├── Give and Take by Adam Grant └── README.md ├── Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana └── README.md ├── Players First by John Calipari └── README.md ├── Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely └── README.md ├── README.md ├── Remote by Jason Fried & David Hansson └── README.md ├── Rework by Jason Fried & David Hansson └── README.md ├── The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson └── README.md ├── The War of Art by Steven Pressfield └── README.md └── Zero to One by Peter Thiel └── README.md /Give and Take by Adam Grant/README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ## Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success by Adam Grant 2 | 3 | ### Chapter 1: Good Returns 4 | 5 | * Givers are most likely to land at the bottom of the success ladder 6 | * So who’s at the top - takers or matchers? It’s the givers again! 7 | * **Most of life isn’t zero-sum, and on balance, people who choose giving as their primary reciprocity style end up reaping rewards** 8 | * Giving is especially risky when dealing with takers 9 | * Understanding what makes giving both powerful and dangerous is the focus of Give and Take 10 | 11 | ### Chapter 2: The Peacock and the Panda 12 | 13 | * Since takers tend to be self-absorbed, they’re more likely to use first-person singular pronouns like I, me, mine, my, and myself 14 | * When we have access to reputational information, we can see how people have treated others in their networks 15 | * Lekking = Self-glorifying images, self-absorbed conversations, and sizable pay gaps 16 | * Lekking in its many sizes and forms abounds in social network profiles 17 | * Network ties are conduits by which information and resources are spread 18 | * Nowadays it’s much harder for takers to get away with being fakers, fooling people into thinking they’re givers 19 | * Takers tend to stay in touch to get favors 20 | * **You can understand someone’s reputation at a peer level very quickly. When your relationships and reputations are visible to the world, its harder to achieve sustainable success as a taker** 21 | * (Quote by ‘Panda’ Adam Rifkin, founder of 106 Miles, talking about how he built his network) "With a desire to make better the lives of the people I’m connected to. Frankly, I would like to see more people helping other people." 22 | * It’s not just about building your reputation; it really is about being there for other people 23 | * People go to Adam because they know his heart is in the right place 24 | * On LinkedIn, Adam Rifkin has written recommendations for 265 different people. He gives a lot more than he receives. It’s part of his mantra to be helpful 25 | * **It’s better to give before you receive** 26 | * Reciprocity is a powerful norm, but it comes with two downsides: people on the receiving end often feel like they’re being manipulated + when favors come with strings attached or implied, the interaction can leave a bad taste 27 | * Takers burn bridges, givers build bridges - Ib 28 | * Matchers tend to build smaller networks 29 | * **If you insist on a quid pro quo every time you help others, you will have a much narrower network** 30 | * I believe in the strength of weak ties - Panda 31 | * Weak ties are more likely to open up access to a different network, facilitating the discovery of original leads 32 | * We don’t always feel comfortable reaching out (to weak ties) 33 | * Dormant ties offer the access to novel information that weak ties afford but without the discomfort 34 | * **When we need new information, we may run out of weak ties quickly, but we have a large pool of dormant ties that prove to be helpful. And the older we get, the more dormant ties we have, and the more valuable they become** 35 | * According to networking experts, reconnecting is a totally different experience for givers, especially in a wired world 36 | * It’s possible to track the flows of energy through networks. The givers were the suns: they injected light around the organization. Givers created opportunities for their colleagues to contribute, rather than improving their ideas and hogging credit for achievements 37 | * Connecting is an energizing experience for givers 38 | * See networks as a vehicle for creating value for everyone 39 | * Rifkin doesn’t think about what any of the people he helps will contribute back to him. When Panda does ask people for help, he’s usually asking for assistance in helping someone else. By creating a norm of adding value, Rifkin transforms giving from a zero-sum loss to a win-win gain 40 | * Giving can be contagious 41 | * **The group is significantly better off if everyone gives** 42 | * The presence of a single giver was enough to establish a norm of giving 43 | * The goal of the group is to instill the value of giving 44 | * True giver = someone who gives on a consistent basis - Ib 45 | * Givers only took a productivity dive when they gave infrequently 46 | * **Givers gain** 47 | 48 | ### Chapter 3: The Ripple Effect 49 | 50 | * **Genius makers tend to be givers: they use their intelligence to amplify the smarts and capabilities of other people** 51 | * Givers are more effective collaborators - Ib 52 | * Our success depends more on others than we realize 53 | * **Givers reject the notion that interdependence is weak** 54 | * Do the hard work no one else wants to do in a group - Ib 55 | * **Extensive research reveals that people who give their time and knowledge regularly to help their colleagues end up earning more raises and promotions in a wide range of settings** 56 | * Always put the team ahead of yourself - Ib 57 | * Do things that add value to other people’s life - Ib 58 | * When givers put a group’s interests ahead of their own, they signal that their primary goal is to benefit the group 59 | * Highly talented people tend to make others jealous, but if these people are givers they don’t have a target on their back 60 | * Groups reward individual sacrifice 61 | * There’s something magical about getting the reputation as some who cares about others more than yourself 62 | * Ask yourself: What teams are you a part of? What groups are you a part of? What can you do to make the team better? - Ib 63 | * **Responsibility bias: exaggerating our own contributions relative to others’ inputs. When we think about who deserves the credit, we have more knowledge of our own contributions** 64 | * Good leaders and givers: 1) Shoulder the blame for failures 2) Do not let themselves take all the credit for successes 3) Are more forgiving of other people’s mistakes 4) Care about people’s humanness - Ib 65 | * Take care to recognize what other people's contributions 66 | * Givers foster psychological safety: the belief that you can take a risk without being penalized or punished 67 | * Givers specialize in the emotional support of people 68 | * Perspective gap: when we’re not experiencing a psychologically or physically intense state, we dramatically underestimate how much it will affect us. Without being in a state of pain themselves, physicians can’t fully realize what it’s like to be in that state 69 | * Givers are motivated to benefit others, so they find ways to put themselves in other people’s shoes 70 | * **Successful givers shift their frames of reference to the recipients perspective AKA empathy!** 71 | 72 | ### Chapter 4: Finding the Diamond in the Rough 73 | 74 | * What happened to students when teachers believed they had high potential? Teachers’ beliefs created self-fulfilling prophecies. When teachers believed their students were bloomers, they set high expectations for their success. Teachers expectations are highly important for improving the grades and intelligence tests scores of low-achieving students and members of stigmatized minority groups 75 | * Since matchers tend to play it safe, they often wait to offer support until they’ve seen evidence of promise. Consequently, they miss out on opportunities to develop people who don’t show a sign of talent or high potential first 76 | * **Givers don’t wait for signs of potential. because they tend to be trusting and optimistic about other people’s intentions. In their roles as leaders, managers, and mentors, givers are inclined to see the potential in everyone. By default, givers start by viewing people as bloomers** 77 | * **Think about every newcomer is a diamond in the rough - Ib** 78 | * Givers resist the temptation to search for talent first. By recognizing that anyone can be a bloomer, givers focus their attention on motivation 79 | * Givers push people to their potential. They force people to work harder than they every have in their lives which benefits those people in the long run. - Ib 80 | * (Talking about drafting players) Teams couldn’t let go of their big bets. They stuck with the players whom they drafted early. They often invest more time when they come at a fork. This is known as escalation of commitment. 81 | * Do not fall victim to ego threats - Ib 82 | * When an investment doesn’t pay off, even if the expected value is negative, we invest more. The most powerful factor is ego threat: If I don’t keep investing. I’ll look and feel like a fool 83 | * People actually make more accurate and creative decisions when they’re choosing on behalf of others than themselves 84 | * **Givers focus more on the interpersonal and organizational consequences of their decisions, accepting a blow to their pride and reputations in the short term in order to make better choices in the long term** 85 | * Givers listen to negative feedback 86 | * (On drafting players) He wanted players whose character and intelligence were as high as their vertical jumps. It’s not what a player is but what he can become 87 | * **Givers are more receptive to expertise from others, even if it challenges their own beliefs** 88 | * Givers are also surprisingly good at moving on when their bets don’t work out 89 | 90 | ### Chapter 5: The Power of Powerless Communication 91 | 92 | * Takers are attracted to, and excel in, gaining dominance 93 | * When our audiences are skeptical, the more we try to dominate them, the more they resist. Even with a receptive audience, dominance is a zero sum game: the more power and authority I have, the less you have. 94 | * We’re told that great leaders use “power talk” and “power words” to forcefully convey their messages. By using powerless communication, surely people wind up at a disadvantage when it comes to influence…right? No. 95 | * **Because givers value the perspectives and interests of others, they are more inclined toward asking questions than offering answers. They seek advice rather than imposing their views on others.** 96 | * (Grant talking about his own class at Wharton) I open my very first class with a story about my biggest failures 97 | * **Givers are much more comfortable expressing vulnerability: they’re interested in helping others, not gaining power over them, so they’re not afraid of exposing chinks in their armor. By making themselves vulnerable, givers can actually build prestige** 98 | * Expressing vulnerability is only effective if the audience receives other signals establishing the speaker’s competence 99 | * Grant talks about how a lawyer's stutter actually helped him appeal to the jury because they thought about him as more human - Ib 100 | * Expressing vulnerability in ways that are unrelated to competence may build prestige, but it’s only a starting point for givers to exercise influence. We need to convert the respect that we earn into a reason for our audiences to change their attitudes and behaviors 101 | * The more you talk, the more you think you’ve learned about the group. By talking like a taker and dominating the conversation, you believe you’ve actually come to know the people around you, even though they barely spoke 102 | * Sales = asking questions and listening to answers - Ib 103 | * Asking questions is a form of powerless communication that givers adopt naturally. Questions work especially well when the audience is already skeptical of your influence 104 | * By asking questions and getting to know their customers, givers build trust and gain knowledge about their customers’ needs. Over time, this makes them better and better at selling. 105 | * The art of advocacy is to lead you to my conclusion on your own terms. I want you to form your own conclusions: you’ll hold onto them more strongly - Lawyer 106 | * By asking people questions about their plans and intentions, we increase the likelihood that they actually act on these plans and intentions. Only works if you already feel good about the intention that the question targets. 107 | * **When people have to work closely together such as in teams and service relationships, powerless speech is actually more influential than powerful speech** 108 | * Givers value the opinion of everyone, but know when to call out bullshit - Ib 109 | * Givers thrive because people like working with and trust them 110 | * When givers use powerless speech, they show us that they have our best interests at heart. But there’s one role in which people tend to avoid talking tentatively: leadership. Although group members perceive takers as highly effective leaders, takers actually undermine group performance 111 | * Talking tentatively didn’t establish dominance but it earned plenty of prestige 112 | * (Taking about Annie, a consultant and giver) When her colleagues make a mistake, she’s regularly the one to take responsibility shielding them from the blame at the expense of her own performance 113 | * New research shows that advice seeking is a surprisingly effecting strategy for exercising influence when we lack authority 114 | * Advice seeking tends to be significantly more persuasive than the taker’s preferred tactics of pressing subordinates and ingratiating superiors 115 | * **Advice seeking is a form of powerless communication that combines expressing vulnerably asking questions, and talking tentatively** 116 | * When givers ask for advice, it’s because they’re genuinely interested in learning from others 117 | * Advice seeking has four benefits: learning, perspective taking, commitment, and flattery 118 | * **When we give our time, energy, knowledge, or resources to help others, we strive to maintain a belief that they’re worthy and deserving of our help. Seeking advice is a subtle way to invite someone to make a commitment to us** 119 | * When we ask people for advice, we grant them prestige 120 | * Regardless of their reciprocity styles, people love to be asked for advice 121 | * Givers make it clear that they’re expressing vulnerability not only to earn prestige but also to make a genuine connection with the audience 122 | * Not every giver uses powerless communication but those who do often find that it’s useful in situations where they need to build rapport and trust 123 | 124 | ### Chapter 6: The Art of Motivation Maintenance 125 | 126 | * The next three chapters examine why some givers burn out while others are on fire 127 | * Givers, it turns out, are just as ambitious as takers and matchers 128 | * Pathological altruism: an unhealthy focus on others to the detriment of one’s own needs 129 | * Self-interest and other-interest are completely independent motivations: you can have both of them at the same time 130 | * **Otherish givers: high concern for self-interest, high concern for others’ interests - Ib** 131 | * By spending just five minutes reading about how the job helped other people, the givers were motivated to achieve the same level of productivity as the takers 132 | * Attaching a single patient’s photo to a CT exam increased diagnostic accuracy by 46% 133 | * **Change of context is important - Ib** 134 | * When people give continually without concern for their own well-being, they’re at risk for poor mental health and physical health 135 | * Chunker: packing acts of kindness into a small window of time, usually during one day of the week 136 | * The chunkers achieved gains in happiness. Chucking giving is an otherish strategy. Selfless people are more inclined to sprinkle their giving throughout their days, helping whenever people need them. This can become highly distracting. Think about hosting office hours. 137 | * Those who volunteered between 100 and 800 hours per year were happier and more satisfied with their lives than those who volunteered fewer than 100 or more than 800 hours annually. 100 hours/year == < 2 hours/week 138 | * Giving has an energizing effect only if it’s an enjoyable, meaningful choice rather than undertaken out of duty and obligation 139 | * Selfless givers are determined to be in the helper role, they’re reluctant to burden or inconvenience others. Selfless givers receive far less support than otherish givers. 140 | * When they’re on the brink of burnout, otherish givers seek help 141 | * **One of the most striking aspects of the human stress response is the tendency to affiliate — that is to come together in groups to prove and receive joint protection in threatening times** 142 | * **Otherish givers build up a support network that they can access for help when they need it. This, along with chunking giving, makes givers less vulnerable to burnout** 143 | * Otherish givers reported that they enjoyed helping other people but were not afraid to seek out help when they needed it 144 | * By consistently overriding their selfish impulses in order to help others, givers had strengthened their psychological muscles to the point where using willpower for painful tasks was no longer exhausting 145 | * **Givers accrue an advantage in controlling their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors** 146 | * (Talking about Huntsman, only 1/19 people in the world to donate more than $1 billion) Huntsman believes that being a giver actually made him rich 147 | * The more one gives, the better one feels; and the better one feels about it the easier it becomes to give 148 | * Volunteering is a long term play. You’ll only feel better if you do it consistently for a period of one year - Ib 149 | * Older adults who volunteer or give support to others actually live longer. Giving adds meaning to our lives. 150 | * **Overall, on average, happier people earn more money. Happiness alone accounts for about 10% of the variation between employees in job performance** 151 | * By giving in ways that are energizing rather than exhausting, otherish givers are more likely to rise to the top 152 | * Otherish givers = long term, sustainable contributors - Ib 153 | 154 | ### Chapter 7: Chump Change 155 | 156 | * Trust is another reason that givers are so susceptible to the doormat effect: they tend to see the best in everyone, so they operate on the mistaken assumption that everyone is trustworthy 157 | * We tend to stereotype agreeable people as givers and disagreeable people as takers 158 | * There are lots of fakers, beware - Ib 159 | * **Givers also gain a sincerity screening advantage from habitually trusting others, which creates opportunities to see the wide range of behaviors of which other people are capable** 160 | * (Talking about Deloitte consultant Jason Geller) Geller starts by offering help to every new hire but in his initial conversations with them, he pays attention to who seems to be a giver verses a taker. Some folks approach the conversation in terms of learning. Others come in and say, I want to get promoted to senior consultant. What should I do? 161 | * Empathy is a pervasive force behind giving behaviors, but it’s also a major source of vulnerability 162 | * Empathy traps are common in negotiation, don’t operate like a selfless giver in these situations - Ib 163 | * **Empathy = What other people are thinking, getting inside people’s heads rather than their heart - Ib** 164 | * Focusing on our counterparts emotions and feelings puts us at risk of giving away too much 165 | * Once a counterpart is clearly acting like a taker, it makes sense for givers to flex their reciprocity styles and shift to a matching strategy 166 | * Generous tit-for-tat (game theory) = never forget a good turn, but occasionally forget a bad one. Cooperate until counterpart starts competing. Then you compete 2/3 of the time, and cooperate 1/3 of the time. Generous tit for tat is an otherish strategy 167 | * Vary time investment in another person based on their reciprocity style - Ib 168 | * Negotiating effectively is about putting yourself in a different frame of mind, such as representing your family’s interests - Ib 169 | * When givers are advocating for someone else, pushing is closely aligned with their values of protecting and promoting the interests of others 170 | * **Successful negotiators tend to operate in an otherish fashion. By looking for opportunities to benefit others and themselves, otherish givers are able to think in more complex ways** 171 | * If you give to another person, make sure you tell them to give to other people in the same way - Ib 172 | 173 | ### Chapter 8: The Scrooge Shift 174 | 175 | * **In group settings, there’s a different way for givers to make sure that they’re not being exploited: get everyone in the group to act like givers** 176 | * (Talking about Freecycle, a site where people give away stuff for free) People who initially give things away for selfish reasons begin to care about the people they’re helping 177 | * Common ground is a major influence on giving behaviors. This is called activating a common identity (think frats and sororities!) 