiz game 'froze' so he took the man's pulse and said, 'Either this man's dead or my watch has stopped. If you notice that you are shorter than your partner you can say 'Simpkins! Didn't I forbid you ever to be taller than me?' If your partner is sweating, fan yourself. If he yawns, say 'Late, isn't it?'",

• "To make a good story - He shouldn't really think of making up stories, but of interrupting routines. Sailors travel across the ocean then X. Walking through the forest then a bear…",

• "We have instinctive responses to faces. We try and be rational and assert that 'people can't help their appearance' , yet the truth is that we learn to hold characteristic expressions as a way of maintaining our personalities. Adults lose this vision in which the face is the person, but after their first Mask class students are amazed by passersby in the street suddenly they see 'evil' people, and 'innocent' people, and people holding their faces in Masks of pain, or grief, or pride, or whatever. Our faces get 'fixed' with age as the muscles shorten, but even in very young people you can see that a decision has been taken to appear tough, or stupid, or defiant. (Why should anyone wish to look stupid? Because then your teachers expect less of you.)",

• "When actors insist on 'thinking' about the Mask, I tell them to ‘attend' to it instead. I say, 'Imagine you're in a great forest and you hear a sound you can't identify quite close to you. Is it a bear? Is it dangerous? The mind goes empty as you stay motionless waiting for the sound to be repeated. This mindless listening is like attending to a Mask.",

2023

• "You can kill me but you cannot harm me",

• "When at small cost you are supplied of everything for the body, do not be proud of this. How much more frugal the poor are than we, and how much more enduring of labor. If you ever wish to exercise yourself of labor endurance—if you are ever very thirsty, take a draught of cold water, and spit it out, and tell no man.",

• "Everything has two handles, the one by which it may be borne, the other by which it may not. If your brother acts unjustly, do not lay hold of the act by that handle wherein he acts unjustly, for this is the handle which cannot be borne; but lay hold of the other, that he is your brother, that he was nurtured with you, and you will lay hold of the thing by that handle by which it can be borne.",

• "If a man has reported to you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make any defense (answer) to what has been told you: but reply, The man did not know the rest of my faults, for he would not have mentioned these only. 'If only he knew me, he would have said so much worse'",

• "These things happen (when your neighbor’s slave breaks his cup). When your cup is also broken, you ought to think as your neighbors cup was broken. Transfer this reflection to greater things also. When your or another man’s child is dead, it is one of the things which happen.",

• "Well, what is the price of lettuces? An obolus perhaps. If then a man gives up the obolus, and receives the lettuces, and if you do not give up the obolus and do not obtain the lettuces do not suppose that you receive less than he who has got the lettuces; for as he has the lettuces, so you have the obolus which you did not give. In the same way then in the other matter also you have not been invited to a man's feast, for you did not give to the host the price at which the supper is sold; but he sells it for praise (flattery), he sells it for personal attention. Give then the price, if it is for your interest, for which it is sold. But if you wish both not to give the price and to obtain the things, you are insatiable and silly. Have you nothing then in place of the supper? You have indeed, you have the not flattering of him, whom you did not choose to flatter; you have the not enduring of the man when he enters the room.",

• "Let death and exile and every other thing which appears dreadful be daily before your eyes; but most of all death: and you will never think of anything mean nor will you desire anything extravagantly.",

• "Remember that thou art an actor in a play of such a kind as the teacher (author) may choose; if short, of a short one; if long, of a long one: if he wishes you to act the part of a poor man, see that you act the part naturally; if the part of a magistrate, (do the same). For this is your duty, to act well the part that is given to you; but to select the part, belongs to another.",

• "Remember that in life you ought to behave as at a banquet. Suppose that something is carried round and is opposite to you. Stretch out your hand and take a portion with decency. Suppose that it passes by you. Do not detain it. Suppose that it is not yet come to you. Do not send your desire forward to it, but wait till it is opposite to you. Do so with respect to children, so with respect to a wife, so with respect to magisterial offices, so with respect with wealth. But if you take none of the things set before you, and even despise them, then you will not only be a fellow banqueter of the Gods, but also a partner with them in power. Wish not to be a senator or a general, but a free man; and there is only one way to this, to care not for the things which are not in our power. ",

• "Never say about anything, I have lost it, but say I have restored it. Is your child dead? It has been restored. Is your wife dead? She has been restored. Has your estate been taken from you? Has not then this also been restored? Take care of it as a thing which belongs to another, as travelers do with their inn. Is a little wine stolen? Say on the occasion, at such a price is sold freedom from perturbation",

• "Disease is an impediment to the body, but not to the will, unless the will itself chooses. Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will. And add this reflection on the occasion of everything that happens; for you will find it an impediment to something else, but not to yourself.",

• "In everything which pleases the soul or supplies a want, or is loved, remember to add this; what is the nature of this thing, beginning from the smallest? If you are kissing your child or wife, say it is a human being that you are kissing, for when they die you will not be disturbed.",

• "When you start your company, you would raise your initial money of $2-5M in a SAFE. When you hit product-market fit, you raise an additional $2-10M in a Series A priced round and the SAFE converts into this round You then immediately make available another SAFE. Continue to leave it available until you have raised another $5-10M. Once you hit $5M in annual recurring revenue, you raise a Series B priced round of an additional $5-20M and the second SAFE converts into this round. You then make available a third SAFE round. And so on. Institutional investors usually only invest in priced equity rounds. But family offices, strategic investors, etc. are more likely to participate in SAFEs",

• "I like this feedback framework: A. Like - These are the specific actions that I like that you are doing. B. Wish That. - These are the specific actions that I wish that you would do differently.",

• "Why do I get angry when I am insulted? Because I entertain the verity of the insult. Either a) Because something within you entertains the possibility that you might, in fact, be. Then something else within you grows irritated by the idea that you might be. This internal conflict manifests itself as anger. Or b) Because you view the thing as an insult, rather than all things being the same, no better or worse. Anger is born of unfulfilled desire. It is born of unfulfilled expectation.",

• "Attachment is the greatest bondage in the life of man. Attachment gives birth to hope and need. Hope gives birth to fear. Q: From where does addiction arise? A: The mind. Q: How does this happen? A: The mind peddles in desire. It has an unending appetite for desire. It is a wanting machine. It cannot get enough of that which it enjoys. This is the seed of addiction. Q: Is everyone's mind like this? A: Yes.",

• "What leads to a peaceful relationship? A: The abandonment of need. Q: But if two individuals don't need each other, what is the point of a relationship? A: Two individuals who need each other will only have conflict. They can never have a relationship. Q: So if there's no need, what binds them together? A: The enjoyment of each other's company.",

• "Instead of trying to "live" a life, one must become life itself. Q: To become life itself? A: Yes. Q: In what way? A: If a man tries to "live" a life, he suffers at every turn. If he devotes his life, the game changes. You do not have a life.

• You do not own a life. You are life itself. Return once again to being nothing but a piece of life. Experience what it feels like to be alive. Simply alive. A part of all living things. Trees behave as if they were made to become a part of the landscape. They treat their life as it were not their own. They exist as if existing were the greatest form of activity. Just looking at a tree makes one still.",

• "Q: Why does one person have great success, while another person struggles? A: One enjoys success. While the other enjoys struggle. Some will speak endlessly of their successes. Others will speak endlessly of their failures. They may not do it overtly. But subtly. They will get across the message that is most prevalent in their mind. What they think of themselves will dictate what they choose to share and withhold from others. Q: And what can be learned from such behavior? A: That the successful identify themselves as successes. While those who struggle identify themselves as unfortunate failures. The successful view themselves as conquerors. While those who struggle view themselves as victims of circumstance. Q: Why would an individual view himself as a victim of circumstance, rather than become a conqueror? A: The fear of having to leave behind the comfort of his identity. The fear of loss. Q: The fear of loss? He already loses. What more could he lose? A: The luxury of self-pity. The sympathies of victimhood. Such things are not easily sacrificed.",

• "It is the child that has something to teach. Not through lessons or words, but through the way in which he walks. The manner in which he smiles. And the sincerity with which he cries.If the parent understood this, perhaps he would begin to walk with the child, rather than ahead of him. Because they are not burdened by ideals of Achievement and Awards and Competition. They are not WEIGHED DOWN by NEEDS for progress and success and accolades. To them it is ALL PLAY. Life is PLAY. Games are PLAY. Play, play, play. Come what may. And because they are not burdened by THOUGHT, they have an enormous amount of energy available to them.",

• "The Buddha’s realization that he was going to become old, get sick, and die. Not in your head, a realization. The human being, by virtue of his most prevalent mental state, is a creature of the 12th hour. Because he forever lives within 11:59, he rarely feels the urgency of 12:00. But occasionally something shakes him. A sudden death. A calamity of some sort brings things into sudden perspective. He is shaken from his complacency and he is forced to confront the moment. But eventually, the drama of the event fades and be fades back to meager existence. Nature should be more kind to man. It should have man experience a near-death experience at least once a month. Just to remind him that His Time Is Running Out. To remind him that this paper existence that he lives is about to Whither. To remind him NOT to get too comfortable. To remind him not to take his life seriously, for it is only on Lease",

• "We are forever lying in wait. But when that event comes, it passes. And then we move on to the next one. And eventually that passes as well. We hop from event to event. What you are right now is all you will ever be. What you have right now is all you will ever have. I will only say that living a life founded on HOPE will leave you destitute and dejected. Hope will destroy every Today, as you have your eyes set erroneously on Tomorrow. Hope will suck the blood out of your existence. And leave you hollow and worn on the side of a rural stretch of highway. You are horrified by the turmoil of the world. But you thrive upon it. You complain incessantly about the dramas of life but cannot imagine life without them. While you were trying to tie the loose ends which keep coming untied... darn those loose ends. They just don't stay tied do they. Life was passing you by. Acquiring even more success than you already have is a whirring motor which hums in your ear. You see, all of these problems, aspirations, conflicts, and issues that you have are like a school of fish. The man of understanding will allow himself to at least entertain the possibility that the school of fish is not fixable. That no matter how much you want to believe these schools of fish are your life, they are just schools of fish. The only thing that will change between now and the end of your life is your understanding that this is all you have. When you die, things will be left unfinished. Some dreams will be left unfulfilled. The kitchen will remain half cleaned. And the lives of your neighbors and those of the rest of the people in all of society will go on as if nothing happened.",

