Hello!

“The world wants you to be vanilla.”

“Being part of the elite class does not in itself make one an elitist. Elitism is an attitude: one that looks down upon those who don’t have elite wealth or an elite education, who don’t have the right table manners or the right hobbies. Or…one that looks down upon those who don’t hold the elite’s political views or use the proper elite words and terms. Elitism is a social club with very specific codes and rules, and Social Justice Fundamentalism sure seems like the current set of code words and code views to signify membership. Which is, of course, the very opposite of what progressivism is supposed to be about.”

“It’s as if we like to keep our perception of the world at a constant. So when the world changes, instead of allowing our perception of the world to change, we alter our standards and our definitions to keep our perception the same.”

“Being tolerant, fair, and humane to some people and not others is the definition of intolerance and inhumanity. Everyone is principled when it comes to people and ideas they’re tribally aligned with—a person’s moral integrity is judged precisely by how well they apply their principles to the people they can’t stand.”

“As soon as you realize that news media is also entertainment media, the constant coverage of conflict and drama makes perfect sense.”

“I don’t know what truly motivates today’s media. Maybe they make politically motivated propaganda. Maybe they make profit-motivated entertainment, which happens to double as political propaganda. Whatever the motivation, the consequence is the same: enhanced political tribalism.”

“While an alien attack would suck overall, it would do wonders for species solidarity.”

“Like the human hand or the human eye, the human brain is a tool developed by evolution for a specific set of purposes. Truth wasn’t one of those purposes. We can do truth, but a human doing truth is like a dog standing on its hind legs—it’s a real effort and we’re not in our element.”

“Language is so important because it allows individual brains to connect, like neurons, to form a larger thinking system: a communal brain.”

“We’re pre-programmed to be low-rung thinkers, so our intellects are always fighting against gravity.”

“The Scientist’s default position on any topic is “I don’t know.””

“Your Higher Mind is aware that humans are often delusional, and it wants you to be not delusional. It sees beliefs as the most recent draft of a work in progress, and as it lives more and learns more, the Higher Mind is always happy to make a revision.”

“Inertia is a powerful force.”

“Organize your project, your life, and your organization around the minimum. What’s the smallest market you can survive on?”

“The relentless pursuit of mass will make you boring, because mass means average, it means the center of the curve, it requires you to offend no one and satisfy everyone. It will lead to compromises and generalizations. Begin instead with the smallest viable market. What’s the minimum number of people you would need to influence to make it worth the effort?”

“If you want to make change, begin by making culture. Begin by organizing a tightly knit group. Begin by getting people in sync. Culture beats strategy—so much that culture is strategy.”

“Marketers don’t use consumers to solve their company’s problem; they use marketing to solve other people’s problems. They have the empathy to know that those they seek to serve don’t want what the marketer wants, don’t believe what they believe, and don’t care about what they care about. They probably never will.”

“It’s easier to make products and services for the customers you seek to serve than it is to find customers for your products and services.”

“How you handle irrational behaviour can form a pattern as to how the dog behaves in the future. Initially, we should be aware of the effects of puberty in young dogs and young adult humans, and we should take the view that we cannot punish irrational behaviour, because there is no logic behind it. We can, however, make sure by our off-hand reaction that the behaviour is not going to be encouraged.”

“The Francis Crozier inua still alive and well in Taliriktug had no illusions about life being anything but poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But perhaps it did not have to be solitary.”

“Don’t dismiss simplicity. Simple means solid.”

“Anger is its own punishment.”

“Health, love, and your mission, in that order. Nothing eles matters.”

“Ten thousand times the web could be destroyed, and ten thousand times the spider would rebuild it. There was neither annoyance nor despair, nor any delight, just as it had been for a billion years.”

“If wisdom could be imparted through words alone, we’d all be done here.”

“Impatience with actions, patience with results.”

“To have peace of mind, you have to have peace of body first.”

“The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgements. To a tree, there is no concept of right or wrong, good or bad. You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations (lights, colors, and sounds), and then you die. How you choose to interpret them is up to you—you have that choice.”

“Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind.”

“Don’t take yourself too seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.”

“If you can’t decide, the answer is no.”

“Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.”

“Charisma is the ability to project confidence and love at the same time.”

“You should never, ever fool anybody, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

“The good news is, the moment of suffering—when you’re in pain—is a moment of truth.”

“One definition of a moment of suffering is ‘the moment when you see things exactly the way they are.’”

“To be honest, speak without identity.”

“It’s only after you’re bored you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time.”

“Money is not going to solve all of your problems, but it’s going to solve all of your money problems.”