178 | * If we help people who belong to our group, we’re also helping ourselves, as we’re making the group better off 179 | * People are willing to give freely to anyone who shares their unique identity - Ib 180 | * We help each other without keeping score. Neither one of us ever gives it any thought; we just do what’s helpful - Panda 181 | * We’re always looking for commonalities among us and we’re always looking to bond with other people - Ib 182 | * **When similarities between people are rare, that becomes a part of their uncommon identity which is very powerful when it comes to exercising influence - Ib** 183 | * Optimal distinctiveness: We look for ways to fit in and stand out 184 | * **Being a part of a group that is clearly distinct from other groups gives us a sense of uniqueness. These are the groups in which we take the most pride and feel the most cohesive and valued** 185 | * People only identify with a generalized giving group after they receive enough benefits to feel like the group is helping them 186 | * Elevation = warn feeling of being moved by others’ acts of giving, which can seem to push a mental reset button 187 | * Givers model a standard that seems attainable 188 | * **When people join a group, they look for cues about appropriate behaviors** 189 | * Knowing that other people follow a set of rules means we naturally wanna do the same thing - Ib 190 | * People are most influenced by similar others 191 | * Just showing people how they were doing relative to the local norm caused a dramatic improvement in energy conservation. People usually don’t realize they’re deviating from the norm and showing them is often enough to motivate them to give 192 | * It’s a part of natural selection to look out for other people in the group and to prioritize the groups interests over individual interests - Ib 193 | * **Reciprocity Ring = Each person makes a request to the group, and the rest of the group tries to use their knowledge, resources, and connections to fulfill the request** 194 | * Because giving appears to be uncommon in lots of groups, people with giver values begin to feel that they’re in the minority. When people assume that others aren’t givers, they act and speak in ways that discourage others from giving, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy 195 | * **Set up ways for people to be recognized for their work - Ib** 196 | * Influence is far more powerful when we try to change people’s behaviors first, and their attitudes often follow. To turn takers into givers, it's often necessary to convince them to start giving 197 | * **As people make voluntary decisions to help colleagues and customers beyond the scope of their jobs, they come to see themselves as organizational citizens** 198 | 199 | ### Chapter 9: Out of the Shadows 200 | 201 | * The smarter negotiator appears to be able to understand his or her opponents true interests and thus to provide them with better deals at little cost to him or herself - Vandy Profs Barry and Friedman 202 | * The best of the best are givers, try to model your behavior after them - Ib 203 | * **Givers see success in terms of making significant lasting contributions to a broad range of people** 204 | * What I find most magnetic about successful givers: they get to the top without cutting others down, finding ways of expanding the pie that benefit themselves and the people around them 205 | 206 | ### Actions + Websites for Impacting Positive Change 207 | 208 | * **Help generously and without thought of return!** 209 | * Reach out to someone once a month whom you haven’t talked with in a while. Find out what they’re working on and ways you can be helpful 210 | * [GetRaised](https://getraised.com) is a free website that offers advice on negotiating salary increases 211 | * [Freecycle](https://www.freecycle.org) is a community of people that give away goods and see what people need 212 | * [ServiceSpace](https://www.servicespace.org) is a platform for people to increase their giver quotients and is divided into three categories (gift economy projects, inspirational content, volunteer and non-profit support) 213 | * [KindSpring](https://www.kindspring.org/) is a gift economy project which collects stories of people playing giver tag 214 | * [@HopeMob](https://hopemob.org) is a community that provides sustainable support for leaders of color 215 | * [BNI](https://www.bni.com) is a business networking organization with the motto ‘Givers Gain’ 216 | * [Kiva](https://www.kiva.org) is a non-profit organization that allows people to lend money to low-income entrepreneurs and students in developing countries 217 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana/README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ## Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana 2 | 3 | ### Chapter 1: Why Bother? 4 | 5 | - **Meditation is not easy.** Meditation takes gumption 6 | - Why do it? Simple. Because you are human. Just because of the simple fact that you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life that simply will not go away. You suddenly realize you are spending your whole life just barely getting by 7 | - Watch the news on TV. Listen to the lyrics of popular songs. You find the same theme repeated over and over in variations: jealousy, suffering, discontent, and stress 8 | - We get stuck in the “if-only” syndrome. It comes from the conditions of our own minds. It is a deep, subtle, and pervasive set of mental habits 9 | - **Moment by moment life flows by and it is never the same. Perpetual fluctuation is the essence of the perceptual universe** 10 | - We stick each perception into one of three mental pigeon holes: it is good, bad or neutral. The direct result of this lunacy is a perpetual treadmill race to nowhere, endlessly pounding after pleasure, endlessly fleeing from pain, and endlessly ignoring 90 percent of our experience. Then we wonder why life tastes so flat. In the final analysis this system does not work 11 | - “Suffering” is a big word in Buddhist thought. It means that deep, subtle sense of dissatisfaction that is a part of every mind moment 12 | - And in the end, you are going to die; in the end, you lose everything. It is all transitory 13 | - Do not try to block things out and ignore them 14 | - Happiness and peace are really the prime issues in human existence. That is what all of us are seeking 15 | - What we are really after is the feeling of relief that comes when the drive is satisfied. Relief, relaxation, and an end to the tension 16 | - **You can learn to control your mind, to step outside of the endless cycle of desire and aversion. To recognize desires but not be controlled by them** 17 | - We have overdeveloped the material aspects of existence at the expense of the deeper emotional and spiritual aspects 18 | - You can’t make radical changes in the pattern of your life until you begin to see yourself exactly as you are now 19 | - The consequences of a purified mind will follow you like you own shadow. No one can do more for you than your own purified mind — no parent, no relative, no friend, no one. A well-disciplined mind brings happiness 20 | - Civilization changes a person on the outside. Meditation softens a person from within, through and through 21 | - You feel love toward others because you understand them, and you understand others because you have understood yourself 22 | - **Meditation changes your character by a process of sensitization, by making you deeply aware of your own thoughts , words, and deeds.** Your arrogance evaporates, and your antagonism dries up 23 | 24 | ### Chapter 2: What Meditation Isn’t 25 | 26 | - **This book is specific. We are dealing with the Vipassana system of meditation** 27 | - All meditation procedures stress concentration of the mind 28 | - Vipassana seeks another goal: awareness. The goal is insight 29 | - **Vipassana, by definition, is the cultivation of mindfulness or awareness** 30 | - Meditation deals with levels of consciousness that lie deeper than conceptual thought 31 | - It is an investigation and an experiment, an adventure every time 32 | - Meditate and you will probably dredge up various nasty matters from your past. The suppressed material that has been buried for quite some time can be scary. But exploring it is also highly profitable 33 | - Properly done, meditation is a very gentle and gradual process 34 | - There are three integral factors in Buddhist meditation - morality, concentration, and wisdom 35 | - If you fail to see the consequences of your actions, you will blunder 36 | - There is a third level of morality - ethics. This level of morality absolutely demands meditation 37 | - Sorry, meditation is not a quick cure all, but really profound effects are down the line. Patience is key, patience 38 | 39 | ### Chapter 3: What Meditation Is 40 | 41 | - Probably every culture on earth has produced some sort of mental practice that could be termed meditation 42 | - Your goals: I want to understand the true nature of life. I want to know what this experience of being alive really is. I want to apprehend the true and deepest qualities of life and I don’t want to just accept somebody else’s explanation 43 | - **In vipassana meditation we train ourselves to ignore the constant impulses to be more comfortable** 44 | - Real peace only comes when you stop chasing it 45 | - **When you seek to know reality without illusion, complete with all its pain and danger, real freedom and security will be yours** 46 | - The process of change is constant and eternal 47 | - So you pine for your lost youth, cry when your possessions are gone. Where does this pain come from? It comes from your own inattention. You failed to look closely at life. You failed to observe the constantly shifting flow of the world 48 | - We ignore our inherent connectedness to all other beings and decide that “I” have to get more for “me”; then we marvel at how greedy and insensitive human beings are 49 | - The more hours you spend in medication, the greater your ability to calmly observe every impulse and intention, thought and emotion, just as it arises in the mind 50 | - Vipassana meditation is inherently experiential, not theoretical 51 | 52 | ### Chapter 4: Attitude 53 | 54 | - Tips 55 | - **Don’t expect anything** 56 | - Don’t strain 57 | - Let go. Loosen up and relax 58 | - **Accept everything that arises** 59 | - Be gentle with yourself 60 | - Question everything 61 | - View all problems as challenges 62 | - Don’t ponder. You don’t need to figure everything out 63 | - Stop comparing your life to other people and instead judge your own progress - Ib 64 | - **Ordinary human thinking is full of greed, jealousy, and pride** 65 | - Get rid of prideful thoughts - Ib 66 | - We should rather examine the very process of perception itself. We should watch the feelings that arise and the mental activities that follow. With practice, this habit pattern replaces our normal habit of egoistic comparison and feels far more natural in the long run 67 | 68 | ### Chapter 5: The Practice 69 | 70 | - **Start with focusing your undivided attention on your breathing to gain some degree of basic concentration** 71 | - You are practicing mindfulness 72 | - Seeing with wisdom means seeing things within the framework of our body-mind complex without prejudices or biases that spring from greed, hatred, and delusion 73 | - Feeling is one of the seven universal mental factors. The other six are contact, perception, attention, concentration, life-force, and volition 74 | - We begin seeing the mind and body as separate; we should also see their interconnectedness 75 | - The body alone can do nothing for itself; it is like a log. The mind can do nothing without the support of the body. When we mindfully watch both body and mind, we can see how many wonderful things they do together 76 | - **If we mindfully investigate out own mind, we will discover bitter truths about ourselves: for example, we do not really love ourselves** 77 | - What are the things we do not like? We do not like someone who points out our faults. We do not like someone to be wiser than we are, for we are deluded about ourselves 78 | - If we think that we don’t have the faults, we will never clear our spiritual path. **If we are blind to our own flaws, we need someone to point them out to us. When they point out our faults, we should be grateful to them** 79 | - You have to be free from hatred when pointing out faults in others - Ib 80 | - Our goal 81 | - Purification of mind 82 | - Overcoming sorrow and lamentation 83 | - Overcoming pain and grief 84 | - Treading the right path leading to attainment of eternal peace 85 | - Attaining happiness by following that path 86 | - Practice 87 | - You must make every effort not to change your original position 88 | - After sitting motionlessly, close your eyes 89 | - **Keep your mind in the present moment by focusing on your breath** 90 | - As soon as you notice that your mind is not on your object, bring it back mindfully 91 | - Our mind is analogous to a cup of muddy water. The longer you keep a cup of muddy water still, the more the mud settles down and the water will be seen clearly 92 | - **Even a small degree of desire for permanence in an impermanent situation causes pain or unhappiness** 93 | 94 | ### Chapter 6: What to Do with Your Body 95 | 96 | - The practice of meditation has been very, very thoroughly refined 97 | - **The most essential thing is to sit with your back straight.** The spine should be like a firm young tree growing out of soft ground. The rest of your body just hangs from it in a loose, relaxed manner 98 | - **Sit for the entire session without moving at all** 99 | - The clothes you wear for your meditation should be loose and soft 100 | - Your hands are cupped, one on the other and they rest on your lap with the palms turned upside down 101 | - Choose a position that allows you to sit the longest without pain, without moving 102 | - When using a chair: pick one that has a level seat, a straight back, and no arms 103 | 104 | ### Chapter 7: What to Do with Your Mind 105 | 106 | - One must begin by focusing the attention on the breathing and then go on to note all other physical and mental phenomena 107 | - The difference between being aware of the thought and thinking the thought is very real. But it is extremely subtle and difficult to see. Concentration is one of the tools needed to be able to see this difference 108 | - Without a fixed reference point you get lost. We use breath as our focus point 109 | - **When we truly observe the breath, we are automatically placed in the present** 110 | - What you are looking for is the physical, tactile sensation of the air that passes in and out of the nostrils. This is usually just inside the tip of the nose 111 | - Make no attempts to control the breath 112 | - Just let the breath move naturally, as if you were asleep 113 | - The monkey-mind phenomenon is well known. It is something that every seasoned mediator has had to deal with 114 | - **Sinking denotes any dimming of awareness. Sinking mind is a void. Avoid it.** 115 | - Vipassana meditation is an active function 116 | - Don’t think about your problems during your practice. Push them aside very gently 117 | - Don’t set goals for yourself that are too high to reach 118 | - Observe each breath with care and precision. (If possible, solely focus on inhalation - Ib) 119 | 120 | ### Chapter 8: Structuring Your Meditation 121 | 122 | - Just how do we go about this thing called mediation? 123 | - **You need to establish a formal practice schedule** 124 | - **Meditation recharges your mindfulness** 125 | - Where? Find yourself a quite place, a secluded place, a place where you will be alone 126 | - When? First thing in the morning is a great time to meditate. You may want to shower or exercise a bit 127 | - Make your effort consistent and steady 128 | - You’ll bolt every time something unpleasant comes up or whenever you feel restless. That’s no good. These experiences are some of the most profitable a mediator can face 129 | - Self-discipline is different. It’s the skill of looking through the hollow shouting of your own impulses…they have no power over you. 130 | - **Your urges scream and bluster at you; they cajole; they coax; they threaten; they they carry no stick at all** 131 | - **There is another word for self-discipline. It is patience** 132 | 133 | ### Chapter 9: Set-up Exercises 134 | 135 | - Repeat this before every meditation: “I am about to tread the very same path that has been walked by the Buddha and by his great and holy disciples. An indolent person cannot follow that path. My my energy prevail. May I succeed." 136 | - **Noble behavior means behaving in a most friendly manner. Behavior includes your thought, speech, and actions. If this triple mode of expression of your behavior is contradictory, then something is wrong, and contradictory behavior cannot be noble behavior** 137 | - If your thoughts, words, or deeds cause harm to you or others, or both, then you must ask yourself whether you are really mindful of loving friendliness 138 | 139 | ### Chapter 10: Dealing with Problems 140 | 141 | - **Difficulties are an integral part of your practice. They aren’t something to be avoided, they are to be used.** 142 | - The reason we are all stuck in life’s mud is that we ceaselessly run from our problems and after our desires 143 | - All seasoned meditators have had their own brick walls. They come up again and again 144 | - **It is essential to learn to confront the less pleasant aspects of existence** 145 | - Paradoxically, kindness entails confronting unpleasantness when it arises 146 | - If you are miserable you are miserable; that is the reality. Observe if mindfully, study the phenomenon and lean its mechanics 147 | - Pain is inevitable, suffering is not 148 | - Buddhism does advise you to invest time and energy in learning to deal with unpleasantness 149 | - Handling pain is a two-stage process. First, get rid of the pain if possible. Then, if some pain lingers, use it as an object of mediation 150 | - On fear: **Observe the fear exactly like it is. Don’t cling to it. Just watch is rising and growing. Study its effect. See how it makes you feel and how it affects your body** 151 | - We humans are great at repressing things 152 | - Sitting through restlessness is a little breakthrough in your meditation career. It will teach you a lot 153 | - Beginners in meditation are often much too serious for their own good. It is important to learn to looses up in your session 154 | - A sense of failure is only another ephemeral emotional reaction. If you get involved, it feeds on your energy and it grows. If you simply stand aside and watch it, it passes away 155 | - **There is no such things as failure in meditation. There are setbacks and difficulties** 156 | 157 | ### Chapter 11: Dealing with Distractions I 158 | 159 | - Buddist psychology has developed a distinct system of classification. Rather than dividing thoughts into classes like ‘good’ and ‘bad’, Buddhist thinkers prefer to regard them as ’skillful’ verses ‘unskillful’. An unskillful thought is one connected with greed, hatred, or delusion. Skillful thoughts on the other hand, are those connected with generosity, compassion, and wisdom 160 | - **Take a good strong look at the emotional response you are trying to get rid of. Actually ponder it. See how it makes you feel.** Look at what it is doing to your life, your happiness, your health and your relationships 161 | 162 | ### Chapter 12: Dealing with Distractions II 163 | 164 | - When your mind wanders from the subject of meditation, just observe the distraction mindfully 165 | - **Ask yourself these three questions whenever a thought comes up in your head: “What is it? How strong is it? And how long does it last?"** 166 | - The distraction itself can be anything. Don’t try to force it out of your mind. There is no need for that. Just observe it mindfully with bare attention. And do not condemn yourself for having been strayed. Distractions are natural. They come and they go 167 | - **Mindfulness is the most important aspect of meditation. It is the primary thing that you are trying to cultivate** 168 | - From the point of view of mindfulness, there is really no such thing as a distraction. Whatever arises in the mind is viewed as just one more opportunity to cultivate mindfulness 169 | - On desire: Notice the mental state of desire that accompanies it as a separate thing. Notice the exact extent or degree of that desire 170 | - As your consciousness deepens, you gain the ability to see thoughts and sensations arising slowly, like separate bubbles, each distinct and with spaces between them 171 | - **Conceptualization is an insidiously clever process. It creeps into your experience and it simply takes over (hint: don’t let it - Ib)** 172 | 173 | ### Chapter 13: Mindfulness (Sati) 174 | 175 | - When you first become aware of something, there is a fleeting instance of pure awareness just before you conceptualize the thing, before you identify it 176 | - **Mindfulness is non-judgmental. The meditator observes experiences very much like a scientist observing an object under a microscope without any preconceived notions** 177 | - In order to observe our own fear, we must accept the fact that we are afraid 178 | - Mindfulness is present moment awareness. It is the observance of what is happening right now in the present 179 | - Mindfulness is non egotistic alertness. With mindfulness, one sees all phenomena without references to concepts like ‘me’, ‘my’, or ‘mine’. One does not enhance anything, One does not emphasize anything. One just observes exactly what is there — without distortion 180 | - Mindfulness is awareness of change. It is watching things as they are changing 181 | - Mindfulness reminds you of what you are supposed to be doing 182 | - Mindfulness sees things as they really are 183 | - Mindfulness actually sees. It sees the transitory nature of everything that is perceived. It also sees the inherently unsatisfactory nature of all conditioned things 184 | - One who attends constantly to what is really going on in the mind achieves the state of ultimate sanity (housekeeping, but for your mind - Ib) 185 | - **Mindfulness makes possible the growth of wisdom and compassion. Without mindfulness, they cannot develop to full maturity** 186 | - Fully developed mindfulness is a state of total non-attachment and utter absence of clinging to anything in the world 187 | - **Mindfulness neutralizes defilements in the mind. The result is a mind that reminds unstained and invulnerable, completely undisturbed by the ups and downs of life** 188 | 189 | ### Chapter 14: Mindfulness verses Concentration 190 | 191 | - **You need a balance of concentration and mindfulness - Ib** 192 | - You can use concentration to dominate others. You can use it to be selfish. The real problem is that concentration alone will not give you perspective on yourself 193 | - Mindfulness does not categorize thoughts - Ib 194 | - **There is no ‘me’ in a state of pure mindfulness** 195 | - **Mindfulness makes you see how you hurt others - Ib** 196 | - **Mindfulness can make you free** 197 | - The process cannot be forced or rushed. It proceeds at its own pace 198 | - A couple of months down the track and you will have developed concentration power. Then you can state pumping your energy into mindfulness 199 | - You are not in competition with anybody, and there is no schedule 200 | 201 | ### Chapter 15: Meditation in Everyday Life 202 | 203 | - Focus on fundamentals - Ib 204 | - **Seated meditation is the arena in which mediators practice their own fundamental skills.