• "The man who inspires through his actions, his ways of being, is often called a leader. But he does not seek leadership. The inspiration does not arise in the mind, but in the heart. One gets a deep, instinctual feeling that this is indeed the way a man should be. He will travel any distance. He is a man possessed by his inspiration. His steps are not his. His ideas are not his. Because he has given himself to his inspiration, they flow through him. He has surrendered to his inspiration, for him all that exists is inspiration.",

• "Man believes that happiness is the opposite of sadness. When, actually, there are only shades of difference between them. Happiness and sadness are moods. Moods are a byproduct of thought. And thought is the very constitution of the mind. Man thinks, and he then responds to the feeling which arises from the thought. He begins to have a thought about the thought. And he begins to have an opinion about the feelings. He categorizes his feelings into likes and dislikes. And he attempts to find ways to cultivate the good feelings and avoid the bad ones. Thus begins his search for happiness, as a way of 'running away from sadness'. It is the search for pleasure that produces pain. Without the search for pleasure is a life of equanimity. Man hears voices. And his entire life is lost in a frantic quest to quell some voices and accentuate others.",

• "Have you ever seen a jungle? If you look through the tree canopy you see glorious shards of celestial light. If you look on the ground you see rotting wood and armies of ants. Some areas are clear and pristine. While others are disheveled. If you look in one area or another, it looks either ugly or beautiful. But when you look at it as a whole. When you look at it as a unit. You never find yourself saying that this is a beautiful jungle or an ugly jungle. You never protest against the piles of fallen leaves. In fact, if someone raised the idea of cleaning them up, you wouldn't feel quite right about it. Why? Because it's the jungle. This is just the way a jungle is. To clean it is to spoil it. It's the same with you. And it's the same with your life. Some parts of you are beautiful and generous. Other parts of you are downright ugly. Some parts of your life are joyful and fortunate. Other parts are cumbersome and painful. Now, I won't tell you to accept it. Nor will I tell you to clean it. If there are some parts of you that are so ugly that you just can't accept that part of you, then clean it. Please don't ask me how. As soon as you ask me how, you and I both know you are not serious about cleaning it. If your hair was on fire would you call me and ask me How to put the fire out? You would certainly put it out. How? BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY! That's How!",

• "Who You Are Is The One Who Knows That He Has A Body. By that definition, you are neither the body, nor the mind. You are the Witness. If you live as this Witness you will live your life in the sort of bliss that a wrinkle-free body will never give you. Live as the Witness. Live your life unburdened by thoughts. Be completely thought-less. And employ thought only when absolutely necessary. In doing so, you will begin to drop the mind. If you truly wish to Become Present, there is something you will have to sacrifice. If you wish to See as nature sees, there is something you will have to abandon, and you cannot be attached to that.",

• "Fluent powertalk (among the sociopaths) is about the unsaid. Ex. Wallace casually invites Jim to blow off the party for a while and shoot hoops in the backyard. Once outside, Wallace nonchalantly asks, "So what's up with Jan and Michael?" He is clearly fishing for information, having observed the bizarre couple dynamics at the party. Jim replies, "I wouldn't know... (pregnant pause)... where to begin." (slight laugh). The key here is that only Message 1 is comprehensible to the truly Clueless; this is what makes for plausible deniability. You cannot prove that the other messages were exchanged, but the currency is usually reality-information. Sociopaths pay attention to what you have, and how well you bargain with it. If you've watched movies you might be under the impression that Sociopaths communicate by retreating to places where the Clueless and the Losers can't hear them. Out there on the golf course, or in private dining rooms in exclusive restaurants, you might think they let their guard down and speak bluntly, with liberal cursing and openly cruel jokes about non-Sociopaths. You couldn't be more wrong. That sort of private candor is actually a type of aggressive Posturetalk prevalent among the Clueless in the more superficially macho (finance) industries. Both the Clueless and Losers are too self-absorbed to put in much work developing accurate and usable mental models of others. True powertalk is about custom mental models and the real information of the world, right out in the open in the presence of non-Sociopaths.",

• "The laws require that in a group of ten people it is much easier, both for insiders and outsiders, to identify numbers 1 or 10 (alpha and omega) than it is to identify number 4 unambiguously. Status illegibility works a bit like this, but is stronger. It requires that the middle be jumbled up. There can be no correct rank ordering, but the group is still meaningfully coherent. When all you really know about the club is the range of status (lowest and highest). If you know you belong in the range ("that dude is cooler than me, but I am definitely cooler than that loser"), but have no idea whether your status is above or below the average, the uncertainty allows you to join. On desirous clubs: Michael would only want to belong if specific people, from whom he sought proxy-familial validation, belonged. Dwight would only want to belong if it involved a hierarchy of skilled superiors and formal tests of prowess or craftsmanship. Jim is invited to join, but being on the cusp of sociopathy, is unable to take it seriously. Clueless are made as a buffer so you don’t have the natural master-slave dynamic and society can function.",

• "Wow. Not sure if 100% true but - Loser delusions obscure pervasive mediocrity and require groups to maintain. Losers are too smart to fool themselves. They enter into social contracts which require them to fool each other - You scratch my delusion, I'll scratch yours. I'll call you a thoughtful critic if you agree to call me a fascinating blogger. And we'll both convince ourselves that our lives are to be valued by these different measures. The delusion lies not in a false assessment of artistic skills, but in the group choosing to evaluate on the basis of art in the first place. The "uniqueness" game is a game of mutual delusion. In the big games of life, those involving the Darwinian dimensions of sex, money or power, we don't get to define the rules. And it is only those games that can create social value.",

• "Wild way of putting it - The future Sociopath must be an under-performer at the bottom. Like the average Loser, he recognizes that the bargain is a really bad one. Unlike the risk-averse loser though, he does not try to make the best of a bad situation by doing enough to get by. He has no intention of just getting by. He very quickly figures out — through experiments and fast failures — that the Loser game is not worth becoming good at. He then severely under-performs in order to free up energy to concentrate on maneuvering an upward exit.  He knows his under-performance is not sustainable, but he has no intention of becoming a lifetime-Loser employee anyway",

• "HIWTYL (heads I win, tails you lose) is about looking for ways to systematically claim paternity for successes, and orphan failures. Ex. First you would cut a deal for a performance-linked bonus for a successful marketing campaign (but no penalty for failure of course). Next, you would set up a committee and charter it to collect, vet and recommend ideas, perhaps with a promise of some nominal rewards, such as gift certificates, for successful ideas. You would then drop hints and suggestions to create ideas, like the Golden Ticket scheme, that you personally favor. And finally you would create the appropriate level of urgency in the work of the committee to achieve the risk-levels you want in the ideas produced. If it works, you praise everybody generously, hand out a few gift certificates, keep your bonus to yourself, and move on. If it fails, you blame the people in charge of the work for failing to consider an "obvious" (with 20/20 hindsight) issue. The chair of such a committee would likely be Clueless, his appointment being a false honor - a case of being set up take a fall. Standard blame sidestep. you blame poor systems and processes and mitigate the blame with 'well, at least we learned something, and can improve our processes next time.' HIWTYL means bureaucracy, you hold the forms, you get people to do what they have to do to achieve the goals you set, then if something goes wrong you use the forms to cover yourself. ",

• "The key, when betraying the Clueless, is to get them to blame themselves. With Losers, the key is to get them to blame each other.",

• "The Clueless can process the legible, so a legible world is presented to them (e.g, KPIs, afterlife calculus, retirement fantasy, fairness games). Losers can process a world where emotional significance is the only kind of significance, so a world pregnant with emotional significance is created for them (us vs. them, you are special/important). Which means that the power of Sociopaths derives from the things they remove from the scene: illegible, emotionally charged material realities that are potentially infinite in their complexity (e.g., intense financial negotiations are a place where the material cannot be separated from the emotional). In other words, the raw material of power.",

• "Hm - It becomes apparent that all social realities are based on fictional meanings created by denying some aspect of natural, undivided reality. There is only one reality, that does not revolve around the needs of humans. 'All life is sex, and all sex is competition, and there are no rules to that game'. A routine skill for the Sociopath is the process of ripping away masks of social reality and getting behind them. Once you do this (game design) a few times, it becomes second nature, a sort of basic power literacy (e.g., All that is required is to control people who believe in fairness, is to remove any evidence suggesting that the world might fundamentally not be a fair place, and mask it appropriately with a justice principle such as an afterlife calculus, or a retirement fantasy.). Clueless are controllable through 3 beliefs, 1) I am OK if Mommy applauds my performance (early childhood), 2) I am OK if I earn badges from teachers (pre-adolescence), 3) I am OK if I can sit with the cool kids (adolescence). Either laughing with Michael or throwing up your hands in frustration is a victory for him. During disruptive reaction, the only effective response is to calmly ignore his disruptive actions, wait for the reaction to die down, and continue the conversation in dominant mode. If you attempt to make sense of it, reason with it, or ague with it you've already lost. The Clueless have a complete inability to generate an original thought because delusions are closed logical schemes, where reality is mangled into the service of a fixed script through defense mechanisms, with the rest of the meaning thrown away. To manufacture original thought you have to look at/listen to reality in open ways for data. That is why Michael's database is so full of movie lines. Movies are goldmines of canned situation-reactions that don't require much present-reality data to retrieve.",

• "The bank has to win for the same basic reason that governments won't give in to hijackers of airplanes when they demand money or whatever else. It's tempting to make the payment and save the passengers' lives. You probably would make the payment if you knew it never was going to happen again. But that's the point: not just that it might happen again, but that if you make the payment it becomes more likely that it will happen again. When you hear that a lawyer is making a "policy" argument, that usually means it's an argument from the ex ante perspective- that is, a claim about the effects the decision might have on someone's incentives.",

• "A car accident that neither side sees coming. If the drivers had known they would be at risk of colliding with each other in the afternoon, they would have made a contract in the morning in which they both agreed to drive at a reasonable speed in which case the party who drove too fast could be thought of as breaking the contract. Nobody advocates for waste; when it does occur, you usually can view it as a departure from what the parties would have agreed on in advance if they could. A lot of legal rules thus make more sense when you imagine the people affected by them all discussing the issue before the arrival of whatever situation they are in. How judges decide accident many cases: they ask whether the defendant failed to take any steps that were cost-justified-any steps, in other words, that would have saved money when compared with the costs of the accidents they could have been expected to prevent. If so, the defendant is liable, and otherwise not.",