“Everybody wants to get rich immediately, but the world is an efficient place; immediate doesn’t work.”

“Sharks eat well but live a life surrounded by sharks.”

“Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you are retired.”

“99% of effort is wasted.”

“Specific knowledge cannot be taught, but it can be learned.”

“It is a misconception to think that during evolution humans sacrificed physical skill in exchange for intelligence: wielding one’s body is a mental activity.”

“It was clear now why Yahweh had not struck down the tower, had not punished men for wishing to reach beyond the bounds set for them: for the longest journey would merely return them to the place whence they’d come. Centuries of their labor would not reveal to them any more of Creation than they already knew.”

“If your puppy doesn’t work off her energy outside, she’ll work it off inside. Along the same lines, if you don’t run her, she may demolish your couch. No, it’s not spite. It’s just energy coupled with boredom.”

“Every company has their own buying quirks. Don’t be afraid to probe. The better you understand how their process works, the more effectively you can help them figure out if your product is a fit or not.”

“Qualify or disqualify early, gain access to the multiple people in a deal that have power, and begin creating a common vision with the prospect.”

“Your puppy’s behavior is directly related to your own reactions whether they’re positive or negative.”

“ANYTHING is better than no process. A consistent process that isn’t working well is better than no process, because you can improve consistent systems; you can’t improve random systems.”

“It takes longer than you want to nail your market and messaging. Companies sell to the wrong people and companies ALL THE TIME.”

“That’s the irony of stressing too much about the close itself: the stress can reduce the likelihood of it happening.”

“'Working harder’ translated usually means: ‘What we are doing isn’t working, só do more of it!’”

“You’re a non-threatening researcher, not a pushy salesperson.”

“Your sales results are only scalable to the extent the CEO and other executives are designed out of the process.”

“Humans’ ability to do science has helped humans refine killing.”

“Sigmund Freud once asserted, ‘Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge.’ Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the ‘individual differences’ did not ‘blur’ but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints.”

“People have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning.”

“If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, “mercy” killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.”

“A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes—within the limits of endowment and environment—he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.”

“A human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy,”

“Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.”

“What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. Logos is deeper than logic.”

“In no way is suffering necessary to find meaning. I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering—provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable. If it were avoidable, however, the meaningful thing to do would be to remove its cause, be it psychological, biological or political. To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.”

“In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”

“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!’”

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.”

“There are various masks and guises under which the existential vacuum appears. Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money. In other cases, the place of frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure.”

“I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, ‘homeostasis,’ i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.”

“We were not hoping for happiness—it was not that which gave us courage and gave meaning to our suffering, our sacrifices and our dying. And yet we were not prepared for unhappiness.”

“The experience of disillusionment is different. Here it was not one’s fellow man (whose superficiality and lack of feeling was so disgusting that one finally felt like creeping into a hole and neither hearing nor seeing human beings any more) but fate itself which seemed so cruel. A man who for years had thought he had reached the absolute limit of all possible suffering now found that suffering has no limits, and that he could suffer still more, and still more intensely.”

“It is apparent that the mere knowledge that a man was either a camp guard or a prisoner tells us almost nothing. Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils.”

“I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours—a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God—and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly—not miserably—knowing how to die.”

“The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.”

“In my mind I took bus rides, unlocked the front door of my apartment, answered my telephone, switched on the electric lights. Our thoughts often centered on such details, and these memories could move one to tears.”

“A man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the ‘size’ of human suffering is absolutely relative. It also follows that a very trifling thing can cause the greatest of joys.”

“Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy makeup often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature.”

“If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is. Each must find out for himself, and must accept the responsibility that his answer prescribes. If he succeeds he will continue to grow in spite of all indignities.”

“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”

“An Essentialist focuses the way our eyes focus; not by fixating on something but by constantly adjusting and adapting to the field of vision.”

“If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.”

“In the cosmos, no matter how fast you are, someone will be faster; no matter how slow you are, someone will be slower.”

“Life reached an evolutionary milestone when it climbed onto land from the ocean, but those first fish that climbed onto land ceased to be fish. Similarly, when humans truly enter space and are freed from the Earth, they cease to be human.”

“The false alarm was the result of the explosive amplifying effects of a hyper-information society when fed sensitive news.”

“All the matter that used to be there is still there, and so is all the angular momentum. It’s only the arrangement of matter that has changed, like a deck of cards being reshuffled. But life is like a straight flush: Once you shuffle, it’s gone.”

“So, let me tell you, when humans are lost in space, it takes only five minutes to reach totalitarianism.”

“Honesty compounds.”

“The only way to create value for yourself is to create value for others.”