** Even the most seasoned meditator continues to practice seated meditation 205 | - You do not have to sit to meditate. **Meditation is awareness and it must be applied to each and every activity of one’s life** 206 | - **Standard Buddhist practice advocates frequent retreats to complement your daily sitting practice.** A retreat is a relatively long period of time devoted exlucsively to meditation. One - or two - day retreats are common for lay people 207 | - The usual pattern is to interferes blocks of sitting with blocks of walking mediation. An hour of each with short breaks between is common 208 | - To do the walking meditation, you need a private place with enough space for at least five to ten paces in a straight line 209 | - Your body goes through all kinds of contortions over the course of a single day 210 | - As you go through your day, spend a few seconds every few minutes to check your posture. Don’t do it in a judgemental way 211 | - Intentionally slowing down your thoughts, words, and movements allows you to penetrate far more deeply into them than you otherwise could. What you find there is utterly astonishing 212 | - Bare attention brings order into the clutter that collects in those untidy little hidden corners of the mind 213 | - **You start to see the extent to which you are responsible for your own mental suffering** 214 | - **Mindfulness is a state of mental readiness. Whatever comes up can be dealt with instantly. A problem arises. You simply deal with it** 215 | - Every spare moment can be used for meditation 216 | - **Meditating your way through the ups and downs of daily life is the whole point of vipassana** 217 | 218 | ### Chapter 16: What’s in It for You 219 | 220 | - **The ego sense itself is essentially a perception of distance between that which we call ‘me' and that which we call ‘other'** 221 | - Once you have clearly seen what greed really is and what is really does to you and to others, you just naturally cease to engage in it 222 | - Your experience of being alive, the very sensation of being conscious becomes lucid and precise. Nothing is glossed over or taken for granted, no experiences labeled as merely ‘ordinary' 223 | - **On true mindfulness: This awareness cannot be described adequately. Words are not enough. It can only be experienced. You watch yourself twisting reality with mental comments, with stale images and personal opinions** 224 | - On desire: As soon as you grasp anything, pain inevitably follows 225 | - There is no static self to be found; it is all a process 226 | 227 | ### Afterword: The Power of Loving Friendliness 228 | 229 | - **Cultivating a deep sense of loving friendliness is especially crucial for our well-being** 230 | - **Only in a calm mind, a mind free from anger, greed, and jealousy, can the seeds of loving friendliness develop** 231 | - With every breath, with every pulse, with every heartbeat, I [the author] try to allow my entire being to become permeated with the glow of loving friendliness 232 | - Author talks about how he was meditating at an airport and a little child just came up to him and wrapped her arms around him and wouldn’t let go. He attributes this strange occurrence to the power of loving friendliness 233 | - Many people have no idea how much loving friendliness they have 234 | - We sometimes need to ignore a person’s superficial weaknesses to find her good heart 235 | - **Cultivate loving friendliness toward yourself first** 236 | - In time, your heart grows stronger, and the response of loving friendliness becomes automatic 237 | - Practicing loving friendliness can change our habitual negative thought patterns and reinforce positive ones 238 | - But loving friendliness is not limited to our thoughts. We must manifest it in our words and our actions 239 | - **Whenever you see another being, any being, keep this in mind. Wish for them happiness, peace and well-being. It is a practice that can change your life and those around you** 240 | - Some people think of morality as restrictions on freedom, but in fact, these precepts liberate us. They free us from the suffering we cause ourselves and others when we act unkindly 241 | - When we are angry with someone, we often latch onto one particular aspect of that person. Usually it’s only a moment or two, enough for a few harsh words. We focus on only one aspect of that person — the part that made us angry 242 | - **When we take time to consider all the many elements and processes that make up a person, our anger naturally softens** 243 | - **Hatred is never appeased by more hatred.** An angry response only leads to more anger. If you respond to anger with loving friendliness, the other person’s anger will not increase 244 | - The response of anger is a conditioned response. If we have been trained from childhood to be patient, kind, and gentle, then loving friendliness becomes part of our life. It becomes a habit 245 | - When someone tries to make you angry or does something to hurt you, stay with your thoughts of loving friendliness toward that person 246 | - We don’t have to be swept away by our feelings. We can respond with wisdom rather than delusion 247 | - With thoughts of loving friendliness we appreciate the success of others with warm feeling. We not only make life more pleasant for those around us, our own lives become peaceful and happy 248 | 249 | ### Appendix: The Context of the Tradition 250 | 251 | - The mediator learns to watch changes occurring in all physical experiences, feelings, and perceptions, and learns to study his or her own mental activities 252 | - **Meditation is a living activity, an inherently experiential activity** -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /Players First by John Calipari/README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ## Players First: Coaching From The Inside Out by John Calipari 2 | 3 | ### Introduction: The Names On The Back Of The Jerseys 4 | 5 | - **I coach for the names on the backs of they jerseys — not just the front. My players. They are sent to me by their fathers, their mothers, their grandmothers, their aunts — whoever in this world raised raised them and loves them** 6 | - It’s a burden to be responsible for other people’s children, sometimes a heavy burden 7 | - I ask myself, Have I done everything I can to show them the importance of being grateful for what they have? 8 | - I say to them…How are you going to help society and your community? 9 | - My credo is “Players First" 10 | - **Honesty and its related quality, trust, are at the very core of my coaching philosophy.** I’m straight up with my players from the moment I walk into their houses to recruit them 11 | 12 | ### Chapter 1: Making Lists, Keeping Score 13 | 14 | - **If it matters to you, put it in writing. Write it down and give yourself a deadline** 15 | - Coaches have to monitor themselves, their own mental well-being. The most intense pressure we feel is self-induced 16 | - I tell my guys now: “You’ve got to love the grind.” And keep track of it all, because it keeps you honest. If there’s not something measurable, it’s not real 17 | - **You can quickly improve your skills if you’re willing to spend time.** You learn three or four moves, you practice them, and it can happen fast if you really zero in on it 18 | - **You control your own destiny. It’s up to you** 19 | - Basketball is an intimate sport. Think about some of the words we use. Sharing the ball. Sacrificing for teammates. Helping on defense. It’s the same words you use in relation to family. It’s all about shared responsibility 20 | - Character matters probably a little more than it does in other sports 21 | - Play the game the right way. Care about one another. Keep the commitments you’re made to your teammates 22 | - [Coach Cal talking about difficult off-court situations with players] You look back and hope you gave good advice, that your words of comfort were the right words 23 | - [Coach Cal thinking to himself while considering the possibility of pulling a player off the team] How would I want my own son to be treated? 24 | - **I do believe that anybody is helped if they have a belief in a higher power. I don’t know how you get through life without that** 25 | - Nothing I need to get across on my practice court is important enough to violate a young man’s human dignity 26 | - My belief is that certain people can’t get up on top of the ladder on their own, so they want to drag somebody else down 27 | - **The guy who tries to stab you — you’re supposed to say, “Look, I forgive you,” and then you move on. That’s what you’re taught** 28 | 29 | ### Chapter 2: Just Two Words 30 | 31 | - **I measure my success by the success of those whom I’m serving. Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants** 32 | - I wrote earlier that honesty — by which I mean straight talk— is the essential element of Players First. If you BS your players, you’ll get that in return 33 | - The dribble drive is a departure from traditional basketball, which is five passes before you shoot, or four or five screens before you create a shot for a team member 34 | - Dribble drive = anywhere I catch the ball and begin to drive to the basket, I will have a lane completely to the rim; there shouldn’t be any offensive player in my way if I drive. If a defensive player other than the one guarding me jumps in the lane, I should have an open man 35 | - Practice is where we work on our players’ weaknesses; games are where we show our players’ strengths 36 | - **My most successful college teams take ownership at some point in the season.** It’s their team. They don’t play for me, they play for one another. They lean on one another. They feel their own power 37 | - However we want to play, we impose that on the opponent 38 | 39 | ### Chapter 3: The Kentucky Effect 40 | 41 | - I’m not in the business of sugarcoating anything. **I’m not protecting you. I can’t protect you** 42 | - We have NBA scouts and team executives in our gym at every practice 43 | 44 | ### Chapter 4: Knocking On The Door 45 | 46 | - We hadn’t yet figured out how to close games, which is typical of young teams 47 | 48 | ### Chapter 5: Champions At Last 49 | 50 | - **Certain players just naturally elevate the entire group** 51 | - What I want is to visually be able to see is that we’re getting better. Are we correcting our errors? Is what we’re doing in practice carrying over into games? Are we playing the right way? 52 | - Ideally, you want a point per possession, and if you achieve that, you’re doing pretty well. On defense you’re trying to hold the opponent under a point — .75 or .8 per possession 53 | - Even in the NBA, where the three-point arc is farther out, most of the best teams are near the top in three point shots attempted and percentage of three-pointers made 54 | - **I also believe that if you don’t slow down and take stock sometimes, you’re never going to feel good about yourself** 55 | - The best players I’ve coached have a demeanor about them that never moves. They have a calmness. You can’t read the score on their faces 56 | - I keep it really simple when I talk to the team before games. We go over our assignments. I tell them how I think the game will be played 57 | - **Part of coaching is acting. It’s true of any kind of leadership, whether you’re a CEO, an army general or a father. Part of the job is that you don’t reveal your own apprehensions** 58 | - You want to win with grace, and if you’re a decent person you should be able to do that. You credit your opponents. You don’t gloat. You teach your players to handle it that way. But you want to be able to accept losses without anger or bitterness, and it’s not always easy when someone puts a microphones in your face seconds after the buzzer 59 | 60 | ### Chapter 6: Decision Time [no notes] 61 | 62 | ### Chapter 7: The Trouble With One And Done [no notes] 63 | 64 | ### Chapter 8: Humbled 65 | 66 | - (Talking about his 2013-14 team) You have to try to figure out, What did I do to cause this? What didn’t I see? Why couldn’t I get through to my team? What do I have to change to make sure it doesn’t happen again? 67 | - (Talking about his 2013-14 team) I had not succeeded in getting them to love the grind 68 | - (General basketball advice) When you catch the ball do the old “one thousand one” count. That will give you time to lift your head. If there is a pick coming it will allow your teammate to get there before you start moving - Ib 69 | - Sprint wide = run down the sideline to create proper spacing - Ib 70 | - If you have teammates with you, try to get in the lane, then create a shot for one of them 71 | - Even when we won, I wasn’t fully satisfied, which is how you’re supposed to coach. You’re happy, but you ask for more 72 | - One day, instead of having a basketball practice, we played dodgeball 73 | - (Talking about his 2013-14 team) My primary failure was that I did not put together a roster that made my kids compete against one another. Nothing in my Players First philosophy says that I should protect kids from competition. It’s just the opposite. I serve them by giving them competition 74 | - **You have to know how to fight and take care of yourself. I can’t do that for you** 75 | - Teams that have a good mix of talent and leadership and depth — and play really hard — can sometimes rally after an injury takes away their best player 76 | - If you get chased off your college team because you’re afraid of the competition, you have no chance of making it in the NBA. None 77 | - Yeah, I’ve got that part of me that sometimes wants revenge and I try my best to keep it under control, but it is never, never directed against a kid I coach or have coached 78 | - **I know my life changed when I made it about other people. It doesn’t come naturally for kids to have that attitude** 79 | - If you’re a parent, you know how it goes with your own kids — you tell them something and they might not get it right away. You don’t even think they paid attention. But a month later, a year later, you’ll see them act in a certain way and think, Oh yeah, they actually were listening 80 | 81 | ### Chapter 9: Recruiting At A Non Traditional Program 82 | 83 | - **A salesman who’s a fake isn’t a very good salesman — or at least he’s not good at selling to intelligent people.** It’s about results, referrals, and relationships 84 | - **I used to take every opportunity I had to hit back at people, but the older I get, the less I want to be in mud fights** 85 | - The quality I’m looking for in a kid is respect. You need to be able to give respect 86 | - **(Talking about all-time greats in the basketball world…LeBron, Jordan etc.) They keep grinding to get more championships and to get better individually because that’s what’s inside them** 87 | - We go into any recruiting situation with our eyes wide open 88 | - **“We all go down together, and we all come up together”** - Coal Miner that Coach Cal references 89 | 90 | ### Chapter 10: I Don’t Do This Alone 91 | 92 | - What we do is not all about the program; it's about everyone within it. **Nothing we accomplish is worth a thing if people are not appreciated and treated correctly** 93 | - I need people who look at adversity as a challenge and failure as a learning opportunity. I need people with an attitude that we either win or we learn 94 | - **I have to have people with integrity** 95 | - If someone can come in and change my way of thinking for the better, I’m all for it 96 | - I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the way certain former pro athletes carry themselves. Their whole body language, every step they take, sort of says, Yeah, as a matter of fact, I am all that 97 | - **It doesn’t matter how old you are or what you think you’ve accomplished. You don’t know everything. You get stupider because you stop listening. Nobody can tell you anything** 98 | - One hope I have is that my players see these efforts and get a lesson in humility. They see that their coach reaches out for help. It doesn’t make me weak; it makes me better at everything I do 99 | - You can be the world’s greatest basketball tactician, but if you can’t show your love to players, you won’t ever get the best from them 100 | 101 | ### Chapter 11: At War? Common Sense Verses The NCAA 102 | 103 | - Sometimes you can take the measure of a person, or an organization, by how willing they are to go to war over stuff that doesn’t matter 104 | - The NCAA will soon have to reform itself or it will not remain the dominant force in college athletics 105 | 106 | ### Chapter 12: Fail Fast 107 | 108 | - You recruit kids, watch them play, get to know them, but you never truly know what you have until they’re on campus and on your practice court 109 | 110 | ### Chapter 13: The Long Road To The Final Four — And The Road Ahead 111 | 112 | - **When you struggle and experience failure, you find out if you truly believe in your core principals** 113 | - Players First. I’ve got their backs. My job is to love them. Their job is to love each other 114 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely/README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ## Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely 2 | 3 | ### Introduction 4 | 5 | * **This book is about human irrationality — about our distance from perfection** 6 | * Understanding irrationality is important for our everyday actions and decisions 7 | * Our irrationality happens the same way, again and again 8 | * We are really far less rational than standard economic theory assumes 9 | 10 | ### Chapter 1: The Truth About Relativity 11 | 12 | * Everything is relative, even when it shouldn’t be 13 | * **Humans rarely choose things in absolute terms. We focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another, and estimate value accordingly** 14 | * Most people don’t know what they want unless they see it in context. Like an airplane pilot landing in the dark, we want runway lights on either side of us, guiding us to the place where we can touch down our wheels 15 | * When we have 3 options that are hard to compare, we get confused and usually pick the middle one - Ib 16 | * If everything is relative…then what irrational choices are you making based on the wrong comparisons? - Ib 17 | * **We are always looking at the things around us in relation to others. We can’t help it. We do it for ephemeral things as well: emotions, attitudes, and points of view** 18 | * We tend to focus on comparing things that easily comparable and avoid comparing things that cannot be compared easily 19 | * Decoy effect: If given 3 choices, 2 of which are easily comparable, and of the 2, 1 is clearly better than the other, then we choose the better of the 2, completely ignoring the 3rd option. A, -A, B…you’ll choose A all the time because you can easily compare it to -A 20 | * Comparing yourself to other people is bullshit - Ib 21 | * We can control the circles around us, moving forward smaller circles that boost our relative happiness 22 | * It’s easy for a person to add $200 to a $5000 catering bill for a soup entree 23 | * **The more we have, the more we want. And the only cure is to break the cycle of relativity** 24 | 25 | ### Chapter 2: The Fallacy of Supply and Demand 26 | 27 | * **In order to make a man covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain** 28 | * Do our first impressions and decisions become imprinted? Assel (a black perl seller) “anchored” his pearls to the finest gems in the world — and the prices followed forever after 29 | * Why do we accept anchors? Once people are willing to pay a certain price for one product, their willingness to pay for other items in the same product category was judged relative to that first price (the anchor) 30 | * Price tags by themselves are not necessarily anchors. They become anchors when we contemplate buying a product or service at that particular price. That’s when the imprint is set. From then on, we are willing to accept a range of prices — but as with the pull of a bungee cord, we always refer back to the original anchor. Thus the first anchor influences not only the immediate buying decisions but many others that follow 31 | * Anchoring influences all kinds of purchases. People who move to a new city generally remain anchored to the prices they pain for housing in their former city 32 | * **Do we hop from one anchor to another? It seems not. Our first decisions resonate over a long sequence of decisions** 33 | * Herding: when we assume that something is good or bad on the basis of other people’s previous behavior, and our own actions follow suit 34 | * The power of the first decision can have such a long-lasting effect that it will percolate into our future decisions for years to come 35 | * The sensitivity we show to prices changes might in fact be largely a result of our memory for the prices we have paid in the past and our desire for coherence with our past decisions 36 | * Sometimes we want our decisions to have a rational veneer when, in fact, they stem from a gut feeling — what we crave deep down 37 | * **Following our gut feelings and rationalizing after the fact is not always bad** 38 | 39 | ### Chapter 3: The Cost of Zero Cost 40 | 41 | * It’s no secret that getting something free feels very good. Zero is not just another price, it turns out. **Zero is an emotional hot button — a source of irrational excitement** 42 | * **When something is FREE! we forget the downside. I think it’s because humans are intrinsically afraid of loss.** The real allure of FREE! is tied to this fear 43 | * In the land of pricing, zero is NOT just another price 44 | * When choosing between two products, we often overreact to the free one 45 | * Free = short term thinking. Always think for the long term - Ib 46 | * **The concept of zero also applies to time. Time spend on one activity, after all, is time taken away from another.** So if we spend 45 minutes in a line waiting for our turn to get FREE! taste of ice cream, or if we spend half an hour filling our a long form for a tiny rebate, there is something else that we are not doing with our time 47 | * The difference between two cents and one cent is small. But the difference between one cent and zero is huge! If you are in business and understand that you can do some marvelous things. Want to sell more products? Make part of the purchase free 48 | * Take for example the common experience of going to a restaurant with friends. FREE! can help us solve this problem. We feel more pain of paying as the bill increases, but every additional dollar on the bill pains us less. Thus, the pain of paying does not increase linearly 49 | * When we make choices, we consider relative value instead of absolute value - Ib 50 | * **The price of zero plays a unique role in our decisions** 51 | 52 | ### Chapter 4: The Cost of Social Norms 53 | 54 | * **We live simultaneously in two different worlds — one where social norms prevail, and the other where market norms make the rules. The social norms include the friendly requests that people make of one another. The second world, the one governed by market norms, is very different. The exchanges are sharp edged: wages, prices, rents, interest, and costs.