• "We are in search of marginal effects, not average ones. Law tries to influence those at the margin, not those who were going to buy a car but those who would of there was no tax but if there was a tax ended up driving their car a few more years. Imagine a controversy between an airport and neighbors who complain that it makes too much noise. Suppose the airport creates $10 million in benefits over some period of time, but the neighbors say it creates $15 million in costs (perhaps that is what you would have to pay all the neighbors to make them indifferent to the noise). It might seem natural to conclude that the airport should be shut down; it creates more harm than good. But now look at it from a marginal point of view. Maybe cutting back on 10 percent of its flights perhaps by stopping the ones at night would reduce the airport's benefits by $1 million but reduce the harm to the neighbors by $8 million. Then the balance would be different: $9 million in benefits as compared to $7 million in costs. The optimal solution here isn't to shut down the airport; it's to adjust the margins.",

• "Imagine one person owned both things, would they make the same decision? If not, you have a strong case. Think of shooting your neighbors ox when it attacks your goat. You might lost the suit if the ox is worth way more than your goat, because if you owned both you would have let the ox kill your goat and then bought a new goat, not a new ox.",

• "This is the most important practical point to understand about how games of chicken, when they must be played, are won and lost: the winner generally will be the one who can commit himself to an aggressive strategy to playing the "hawk" most visibly and irrevocably. The best strategy for a driver playing chicken would be to somehow remove his steering wheel and throw it out the window. The second driver inevitably will swerve away to avoid being killed. Once you grasp this principle, you will see it in all the little negotiations of everyday life: one side stakes out a position that reflects what he hopes to end up with, and tries to make it sound like he won't or can't bend and that massive destruction will result if the other side takes the same position. The other side then decides whether to go straight or swerve, a decision that will depend largely on how firm he thinks the first player's original position is; and so it goes. Children are great at this. They figure it all out very early, and tend to be ruthless negotiators.",

• "When is there a real risk of a slippery slope? 1) When the first decision lowers the cost of the second. If everyone registers their handguns, confiscating them later will be easier (less thorough searching required to get all guns). 2) The first decision affects the attitudes brought to the second one. 3) “Equality” means the second decision must be made like the first one. 4) The first decision affects the power of those interested in the second one. If weed is legal, weed companies have more power and profit, and can advertise to achieve XYZ",

• "You can make an acoustic separation argument if you couldn’t have known the law. If you shoot a burglar as they break in, you aren’t held liable. You couldn’t have checked the law, you had to act. If you set up a trap to kill anyone who walks through the door you will be held liable, because you could have checked the law (and the law wants to deter that behavior). But even if they wanted to deter you shooting a burglar, you wouldn’t have been able to check",

• "Property rules and liability rules differ in the extent to which they require permission from their owners before they are invaded. This is why we put people in jail for petty thefts but not for causing terrible accidents: If for some reason I really want to smash the front of your car with a sledgehammer, I ought to ask first. If I don't ask and do it anyway, I go to jail. If I'm going to mistakenly demolish the front of your car by backing into it with mine, again it would be nice if I asked first, but this time it isn't realistic. We're talking about an accident; if I had the foresight to ask about it in advance, I would have had the foresight to avoid it altogether. This is the difference between jail and a fine. ",

• "Base rates mean you have to consider the ratio of error to the ratio in the population. Smithers is required to take a test to see whether he has AIDS (1/250 chance of aids, AIDS test catches the disease in every person who has it, with 4% false positive). Smithers is positive, what are the chances that he has AIDS? At first the chances look great: the test yields a false positive only 4 percent of the time, so that means he's 96 percent likely to have the disease, right? Wrong. To account for the base rate-the background unlikelihood-we build a fraction. On top goes the number of times the dog will bark and be right (1/250) and on the bottom goes the number of times the dog will bark, rightly or wrongly (1 accurate positive + 12 erroneous positives). The number on the bottom of the fraction thus is 44: 4 correct positives and 40 bad ones in every 1,000 tests. Now we can see the odds that Smithers has AIDS when his test says so: only about 9%.",

• "Lifechanging: Valuation through insurance - We have another way to think of the value she put on the film. If we consider the $10 a premium for a kind of insurance, we can reason backwards to the value that the owner of the film put on it for these purposes. You wouldn't spend $10 to insure against a 1/1,000 chance of a misfortune that would cost you only $10 or $100 at least not if you were being economically rational. It wouldn't be worth it. In the long run you would end up paying more in insurance premiums than you ever would collect when the dreaded event occurs. Imagine paying $ 10 a day for 1,000 days, then collecting $100 on the day when the bad thing happens: it would be a bad deal. But if the loss were worth $1 million to you, the $10 payment to avoid the 1/1,000 chance of it would be a bargain. So to return to our case, if we assume $10 is the most you would pay to accept the 1/1,000 risk of lost film, the implication is that you value the film at $10,000. We can use the amount the prosecutor spent on backups, cloud storage, etc. as proxies for insurance. There are thoroughbred horse races like this, too, called claiming races. Set rules that automatically value: Your horse races against other horses of similar value—in, say, the $20,000 bracket. You can try to sneak your horse into a cheaper bracket where it is more likely to win the races, but you probably won't, because there is a catch: anyone can buy your horse for the price that defines the bracket.)",

2022

• "When there is no resistance between the open and the hidden, then the hidden, because it has the patience of time, will not violate the immediate. What is important is the understanding of the hidden, and not the mere education of the superficial mind to acquire knowledge, however necessary. This understanding of the hidden frees the total mind from conflict, and only then is there intelligence.",

• "Life becomes a means to an objective when you have established through your various environments and conditions. So life becomes a school of great conflict and struggle, never a thing of fulfillment, of richness, of completeness. When we ask for the meaning of life we are seeking an end. In seeking an end we desire to skip life. There is either the meaning of life, or life (itself).",

• "Beauty is not something you see—not a beautiful tree, a beautiful picture, a beautiful building, or a beautiful woman. There is beauty only when your heart and mind know what love is.",

• "You do not think about love when it is there; you think about it only when it is absent, when there is distance between you and the object of your love. It is when the communion breaks, at any level, that the process of thought, of imagination, begins. Love is not of the mind. The mind makes the smoke of envy, of holding, of missing, of recalling the past, of longing for tomorrow, of sorrow and worry; and this effectively smothers the flame. When the smoke is not, the flame is. 'I love you, but the moment you cease to supply what I want I don’t like you.' So there is antagonism between you, there is separation, and when you feel separate from another there is no love. But if you can live with your wife without thought creating all these contradictory states, these endless quarrels in yourself, then perhaps—perhaps—you will know what love is.",

• "One wonders why this craving, longing, for identification exists. One can understand the identification with one’s physical needs, the necessary things— clothes, food, shelter, and so on. But inwardly, inside the skin as it were, we try to identify ourselves with the past, with tradition, with some fanciful romantic image, a symbol much cherished. And surely in this identification there is a sense of security, safety, a sense of being owned and of possessing. This gives great comfort.",

• "Two small creatures quarreling with each other, fighting in their small way. One was trying to drive off the other. The other was intruding, trying to get into the other's little hole, and the owner was fighting it off. The little creature had identified itself with its home, as we human beings do. We are always trying to identify ourselves with our race, with our culture, with those things which we believe in, with some mystical figure, or some savior, some kind of super authority. Identifying with something seems to be the nature of man. Probably we have derived this feeling from that little animal.",

• "You depend on her for your happiness, and this dependence is called love. She is always there to cover up the fact of your loneliness, as you cover up hers; but the fact is still there, is it not? By escaping from yourself, you have become dependent. Dependence grows stronger, escapes more essential, in proportion to the fear of what is. The wife, the book, the radio, become extraordinarily important; escapes come to be all-significant, of the greatest value. I use my wife as a means of running away from myself, so I am attached to her. I must possess her, I must not lose her; and she likes to be possessed, for she is also using me. You cannot do anything about it. Whatever you do is an activity of escape. That is the most essential thing to realize. Then you will see that you are not different or separate from that hollowness. You are that insufficiency. Why are you frightened of being alone? Because you are faced with yourself as you are and you find that you are empty, dull, stupid, ugly, guilty, and anxious—a petty, shoddy, secondhand entity. Do not run away from it - the moment you run away fear begins. Face the fact; look at it, be lonely. To be alone you must die to the past. The man who is completely alone in this way is innocent and it is this innocence that frees the mind from sorrow. Then if you proceed further, there is no longer calling it loneliness; the terming of it has ceased. If you proceed still further, which is rather arduous, the thing known as loneliness is not; there is a complete cessation of loneliness, emptiness, of the thinker as the thought. That which is wholly empty can attend without a cause.",

• "The truth is that as long as there is a point in the mind which is moving toward another point, that is, as long as the mind is seeking security in any form, it will never be free from pain. most of us are aware of this emptiness, and we try to run away from it. In running away from it, we establish certain securities, and then those securities become all-important to us because they are the means of escape from our particular loneliness, emptiness, or anguish. Your escape may be a Master, it may be thinking yourself very important, it may be giving all your love, your wealth, jewels, everything, to your wife, to your family; or it may be social or philanthropic activity. Any form of escape from this inward emptiness becomes all-important and, therefore, we cling to it desperately. Those who are religiously-minded cling to their belief in God, which covers up their emptiness, their anguish",

• "Either you are suffering on behalf of your father, that is, because he enjoyed living and wanted to live, and now he is gone; or you are suffering because there has been a break in a relationship that had significance for so long, and you are suddenly aware of loneliness. Loneliness is an experience of being completely isolated; a feeling of not being able to depend on anything, of being cut off from all relationship. The 'me,' the ego, the self, by its very nature, is constantly building a wall around itself; all its activity leads to isolation. Becoming aware of its isolation, it begins to identify itself with virtue, with God, with property, with a person, country, or ideology; but this identification is part of the process of isolation.",

• "Now, must we not be alone? At present we are not alone—we are merely a bundle of influences. We are the result of all kinds of influences—social, religious, economic, hereditary, climatic. Through all those influences, we try to find something beyond, and if we cannot find it, we invent it, and cling to our inventions. But when we understand the whole process of influence at all the different levels of our consciousness, then, by becoming free of it, there is an aloneness which is uninfluenced; that is, the mind and heart are no longer shaped by outward events or inward experiences. It is only when there is this aloneness that there is a possibility of finding the real. Emptiness can never finally be covered—it must be understood. To understand it, we must be aware of these escapes, and when we understand the escapes, then we shall be able to face our emptiness. Then we shall see that the emptiness is not different from ourselves, that the observer is the observed.",

• "'I want to understand this whole problem, not just one fragment of it expressed in war, but this aggression in man which also exists in the animals and of which I am a part.' Violence is not merely killing another. It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person, when we obey because there is fear. When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind.",

• "Now, what is this thing which we call life? We know life only through self- consciousness, do we not? I know I am alive because I speak, I think, I eat, I have various contradictory desires, conscious and unconscious, various compulsions, ambitions, and so on. It is only when I am conscious of these, that is, as long as I am self-conscious, that I know I am alive. And what do we mean by being self-conscious? Surely, I am self-conscious only when there is some kind of conflict; otherwise I am unconscious of myself.",

• "One gets indifferent, hard and callous, and one’s mind becomes duller and duller. If we do not get used to it we try to escape from it by taking some kind of drug, joining a political group, shouting, writing, going to a football match or to a temple or church, or finding some other form of amusement. Why is it that we escape from actual facts? We are afraid of death—I am just taking that as an example—and we invent all kinds of theories, hopes, beliefs, to disguise the fact of death, but the fact is still there. To understand a fact we must look at it, not run away from it. Most of us are afraid of living as well as of dying. We are afraid for our family, afraid of public opinion, of losing our job, our security, and hundreds of other things. The simple fact is that we are afraid, not that we are afraid of this or that. Now why cannot we face that fact?",

• "If environment is driving you to a certain action, it is no longer righteous. It is only when there is action born out of the understanding of that environment that there is righteousness.",

• "Mind, being conscious of insufficiency, pursues a gain and, therefore, creates a distinction, a division. Such a mind cannot understand environment, and as it cannot understand it, it must rely on the accumulation of memory for guidance. Suffering is the shock of the mind’s insufficiency. I couldn’t be safe, warm, happy, loved, without ….. {cause of suffering}. If you have been relying on {cause of suffering} to fulfill that insufficiency, you will experience loss. You will experience loss until your mind becomes sufficient to fulfill …. There is an emptiness and a solution. The solution was always there. There is no becoming, just ….. Suffering is merely high intense clarity of thought which forces you to recognize things as they are",

• "Try living completely in the present. In the fullness of the moment you become conscious of all the subconscious entanglements of memory, the dormant hopes and longings which surge forward and prevent you from functioning intelligently in the present. If you are aware of that, if you are aware of that hindrance, aware of it at its depth, not superficially, then the dormant subconscious memory, which is but the lack of understanding and incompleteness of living, disappears and, therefore, you meet each movement of environment, each swiftness of thought, anew. Welcome the insight that comes in the present - and follow its depth. Only when all these walls of protection are destroyed in the flame of awareness, in which there is no modification or alteration or adjustment, but complete understanding of the significance of environment with all its delicacies and subtleties. Then there is an ecstasy, there is that living movement of truth, which is not an end, not a culmination, but an ever-creative living",

• "This morning there wasn’t a cloud in the sky; the sun was in the valley and all things were rejoicing, except man. He looked at this wondrous earth and went on with his labor, his sorrow and passing pleasures. He had no time to see; he was too occupied with his problems, with his agonies, with his violence. When he’s forced to look, he tears to pieces what he sees, which he calls analysis, runs away from it or doesn’t want to see.",

• "Sensitivity means being sensitive to everything around one—to the plants, the animals, the trees, the skies, the waters of the river, the bird on the wing; and also to the moods of the people around one, and to the stranger who passes by. This sensitivity brings about the quality of uncalculated, unselfish response, which is true morality and conduct. To be sensitive is to love.",

• "Would you ask that question if there were a poisonous snake in your room? Then you wouldn't ask, 'How am I to keep awake? How am I to be intensely aware?' You ask that question only when you are not sure that there is a poisonous snake in your room. Either you are wholly unconscious of it, or you want to play with that snake, you want to enjoy its pain and its delights. Please follow this. There cannot be awareness, that alertness of mind and emotion, so long as mind is still caught up in both pain and pleasure. That is, when an experience gives you pain and at the same time gives you pleasure, you do nothing about it. You act only when the pain is greater than the pleasure, but if the pleasure is greater, you do nothing at all about it, because there is no acute conflict. It is only when pain overbalances pleasure, is more acute than pleasure, that you demand an action. Most people wait for the increase of pain before they act, and during this waiting period they want to know how to be aware. No one can tell them. They are waiting for the increase of pain before they act; that is, they wait for pain through its compulsion to force them to act, and in that compulsion there is no intelligence. act when pleasure equals pain, and when pleasure is greater. Act when.",

• "Learning is possible only when there is no coercion of any kind. And coercion takes many forms, does it not? There is coercion through influence, through attachment or threat, through persuasive encouragement or subtle forms of reward.",

• "It is the same with sexual desire or any other form of desire. There is nothing wrong with desire. To react is perfectly normal. If you stick a pin in me I shall react unless I am paralyzed. But then thought steps in and chews over the delight and turns it into pleasure. Thought wants to repeat the experience, and the more you repeat, the more mechanical it becomes. So thought creates and sustains pleasure through desire, and gives it continuity. The only thing certain in life is change; there cannot be continuity of pleasure (or of pain). You know this. You cannot think about joy. Joy is an immediate thing and by thinking about it, you turn it into pleasure. Living in the present is the instant perception of beauty and the great delight in it without seeking pleasure from it.",

• "I think it is always important to ask fundamental questions: but when we do ask a fundamental question, most of us are seeking an answer, and then the answer is invariably superficial, because there is no yes or no answer to life. Life is a movement, an endless movement, and to inquire into this extraordinary thing called life, with all its innumerable aspects, one must ask fundamental questions and never be satisfied with answers, however satisfactory they may be, because the moment you have an answer, the mind has concluded, and conclusion is not life—it is merely a static state.",

• "It is said of a man that he will soon die when he acts in any way unlike himself.",

• "Nature has divided herself so that she may be her own delight. Follow her confidence and delight yourself insatiably with new creatures forever springing up. Nature loves movement, that’s why every want once satisfied is soon growing again.",

• "Error is related to truth as sleep is to waking.",

• "Apart from this real world there is a world of illusion, a more potent world where most men live. This is the same as the population of statues in Rome that isn’t counted in the census, but is a very real part of Roman life. Try to learn about this world when you meet others, it’s the story they tell themself. Partly even the patterns they’ve repeated since childhood.",

• "You will always have to pay for your humanity.",

• "Generosity wins favor for every one, especially when it is accompanied by modesty.",

• "Love what you command yourself to do.",

• "A man is only happy when he delights in the goodwill of others.",

• "In all human decisions and actions there is always a reason for doing the opposite of what we do, for nothing is so perfect that it does not contain a defect. Nothing is so evil that it does not contain some good, just as nothing is so good that it does not contain some evil. This causes many men to remain inactive, because every tiny flaw disturbs them. That is no way to be.",

• "He must retain their allegiance with hopes rather than deeds. To be successful he must occasionally be very generous to just one of them; that is enough. For the nature of men is such that hope, as a rule, is stronger than fear. They are more excited and pleased by the sight of one man well rewarded than they are frightened by seeing many men treated poorly.",

• "Encourage 'I intend to.' messages from your team. 'Captain, I intend to submerge the ship. We are in water we own, the depth has been checked and is four hundred feet, all men are below, the ship is rigged for dive, and I’ve certified my watch team.' 'Very well.' Not, 'Request permission to.,' or 'I’d like to'. Nobody should follow your order because they think you have secret information for 'executives only'. They should push back. If there is secret info it should be explicit. Otherwise you might be wrong and they would blindly execute. Ask them 'can you think aloud?' if you want to disagree with their logic",

• "Pleasant experiences make life delightful. Painful experiences lead to growth. Suffering points up an area where you have not yet grown, where you need to grow and be transformed and change.",

• "Nobody ever rejects you, they’re only rejecting what they think you are. But that cuts both ways. Nobody ever accepts you either. How easy it is to love people once you understand this. How easy it is to love everyone when you don’t identify with what they imagine you are or they are. It becomes easy to love them, to love everybody.",

• "The person who is asleep always thinks he’ll feel better if somebody else changes. You’re suffering because you’re thinking, “How wonderful life would be if somebody else would change; how wonderful life would be if my neighbor changed, my wife changed, my boss changed. Put this program into action, a thousand times: (a) identify the negative feelings in you; (b) understand that they are in you, not in the world, not in external reality; (c) do not see them as an essential part of 'I'; these things come and go; (d) understand that when you change, everything changes. When you go through your life with preferences but don’t depend on any one of them, you’re awake. Turn desires into preferences.",

• "There’s not a single evil in this world that you cannot trace to fear. (Anger comes from fear. When you are angry in a car, you identify with your body and the car, and you are suddenly aware of how vulnerable you are to losing - the car, and therefore the body, and you get angry. Road rage.)",

• "Thank you, you have a golden heart. Because love does that. It shines on the good and bad alike; if makes rain fall on the saints and sinners alike. Is it possible for the rose to say, 'I will give my fragrance to the good people who smell me, but I will withhold it from the bad'?",

• "They were living in another world, the world of the awakened. They had the attitude: 'I’m an ass, you’re an ass, so where’s the problem?' Let the dictator in you come out. But I’m a tyrant and you’re a tyrant. Stop being a dictator. Stop trying to push yourself somewhere.",

• "On a friend dying - We never feel grief when we lose something we have allowed to be free, that we have never attempted to possess.",

• "You would be the sky, observing the clouds. You are a passive, detached observer. That’s shocking, particularly to someone in the Western Culture. You’re not interfering. Don’t interfere. Don’t 'fix'. Watch! Feel, experience and let go. Sit in the chair and see yourself. This is the I observing Me. Become a participant observer. Talking to you, I’m watching myself and you. Self-observation—watching yourself—is important. It means to watch everything in you and around you as far as possible and watch it as if it were happening to someone else. What does that last sentence mean? It means you do not personalize what is happening to you. Look at things as if you have no connection to them whatsoever. Say I’m looking at those trees and worrying. Am I distracted? I am distracted only if I mean of concentrating on the trees. But if I’m aware that I’m worried right now, then I’m not distracted at all. Just be aware of where your attention goes. If you want a royal experience, sit down quietly and listen to all the sounds around you. You do not focus on any one sound; you try to hear them all.",