** 55 | * When we mix up social norms and market norms in our head bad things tend to happen - Ib 56 | * A small cost causes us significantly less joy than no cost —> when giving and receiving 57 | * There are many examples to show that people will work more for a cause than for cash. In one experiment, instead of asking lawyers whether they would offer their services for a discounted price volunteers asked if they would offer free services to the needy — overwhelmingly the lawyers said yes 58 | * Maybe paying my parents back for college violates social norms - Ib 59 | * No one is offended by a small gift, because even small gifts keep us in the social exchange world and away from market norms 60 | * For market norms to emerge, it is sufficient to mention money (even when no money changes hands) 61 | * Life pro tip: Don’t even mention the word money in social situations - Ib 62 | * **Suddenly switching from social norms to market norms can have detrimental long lasting effects - Ib** 63 | * Social relationships are not easy to reestablish. Once the bloom is off the rose — once a social norm is trumped by a market norm — it will rarely return 64 | * If you’re a company, my advice is to remember that you can’t have it both ways. You can’t treat your customers like family one moment and then treat them impersonally — or even worse, as a nuisance or a competitor — a moment later when this becomes more convenient or profitable. This is not how social relationships work. 65 | * If employees promise to work harder they must get something similar in return — something like support when they are sick or a chance to hold onto their jobs when the market threatens to take their jobs away. Medical benefits and in particular comprehensive medical coverage are among the best ways a company can express its side of the social exchange 66 | * **If corporations stated thinking in terms of social norms they would realize that these norms build loyalty** 67 | * **Social norms are the forces that can make a difference in the long run** 68 | * Money, as it turns out, is very often the most expensive way to motivate people. Social norms are not only cheaper but often more effective as well. 69 | * On Burning Man: Money is not accepted at Burning Man. Rather, the whole place works as a gift exchange economy — you give things to other people, with the understanding that they will give something back to you 70 | * Remember that social norms can play a far greater role in society than we have been giving them credit for 71 | * If you want to demonstrate affection, or strengthen your relationship, then giving a gift — even at the risk that it won’t be appreciated as much as you hoped — is the only way to go 72 | * **While gifts are financially inefficient they are an important social lubricant** 73 | * For many people the workplace is not just a source of money also a source of motivation and self-definition 74 | * Gifts and employee benefits seem, at first glance, to be an odd and inefficient way of allocating resources. But with the understanding that they fulfill an important role in creating long-term relationships, reciprocity, and positive feelings, companies should try to keep benefits and gifts in the social realm 75 | 76 | ### Chapter 5: The Power of a Free Cookie 77 | 78 | * When we offer people a financial payment in a situation that is governed by social norms, the added payment could actually reduce their motivation to engage and help out 79 | * **In economic exchanges, we are perfectly selfish and unfair. And we think that following our wallets is the right thing to do** 80 | * **When price is not part of the exchange, we become less selfish maximizers and start caring more about the welfare of others.** 81 | * We are caring social animals, but when the rules of the game involve money, this tendency is muted 82 | * The communal plate transforms the food into a shared resource and once something is part of the social good, it leads us into the realm of social norms and with that the rules for sharing with others 83 | * Whenever price is not a part of the exchange, social norms get entangled 84 | * **Not mentioning price ushers in social norms, and with those social norms, we start caring more about others** 85 | 86 | ### Chapter 6: The Influence of Arousal 87 | 88 | * **Dan mentions that we exist in two emotional states: ‘hot' and ‘cold'. In a ‘cold' state, we usually underestimate the influence of our emotions when predicting our actions in a ‘hot’ state - Ib** 89 | * The desire to engage in a variety of somewhat odd sexual activities would be nearly twice as high as participants had predicted when they were ‘cold' 90 | * Participants themselves did not know what they were like once aroused. Prevention, protection, conservatism and morality disappears completely from the radar screen 91 | * **Every one of us, regardless of how ‘good’ we are, under predicts the effect of passion on our behavior** 92 | * We all systematically under predict the degree to which arousal completely negates our superego, and the way emotions can take control of our behavior 93 | * We make strange, irrational decisions when we are emotionally charged - Ib 94 | * Dan mentions the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - we’re kinda like Mr. Hyde under the influence of arousal and emotions 95 | * (With regards to having safe sex) Avoiding temptation altogether is easier than overcoming it in the heat of the moment. This just means being prepared. - Ib 96 | * To make informed decisions we need to somehow experience and understand the emotional state we will be in at the other side of the experience. We need to understand the cold state and the hot state. 97 | * **Just being aware that we are prone to making the wrong decisions when gripped by intense emotion may help us** 98 | 99 | ### Chapter 7: The Problem of Procrastination and Self-Control 100 | 101 | * **Giving up on our long term goals for immediate gratification, my friends, is procrastination** 102 | * Although almost everyone has problems with procrastination, those who recognize and admit their weakness are in a better position to utilize available tools for recommitment and by doing so help themselves overcome it 103 | * **Resisting temptation and instilling self-control are general human goals, and repeatedly failing to achieve them is a source of much of our misery. Without pre-commitments, we keep on falling for temptations** 104 | * Everyone knows that preventive medicine is generally more cost-effective —for both individuals and society — than our current remedial approach 105 | * Most of us find the allure of immediate gratification so strong that it wrecks our best-laid plans for dieting, saving money, cleaning the house — the list is endless 106 | * (TMYK) Men benefit from marriage more than women 107 | * If a particular behavior results in an immediate negative outcome, this behavior will be very difficult to promote, even if the ultimate outcome is highly desirable. It is useful to look for tricks that match immediate, powerful, and positive reinforcements with the not so pleasant steps we have to take toward our long term objectives 108 | * **About half of us will make a lifestyle decision that will ultimately lead us to an early grave** 109 | * By pairing something that we love with something that we dislike but that is good for us, we might be able to harness desire with outcome 110 | 111 | ### Chapter 8: The High Price of Ownership 112 | 113 | * **We tend to overvalue what we own** 114 | * We focus on what we may lose rather than what we may gain 115 | * Our aversion to loss is a strong emotion, and as I will explain later in the book, one that sometimes causes us to make bad decisions 116 | * **We assume that other people will see the transaction from he the same perspective as we do** 117 | * The ‘Ikea Affect’: he more work you put into something the more ownership you being to feel for it 118 | * A widespread marketing hook is the “30-day money back guarantee”. You’re not returning that shit, you know it - Ib 119 | * Everywhere around us we see the temptation to improve the quality of our lives by buying a larger home, a second car, a new dishwasher, a lawn mower and so on. While moving up in life, we indulge ourselves with the fantasy that we can always ratchet ourselves back if need be, but in reality we can’t 120 | * **My approach (Dan’s approach) is to view all transactions (particularly large ones) as if I were a non owner, putting some distance between myself and the item of interest** 121 | * We overvalue everything that we own, whether it’s a pair of basketball tickets or our domiciles 122 | * **Our propensity to overvalue what we own is a basic human bias**, and it reflects a more general tendency to fall in love with and be overly optimistic about anything that has to do with ourselves 123 | * (Advice from Dan) We can realize that we have such biases and listen more carefully to the advice and feedback we get from others 124 | 125 | ### Chapter 9: Keeping Doors Open 126 | 127 | * **Options distract us from achieving the main objective** 128 | * Normally, we cannot stand the idea of closing doors on our alternatives 129 | * **We might not always be aware of it, but in every case we give something up for those options. It’s a fool’s game and we’re remarkably adept at playing it.** 130 | * Why do we feel compelled to keep as many doors open as possible, even at great expense? How can we unshackle ourselves from this irrational impulse to chase worthless options? 131 | * People are beset not by a lack of opportunity, but by a dizzying abundance of it 132 | * The bigger doors (or those that seem bigger) are harder to close. Jobs, dreams, relationships etc. 133 | * We have an irrational compulsion to keep doors open. It’s just the way we’re wired. 134 | * Choosing between two things that are similarly attractive is one of the most difficult decisions we can make 135 | * **When we focus on the similarities and minor differences between two things we fail to take into account the consequences of not deciding - Ib** 136 | 137 | ### Chapter 10: The Effect of Expectations 138 | 139 | * Dan is trying to explore how previously held impressions can cloud our point of view 140 | * If you tell people up front that something might be distasteful, the odds are good that they will end up agreeing with you — not because their experience tells them so but because of their expectations. This is useful because if you know the other person has no experience dealing with the current situation you can heavily influence their reality - Ib 141 | * The better the ambiance of something, the more we tend to elevate its value - Ib 142 | * Telling people slightly terrible information after they’ve had a chance to form good positive impressions is the way to go. Telling people before influences them negatively - Ib 143 | * **Expectations and unfounded assumptions can influence nearly every aspect of our life - Ib** 144 | * **Presentation is almost as important as the product, never underestimate it’s power - Ib** 145 | * That’s what marketing is all about — praising information that will heighten someone’s anticipated and real pleasure 146 | * The brain cannot start from scratch at every new situation. It must build on what it has been before. Research on stereotypes shows not only that we react differently when we have a stereotype of a certain group of people, but also that stereotyped people themselves react differently when they are aware of the label that they are forced to wear 147 | * Our own behavior can be influenced by our stereotypes, and that activation of stereotypes can depend on our current state of mind and how we view ourselves at that moment 148 | * When stripping away our preconceptions and our previous knowledge is not possible, perhaps **we can at least acknowledge that we are all biased. If we acknowledge that we are trapped within our perspective, which partially blinds us to the truth we may be able to accept the idea that conflicts generally require a neutral third party** — who has not been tainted with our expectations 149 | * Expectation is an important part of how we experience everything - Ib 150 | * In the absence of expertise or perfect information, we look for social cues to help us figure out how much we are, or should be impressed, and our expectations take care of the rest 151 | * Uplift people with your high expectations of them but don’t make them unreasonable. **Success is heavily influenced by people’s beliefs in you - Ib** 152 | 153 | ### Chapter 11: The Power of Price 154 | 155 | * **Our expectations can affect us by altering our subjective and even objective experiences — sometimes profoundly so** 156 | * Before recent times, almost all medicines were placebos. The truth is that placebos run on the power of suggestion. They are effective because people believe in them 157 | * Two mechanisms shape the expectations that make placebos work. One is belief — our confidence or faith in the drug, the procedure, or the caregiver. The second mechanism is conditioning - the body builds up expectancy after repeated experiences 158 | * If we see a discounted item, we will instinctively assume that its quality is less than that of a full-price item — and then in fact we will make it so 159 | * **Placebos represent the amazing ways in which our mind controls our body - Ib** 160 | * Placebos are all about self-fulfilling prophecies 161 | 162 | ### Chapter 12: The Cycle of Distrust 163 | 164 | * We’ve become distrustful — not only of those who are trying to swindle us but of everyone 165 | * **Trust, like money, is a crucial lubricant for the economy** 166 | * Without constant suspicion, we can get more out of our exchanges with others while spending less time making sure that others will fulfill their promises to us 167 | * Most people and companies miss or ignore the fact that trust is an important public resource and that losing it can have long-term negative consequences for everyone involved 168 | * **Widespread distrust also makes it more difficult for us to believe those who truly deserve to be trusted** 169 | * Small lies add up to big problems - Ib 170 | * It appears that mistrust in marketing information runs so deeply that it colors our entire perception even in the face of firsthand, direct experience 171 | * Special companies see trust as a public good (like clean air and water) 172 | * Trust, once eroded, is very hard to restore 173 | * By coming to understand trust as an important, tangible, public resource to be protected and cared for, organizations could do a great deal to restore it 174 | * Honesty, transparency, conscientiousness and fair dealing should be bedrock corporate principals 175 | 176 | ### Chapter 13: The Context of Our Character, Part I 177 | 178 | * **When given the opportunity, many honest people will cheat** 179 | * Even when we have no chance of getting caught, we still don’t become wildly dishonest 180 | * **Adam Smith: The success of most people…almost always depends upon the favor and good opinion of their neighbors and equals** 181 | * Honestly is something that is considered a moral virtue in nearly every society 182 | * Once they begin thinking about honestly — whether by recalling the 10 Commandments or by signing a simple statement — participants stop cheating completely 183 | * Occasional swearing of oaths and occasional statements of adherence to rules are not enough. From our experiments, it is clear that oaths and rules must be recalled at, or just before, the moment of temptation 184 | * **What can we do to keep our country honest? We can read the Bible, the Quran, or whatever reflects our values, perhaps. We can revive professional standards. We can sign our names to promises that we will act with integrity** 185 | 186 | ### Chapter 14: The Context of Our Character, Part II 187 | 188 | * **When we look at the world around us, much of the dishonesty we see involves cheating that is one step removed from cash** 189 | * It’s often hard to get a clear picture of how non monetary objects influence our cheating 190 | * We cheat far more often and far more egregiously for things that are 1 step removed from cash - Ib 191 | * **Honesty = long term monetary returns** 192 | * Even good people are not immune to being partially blinded by their own minds. This blindness allows them to take actions that bypass their own moral standards on the road to financial rewards 193 | 194 | ### Chapter 15: Beer and Free Lunches 195 | 196 | * **We are not noble in reason, not infinite in faculty, and rather weak in apprehension** 197 | * People are sometimes willing to sacrifice the pleasure they get from a particular consumption experience in order to project a certain image to others 198 | * People, particularly those with a high need for uniqueness may sacrifice personal utility to gain repetitional utility 199 | * We are all far less rational in our decision making than standard economic theory assumes 200 | * **People are susceptible to irrelevant influences from their immediate environment (context effects), irrelevant emotions, shortsightedness, and other forms of irrationality** 201 | * If I were to distill one main lesson from the research described in this book, it is that **we are pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend.** We usually think of ourselves as sitting in the driver’s seat with ultimate control over the decision we make and the direction our life takes, but alas, this perception has more to do with our desires and with how we want to view ourselves — than with reality 202 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | # Books 2 | 3 | ## What is this? 4 | This is a repository containing notes from books I've read! My aim is to synthesize the most important quotes and concepts from any piece of text such that when I want to refresh myself on the contents again, I (and hopefully others!) can do so very quickly. 5 | 6 | ## Process 7 | I directly transcribe self-underlined or self-highlighted sentences from the book's pages so most of everything contained inside the notes are quotations. There's also a healthy mix of commentary where context is sparse for clarification purposes. 8 | 9 | Initially, I thought about just attaching PDFs of my notes and dumping them in this repo. But to be frank, this approach is inflexible because oftentimes I want to change and iterate on the notes I've already taken. Instead, I've chosen to convert those notes to .md files which can then be exported in any format for consumption elsewhere. I've done my best to organize these .md files in a way that's easy to consume, but as with all markdown files, formatting options are limited. 10 | 11 | ## Repo Updates 12 | I anticipate I'll update this repository every 3-4 weeks with a new book. It takes a while to read and identify important quotations from a book and then type them out. It's painstaking to do, but will be useful in the long term. 13 | 14 | ## Usage 15 | Feel free to download and modify your own copies of these notes as you wish! Since most of these notes are quotations, I'm somewhat wary of copyright issues. My intention is not to cause others harm and if I've violated any rules by uploading these notes, please contact me, preferebly in a non-angry way. 16 | 17 | ## Author 18 | Created by Ibrahim Ali. Contact: ibrahim.ali@vanderbilt.edu 19 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /Remote by Jason Fried & David Hansson/README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ## Remote by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson 2 | 3 | ### The Time Is Right For Remote Work 4 | 5 | * The office during the day has become the last place people want to be when they really want to get work done 6 | * The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely 7 | * Stop commuting your life away. Commuting isn’t just bad for you, your relationships, and the environment — it’s bad for business 8 | * **The internet enables remote work to thrive. The future, quite literally, belongs to those who get it** 9 | * A company that is efficiently built around remote work doesn’t even have to have a set schedule. Release yourself from the 9am-5pm mentality 10 | * **The new luxury is to shed the shackles of deferred living — to pursue your passions now, while you’re still working.** What’s the point in wasting time daydreaming about how great it’ll be when you finally quit? 11 | * The new luxury is the luxury of freedom and time. Once you’re had a taste of that life, no corner office or fancy chef will be able to drag you back 12 | * Great talent is everywhere 13 | * Letting people work remotely is about promising quality of life, about getting access to the best people wherever they are, and all the other benefits we’ll enumerate 14 | 15 | ### Dealing With Excuses 16 | 17 | * By rationing in person meetings their stature is elevated to that of a are treat. They become something to be savored, something special 18 | * People have an amazing ability to live down to low expectations. The bottom line is that you shouldn’t hire people you don’t trust, or work for bosses who don’t trust you 19 | * Keep in mind, the number one counter to distractions is interesting, fulfilling work. Most people want to work, as long as it’s stimulating and fulfilling 20 | * **Working remotely is about making things better for more people more of the time** 21 | * Many big businesses get away with staggering amounts of inefficiency and bureaucracy 22 | * The best way to diffuse the “everyone must be bound by the same policy” line of argument is to remind your boss, yourself, and any other concerned party that you’re all on the same team 23 | * What about culture? **Culture is the spoken and unspoken values and actions of the organization**: 24 | * How we talk to customers — are they always right 25 | * What quality is acceptable — good enough or must it be perfect? 26 | * How we talk to each other — with diplomatic tones or shouting matches? 