• "You want to wake up? Want happiness? Here it is: drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them. Every act motivated by selfishness. Our own search for pleasure or run from pain. The lovely thing about Jesus was that he was so at home with the sinners because he understood that he wasn’t one bit better than they were.",

• "You cannot fear the unknown. You cannot fear something you do not know. What you really fear is loss of the known.",

• "When you renounce something, you are stuck to it forever. In opposites you are holding on, not letting go. The prostitute comes to the guru talking about God. The priest about sex. When you fight something, you’re tied to it forever. Don’t renounce it, see through it. Understand it’s true value and drop it from your hands.",

• "Sometimes people have to suffer enough in a relationship to get disillusioned about all relationships. It takes that rock bottom to reach the insight of: there must be another way of living than depending on another human being.",

• "The performance of the Intel facilities maintenance group, which is responsible for keeping our buildings clean and neat, was mediocre, and no amount of pressure or inducement seemed to do any good. We then initiated a program in which each building's upkeep was periodically scored by a resident senior manager, dubbed a 'building czar.; The score was then compared with those given the other buildings. The condition of all of them dramatically improved almost immediately.",

• "Idea: Make a central 'problems list' for the company and send it out on friday for problems that don’t have a clear solution, as well as (sub boards, names of people in charge?) to collect ideas. This way you harness the genius of different departments and weak ties/random connections.",

• Management leverage depends on 1) timing (right before a decision vs. way too early nobody is working on it or after the decision trying to fix ambiguities and people going in random directions). 2) Reducing negative leverage (e.g., arriving unprepared to a meeting, if you are in a bad mood it bleeds into your team quickly,  putting off a difficult decision that affects other people, giving detailed steps given your knowledge of the subordinates responsibilities rather than letting them take care of it/micromanaging. 3) Giving feedback (takes you a short time but affects a subordinate for a long time). 4) Use standard products for tasks that pop up over time. A big example of this: reducing interruptions - usually from people outside your team but whose work your work influences - like marketing to sales. Make a standard product for the main types of requests you get, so you can send it over or delegate it to a team member to take care of.",

• "Premise: as an item moves through the production process it gets more valuable. Corollary: Detect and fix any problem in the production process at the lowest value stage possible. Thus, we should find the rotten egg as it’s being delivered from the supplier rather than permitting the customer to find it.",

• "The highest leverage point for managers is choosing tasks - there are infinite things you and your team can do - which are the high leverage tasks?",

• "As leader, your job is to care. Your focus, your passion trickles down. If you don’t give a shit about marketing, you’ll get shitty marketing. If you don’t care about design, you’ll get designers who don’t care either.  I met with every team at least twice a year. Even if you were building internal software tools, eventually you’d be called in to show your strategy.",

• "For product ideas avoid habituation: Everyone gets used to things. Life is full of tiny and enormous inconveniences that you no longer notice because your brain has simply accepted them as unchangeable reality and filtered them out. For example, think about the little sticker that grocery stores put on produce. Instead of just eating an apple, you now have to find the sticker, peel it off, and scrape the gluey residue off with a fingernail. The first few times you encountered the sticker, you were probably annoyed. By now you barely register it. But when you think like a designer, you stay awake to the many things in your work and life that can be better. You find opportunities to improve experiences that people long ago assumed would just always be terrible.",

• "A great analogy allows a customer to instantly grasp a feature and then describe the feature to others. Ex. 1,000 songs in your pocket",

• "Make the intangible tangible and spend effort by how much it solves a customer problem and how much time the customer spends on that part of their journey. E.g., for Nest: 10% on website, 10% on installation, 10% on looking/touching device, 70% on the phone controlling the thermostat Make each step physical (even if it’s not). Draw pictures. Make models. Pin mood boards. Sketch out the bones of the process in wireframes. Write imaginary press releases. Write up the reactions you’d want to get from the early adopters. Write up the headlines you want to see from reviewers. Get it out of your head and onto something you can touch. That’s how you hack your brain. That’s how you hack the brain of everyone on your team.",

• "How Tony became CTO at Phillips: A) pitched an idea to his mangers at general magic, but they didn’t have the bandwidth to make a new product. B) reached out to investors and big corporate partners (one was phillips)",

• "New perspectives are everywhere. You don't have to drag a bunch of people off the street to stare at your product and tell you what they think. Start with your internal customers. Everyone in a company has customers, even if they're not building anything. You're always making something for someone the creative team is making stuff for marketing, marketing is making stuff for the app designers, the app designers are making stuff for the engineers every single person in the company is doing something for someone, even if it's just a coworker on another team. Talk to marketing and support since they’re closest to the customer.",

2021

• "Jim Rohn once said that you shouldn't wish that things were easier; you should wish that you were better.",

• "The world thinks nothing profitable that is not painful.",

• "Value what you have above all the rest, and conclude that no beauty can be greater than what you see.",

• "If you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light, no other shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed.",

• "How many have died before they arrived at thine age?",

• "Tis all the swine’s flesh, varied by sauces.",

• "And his ideas in death: Let us disarm death. Upon all occasions of every shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, 'Well, and if it had been death itself?'",

• "Archelaus, king of Macedon, walking along the street, somebody threw water on his head. 'Ay but,” said he, “Whoever it was, he did not throw the water upon me, but upon him who he took me to be.' You didn’t throw water on me, you threw water on the man you mistook me for.",

• "The root of wealth is activity, and of evil its reverse.",

• "Limiting Factor: It was with regard to grain that Justus von Liebig came up with his famous “law of the minimum.” It doesn’t matter how much nitrogen is available to the grain, he said, if what’s short is phosphorus. It does no good to pour on more phosphorus, if the problem is low potassium.",

• "There is always a cost. Just be aware of the tradeoff you are making.",

• "A stock is a collection. A flow is a movement, a growth or a decline. We never think about this easy side of the flow equation: a company can build up a larger workforce by more hiring, or it can do the same thing by reducing the rates of quitting and firing. These two strategies may have very different costs. Your self-esteem is a stock. Even if you wake up today and commit to a large positive change, you must understand that you are changing the flow. If the stock is largely negative, it will get positive much faster than before you made the decision, but it will still be a long time until the stock’s value is positive.",

• "So What? Means so what, until they know how what you have that can benefit them. If you can anticipate—and address—the So What Question, you will be much more successful in business and in life. If you can’t think of a So What Benefit, ask a member of your target audience to complete the following sentence: All I really care about is ___________. Connect that so what benefit to emotion and you are golden.",

• "'Write your injuries in dust and your benefits in marble' - Ben Franklin",

• "This is the whole idea of the experience curve: costs decrease over time. The leader has a lower cost than his competitors because his superior market share permits the accumulation of more experience.",

• "'Conditional' is a very good word. This is my hypothesis, it is conditional on X being true.",

• "The real basis for status is the importance of the activity to the organization - that is the underlying reason why initiative will be accepted. The lever to grow your power is giving or withholding favors (from being neighborly to politically blocking something for you). I do something for you that costs me less than it is worth to you. Later, I can call on you for a favor that costs you less than it is worth to me. If I can invest the net proceeds in additional favors, then I can compound a power base.",

• "You can segment your (and your competitor’s) businesses into multiple product-market pairings. If you can find a way to segment the market in a way that minimized your competitors strengths and maximizes yours, there is a huge opportunity to concentrate your resources into that segment.",

• "Spectacular business successes are usually new ways of doing business in familiar markets with familiar products.",

2020

• "Your mind can’t tell fact from fiction. Your heart races during a horror movie even though you consciously know it is just a movie. Your mouth waters when you think of a lemon.",

• "Be warmer to others. Know that for this phase of growth they are perfect. People like people who like them, so when you first meet someone, be happy to see them. Remember they are just like you, “we are of one blood”, same background, same feelings, etc.",

• "Lower the intonation of your voice at the end of sentences, reduce how quickly and often you nod, and pause for 2 full seconds before you speak. (Allow yourself to take their full statement into consideration)",

• "Use the full power of images. If you were told the number of deaths caused by smoking each year, you’d forget it. If you were told the figure was equal to three fully loaded Boeing 747 planes crashing into the earth every day for a year, with no survivors, you’d remember the image. Generate images and speak in pictures- images are the brain’s language. Incorporate visual metaphors for positive concepts. Use phrases like 'We’ll take care of it.' 'Call anytime' instead of 'Don’t worry' or 'No problem'”,

2019

• "Entropy is the normal state of the mind—a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable. Unless a person knows how to give order to his thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic in the moment: it will focus on some real or imaginary pain, on recent grudges or long-term frustrations. While others need external stimulation—TV, reading, conversation, or drugs—to keep their minds from drifting into chaos, the person whose memory is stocked with patterns of information is autonomous and self-contained.",

• "Autotelic experience - an activity which is done without expectation of future benefit because the doing itself is the reward.",

• "Difference between pleasure and enjoyment: Everyone takes pleasure in eating. To enjoy food is more different, it requires paying attention to the various sensations provided by a meal. We can experience pleasure without any investment of psychic energy, whereas enjoyment happens only as a result of unusual investments of attention. Without enjoyment, life can be endured, and even pleasant. But it can be so only precariously, depending on the luck and cooperation of the external environment.",

• "We all know individuals who can transform hopeless situations into challenges to be overcome, just through the forces of their personalities. This ability to persevere despite obstacles and setbacks is the quality people most admire in others, and justly so; it is probably the most important trait not only for succeeding in life, but for enjoying it as well.",

• "A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe. Happiness does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness."

• "You’re either getting better or your getting worse."

• "There is no finish line. There is always more to learn and you will always have weaknesses to strengthen. You have to keep a championship pace for your whole life, not just a season or a year,  so you need rest and healthy nutrition.",

• "A car has a governor which limits the flow of fuel and air so it doesn’t burn too hot, limiting the car from going its maximum velocity. We have a governor too. Deep in our minds, and it reads our life story and forms the way we see ourselves. It delivers pain and exhaustion, and fear and insecurity, trying to stop us before we risk it all. The governor stops us at 40%. Stretching your pain tolerance, using your discipline, letting go of your identity and all your self-limiting stories allows you to blow past that 40% to closer to your full potential. You have to remember that that initial blast if pain and fatigue or extreme discomfort is just your governor talking.",

• "The first step on the journey to a calloused mind is stepping outside your comfort zone on a regular basis. No matter how bad the pain gets, all bad things end.",

• "The marketing imagination begins with the assertion that people don’t buy things but solutions to problems. Ex. Charles Revson said 'In the factory we make cosmetics. In the store we sell hope.' Ex2. Leo McGinneva said that people buy quarter-inch drill bits because 'they don’t want quarter inch drill bits. They want quarter-inch holes.'”,

• "Regularly remind the customers of what they’re getting (the promises that were made in order to land the customer must be regularly reinstated when the promises are fulfilled)",

• "The world belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious and who effectively marshal resources and energies for their attainment or avoidance.",

• "All things that are in the world are perpetually in the state of alteration. Thou also art in a perpetual change...",

• "Keep thyself to the first bare and naked apprehensions of things, as they present themselves unto thee, and add not unto them. Keep to the first motions of things and do not add to them through your own conceit and opinion.",

• "How many of them who came into the world at the same time when I did, are already gone out of it?".

• "A man with a good understanding faculty must consider what it is to die. He can conceive of it as nothing other than a work of nature, and he that fears and work of nature is a very child. Man can part with no life properly, save for that little part of life which he now lives: and that which he lives, is no other, than that which at every instant he parts with. A man cannot truly part with the future or the past, for how should a man part with that which he hath not?",

• “At best suffer patiently, if thou canst not suffer joyfully.”,

• "It is in no man’s, not even the rich man’s, power to have whatever he wants; but he has it in his power not to wish for what he hasn’t got, and cheerfully make the most of the things that do come his way. And a stomach firmly under control, one that will put up with hunger, marks a considerable step towards independence.",

• "For Fate the willing leads, the unwilling drags along.",

• "If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.",

• "You must need experience pain and hunger and thirst, and be ill, and suffer loss, and finally perish, but there’s nothing in all this that’s evil, insupportable or even hard.",

• "Natural desires are limited; those which spring from false opinions have nowhere to stop, for falsity has no point of termination.",

• "Hecato: 'I shall show you a love philtre compounded. It is this: if you wish to be loved, love.'”, 

• "Seneca learned from Hecato that limiting one’s desires actually helps to cure one of fear. ‘Cease to hope and you will cease to fear’ Both belong to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking to the future. Both are due to projecting our thoughts far ahead instead of adapting ourselves to the present.",

• "Regard him as loyal, and you will make him loyal.",

• "Nothing is a better proof of a well-ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.",

• "What counts, is one’s attitude toward wealth, which is the wise man’s servant and the fool’s master; h, could lose all he had without being a whit less happy.",

• "Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so",

• "All negative emotions—anger, insecurity, jealousy, guilt, shame, and greed—are rooted in fear. All positive emotions are rooted in trust.",

• "When insomnia, which is the philosopher’s ailment, is increased through irritation caused by city noises, I can recover my calm by living the metaphors of the ocean. Any image is a good one, provided we know how to use it.",

• "The unconscious cannot be civilized. It takes a candle with it when it goes to the cellar and sees shadows dancing on the walls, even though civilized electricity lights the whole cellar.",

• "Boredom is the very germ of all freedom",

• "You must have presence. That is what makes the teacher who is able to walk into a room of rambunctious kids get everyone to calm down and behave.",

• "Why is a two year old so terrible?  Because they are systematically testing the notion that something that gives her pleasure might not actually give someone else pleasure—and the truth is that as adults we never lose that fascination.",

• "Education is valuable marketing. 'It seems to work as well as running ads'. We’ll teach people stuff, and some tiny fraction of those people will become customers.",

• "Instead of influencing the opposite sex with their concerns, they influence their own behavior. Women who care more about their partner's clothes spend more time on their own clothes. Men who care about women's physique are the ones who work out more. Women who care about status cues think men care about status cues more than they actually do."

• "The Red Queen Problem: the faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less you make progress.",

• "Acute Physical stress - You are a zebra, and a lion has just mauled your leg. The body’s responses are brilliantly adapted to this. Psycho-social stressors - We live long enough to generate stressful events purely in our heads. These events rarely correlate to actual danger. To mitigate psychological stressors, you need an outlet for your frustration.  This means believing you are in control, boxing, hugging, eating.",

• "Intimacy is the only completely satisfying answer to stimulus-hunger, recognition-hunger, and structure-hunger. Games are necessary and desirable for intimacy in daily social life.",

2018

• "What shall I do with the stranger? Invite him into my house, and treat him like a brother, so that he may become one.  Extend the hand of trust to someone so that his or her best part can step forward and reciprocate.",

• "Interesting: children will definitely misbehave more in public, because they are experimenting: trying to establish if the old rules apply in the new place.",

• "Ask, and ye shall receive. Knock, and the door will open. If you ask, as if you want, and knock, as if you want to enter, you may be offered a chance to improve your life, a little; a lot; completely—and with that some progress will be made in Being itself. ",

• "Repetition Compulsion - Freud coined the term to describe the unconscious drive to sometimes repeat the horrors of the past, sometimes to formulate those horrors more precisely or attempt more active mastery over the situation.",

• "To stand up with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. Your nervous system responds in an entirely different manner when you face the demands of life voluntarily. You respond to the challenge, instead of bracing for the catastrophe. You see the gold the dragon hoards instead of shrinking in fear at the thought of a dragon nearby.",

• "The primeval part of the brain watches how you are treated by other people. It renders a determination of your value and assigns you a status. If you are judged by your peers as of little worth, the brain restricts serotonin, making you more physically and psychologically reactive. You need that reactivity. Emergencies are common at the bottom, you must be ready to survive. Low status = Low serotonin = high stress. It will shut down your immune system, expending energy on services required now and sacrificing those later.",

• "Dreams shed light on the dim places where reason has yet to voyage.",

• "When we fall in love we tend to fall in love with our own anima—the characteristics of the opposite sex which we’ve repressed in ourselves since a young age. Because we are not relating to the actual woman, but rather to the projection of the anima, we will feel disappointed, as if they are to blame for not being what we imagined. The relationship tends to fall apart due to miscommunications.",

• Infect people with the proper mood. As social animals, we are susceptible to the moods of other people. If you are relaxed and anticipating a pleasurable experience, this will communicate itself and have a mirror-like effect on the other person. Adopt an attitude of complete indulgence; you accept people as they are. Feel excited for any reason—you know you can learn something new, you think they are good-looking, or you have common interests. Then, Confirm their self-opinion. Ex. Confirm their intelligence when they delineate an argument. Try to praise hard work, not just talent. Then find the uncertainty regarding their insecurities. If they imagine that perhaps they are not so bad at writing, then flattery can work wonders. Then, use people’s words back on them. How can they not follow what you suggest when it is exactly the words they have just used?

• "Influence over people and the power that it brings are gained in the opposite way from what you imagined. Normally we try to charm people with our own ideas, showing ourselves off in the best light, hyping our past accomplishments. Instead: Put the focus on others. Let them do the talking. Let them be the stars of the show. Such attention is so rare in this world, and people are so hungry for it, that giving them such validations will lower their defenses and open their minds to whatever ideas you want to implant. Your first move should always be to step back and assume the inferior position in relation to the other. Make it subtle. Ask for their advice. Once you feel that they are addicted to this attention, you can initiate a cycle of favors by doing something small for them, which saves them time or effort. Once people do favors for you, they will continue to work on your behalf.",

• "Cultivate your supreme desire for novelty into connecting more deeply with your environment. Don’t entertain exotic fantasies or ideas which aren’t grounded in reality, instead covet a deeper relationship to reality. It will bring you calmness, focus, and the power to alter what is possible to alter.",

• "One illicit desire almost all people desire is voyeurism: to peek inside the private lives of others. You can incorporate this into your work by giving the impression that you are revealing secrets that should not be shared. Some will be outraged but all will be curious. These could be secrets about yourself and how you accomplished what you did, or it could be about others, what happens behind the closed doors of powerful people and the laws they operate by. Offer new, unfamiliar, exotic to create a covetous pull.",

• "Extroverts are largely governed by external criteria. The question that dominates them is 'What do others think of me?' They value external things—good clothes, meals, enjoyment shared with others. They are comfortable with and actively search out noise/interaction. While introverts are largely interested in their own opinions/feelings.  They love to theorize and come up with their own ideas. They do not like to promote their ideas and view promotion as distasteful. They like to keep a part of their life a secret from others, to have secrets. They can seem awkward, mistrustful, and uncomfortable with attention. They tend to be more pessimistic and worried.",

• "People never do something just once.",

• "Powerful people feel allowed to look around more at others, choosing to make eye contact with whomever you please. Their eyelids are more closed (half-lidded), a sign of seriousness and competence. They often smile less, frequent smiling being a sign of overall insecurity. They feel more entitled to touch people, such as a pat on the arm or shoulder. They tend to take up more space and create more distance around themselves. While Weak/anxious individuals will often blink more. They put on forced smiles and emit nervous laughs. They touch themselves, not others, in pacifying behavior—the hair, neck, or forehead. They may talk in an animated way, their hands remaining unusually still, a prominent sign of anxiety.",

• "10 things to do to get business today: Send a handwritten note. Clip and send an article of interest. Talk to a satisfied client and ask who else you might help. Send a thank you gift to someone who referred you. Give your business card to someone with influence. Send a letter to the editor of a magazine your customers read. Add fifteen people to your mailing list. Leave a compelling voicemail. Make an appointment. Call a client you haven’t talked to in two years.",

• "The plumber who generates the most revenue doesn’t charge $50 for a service call, he sells a clean, dry basement for $100, saving the customer’s thousand dollar carpet. If your product solves a problem then the question should be answered in dollars. Ex. Selling software to hotel. The reason the customer should do business with you is because your product will generate $2 per room per night by more accurately capture and bill usage of hotel phone lines.",

• "Rainmakers welcome customer objections because they know that objections are simply the way customers express their desires. When the customer says, “the motor is too loud,” he is values the noise of the product. When the customer says, “your price is too high,” the customer’s goal is to get the proper value for the money invested.  The rainmaker always turns a customer objection into a mutual customer/rainmaker objective. Ex. Customer says, “Your delivery time is too long.” Rainmaker responds, 'So our objective is to get you your product when you want it, correct?'",

2017

• "The otherwise complex behavior of man is much simplified when he automatically thinks and does what he observed to be thought and done around him. Such followership usually works out fine and for the better. Social-proof is a crutch that is most often relied upon when the user is in a state of puzzlement or stress",

• "Deprival-Superreaction Tendency - The quantity of a man's pleasure from a ten-dollar gain does not match the quantity of his displeasure at a ten-dollar loss. The loss hurts more than the gain makes you happy.",

• "Chains of habit were too light to be felt before they became too strong to be broken. A really good way to exploit the inconsistency-avoidance tendency is to maneuver someone important who's approval you want into doing some unimportant favor, like lending a book to you. Thereafter, the man will admire and trust you more because a non-admired and non-trusted You would be inconsistent with the appraisal implicit in lending you the book.",

• "Liking/Loving Tendency - One of the very practical consequences of Liking/Loving Tendency is that it acts as a conditioning device that: makes the liker or lover tend (1) to ignore faults of, and comply to the wishes of the object of his affectiom, (2) to favor people merely associated with the object of his affection, (3) to distort other facts to facilitate love. Works for disliking/hating tendency as well"

• "One also needs checklist routines. They prevent a lot of errors. You should possess a wide-ranging elementary wisdom but also go through mental checklist routines while using it. There is no other procedure that will serve you better.",

• "I have what I call an 'Iron Prescription' that helps me keep sane when I drift toward preferring one intense ideology over another. I feel that I'm not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition."