27 | * Workload — do we cheer on all-nighters or take Fridays off? 28 | * Risk taking — do we favor bet-the-company pivots or slow growth? 29 | * **Not every question needs an answer immediately.** That means realizing that not everything is equally important. Once you’ve grasped that, you’re truly on the path to enlightenment and productivity. 80% of you’re questions aren’t so time-sensitive after all 30 | * The thinking goes: If I can’t see them, I can’t control them. Wresting that antiquated notion of control away from managers isn’t a logical or rational process. It’s often something that needs to be slow-walked 31 | 32 | ### How To Collaborate Remotely 33 | 34 | * We’ve found that we need a good four hours of overlap to avoid collaboration delays and feel like a team 35 | * **Put all the important stuff out in the open, and no one will have to chase that wild goose to get their work done** 36 | * We all need mindless breaks and it helps if you spend some of them with your team. That’s where the virtual water cooler comes in. The wonderful thing about a chat room is that it doesn’t require constant attention. People check in and check out during the day at natural breaks points 37 | * To instill a sense of company cohesion and to share forward motion, everyone needs to feel the that they’re in the loop - we’ve institutionalized this through a weekly discussion thread with the subject “What have you been working on?”. It simply aims to make everyone feel like they’re in the same galley and not their own little rowboat. It’s also a lot harder to bullshit your peers than your boss 38 | * **The work is what matters. The secret benefit of hiring remote workers is that the work itself becomes the yardstick to judge someone’s performance.** When you can’t see someone all day long, the only thing you have to evaluate is the work 39 | * If you’re an owner or manager, letting local people work remotely is a great first step toward seeing if remote will work for you 40 | * M&Ms = Managers and Meetings. Take it easy on those M&Ms 41 | * **Meeting should be like salt — sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful.** Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many meetings can destroy morale and motivation 42 | * Managers are good. They’re essential. But management, like meetings, should be used sparingly 43 | * Cabin fever is real and remote workers are more susceptible to it than those forced into an office 44 | * If you’re going to make a real go at working from home for the long term, you’ll need to get the ergonomic basics right. That means getting a proper desk, a proper chair, and a proper screen (27 inches) 45 | * Working with clients 46 | * Provide references before the client even asks. Show right up front that you have nothing to hide. Trust is going to be the toughest thing to build early on 47 | * Show them work often. This is the best way to chip away at a client’s natural situational anxiety 48 | 49 | ### Hiring And Keeping The Best 50 | 51 | * Once you’ve formed good remote working habits, the lack of proximity between coworkers will start mattering so little that you’ll forget exactly where people are 52 | * Carabi + Co.’s CEO purposely hires remote workers in other parts of the world because he feels having an international team helps him win clients 53 | * **You need solid writers to make remote work work and a solid command of your home language is key** 54 | * **Given how hard it is to find great people, you should be doing your utmost to keep them** 55 | * People who’ve been with a company for a long time make ideal remote workers 56 | * **Keeping a solid team together for a long time is a key to peak performance.** People grow closer and more comfortable with each other, and consequently do even better work. Meanwhile, rookie teams make rookie mistakes 57 | * **It doesn’t take much for bad blood to develop. That’s one of the key challenges of remote work: keeping everyone’s outlook healthy and happy.** That task is insurmountable if you’ve stacked your team with personalities who tend to let their inner asshole loose even now and again 58 | * **Hire people who go out of their way to make sure everyone is having a good time.** Good sentiments are infectious. It’s never a good idea to let poisonous people stick around to spoil it for everyone else, but in a remote work setup it’s deadly 59 | * A manager of remote workers needs to make an example of even the small stuff — things like snippy comments or passive-aggressive responses 60 | * The old adage still applies: No assholes allowed. But for remote work, you need to extend it to no asshole-y behavior allowed, no drama allowed, no bad vibes allowed 61 | * **Put a team together who are naturally interested in more than just their work — and it continues with encouraging those other interests to bloom.** We’ve also sponsored the pursuit of a long list of hobbies and made sure that people get the time off to for them in. Few companies give their workers both the time off to pursue their hobbies and the financial support to make them affordable 62 | * (On hiring) Asking to see work product is pretty easy for positions with natural portfolios, such as designer, programmer, or writer. It’s the work that matters. Look at the work and forget the abstractions 63 | * As a remote worker, you shouldn’t let employees get away with paying you less just because you live in a cheaper city 64 | * **Great remote workers are simply great workers. They exhibit the two key qualities, as Joel Spolsky labeled them in his “Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing”: Smart and Get Things Done** 65 | * In hiring for remote-working positions, managers should be ruthless in filtering out poor writers. Thankfully, becoming a better writer is entirely possible. You should read, read, and read some more. Study how good writers make their case. Focus on clarity first, style second 66 | * The best way we’ve found to accurately judge work is to hire the person to do a little work before we take the plunge and hire them to do a lot of work. Call it “pre-hiring”. Pre-Hiring takes the form of a one or two week mini project. We usually pay around $1,500 for the mini project. Whatever it is, make it meaningful. Make it about creating something ew that solves a problem 67 | * The next step is figuring out if they’re the right fit culturally. Are they polite? Do they show up on time? Are they fundamentally decent? Do they treat people well? What does the rest of the team think? **In the end we make the call on talent and character. It’s always a blend** 68 | * Contractors know the drill: set a reasonable schedule, show good progress at regular intervals and convert an often fuzzy definition of the work into a deliverable 69 | * Contract work is an excellent way for both the company doing the hiring and the person being hired to ease into remote work and try it on for size 70 | 71 | ### Managing Remote Workers 72 | 73 | * **Cultures grow over time, and it’ll be a lot easier if your culture grows up with remote workers** 74 | * The job of a manager is not to herd cows, but to lead and verify the work. You can’t effectively manage a team if you don’t know the intricacies of what they’re working on 75 | * There’s no reason not to get together every now and then. In fact, it’s almost mandatory to do so occasionally 76 | * It’s just easier to work remotely with people you’ve met in so-called “real-life” — folks you’ve shared laughs and meals with 77 | * Going to an industry conference is another good opportunity for team bonding 78 | * If you treat remote workers like second-class citizens you’re all going to have a bad time. Maintain a level playing field — one on which those in and out of the office stand as equals 79 | * It’s a good idea to check in a bit more frequently with remote workers 80 | * **Remove the roadblocks. Start by empowering everyone to amen decisions on their own. People are often scared to make a decision because they work in an environment of retribution and blame** 81 | * **You must make sure that people have access, by default, to everything they need.** Most companies start out by adopting the reverse policy. Part of the problem is the occasional pride that managers take in being Mr. or Ms. Roadblock. Having to be asked — even courted — gives them a certain perverse satisfaction 82 | * At 37Signals everyone gets a company credit card and is told to “spend wisely" 83 | * If work is all consuming the worker is far more likely to burn out. Responsibility lies with the managers and business owners to set the tone. From May to October, we give everyone an additional weekday off — more time to spend outside while the weather is nice and a good way to decompress from a hard-work winter. The best workers over the long term are people who put in sustainable hours 84 | * **When something is scarce, we tend to conserve, appreciate, respect, and value it. Abundance and value are often opposites** 85 | * **When meetings occur all the time, they begin to lose their value.** The scarcity of such face time in remote working situations makes it seem that much more valuable 86 | 87 | ### Life As A Remote Worker 88 | 89 | * Without clear boundaries and routines, things can get murky 90 | * **It can also be helpful to separate the clothes you wear, depending whether you’re in work or play mode** 91 | * Divide the day into chucks like: Catch-up, Collaboration, Serious Work 92 | * Make sure that real work only happens when you’re in your dedicated home office 93 | * **The gray line between work and play can be hard to see on the best of days. A simple strategy is to separate the two completely by using different devices: simply reserve one computer for work and another for fun** 94 | * Getting away from the office is great for your productivity because nobody can disturb you in person. Take your laptop and head to the nearest coffee shop with wifi. The presence of other people, even if you don’t know then, can fool your mind into thinking that being productive is the only proper thing to do 95 | * **The only reliable way to muster motivation is by encouraging people to work on the stuff they like and care about, with people they like and care about** 96 | * “When I retire, I’m going to travel the world” is a common dram, but why wait for retirement? Creative work that can be done remotely generally only requires a computer and an internet connection 97 | * **Routine has a tendency to numb your creativity. Changes of scenery, however, can lead to all sorts of new ideas** 98 | * Having family close and available is a good way to counterbalance the loss of daily in-person contact with coworkers 99 | * Working remotely doesn’t have to mean working from home. Co-working spaces are also an option 100 | * **There are two fundamental ways not to be ignored at work: make noise or make progress. Do the latter - Ib** 101 | 102 | ### Conclusion 103 | 104 | * **Remote work is here, and it’s here to stay.** The only question is whether you’ll be part of the early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, the laggards 105 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /Rework by Jason Fried & David Hansson/README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ## Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson 2 | 3 | ### First 4 | 5 | * **There’s a new reality. Today anyone can be in business.** Tools that used to be out of reach are now easily accessible. Stuff that was impossible just a few years ago is simple today 6 | 7 | ### Takedowns 8 | 9 | * Ignore the real world. The real world isn’t a place, its an excuse. It’s a justification for not trying. It has nothing to do with you 10 | * Learning from mistakes is overrated. **Failure is not a prerequisite for success.** Success is the experience that actually counts 11 | * Start referring to your business plans as business guesses, your financial plans as financial guesses, and your strategic plans as strategic guesses. Now you can stop worrying about them as much 12 | * **Plans are inconsistent with improvisation. And you have to be able to improvise** 13 | * You have the most information when you’re doing something, not before you’ve done it 14 | * Don’t make assumptions about how big you should be ahead of time. Grow slow and see what feels right — premature hiring is the death of many companies 15 | * **Working more doesn’t mean you care more or get more done.** It just means you work more 16 | * If all you do is work, you’re unlikely to have sound judgements. No one makes sharp decisions when tired 17 | 18 | ### Go 19 | 20 | * **Make a dent in the universe** 21 | * To do great work, you need to feel that you’re making a difference. Your efforts need to feel valuable. You should feel an urgency about this too. What you do is your legacy 22 | * **If you’re going to do something, do something that matters** 23 | * The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use 24 | * **Start making something.** What you do is what matters, to what you think or say or plan 25 | * No time is no excuse. When you want something bad enough, you make the time — regardless of your other obligations 26 | * **You have to believe in something. You need to have a backbone. You need to know what you’re willing to fight for. And then you need to show the world** 27 | * Standing for something isn’t just about writing it down. It’s about believing it and living it 28 | * No matter what kind of business you’re starting, take on as little outside cash as you can 29 | * **You need less than you think.** There’s nothing wrong with being frugal 30 | * Start a business, not a startup. Turn a profit or wind up gone. Startups try to ignore this reality. A business without a path to profit isn’t a business, it’s a hobby 31 | * You should be thinking about how to make your project grow and succeed, not how you’re going to jump ship 32 | * When you build a company with the intention of being acquired, you emphasize the wrong things 33 | * Embrace the idea of having less mass. If you keep your mass low, you can quickly change anything 34 | 35 | ### Progress 36 | 37 | * **Embrace constraints.** Limited resources force you to make do with what you’re got. There’s no room for waste. And that forces you to be creative 38 | * It’s hard enough to do one thing right. So start chopping. Getting to great starts by cutting out stuff that’s merely good 39 | * When you start anything new, there are forces pulling you in a variety of directions. The stuff you have t do is where you should begin. **Start at the epicenter. Which part of your equation can’t be removed?** 40 | * Ignore the details early on 41 | * When you put off decisions, they pile up. **Decide and move forward. Make the call, make progress, and get something out there now** 42 | * Be a curator. Stick to what’s truly essential. It’s the stuff you leave out that matters 43 | * When things aren’t working the natural inclination is to throw more at the problem. Cut back. Do less. 44 | * The core of your business should be built around things that won’t change. Things that people are going to want today and ten years from now (ex. reliability, affordability, practicality) 45 | * It’s tempting for people to obsess over tools instead of what they’re going to do with those tools. People use equipment as a crutch. They’re looking for a shortcut 46 | * Sell your by-products. When you make something you always make something else. You can’t just make one thing. Everything has a by-product 47 | * **Once your product does what it needs to do, get it out there.** Think about this: if you had to launch your business in two weeks, what would you cut out? 48 | 49 | ### Productivity 50 | 51 | * If you need to explain something, try getting real with it. Do everything you can to remove layers of abstraction 52 | * **Get the chisel out and start making something real. Anything else is just a distraction** 53 | * Reasons to quit 54 | * There’s no motivation behind it 55 | * You’re solving an imaginary problem 56 | * It’s not actually useful 57 | * You’re not adding any value 58 | * There’s an easier way to do it 59 | * How could you be spending your time instead? 60 | * **When you’re interrupted, you’re not getting work done. Instead, you should get in the alone zone. Long stretches of alone time are when you’re most productive** 61 | * During alone time, give up instant messages, phone calls, email, and meetings. Just shut up and get to work 62 | * Meetings are toxic. The true cost of meetings is staggering. Let’s say you’re going to schedule a meeting that lasts one hour, and you invite ten people to attain. That’s actually a ten hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting 63 | * **Good enough is fine.** Find a judo solution, one that delivers maximum efficiency with minimum effort. When good enough gets the job done, go for it 64 | * **Momentum fuels motivation. To keep your momentum and motivation up, get it the habit of accomplishing small victories along the way** 65 | * Go to sleep. Lack of sleep results in: 66 | * Stubbornness 67 | * Lack of creativity 68 | * Diminished morale 69 | * Irritability 70 | * We humans are just plain bad at estimating. Break the big thing into smaller things. The smaller it is, the easier it is to estimate. Keep breaking your time frames down into smaller chucks 71 | * Long lists don’t get done. Long lists are guilt trip. Whenever you can, divide problems into smaller and smaller pieces until you’re able to deal with them completely and quickly 72 | * **Make tiny decisions. Make choices that are small enough that they’re effectively temporary** 73 | 74 | ### Competitors 75 | 76 | * Copying is a formula for failure. Copying skips understanding — and understanding is how you grow. Plus, if you’re a copycat, you can never keep up. You’re always in a passive position 77 | * Inject what’s unique about the way you think into what you sell 78 | * **Under do your competition.** When you get suckered into an arms race, you wind up in a never ending battle that costs you massive amount of money, time and drive 79 | * **Focus on competitors too much and you wind up diluting your own vision. Focus on yourself instead** 80 | 81 | ### Evolution 82 | 83 | * **Start getting into the habit of saying no — even to many of your best ideas.** Use the power of no to get your priorities straight. Don’t be a jerk. People are surprisingly understanding when you take the time to explain your point of view. You may even win them over to your way of thinking 84 | * When you stick with your current customers come hell or high water, you wind up cutting yourself off from new ones. Scaring away new customers is worse than losing old customers 85 | * **The enthusiasm you have for a new idea is not an accurate indicator of its true worth. By all means, have as many ideas as you can. Get excited about them. Just don’t act in the heat of the moment. Write them down and park them for a few days. Then, evaluate their priority with a calm mind** 86 | * Don’t write it down. Customers will keep reminding you of which things you truly need to worry about 87 | 88 | ### Promotion 89 | 90 | * Welcome obscurity. No one knows who you are right now. Use this time to make mistakes without the whole world hearing about them. Keep tweaking. It makes no sense to tell everyone to look at you if you’re not ready to be looked at yet 91 | * **When you build an audience you don’t have to buy people’s attention — they give it to you.** This is a huge advantage. So build an audience. Speak, write, blog, tweet, make videos. Share information that’s valuable you’ll slowly but surely build a loyal audience 92 | * **Out-teach your competition.** Most businesses focus on selling or servicing, but teaching never even occurs to them. Teach and you’ll form a bond you just don’t get from traditional marketing tactics. Earn loyalty by teaching 93 | * As a business owner, you should share everything you know. This is anathema to most in the business world. Business are usually paranoid and secretive 94 | * Give people a backstage pass and show them how your business works 95 | * **Don’t be afraid to show your flaws. There’s beauty to imperfection** 96 | * Don’t be afraid to give a little away for free — as long as you’ve got something else to sell. Be confident in what you’re offering 97 | * **Everything is marketing.** Every word you write on your website is marketing. It’s the sum total of everything you do 98 | * Trade the dream of overnight success for slow, measured growth 99 | 100 | ### Hiring 101 | 102 | * **Never hire anyone to do a job until you’ve tried to do it yourself first.** Run with the ball as far as you can before handing it off 103 | * Don’t hire for pleasure, hire to kill pain. The right time to hire is when there’s more work than you can handle for a sustained period of time 104 | * **You need to be able to tell people when they’re full of crap. You need an environment where everyone feels safe enough to be honest when things get tough** 105 | * There’s surprisingly little difference between a candidate with six months of experience and one with six years. The real difference comes from the individual’s dedication, personality, and intelligence 106 | * The pool of great candidates is far bigger than just people who completed college with a stellar GPA 107 | * With a small team, you need people who are going to do work, not delegate work. Everyone’s got to be producing. No one can be above the work 108 | * **Hire managers of one. Managers of one are people who come up with their own goals and execute them. They don’t need heavy direction. These people free you from oversight. They set their own direction** 109 | * Hire great writers. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand 110 | * It’s crazy not to hire the best people just because they live far away. Having non-overlapping hours is actually better for productivity if people are in different time zones. Geography just doesn’t matter anymore 111 | * Test-drive employees. You need to evaluate the work they can do now, not the work they say they did in the past 112 | 113 | ### Damage Control 114 | 115 | * When something goes wrong, someone is going to tell the story. You’ll be better off if it’s you. Otherwise, you create an opportunity for rumors, hearsay, and false information to spread 116 | * **People will respect you more if you are open, honest, public and responsive during a crisis** 117 | * The message should come from the top. Spread the message far and wide. Use whatever megaphone you have 118 | * **Speed changes everything. Getting back to people quickly is probably the most important thing you can do when it comes to customer service.