• "Always think (especially in economics) about second and and higher-order consequences.",

• "I like the navy system. If you're a captain and you've been up for 24 hours straight and have to go to sleep and you turn the ship over to a competent first mate in tough conditions and the first mate takes the ship aground, the captain's naval career is over. The navy model forces you to pay extra attention when conditions are tough, because you know there can be no excuse. If your ship goes aground, it doesn't really matter why. Your ship still went aground and its your ship.",

• "What works best in most cases of persuasion is to appeal to a man's interest",

• "Why, why, why, if you always tell people why, they'll understand it better, they'll consider it more important, and they'll be more likely to comply.",

• "Charlie/Carson's prescription for sure misery: ingesting chemicals in an effort to alter mood or perception, Envy, Resentment, Unreliability (which leads to distrust and exclusion from the 1%), Only learn from your experiences and neglect the wisdom of others and the lessons they learned from their mistakes, Give up when you fail. Self-pity (Self pity can get pretty close to paranoia, and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. Even if your child is dying of cancer, self-pity is not going to help. Self-pity is the standard response, but you can train yourself out of it). Avoid sloth and unreliability.",

• "Beware of envy. The idea of caring that someone is making money faster than you are is one of the deadly sins. Envy is a really stupid sin because it's the only one you could never possibly have any fun at. It is not greed that drives the world but envy.",

• "Enjoy the process along with the proceeds, because the process is where you live.",

• "Don't score yourself on whether you won your hand or not, instead score yourself on  how well you played the hand you got. If you were dealt a winning hand, but barely won, you have lost. Inversely, it is also possible to lose, but do the absolute best you could. When investing, if you're dealt the right hand at the right time... win big. A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price",

• "Invert - In approaching the study of how to create X, study how to create non-X. Charlie studies first what to avoid before he considers the affirmative steps he will take in a given situation.... 'All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there'",

• "Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ought to be learned and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson he learns thoroughly. You have to have a lot of assiduity. I like that word because it means 'sit down on your ass until you've done it.'",

• "There are always some people who will be better at something than you are. You have to learn to be a follower before you become a leader. People should learn to play all roles"

• "Remember that money is of a prolific generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. In murdering a dollar on a bag of chips, you must remember you have destroyed all that it might have produced, even thousands of dollars.",

• "Endeavor to be perfect in the calling you are engaged in; and be assiduous in every part thereof; INDUSTRY being the natural means if acquiring wealth, honor, and reputation; as IDLENESS is of poverty, shame, and disgrace. Remember the path to wealth is through industry and frugality. Waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both.",

• "Know that the idea that sits before you clawed it's way to the top of the meme pool. If a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of 'rival' memes. Memes compete for radio and television time, billboard space, and library shelf-space.",

• "Think in terms of what is in it for him. Speak in terms of other’s interest when influencing them. Even charity can be thought of as selfish, if they did it to feel good.",

• "By developing a habit of telling stories about the world around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes. If you want to make yourself more attentive to small details, cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do throughout your day. You'll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head. Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you'll encode these experiences deeper into your brain. If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do.",

• "The best teams usually encourage people to speak up, and teammates should feel like they could expose their vulnerabilities to one another. This is called "psychological safety" Team members need to feel that it is a safe place to take risks. A team should be characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect. The best tactic for establishing psychological safety is demonstration by a team leader. When the leader goes out of their way to make someone feel important and listened to... or asks for the opinion of a group member who has not spoken in a while, it sets the tone for the whole group.",

• "Motivation 1 - Motivation is triggered by making choices that demonstrate to ourselves that we are in control. A strong internal locus of control is when you praise or blame yourself for successes/failures, instead of on external circumstances and environmental influences. Ex. Focus on things you can improve, like work ethic and work rate, not intelligence. 2) To teach ourselves to self-motivate more easily, we need to link smaller tasks into larger aspirations. 3) Making choices is the most important part of generating motivation because they do two things: convince us we're in control and endow our actions with larger meaning.",

• "Remember that the future isn't one thing. Rather, it is a multitude of possibilities that often contradict one another until one of them comes true. Think of the future as multiple outcomes floating loosely in the air with different weights—their probabilities. Many things can happen, how can you make the one you want more likely to happen?",

• "Entelechy - the realization of potential.",

• "You bet that the Black Swan will happen or that it will never happen. You can gamble dollars to win a succession of pennies while appearing to win all the time, or you can risk pennies to win a succession of dollars. The former and the latter require completely different mindsets. "Bleed" strategy - You lose steadily, daily, for a long time, except when some event takes place for which you get paid disproportionately well. If you survive until tomorrow, it could either mean that (a) you are more likely to be immortal or (b) you are closer to death.",

• "Mental availability affects the assessed probability. Ex. Cancer from smoking seems more likely than cancer without a cause attached to it - an unspecified cause means no cause at all (in our minds). The statement without a reason, being broader, can accommodate more cases and a multitude of causes, but our brain does not account for this.",

• "We very rarely look for disconfirming evidence. Chess grand masters focus on where a speculative move might be weak; rookies, by comparison, look for how the move would be strong. To be at the top you must look for instances that prove your initial theory wrong.",

• "Headlines which contain news are sure-fire. Use tried and true words like amazing, introducing, now, suddenly. Headlines which work best promise the reader a benefit - like a whiter wash, more miles per gallon, freedom from pimples. Before and after campaigns are very, very effective.",

• "St. Augustine has this to say about pressure: 'To be under pressure is inescapable. Pressure takes place through all the world: war, siege, the worries of state. We all know men who grumble under these pressures, and complain. They are cowards. They lack splendor. But there is another sort of man who is under pressure, but does not complain. For it is the friction which polishes him. It is pressure which refines and makes him noble'. Pressure makes diamonds.",

• "A good advertisement can be thought of as a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar, and keep it sweeping.",

• "When I write an advertisement, I don't want you to tell me that you find it 'creative'. I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, 'How well he speaks.' But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, 'Let us march against Philip.",

• "Oglivy's definition of "positioning" - What the product does, and who it is for.  He could have positioned Dove as a detergent bar for men with dirty hands, but chose instead to position Dove as a toilet bar for women with dry skin. Brand image means personality. Your competitors all make excellent products, don't try to imply that your product is better. Just say what's good about your product - and do a clearer, more honest, more informative job saying it. And when writing copy, do not address your readers as if they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing them a letter on behalf of your client.",

• "The old salesmanship: “Please buy a piano. Pianos are great.” The new salesmanship: Reverse the process and indirectly cause the prospective purchaser to say to the manufacturer “please sell me a piano” Ex. Popularize the middle class having a music room in the house. Then, the man or woman who has a music room will naturally think of buying a piano to fill it. It will come to him as his own idea.",

• "PR consists of finding what the public doesn’t like about you, and fixing it in a way that everyone notices. Ex. A department store might discover that its clerks had a reputation for bad manners, and initiate formal instruction in courtesy and tact.",

• "Reward approach is difficult: you have to attend patiently until the target spontaneously manifests the desired behavior, and then reinforce. But you can teach anyone anything: First, figure out what you want.  Then, watch the people around you like a hawk. Finally, whenever you see anything a bit more like what you want, swoop in and deliver a reward. Ex. Your daughter has become reticent since she became a teenager. You wish she’d talk to you more. (Target = more communicative daughter). One morning, at breakfast, she shared an anecdote about school. That’s the time for reward. Stop texting, listen, give attention, compliment. Parental interventions are critical to shaping positive behavior.",

2016

• "Use social currency to go viral. People want to share something that makes them feel in the know, makes them look a certain way to the friends who will see it. The rule of 100: under $100 use a discount (ex: 10%) instead of saying $10 off. Over $100 say $500 off, instead of 25% off. When pricing a product, make the number as compact as possible, like $200 not $200.99. When offering a discount, make the number as large as possible, like $100.00 off instead of $100 off ",

• "The Golden Rule of habit change - you must keep the old cue, insert a new routine, and keep the old reward. Find out what drives the habit loop and possible replacements. Isolate the cue: Location, Time, Emotional State, Other people, Immediately preceding action. If your habit is to eat a cookie, try eating an apple (hunger reward) or socializing (social reward/physical reward). You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it. Belief is the ingredient that makes a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior. Without belief, without faith, the loop falls apart in times of high stress.",

• "When you are building a company, you must believe that there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to the odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand, your task is the same.",

• "Why startups should train their people: People are the most important asset. Don't stop at recruiting the best people. Functional training can be as simple as training a new employee on your expectations for them, or as complex as a multi-week engineering boot camp to bring new recruits up to speed on the historical architectural nuances of your product. No startup has time to do optional things. Training must be mandatory. There is no investment that you can make that will do more to improve productivity in your company. Being too busy to train is like being too hungry to eat.",

• "A way for an agency to get the first few clients when it has no reputation and no way to keep prospects interested is to conduct a pilot survey on some aspect of your prospective client's business. For example, you could evaluate the current effectiveness of their ad campaigns (or lack thereof).",

• "Keep 'a telephone line' open for spontaneous ideas from your subconscious. Your most important job is to decide what you are going to say about your product, what benefit you are going to promise. Always test the promise to find the most effective promise there is. Build the promise into the product name, if you can. Every headline should appeal to the readers self-interest. Always try to inject news into your headlines, because the consumer is always on the lookout for new products or new improvements to an old product. The two most powerful words you can use in a headline are NEW and FREE. Headlines can be strengthened with the inclusion of emotional words, like 'darling' 'love' 'fear' 'proud' 'friend' and 'baby'. The more you tell, the more you sell (facts). You should always include testimonials in your copy. The reader finds it easier to believe the endorsement of a fellow reader than the puffery of an anonymous copywriter. Another profitable gambit is to give helpful advice in your copy, not just sell. Example, in a Rinso ad, Oglivy told housewives how to remove stains. Commercials which start by setting up a problem, then wheel up your product to solve the problem, then prove the solution by demonstration, sell 4x as those that just preach the product.",

• "If you detect the stench of conceit in this book, I would have you know my conceit is selective. I cannot read a balance sheet, work a computer, ski, sail, or play golf. But when it comes to advertising they call me King. When Fortune published an article about me titled 'Is David Ogilvy a Genius?,' I asked my lawyers to sue the editor for the question mark.",

• "'He would not be satisfied with the lot of a poor man. He resolved to make himself a guest at the banquet of fine things. Algamish taught him that the road to wealth can be viewed after first deciding that a part of all you earn is yours to keep. A man’s wealth is not in the purse he carries. A fat purse quickly empties if there be no golden stream to refill it.' Income is a basic necessity in life, and most importantly an income does not require your physical presence. Don't eat the children of your savings, for they will never be able to have children of their own that will also work for you. First make an army of golden slaves before you enjoy a rich banquet. Gold flees the man who would force it to impossible earnings or who followeth the alluring advice of tricksters. Treat work like a friend, make thyself like it. Don't mind because it is hard. If thou thinkest about what a good house thou build, then who cares if the beams are heavy and it is far from the well to carry the water for the plaster. Remember, work, well-done, does good to the man who does it. It makes him a better man", 

• "Pygmalion Effect - higher expectations will lead to higher performance.

• 'What you are shouts so loudly in my ears that I cannot hear what you say' - Emerson.

• Effectiveness--often even survival--does not depend solely on how much effort we expend, but on whether or not the effort we expend is in the right jungle.",

• "Start with why, then how, then what. Most companies do it backwards. Dell selling mp3 players just doesn't feel right because Dell defines itself as a computer company, so the only things that belong are computers. Apple defines itself as a company on a mission so anything they do that fits the definition feels like it belongs. Ex. Southwest was not built to be an airline. It was built to champion a cause. They just happened to use an airline to do it.",

• "Good ideas are works of bricolage; they're built out of the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. We take the ideas we've inherited or stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape. Exaptation - hijacking a trait or invention optimized for a specific use and using it for a completely new endeavor. Like Gutenburg borrowed the wine press and transformed it into the first movable press.", 

• "Bartering is a cost-effective way to trade the goods your business already has (that others need) in exchange for items your business needs, at a discount price. Whenever you require something right now, and the person or company you are trying to trade with doesn't need or want to avail themselves of your firm's goods or services right away, don't let the deal slip away. Offer the prospective trader this option: Tell him he can have unlimited time to take your goods or services and that he may assign the credit you are offering to anyone else he may designate.",

• "There are only three fundamental ways to increase your business: 1) Increase the number of clients. 2) Increase the average size of sale per client. 3) Increase the number of times clients return and buy again. Risk Reversal: Whenever two parties come together to transact business if any kind, most or all of the risk is on one party. If you ask your customers to take on all the risk, their first inclination will be not to buy. Stand behind your product or service and offer a fix, replacement, or refund if they aren't satisfied. The law of consistency is such that if clients recommend you to someone else, they have committed themselves also.",

• "Great sales line: 'Look Mr./Mrs. Prospect. There are a thousand people you can turn to for xyz service if that's what you want. The people that do it, I know about half of them, and there very nice men and women, and I think they're very ethical, and I think they to a very fine job for what they are and what they do. But our approach, our strategy, our positioning is totally different.' Then you can get into why you're different and why your experience is better. A good line: 'We are biased in favor of our product. You'd probably like to know what users say about it, so here are some unsolicited testimonials we have received. You can have any of their addresses and phone numbers if you would like to contact them.'",

• "'The way to love anything is to realize it might be lost' Scarcity Principle-Ideas/Objects appear more valuable to us when their availability is limited. The scarcity principle derives its power from our deep rooted loss aversion, we cannot stand the regret of a missed opportunity. Scarcity preys on peoples shortcut to deciding value based on availability, if something has only a few copies left, it must be because the rest were sold out, and they must have sold out because they are more valuable than the other options.", 

• "Social Proof - One means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct. Social proof is most potent in situations of uncertainty and ambiguity, where people look to others as a crutch to determine their opinion on an uncertainty.  Another important condition that strengthens the power of social proof is similarity - it is important that we are observing behavior of people just like us.",

• "'It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end' Leonardo Da Vinci. Consistency serves as a warm and numb fortress against thought and reason.  Blind consistency can be easily exploited, and consistency can be invoked through commitments. A survey in Bloomington, Indiana, called residents as part of a survey and asked what their response would be if asked to spend three hours collecting money for the American Cancer Society. Not wanting to seem uncharitable to the survey taker or to themselves, many people said they would volunteer if asked. A few days later, a Representative of the American Cancer Society contacted each resident and asked them to volunteer, and the result was a 700% increase in volunteers from the previous year. Get small commitments in writing to have proof and get bigger commitments. What those around us think if us is enormously important in determining what we ourselves think is true. This can be exploited by urging a customer to follow you on social or share a purchase to get them committed to future purchases. Ex. Housewives were asked to donate to the Multiple Sclerosis foundation, and those that were told that someone thought of them as charitable lived up to that reputation and donated more than those who had simply been asked.",

• "Contrast Principle: In an experiment, each student takes a turn sitting in front of three pails of water: one cold, one lukewarm, and one hot. After placing one hand in hot and the other in cold, the participant puts both hands into the lukewarm water simultaneously. Even though both hands are in the same bucket, the one previously in cold water will feel hot, and the one previously hot will feel unnaturally cold based on the nature of the event that precedes it. How to utilize this principle - Clothing stores are instructed to sell the more expensive item first, if a customer requests to purchase two types of items. Ex. A man might balk at spending $95 for a sweater, but may decide to after just having bought a $495 suit. This is contrary to the common sense view, but massively effective.",

• "Trigger features force an automatic compliance response from humans. One helpful example, when being asked for a favor, if the trigger word "because" is used, the favor is most likely accepted. The clause following because is of no importance, even if it is redundant information.",

• "Participants were willing to pay the same amount of money to save 2,000, 20,000, or 200,000 birds from drowning in oil ponds. The number of birds made very little difference. The participants reacted to the prototype—the awful image of helpless birds drowning in thick oil. The almost complete neglect of quantity in such emotional contexts has been confirmed many times.",

• "Availability heuristic can influence judgment on size or frequency. Instead of answering about the size or frequency of an event, your mind substitutes the question asking how quickly and easily did the instance come to mind. Ex. Divorces among Hollywood celebrities and sex scandals among politicians attract much attention, so they will come easily to memory. This leads to an increased likelihood to exaggerate the frequency of both Hollywood divorces and political scandals. This type of persuasion based on ease of recollection is most effective when a person is: in a good mood, engaged in another effortful task simultaneously, or are made to feel powerful (merely reminding people of a time they were powerful increases trust in intuition).",

• "Campbell’s soup: A promotion read: “10% off, limit 12 per person” sold an average of 7 cans, A promotion titled: “10% off, no limit per person” only sold an average of 3.5 cans. The mention of 12 was an anchor that increased the quantity purchased. It also connoted that the goods were flying off shelves and shoppers should feel urgency about stocking up. To avoid the effects of anchoring: When the other party proffers a preposterous bid or anchor of some sort, do not respond with an equally opposite (drastic) bid. Instead: 'Let’s make it clear that if that is their proposal, the negotiations are over. We do not want to start there.'",

• "The Halo effect - the tendency to like everything about an admired person, including things you have not even observed yet. Ex. If you like the president’s political views, you probably like his voice and appearance as well, even if you have not heard him give a speech, which in turn makes you like him more.",

• "Emotional instability - people who move away from baseline and stay there for an inordinate amount of time. Ex. If someone cuts you off in traffic, it is natural to spike up and grow angry, yet they should not be bugged by that incident an hour later",

• "System 1: operates automatically and quickly. Sometimes susceptible to biases. Generates impressions, feelings and inclinations which are transformed into beliefs, attitudes and intentions by system 2. Neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt. Responds more strongly to losses than gains. System 1 has more influence on behavior when system 2 is busy; you are more likely to choose cake over salad when memorizing complicated math digits. Ego depletion - self control and effort are limited; once you employ effort to carry out a certain task, you are less likely to complete the next one. Ego depletion can be undone by ingesting glucose. Cognitive ease - good mood, believe what you hear, trust your intuitions, feel comfortable and familiar. Casual and superficial thinking. Comes from identifying a related experience, clear display, primed idea, or good mood. System 1 cannot account for information it does not have, so when info is scarce, System 1 operates as a machine for jumping to conclusions.",

• "A simplifying heuristic is (roughly, a rule of thumb), used as a crutch for the lazy brain when making a difficult judgment. Intuition heuristic - when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without using the substitution. Experts use intuition. Amateurs however, would also use intuition, but the question/problem is more difficult for them. So instead, they answer a related, easier question intuitively, like 'do I like Ford Cars?' instead of the more complex: 'Is Ford stock underpriced?'",

• "Use social currency to go viral. People want to share something that makes them feel in the know, makes them look a certain way to the friends who will see it. The rule of 100: under $100 use a discount (ex: 10%) instead of saying $10 off. Over $100 say $500 off, instead of 25% off. When pricing a product, make the number as compact as possible, like $200 not $200.99. When offering a discount, make the number as large as possible, like $100.00 off instead of $100 off ",

• "The Golden Rule of habit change - you must keep the old cue, insert a new routine, and keep the old reward. Find out what drives the habit loop and possible replacements. Isolate the cue: Location, Time, Emotional State, Other people, Immediately preceding action. If your habit is to eat a cookie, try eating an apple (hunger reward) or socializing (social reward/physical reward). You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it. Belief is the ingredient that makes a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior. Without belief, without faith, the loop falls apart in times of high stress.",

• "Keystone habits are habits that influence other areas of life. Ex. Alcoa made company safety a habit and subsequently improved efficiency and product quality. Ex. Making your bed every morning is correlated with better productivity, a greater sense of well-being, and stronger skills at sticking with a budget.",

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