** It’s amazing how much that can defuse a bad situation and turn it into a good one 119 | * Even if you don’t have the perfect answer, say something. “Let me do some research and get back to you” can work wonders 120 | * “I” apology is a lot stronger than a “we” apology. The number one principal to keep in mind when you apologize: how would you feel about the apology if you were on the other end? 121 | * Put everyone on the front lines. Everyone on your team should be connected to your customers — maybe not everyday, but at least a few times throughout the year. No one should be shielded from criticism 122 | * **When you rock the boat there will be waves. But if you ride out that first rocky week, things usually settle down. People are creatures of habit. That’s why they react to change in such a negative way** 123 | 124 | ### Culture 125 | 126 | * **You don’t create a culture. It happens.** That is why new companies don’t have a culture. Culture is the by product of consistent behavior. Don’t force it 127 | * Most of the things you worry about never happen anyways. **Optimize for now and worry about the future later** 128 | * There’s a ton of untapped potential trapped under lame policies, poor direction, and stifling bureaucracies. Cut the crap and you’ll find that people are waiting to do great work. They just need to be given the chance 129 | * When everything constantly needs approval, you create a culture of non thinkers. You create a boss-verses-worker relationship that screams “I don’t trust you.” Look at the costs and you quickly realize that failing to trust your employees is awful expensive 130 | * Send people home at 5. You want busy people. People who have a life outside of work. People who care about more than one thing 131 | * **Talk to customers the way you would talk to friends. The mask of professionalism is a joke** 132 | * Avoid using need, can’t, and easy. These are absolutes and hinder good communication. ASAP is poison 133 | 134 | ### Conclusion 135 | 136 | * **Inspiration is perishable.** Inspiration is now thing. If it grabs you, grab it right back and put it to work 137 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson/README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ## The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson 2 | 3 | ### Chapter 1: Don’t Try 4 | 5 | * The dream: someone fights for what they want, never gives up and eventually achieves their wildest dreams 6 | * (Talking about a writer named Bukowski) The genius in Bukowski’s work...was his simple ability to be completely, unflinchingly honest with himself — especially the worst parts of himself — and to share his failings without hesitation or doubt 7 | * Conventional life advice actually fixates on what you lack. It lasers in on what you perceive your personal shortcomings and failures to already be, and then emphasizes them for you 8 | * The problem is that giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health 9 | * **The key to a good life…is giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important** 10 | * The Feedback Loop from hell: You feel so guilty for every mistake you make that you begin to feel guilty about how guilty you’re feeling. or you get sad and alone so often that it makes you feel even more sad and alone just thinking about it. 11 | * We feel bad about feeling bad. We feel guilty for feeling guilty. We get angry about getting angry. We get anxious about feeling anxious. What is wrong with me? This is why not giving a fuck is so key 12 | * By not giving a fuck that you feel bad, you short-circuit the Feedback Loop from Hell 13 | * **The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.** 14 | * "You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life” — Albert Camus 15 | * Pursuing the negative generates the positive 16 | * Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. 17 | * **Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience** 18 | * The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame. 19 | * To try to avoid pain is to give too many fucks about pain 20 | * If you’re able to not give a fuck about the pain, you become unstoppable. 21 | * **To not give a fuck is stare down life’s most terrifying and difficult challenges and still take action** 22 | * Look, this is how it works. You’re going to die one day. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few in fact. 23 | * Not giving a fuck means being comfortable with being different 24 | * **(Talking about indifferent people) They’re afraid to let anyone get close to them, so they imagine themselves as some special, unique snowflake who has problems that nobody would ever understand. That’s why they don’t make any meaningful choices.** 25 | * (Talking about people who don’t give a fuck) Overcoming adversity, the willingness to be different, an outcast, a pariah, all for the sake of one’s own values. The willingness to stare failure in the face and shove your middle finger back at it. They know it’s more important than they are, more important than their own feelings, and their own pride and their own ego. 26 | * The point isn’t to get away from shit. The point is to find shit you enjoy dealing with. 27 | * To not give a fuck about adversity you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity 28 | * Finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the most productive use of your time and energy 29 | * (Talking about life’s trivial details) We realize how little people pay attention to superficial details about us and we choose not to obsess so much over them. This is something called maturity. 30 | * Practical enlightenment is becoming comfortable with the idea that some suffering is always inevitable — that no matter what you do, life is comprised of failures, loss, regrets, and even death. After all, the only way to overcome pain is to first learn how to bear it 31 | * (Talking about this book) Think of it as a guide to suffering and how to do it better 32 | 33 | ### Chapter 2: Happiness Is A Problem 34 | 35 | * Suffering totally sucks. And it’s not necessarily that meaningful either. There is no value in suffering when it’s done without purpose. 36 | * Life itself is a form of suffering. We all must suffer... 37 | * (Talking about Bhuddist philosophy) Pain and loss are inevitable and we should let go of trying to resist them 38 | * Happiness is not a solvable equation 39 | * DISAPPOINTMENT PANDA: his superpower would be to tell people harsh truths about themselves that they needed to hear but didn’t want to accept 40 | * After all, the greatest truths in life are usually the most unpleasant to hear 41 | * We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change 42 | * Research has found that our brains don’t register much difference between physical pain and psychological pain 43 | * "Life is essentially an endless series of problems” - Disappointment Panda 44 | * **“Don’t hope for a life without problems. There is no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems” - Disappointment Panda** 45 | * Problems are a constant in life. Problems never stop: they merely get exchanged or upgraded 46 | * Happiness comes from solving problems. The keyword here is solving. 47 | * **To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action; it’s an activity, not something that is passively bestowed upon you, not something that you magically discover in a top-ten article on the Huffington Post** 48 | * Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work in progress 49 | * True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving 50 | * How not to solve problems: 1) Denial of problems 2) Victimhood mentality 51 | * **Highs are shallow and unproductive ways to go about one’s life** 52 | * High’s also generate addiction. The more you rely on them to feel better about your underlying problems, the more you will seek them out. 53 | * Just because something feels good doesn’t mean it is good. Just because something feels bad doesn’t mean it is bad. We shouldn’t always trust our emotions. 54 | * Remember, pain serves a purpose 55 | * Emotions never last 56 | * Hedonic treadmill: the idea that we’re always working hard to change our life situation, but we actually never feel very different 57 | * Whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad. What creates our positive experiences will define our negative experiences. 58 | * **A question most people never consider is, “What pain do you want in your life. What are you willing to struggle for?"** 59 | * Most people want to have great sex and an awesome relationship, but not everyone is willing to go through the tough conversations, the awkward silences, the hurt feelings, and the emotional psychodrama to get there 60 | * The path to happiness is a path full of shit-heaps and shame 61 | * (Talking about himself) I was in love with the result, but I wasn’t in love with the process. I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but only the victory. And life doesn’t work that way. 62 | 63 | ### Chapter 3: You Are Not Special 64 | 65 | * **A true and accurate measure of one’s self-worth is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves** 66 | * Entitled people exude a delusional degree of self-confidence (do not let yourself feel entitled) 67 | * But entitlement is a failed strategy. It’s just another high. It’s not happiness 68 | * **A person who actually has self-worth is able to look at the negative parts of his character fully** 69 | * When “real traumatic shit” happens in our lives, we begin to unconsciously feel as though we have problems that we’re incapable of ever solving. And this assumed inability to solve our problems causes us to feel miserable and helpless 70 | * Entitlement plays out in 2 ways: 1) I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck 2) I suck and the rest of you are all awesome 71 | * There are no insurmountable problems. That’s a lie - Ib 72 | * If you’re got a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in the future. IT JUST MEANS YOU’RE NOT SPECIAL. 73 | * The more exposed we are to opposing viewpoints, the more we seem to get upset that those other viewpoints exist 74 | * **To become truly great at something, you have to dedicate shit-tons of time and energy to it** 75 | * We’re all, for the most part, pretty average people. But it’s the extremes that get all of the publicity. 76 | * Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes of the bell curve of human experience. The vast majority of life is not unextraordinary, indeed quite average. 77 | * The tendency toward entitlement is apparent across all of society 78 | * The inundation of the exceptional makes people feel worse about themselves 79 | * The internet has not just open sourced information, it has also open-sourced insecurity, self-doubt, and shame 80 | * If everyone were extraordinary, then by definition no one would be extraordinary 81 | * A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they accept it, they’ll never achieve anything, never improve, and that their life won’t matter 82 | * **People who become great at something become great because they understand that they’re not already great - they are mediocre, they are average — and that they could be so much better** 83 | 84 | ### Chapter 4: The Value of Suffering 85 | 86 | * (Talking about lone warrior Onada and the person that found him, Suzuki) Suzuki asked Onada why he had stayed and continued to fight. Onada said it was simple: he has been given the order to “never surrender”. 87 | * Humans often choose to dedicate large portions of their lives to seemingly useless or destructive causes 88 | * These men both chose how they wished to suffer (Onada and Suzuki). Their suffering meant something, it fulfilled some greater cause. 89 | * **The question we should be asking is, “Why am I suffering - for what purpose?"** 90 | * Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more you peel them back, the more likely you’re going to start crying at inappropriate times. 91 | * The first layer of the self-awareness onion is a simple understanding of one’s emotions. We all have emotional blind spots. It takes years of practice and effort to get good at identifying blind spots 92 | * The second layer of the self-awareness onion is an ability to ask why we feel certain emotions. This helps us understand the root cause of the emotional that overwhelm us. 93 | * The third level is our personal values. Values —> nature of our problems —> quality of our lives 94 | * **Values underlie everything we do and are** 95 | * **Everything we think and feel about a situation comes back to how valuable we perceive it to be** 96 | * Most people are horrible at answering these why questions accurately 97 | * Most people avoid responsibility for their own problems, rather than accurately identifying the problem. Their decisions were based on chasing highs, not generating true happiness 98 | * How are they choosing to measure success/failure for themselves 99 | * Honest self-questioning is difficult 100 | * For any given situation you’re in, ask yourself: what is the value and what is the metric by which I’m evaluating said value - Ib 101 | * **We get to control what our problems mean based on how we choose to think about them, the standard by which we choose to measure them** 102 | * We’re apes. We think we’re all sophisticated. We instinctually measure ourselves against others. 103 | * Everyone has different metrics for evaluating success - Ib 104 | * Our values determine the metrics by which we measure ourselves and everyone else 105 | * If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and how you measure failure/success 106 | * Ask yourself: what are your values? If they’re not strong, change them/find new ones 107 | * (Talking the dude who got replaced by Ringo) Fame and glory would have been nice, sure — but he decided that what he already had was more important: a big and loving family, a stable marriage, a simple life 108 | * Shitty values 109 | * Pleasure: pleasure is a false god. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction - the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose 110 | * Material success: don’t measure yourself by status symbols - Ib 111 | * Always being right: if your metric for life success is to be right — well, you’re going to have a difficult time. You prevent yourself from learning from mistakes. It’s far more helpful to assume you’re ignorant and don’t know a whole lot 112 | * Staying positive: sometimes life sucks, and the healthiest thing you can do is admit it. Shit happens - Ib. Need to able to express negative emotions in a socially acceptable and healthy manner and express them in a way that aligns with your values. When we force ourselves to stay positive at all times, we deny the existence of our life’s problems 113 | * “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful” - Sigmund F. 114 | * **Good values** 115 | * Reality based, socially constructive, immediate and controllable 116 | * **Honesty, innovation, vulnerability, standing up for yourself, standing up for others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility, creativity (healthy values are achieved internally)** 117 | * **Self improvement in a nutshell: prioritizing better values, choosing better things to give a fuck about** 118 | 119 | ### Chapter 5: You Are Always Choosing 120 | 121 | * (Talking about running a marathon) When you choose it freely and prepare for it, it was a glorious and important milestone in your life. When it was forced upon you against your will, it was one of the most terrifying and painful experiences of your life 122 | * The only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we choose it, and that we are responsible for it 123 | * **When we feel that we’re choosing our problems, we feel empowered** 124 | * **We, individually, are responsible for everything in our lives, no matter the external circumstances** 125 | * We always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond 126 | * It’s still your responsibility to interpret the meaning of the event and choose a response 127 | * We are always choosing 128 | * With great responsibility comes great power 129 | * Accepting responsibility for our problems is the first step to solving them 130 | * People hesitate to take responsibility for their problems because they believe that to be responsible for your problems is to also be at fault for your problems 131 | * We are responsible for experiences that aren’t our fault all the time. This is part of life. 132 | * **Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you** 133 | * Don’t ever play victim with yourself - Ib 134 | * Taking responsibility for our problems is far more important because that’s where the real learning comes from. That’s where the real-life improvement comes from. 135 | * How we react to death, or robbery, or injustice is our own choice - Ib 136 | * (Talking about privilege) We get dealt the cards. Some of us get better cards than others 137 | * Nobody makes it through life without collecting a few scars on the way out 138 | * Right now, anyone who is affected about anything is oppressed in some way. The biggest problem with victimhood chic is the it sucks attention away from actual victims 139 | * Change is as simple as choosing to give a fuck about something else. It really is that simple. It’s just not easy. 140 | * **As you reassess your values, you will be met with internal and external resistance along the way** 141 | 142 | ### Chapter 6: You’re Wrong About Everything (But So Am I) 143 | 144 | * We used to believe lots of false truths - Ib 145 | * I realized that each individual gets to decide what is “enough” and that love can be whatever we let it be 146 | * **Growth is an endlessly iterative process. We go from wrong to slightly less wrong.** 147 | * It’s easier to sit in a painful certainty 148 | * **Certainty is the enemy of growth. Nothing is for certain until it has already happened — and even then, it’s still debatable** 149 | * Instead of striving for certainty, we should be in constant search of doubt 150 | * All that we know for certain is what hurts in the moment and what doesn’t. And that’s not worth much. 151 | * The human mind is capable fo coming up with and believing in a bunch of bullshit that isn’t rel. And it turns out, we’re all really good at it. 152 | * Most of what we come to know and believe is the product of the innate inaccuracies and biases present in our brains. 153 | * Most our our beliefs are wrong — all beliefs are wrong, some are just less wrong than others 154 | * Our memories are constantly deceiving us. It’s like the telephone game - Ib 155 | * Our brain is always trying to make sense of our current situation based on what we already believe and have already experienced 156 | * **Often we run into life stations where past and present don’t cohere (Don’t rely on the past to explain the present - Ib)** 157 | * Our beliefs are malleable and our memories are horribly unreliable 158 | * If we’re wrong all the time, then isn’t self-skeptisism and the rigorous challenging of our own beliefs and assumptions the only logical route to progress? 159 | * It’s freeing know that everyone including yourself is wrong about pretty much everything - Ib 160 | * For individuals to feel justified in doing horrible things to other people, they must feel an unwavering certainty in their own righteousness, in their own beliefs and deservedness 161 | * Evil people will never believe that they are evil, rather, they believe that everyone else is evil 162 | * The problem here is that not only is certainty unattainable, but the pursuit of certainty often breeds more (and worse) insecurity 163 | * The pursuit fo absolute certainty is futile - Ib 164 | * **The more your embrace being uncertain and not knowing, the more comfortable you will feel in knowing what your don’t know** 165 | * Our own ignorance is greater than us all 166 | * **Manson’s Law of Avoidance: The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it** 167 | * We should all subscribe to a basic set of values that never change - Ib 168 | * Arbitrary metrics why which you define yourself actually trap you 169 | * Ask yourself this with regards to labels you place on yourself: “Maybe I’m not ___, but rather ___” 170 | * There is little that is unique or special about your problems. That’s why letting go is so liberating. 171 | * Measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator 172 | * **The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, there everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible** 173 | * How to be less certain of yourself 174 | * Q1: What if I’m wrong? 175 | * Q2: What would it mean if I were wrong? 176 | * Q3: Would being wrong create a better or a worse problem than my current problem, for both myself and others? 177 | * **We’re often fucking ourselves over in the pursuit of what we think is certain - Ib** 178 | * If it feels like it’s you verses the world, chances are it’s really just you verses yourself 179 | 180 | ### Chapter 7: Failure Is The Way Forward 181 | 182 | * You could make plenty of money and be miserable, just as you could be broke and be pretty happy 183 | * To not pursue my own projects became the failure 184 | * Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something 185 | * At some point, most of us reach a place where we’re afraid to fail 186 | * **If we’re unwilling to fail, then we’re unwilling to succeed** 187 | * Whereas if I instead adopt the metric “Improve my social life”, I can live up to my value of “good relations with others” regardless of how other people respond to me. My self-worth is based on my own behaviors and happiness 188 | * It’s growth that generates happiness, not a long list of arbitrary achievements 189 | * **Our pain often makes us stronger, more resilient, more grounded** 190 | * Fear and anxiety and sadness are not necessarily always undesirable or unhelpful states of mind; rather, they are often representative of the necessary pain of psychological growth. And to deny that pain is to deny our own potential 191 | * **Our most radical changes in perspective often happen at the tail end of our worst moments** 192 | * If you continue to overindulge in various substances or activities, then you’ll never generate the requisite motivation to actually change 193 | * Just shut up and do it 194 | * VCR questions = questions that have really obvious answers but might involve a lot of pain (Paperwork to drop out of med school is easy to fill out, but actually dealing with the repercussions is hard) 195 | * Learn how to sustain the pain you’ve chosen. When you choose a new value, you are choosing to introduce a new form of pain into your life. Relish it. Savor it. Welcome it with open arms. Then act despite it. 196 | * Remember: You don’t know anything 197 | * Life is about not knowing and then doing something anyway. All of life is like this. It never changes. 198 | * Embrace pain and failure - Ib 199 | * **Do something principal: Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.** 200 | * Action —> Inspiration —> Motivation (so all you really need to do is take some sort of action, inspiration will follow) 201 | * **Inspiration is a reward for taking action - Ib** 202 | * If we follow the do something principal, failure feels unimportant. Any result is regarded as progress. 203 | 204 | ### Chapter 8: The Importance of Saying No 205 | 206 | * Absolute freedom by itself means nothing 207 | * **The only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one’s life if through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or one person** 208 | * Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function and not hate themselves 209 | * To build trust you have to be honest. That means when things suck, you say so openly and without apology. 210 | * Be open to rejecting alternatives - Ib 211 | * We need to reject something. Otherwise, we stand for nothing. 212 | * Avoiding rejection gives us short term pleasure by making us rudderless and directionless in the long term 213 | * To value X, we must reject non-X 214 | * The desire to avoid rejection at all costs, to avoid confrontation and conflict, the desire to attempt to accept everything equally and to make everything cohere and harmonize is a deep and subtle form of entitlement 215 | * It’s suspected by many scholars that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet not to celebrate romance but rather to satirize it, to show how absolutely nutty it was 216 | * The problem is that we’re finding out that romantic love is kind of like cocaine. Like frighteningly similar to cocaine. 217 | * The difference between a healthy and an unhealthy relationship comes down to two things: 1) how well each person in the relationship accepts responsibility and 2) the willingness of each person to both reject and be rejected by their partner 218 | * People in a toxic relationship with poor or no boundaries will regularly avoid responsibility for their own problems and/or take responsibility for their partner’s problems 219 | * By boundaries I mean the delineation between two people’s responsibilities for their own problems 220 | * **Do not take responsibility for other people’s problems - Ib** 221 | * **People can’t solve your problems for you. And they shouldn’t try, because that won’t make you happy** 222 | * Don’t blame other people for your problems, take responsibility. Do not be entitled - Ib 223 | * Do not be the victim in the relationship. Do not be the saver. - Ib 224 | * These are the yin and yang of any toxic relationship: the victim and the saver, the person who starts fires because it makes her feel important and the person who puts fires out because it makes him feel important 225 | * Victims and savers both use each other to achieve emotional highs 226 | * The last person I should ever have to censor myself around is the women I love 227 | * When our highest priority is to always make ourselves feel good, or to always make our partner feel good then no body ends up feeling good 228 | * **Without conflict there can be no trust. Conflict exists to show us who is there for us unconditionally and who is just there for the benefits** 229 | * If people cheat, it’s because something other than the relationship is more important to them 230 | * Unfortunately, building a track record for trust takes time — certainly a lot more time than it takes to break trust 231 | * When trust is destroyed, it can be rebuilt only if the following two steps happen: 1) the trust-breaker admits the true values that caused the breach and owns up to them and 2) behavior over time 232 | * But more is not always better. In fact, the opposite is true. We are actually often happier with less. 233 | * Now that I’m in my thirties, I can finally recognize that commitment, in its own way, offers a wealth of opportunity and experiences that would otherwise never available to me, no matter where I went or what I did 234 | * **There is freedom and liberation in commitment** 235 | * Commitment gives you freedom because you’re no longer distracted by the unimportant and frivolous 236 | 237 | ### Chapter 9: …And Then You Die 238 | 239 | * **In the face of the inevitability of death, there is no reason to ever give in to one’s fear or embarrassment or shame, since it’s all just a bunch of nothing anyway** 240 | * In a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero 241 | * (Taking about Becker’s book Denial of Death) 242 | * Humans are unique in that we’re the only animals that can conceptualize and think about ourselves abstractly 243 | * We are all aware on some level that our physical self will eventually die, that this death is inevitable, and that its inevitability — on some unconscious level — scares the shit out of us. Therefore, in order to compensate for our fear of the inevitable loss of our physical self, we try to construct a conceptual self that will live on forever 244 | * Becker called such efforts our “immortality projects” — projects that allow our conceptual self to live on way past the point of our physical death 245 | * All the meaning in our life is shaped by this innate desire to never truly die 246 | * If you haven’t figured it out yet, our immortality projects are our values 247 | * People should question their conceptual self and become more comfortable with the reality of their own death 248 | * Because once we become comfortable with the fact of our own death, we can then choose our values more freely 249 | * The Stoics of ancient Greece and Rome implored people to keep death in mind at all times, in order to appreciate life more and remain humble in the face of its adversities 250 | * Mark Twain: “A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time" 251 | * **Confronting the reality of our own mortality is important because it obliterates all the crappy, fragile, superficial values in life.** 252 | * **Ask yourself: What’s your legacy?** 253 | * **The only way to be comfortable with death is to understand and see yourself as something bigger than yourself; to choose values that stretch beyond serving yourself, that are simple and immediate and controllable and tolerant of the chaotic world around you. This is the basic root of all happiness.** 254 | * You too are going to die, and that’s because you too were fortunate enough to have lived. 255 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /The War of Art by Steven Pressfield/README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ## The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles 2 | 3 | ### Book 1: Resistance - Defining the Enemy 4 | 5 | * Resistance is invisible. It cannot be seen, touched, heard, or smelled. But it can be felt. 6 | * **Resistance is internal.** 7 | * Resistance is insidious. Resistance is always lying and full of shit. 8 | * Resistance is impersonal. 9 | * Resistance is universal. 10 | * Resistance never sleeps. 11 | * Resistance plays for keeps. It aims to kill. 12 | * Resistance is fueled by fear. 13 | * Resistance only opposes in one direction - from a lower sphere to a higher sphere. 14 | * **Resistance is most powerful at the finish line** 15 | * Resistance recruits allies. A peril that must also be guarded against: sabotage by others. 16 | * **Procrastination is the most common manifestation of resistance.** 17 | * Resistance and trouble: the working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing her work. The working artist banishes from her world all sources of trouble. 18 | * Resistance and self-dramatization: creating soap opera in our lives is a symptom of resistance. 19 | * Resistance and self-medication: instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work, we simply consume a product. 20 | * Resistance and victimhood: casting yourself as a victim is the antithesis of doing your work. Don’t do it. If you’re doing it, stop. 21 | * **Resistance and unhappiness: we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc., but only by doing our work.** 22 | * Resistance and fundamentalism: the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them. 23 | * Resistance and criticism: individuals who are realized in their own lives almost never criticize others. 24 | * Resistance and self-doubt: the counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death. 25 | * **Resistance and fear: the more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. So if you’re paralyzed with fear, it’s a good sign. It shows you what you have to do.** 26 | * Resistance is directly proportional to love. 27 | * Resistance and being a star: the professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like. 28 | * **Resistance and support: seeking support from friends and family is like having your people gathered around your deathbed.** 29 | * Resistance and rationalization: rationalization is for cowards. It’s one thing to lie to ourselves. It’s another thing to believe it. 30 | * **Resistance can be beaten.** 31 | 32 | ### Book 2: Combating Resistance & Turning Pro 33 | 34 | * The professional plays for keeps 35 | * To the pro it’s his vocation 36 | * The professional is there seven days a week 37 | * The professional loves it so much he dedicates his life to it. He commits full-time 38 | * **Work leads to inspiration - Ib** 39 | * Principal of Priority: You must know the difference between urgent and important. You must do what’s important first. 40 | * **Treat Resistance with respect, but do not let it beat you - Ib** 41 | * The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not 42 | * He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier or swabbed or jet jockey. War is hell. 43 | * We’re all pros already 44 | * We show up everyday 45 | * We show up no matter what 46 | * We stay on the job all day 47 | * We are committed over the long haul 48 | * The stakes for us are high and real 49 | * **We master the technique of our jobs** 50 | * We have a sense of humor about ourselves 51 | * A real failure is valuable 52 | * **The professional does his work out of love** 53 | * Playing for money or adopting the attitude of one who plays for money or adopting the attire of one who plays for money, lovers the fever 54 | * The payoff of playing-the-game-for-money is not the money, the payoff is that playing the game for money produces the proper professional 55 | * Technically the professional takes money. Technically the pro plays for pay. But in the end, he does it for love 56 | * **The professional understands delayed gratification** 57 | * The professional arms himself with patience 58 | * **The professional cannot live like a vagabond. He is on a mission. He will not tolerate disorder.** 59 | * We do not wait for inspiration, we act in the anticipation of its apparition 60 | * **The professional shuts up. She does her work.** 61 | * The professional knows that fear cannot be overcome 62 | * The professional accepts no excuses 63 | * The field is level, the professional understands, only in heaven 64 | * The professional prepares mentally to absorb blows and to deliver them 65 | * The professional does not show off 66 | * **The professional respects his craft. The professional dedicates himself to mastering technique not because he believes technique is a substitute for inspiration but because he wants to be in possession of the full arsenal of skills** 67 | * **The professional seeks out the most knowledgable teacher and listens with both ears. The levels of revelation are inexhaustible.** 68 | * Madonna does not identify with Madonna. Madonna employs Madonna. 69 | * The professional does not take failure or success personally 70 | * **The professional has seated his professional consciousness in a place other than his personal ego** 71 | * Fear of rejection isn’t just psychological; it’s biological. It’s in our cells. 72 | * All the professional can do is leave everything on the field 73 | * The professional’s artistic self contains many works and many performances 74 | * The professional self-validates. She is tough-minded. 75 | * The professional gives an ear to criticism, seeking to learn and grow 76 | * The professional cannot let himself take humiliation personally 77 | * The professional endures adversity. He lets the birdshit splash down on his slicker, remembering that it comes clean with a heavy duty hosing. 78 | * It’s better to be in the arena taking punches instead of sitting on the sideline 79 | * A professional self-validates 80 | * **Govern your own emotions, so do not act reflexively - Ib** 81 | * Learn compassion and let go of fury 82 | * The professional cannot allow the actions of others to define his reality 83 | * The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had the guts. 84 | * The professional understands her limitations. She brings in other pros and treats them with respect. 85 | * The professional does not permit himself to become hidebound within one incarnation, however comfortable or successful. He continue his journey. 86 | * Real recognize real - Ice Cube 87 | * Don’t let even a tiny bit of success fool you into thinking you’ve made it - Ib 88 | * If we think of ourselves as a corporation, it gives us a healthy distance on ourselves 89 | * **Resistance has no strength of its own; its power derives entirely from our fear of it.** A bully will back down before the runtiest twerp who stands his ground 90 | * The pro keeps coming on 91 | * We make up our mind to view ourselves as pros and we do it. Simple as that. 92 | 93 | ### Book 3: Beyond Resistance - A Higher Realm 94 | 95 | * As resistance works to keep us from becoming who we were born to be, equal and opposite powers are counter-poised agains it. These are our allies and angels. 96 | * **The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except-sitting down every day and trying.** 97 | * When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us 98 | * Eternity is in love with the creations of time - William Blake 99 | * **The Muse: before I sit down to work, I’ll take a minute and show respect to this unseen Power who can make or break me** 100 | * There is a magic to effacing our human arrogance and humbly entreating help from a source we cannot see, hear, touch, or smell 101 | * The magic of making a start: a whole stream of events issues from the decision - assistance which no man would have dreamed would come his way 102 | * When we conceive an enterprise and commit to it in the face of our fears, something wonderful happens. 103 | * We we make a beginning, we get out of our own way 104 | * This process of self-revision and self-correction is so common we don’t even notice. But it’s a miracle. And its implications are staggering. 105 | * Insights pop into our heads while we’re shaving or taking a shower or even amazingly, while we’r actually working 106 | * The power to take charge was in my hands; all I had to do was believe it 107 | * **The Ego is a small part of the Self. There is Divine ground outside the ego. - Ib** 108 | * The Ego’s job is to take care of business in the real world. The soul endures. 109 | * The Ego hates the Self because when we seat our consciousness in the Self, we put the ego out of business 110 | * The Ego hates it because it knows that these souls are awakening to a call, and that that call comes from a plane nobler than the material one and from a source deeper and more powerful than the physical 111 | * The Ego produces resistance attacks the awakening artist 112 | * Resistance feeds on fear. We experience Resistance as fear. But fear of what? 113 | * The Mother of all Fears that’s so close to us that even when we verbalize it we don’t believe it. Fear That We Will Succeed. That we can access the powers we secretly know we possess. 114 | * We know that if we embrace our ideals we must prove worthy of them. And that scares the hell out of us. 115 | * In other words, none of us are born as passive generic blobs waiting for the world to stamp its imprint on us. Instead we show up possessing already a highly refined and individual soul. 116 | * We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny 117 | * The artist must operate territorially. He must do his work for its own sake. 118 | * To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution 119 | * **The artist can’t do his work hierarchically. He has to work territorially. A territory provides sustenance.** 120 | * **A territory can only be claimed by work - what’s your territory?** 121 | * For us to try to second guess our Muse the way a hack second guesses his audience is condescension to heaven. Its blasphemy and sacrilege. 122 | * Think about this as the last person on Earth - would you still pursue this? - Ib 123 | * We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause 124 | * **To labor in this way is a form of meditation and a supreme species of spiritual devotion** 125 | * There exist other, higher planes of reality about which we can prove nothing, but from which arise our lives, our work, and our art 126 | * Do it or don’t do it. Give us your best work. 127 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /Zero to One by Peter Thiel/README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ## Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel 2 | 3 | ### Preface 4 | 5 | * It’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. It is entirely difficult 6 | * The best paths are new and untried 7 | * Technology is a miracle and **humans can work miracles through tech** 8 | * No authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be an innovator 9 | * Successful people find value in unexpected places 10 | * Sharing knowledge is critical 11 | * Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply 12 | * Most people believe in x but the truth is the opposite of x 13 | * You have to make vertical progress, not horizontal progress — that is zero to 1 — also known as tech 14 | * Technology changes lives 15 | * Technology matters more than anything else in the entire world 16 | * Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation 17 | * Globalization without new technology is unsustainable 18 | * Only computers and communications have improved dramatically since midcentury 19 | * **Small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have historically changed the world for the better** 20 | * Startups operate on the principal that you need to work with other people to get stuff done but you need to stay small enough so that you actually can 21 | * A new company’s most important strength is new thinking 22 | * This book is an exercise in thinking 23 | * Need to rethink business from scratch 24 | 25 | ### Chapter 1: Party Like It's 1999 26 | 27 | * “Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule” - Nietzsche 28 | * Only seeking profit is pedestrian — don’t do it 29 | * **Always question what we think we know about the past** 30 | * Hamstrung is a good word 31 | * It’s hard to blame people for dancing when the music was playing; irrationality was rational given that spending .com to your name could double your value overnight 32 | * Small incremental steps are the only safe path forward 33 | * Planning is arrogant and inflexible, experiment 34 | * Improving on recognizable products offered by successful companies is sometimes the move 35 | * If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell, it’s not good enough 36 | * ^However, that doesn’t mean the opposite ideas aren’t true (think for yourself) 37 | 38 | ### Chapter 2: All Happy Companies Are Different 39 | 40 | * Creating value is not enough, you also **need to capture some of the value you create** (think about profit margins) 41 | * Every firm in a competitive market is undifferentiated and sells the same homogenous products 42 | * Under perfect competition, in the long run, no company in a competitive marketplace makes a profit 43 | * A monopoly is company that is so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute 44 | * If you want to create and capture lasting value don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business 45 | * All monopolies mask themselves — there’s something to be said about Google (it captures so much market share in search that it can afford to do other things) 46 | * The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition 47 | * Monopolists describe their companies as a union of several large markets 48 | * The competitive ecosystem pushes people toward ruthlessness or death 49 | * Build a business that’s successful enough to take ethics seriously without jeopardizing its own existence 50 | * Monopolists can afford to think about other things than making money 51 | * **Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits** 52 | * It’s possible to invent new and better things — creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world 53 | * The history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents 54 | * If you’re in a competitive market, some other undifferentiated competitor will always be ready to take your place 55 | * In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception, monopoly is the condition of every successful business 56 | * All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition 57 | 58 | ### Chapter 4: The Ideology of Competition 59 | 60 | * Creative monopolies means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator 61 | * We preach competition, internalize its necessity, and enact its commandments and as a result, we trap ourselves within it - even though the more we compete, the less we gain 62 | * We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences 63 | * Competition is like war: allegedly necessary, supposedly valiant, but ultimately destructive 64 | * **Warring is costly business** 65 | * There are crowds competing for obvious prizes, don’t get caught up in them 66 | * Does the market you’re entering in even make sense? 67 | * If you can’t beat a rival, it may be better to merge 68 | * Calmer heads always prevail. Hot heads fight for things that don’t matter. Always make sure to approach a heated situation with a clear head. 69 | 70 | ### Chapter 5: Last Mover Advantage 71 | 72 | * A great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future 73 | * It takes time to build valuable things and that means delayed revenue 74 | * Most of a tech company’s value will come at least 10-15 years in the future 75 | * For a company to be valuable, it must grow and endure 76 | * **Do not focus on short term growth** 77 | * Nobody knows everything 78 | * You must think critically about the qualitative characteristics of your business 79 | * Proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding — all essential 80 | * Proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute 81 | * You can also make a 10x improvement through superior integrated design (APPLE) 82 | * Network effects: if all your friends are on facebook it makes sense for you to join facebook 83 | * Network effects **businesses must start with especially small markets** 84 | * Economies of scale: a monopoly business gets stronger as it gets bigger 85 | * Software startups can enjoy especially dramatic economies of scale 86 | * Branding: have to protect a company’s brand (you have a monopoly on this too) 87 | * When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he didn’t just make Apple a cool place to work, he slashed product lines to focus on the handful of opportunities for 10x improvements. No technology company can be built on branding alone 88 | * You need to **chose your market carefully** and expand deliberately 89 | * If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is 90 | * The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors 91 | * Any big market is a bad choice 92 | * A large market will either lack a good starting point or it will be open to competition 93 | * Cut throat competition means your profits will be zero 94 | * Jeff Bezos for example, started with books 95 | * eBay started with intense interest groups 96 | * The most successful companies make the core progression to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets — a part of their founding narrative 97 | * But if you truly want to make something new, the act of creation is far more important than the old industries that might not like what you create 98 | * Disruptive companies often pick fights they can’t win — don’t argue over petty stuff 99 | * Avoid competition as much as possible 100 | * **It is much more important to make the last great development in a specific market** instead of being a first mover. That way, you can learn from past mistakes. You must study the endgame before everything else. 101 | * You are not a lottery ticket 102 | * **Success is never accidental** 103 | 104 | ### Chapter 6: You Are Not A Lottery Ticket 105 | 106 | * Every company starts in unique circumstances and **every company starts only once**. Statistics don’t work when the sample size is one. 107 | * Strong men and women believe in cause and effect 108 | * **If you treat the future as something definite it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it** 109 | * Have a very definite (and optimistic) view of the future 110 | * Avoid indefinite pessimism 111 | * Avoid definite pessimism 112 | * Big plans for the future have unfortunately become archaic curiosities 113 | * To an indefinite optimist the future will be better be he doesn’t know how exactly, so he won’t make any specific plans 114 | * Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth (ie Goldman) 115 | * Only in a definite future is money a means to an end, not the end itself 116 | * Indefinite optimists don’t have any specific plans for the future 117 | * Systematic knowledge of the current range of human lifespans has made that range seem natural. Today, our society is permeated by the twin ideas that death is both inevitable and random 118 | * Indefinite optimism may pose an even greater challenge for the future of biotech 119 | * US companies are letting cash pile on on their balance sheets without investing in new projects because they don’t have any concrete plans for the future 120 | * Definite optimism works when you build the future you envision 121 | * How can the future get better is no one plans for it? 122 | * Minimum viable products suck 123 | * **Why should you expect your business to succeed without a plan to make it happen?** 124 | * The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business. Apple imagined and executed definite multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively 125 | * You CAN change the world 126 | * Founders only sell when they have no more concrete plans for the company, in which case the acquirer probably overpaid 127 | * Definite founders with robust plans don’t sell, which means the offer wasn’t high enough 128 | * We have to find our way back to a definite future 129 | * A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery 130 | * The important thing to remember is that you are not a lottery ticket 131 | 132 | ### Chapter 7: Follow The Money 133 | 134 | * **Never underestimate exponential growth** 135 | * Use the power law to your advantage 136 | * Most startups fail and most funds fail with them 137 | * Venture returns don’t follow a normal distribution overall. Rather, they follow a power law: a small handful of companies radically outperform all others. If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of very few companies that can become overwhelmingly valuable, you’ll miss those rare companies in the first place 138 | * The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined 139 | * Two rules for VC: only invest in copies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund. Second rule: there can’t be any other rules because the first one is too restrictive 140 | * VCs must find the handful of companies that will successfully go from 0 to 1 and then back them with every resource 141 | * Every company in a good venture portfolio must have the potential to succeed at a vast scale 142 | * **Once you think that you’re playing the lottery, you’ve already psychologically prepared yourself to lose** 143 | * VCs usually spend even more time on the most problematic companies than they do on the most obviously successful ones 144 | * Less than 1% of new businesses stated each year in the US receive venture-funding and total VC investments disproportionately propel the entire economy 145 | * Venture backed companies create 11% of all private sector jobs 146 | * Every entrepreneur must think about whether her company is going to succeed and become valuable 147 | * Investors who understand the power law make as few investments as possible 148 | * **An entrepreneur cannot diversity herself** 149 | * An individual cannot diversify his own life by keeping dozens of equally possible careers in ready reserve 150 | * **You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future** 151 | * The power law means that differences between companies will dwarf the differences in roles inside companies 152 | * In a power law world, can’t afford not to think hard about where your actions will fall on the curve 153 | * You can achieve difficult things, but can’t achieve the impossible 154 | 155 | ### Chapter 8: Secrets 156 | 157 | * Think about: what valuable company is nobody building? 158 | * If everything worth doing has already been done you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista 159 | * Religious fundamentalism for example allows no middle ground for hard questions 160 | * In between - the zone of hard truths - lies heresy 161 | * Four social trends have conspired to root out belief in secrets 162 | * First is incrementalism: do what you say one step at a time and you shall be rewarded with numbers (this leads us to chase numbers and grades instead of actual learning) 163 | * Second is risk aversion: If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right - dedicating your life to something that one else believes in - is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable. 164 | * Third is complacency: **DO NOT BE COMPLACENT.** Just because you got into a good, just because you’re surrounded by privilege doesn’t mean you’ll succeed 165 | * Fourth is flatness: The voice of doubt can dissuade people from even starting to look for secrets in the first place 166 | * **We have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered** 167 | * In democratic society a wrongful practice persists one when most people don’t perceive it to be unjust 168 | * To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices 169 | * **Belief in secrets = innovation** 170 | * Having abandoned the search for technological secrets, HP obsessed over gossip. As a result, by late 2012 HP was worth just $23 billion- not much more than it was worth in 1990 171 | * You can’t find secrets without looking for them. Belief in secrets is an effective truth 172 | * There are many more secrets left to find they will yield only to relentless searchers 173 | * Only be believing in and looking for secrets could you see beyond the convention to an opportunity hidden in plain sight 174 | * If insights that look so elementary in retrospect can support important and valuable businesses, there must remain many great companies still to start 175 | * There are two kinds fo secrets: secrets of nature and secrets about people 176 | * Natural secrets exists all around us - to find them one must study some undiscovered aspect of the physical world 177 | * **What secrets is nature not telling you? What secrets are people not telling you?** 178 | * People who think they know everything, actually know nothing 179 | * Every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. **A great company is a conspiracy to change the world.** When you share your secret the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator. 180 | 181 | ### Chapter 9: Foundations 182 | 183 | * **A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed** 184 | * Fundamental questions were open for debate by the framers during the first few months thy spent together at the constitutional convention 185 | * If you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people — these mistakes are very hard to correct after they are made 186 | * You cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation 187 | * Choosing a co-founder is like getting married, and founder conflict is just as ugly as divorce 188 | * But if founders develop irreconcilable differences, the company becomes the victim 189 | * Founders should share a pre-history before they start a company together — otherwise, they’re just rolling dice 190 | * **Everyone in your company needs to work well together** 191 | * It’s very hard to go from 0 to 1 without a team 192 | * You need good people who get along, but you also need a structure to help keep everyone aligned for the long term 193 | * Sources of misalignment: ownership (who legally owns a company’s equity? — founders, employees, and investors), possession (who actually runs the company on a day-to-day basis?— employees and managers), control(who formally governs the company’s affairs? — founders, investors) 194 | * To see misalignment at its most extreme, just visit the DMV 195 | * The CEO of a huge company like GM, for example will own some of the company’s stock, but only a trivial portion of the total. Therefore he’s incentivized to reward himself through the power of possession rather than the value of ownership 196 | * Startups are small enough that founders usually have both ownership and position. Most conflicts in a startup erupt between ownership and control — that is, between founders and investors on the board 197 | * **In the boardroom, less is more** 198 | * That is why it’s crucial to choose wisely: **every single member of your board matters.** Even one problem director will cause you pin, and may even jeopardize your company’s future. 199 | * By far the worst you can do is to make your board extra large 200 | * A huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all 201 | * If you want an effective board, keep it small 202 | * As a general rule, everyone you involve with you company should be involved full time 203 | * Anyone who doesn’t own stock options or draw a regular salary from your company is fundamentally misaligned 204 | * That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. 205 | * Cash is not king 206 | * For people to be fully committed, they should be properly compensated 207 | * **A company does better the less it pays the CEO** — that’s one of the single clearest patterns i’ve noticed from investing in hundreds of startups. In no case should a CEO of an early-stage VC backed startup receive more than 150,000 per year in salary 208 | * A cash poor executive, by contrast, will focus on increasing the value of the company as a whole 209 | * Low CEO pay also sets the standard for everyone else 210 | * If a CEO doesn’t set an example by taking the lowest salary in the company, he can do the same thing by drawing the highest salary. 211 | * High cash compensation teaches workers to claim value from the company as it already exists instead of investing their time to create new value in the future. 212 | * **Incentive pay encourages short-term thinking** and value grabbing. Any kind of cash is more about the present than it is about the future 213 | * Startups don’t need to pay high salaries because they can offer something better: part ownership of the company itself 214 | * However, for equity to create commitment rather than conflict, you must allocate it very carefully. Giving everyone equal shares is usually a mistake 215 | * On the other hand, granting different amounts up front is just as sure to seem unfair 216 | * This problem becomes even more acute over time as more people join the company 217 | * Anyone who prefers owning a part of your company to being paid in cash reveals a preference for the long term and a commitment to increasing your company’s value in the future 218 | * **The founding moment of a company really does happen just once: only at the very start** 219 | * **A second, less obvious understanding of the founding: it lasts as long as a company is creating new things, and it ends when creation stops.** If you get the founding moment right, you can do more than create a valuable company: you can steer its distance future toward the creation of new things instead of the stewardship of inherited success 220 | 221 | ### Chapter 10: The Mechanics of Mafia 222 | 223 | * **Employees should love their work.** They should enjoy going to the office so much that formal business hours become obsolete and no-body watches the clock — this picture has vision, but no substance. Without substance, perks don’t work. 224 | * The culture was strong enough to transcend the original company [while talking about paypal] 225 | * Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other? [rhetorical question] 226 | * By taking a merely professional view of the workplace, in which free agents check-in and check-out on a transactional basis, is worse than cold: it’s not even rational. Since time is your most valuable asset, it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future together. 227 | * Stronger relationships would make us not just happier and better at work but also more successful in our careers even beyond PayPal 228 | * **Why should the 20th employee join your company?** 229 | * Talented people don’t need to work for you: they have plenty of options 230 | * Bad answers to this question: stock options, smartest people in the world, challenging problems. General and undifferentiated pitches don’t say anything about why a recruit should join your company instead of many others 231 | * **Good answers: mission and answers about your team. You have to be able to explain why your mission is compelling. The opportunity to do irreplaceable work on a unique problem alongside great people.** 232 | * Ask yourself, are these the kind of people I want to work with? You should be able to explain why your company is a unique match for him personally 233 | * **Don’t fight the perk war** — its pointless 234 | * From the outside, everyone in your company should be different in the same way 235 | * The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principal: everyone at your company should be different in the same way — a tribe of like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company’s mission 236 | * Startups should make their early staff as personally similar as possible. 237 | * Need every new hire to be equally as obsessed 238 | * Do one thing 239 | * On the inside, every individual should be sharply distinguished by her work 240 | * Individual roles can’t remain static for long 241 | * The best thing I did as a manager at paypal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique and everyone knew I would evaluate him or her based on that. 242 | * **Defining roles reduces conflict** 243 | * More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all 244 | * **Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease**: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view. 245 | * In the most intense kind of organization, members hang out only with other members. We have a word for such organizations: cults. 246 | * The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. It’s better to be called a cult - or even a mafia. 247 | 248 | ### Chapter 11: If You Build It, Will They Come? 249 | 250 | * Even though sales is everywhere, most people underrate its importance. 251 | * Distribution may not matter in fictional worlds, but it matters in ours. 252 | * But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen and its harder than it looks. 253 | * **Advertising matters because it works.** It works on nerds, and it works on you too. 254 | * Advertising doesn’t exist to make you buy a product right away; it exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later. 255 | * Sales is the opposite: an orchestrated campaign to change surface appearances without changing the underlying reality 256 | * What nerds miss is that **it takes hard work to make sales look easy** 257 | * Like acting, sales works best when hidden 258 | * People who sell advertising are called ‘account executives’. People who sell customers work in ‘business development’. People who sell companies are ‘investment bankers’. And people who sell themselves are called politicians. There’s a reason for these redescriptions: none of us wants to be reminded that we’re being sold. 259 | * Whatever the career, sales ability distinguishes superstars from also-rans. 260 | * The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it. 261 | * The engineer’s grail is a product great enough that ‘it sells itself’. But anyone who would actually say this about a real product must be lying 262 | * **If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business — no matter how good the product** 263 | * Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation 264 | * No matter how strong your product, you must still support it with a strong distribution plan 265 | * Customer value (over lifetime) > customer acquisition cost 266 | * If you average sale is seven figures or more, every detail of every deal requires close personal attention. It might take months to develop the right relationships. It’s hard to do, but this kind of ‘complex sales’ is the only way to sell some of the most valuable products 267 | * Politics matters in big deals just as much as technological ingenuity (EPIC TERMS) 268 | * Complex sales requires making just a few deals each year 269 | * Elon Musk is a sales grandmaster 270 | * **Complex sales works best when you don’t have salesmen at all** — usually the CEO is working out most of these deals because they are so large 271 | * **Good enterprise sales strategy starts small**, as it must 272 | * Personal sales might range between 10,000 and 100,000 273 | * The difficulty here is to establish a process by which a sales team of modest size can move the product to a wide audience (ZocDoc) 274 | * **In between personal sales and traditional advertising there is a dead zone.** Distribution channels become too hard to manage. Suppose you’re dealing with a $1000 product. There’s no good way to distribute this via a sales team 275 | * TV is a great big megaphone and when you can only afford to spend dozens acquiring a new customer, you need the biggest megaphone you can find 276 | * If every new user leads to more than one additional user, you can achieve a chain reaction of exponential growth 277 | * **Whoever is first to dominate the most important segment of a market with viral potential will be the last mover in the whole market** 278 | * Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business 279 | * Selling to non-customers: ‘This company is so good that people will be clamoring to join it’. ’This company is so great that investors will be banging down our door to invest. 280 | * Selling your company to the media is a necessary part of selling it to everyone else. Nerds who instinctively mistrust the media often make the mistake of trying to ignore it. 281 | * The press can help attract investors and employees 282 | * Everybody sells 283 | * **Look around. If you don’t see any sales-people, you’re the salesperson** 284 | 285 | ### Chapter 12: Man and Machine 286 | 287 | * Computers already have enough power to outperform people in activities we used to think of as distinctly human. 288 | * Everyone expects computers to do more in the future 289 | * Have to understand: **computers are complements for humans, not substitutes.** The most valuable businesses of comping decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete. 290 | * People compete for jobs, and for resources; computers compete for neither 291 | * Globalization = substitution 292 | * People don’t just compete to supply labor, they also demand the same resources 293 | * Technology = complementarity 294 | * Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing, but they struggle to make basic judgements that would be simple for any human 295 | * Computers are tools not rivals 296 | * When we design new computer technology to help solve problems, we get all the efficiency gains of a hyper specialized trading partner without having to compete with it for resources 297 | * Theil talks about Igor, a fraud detection system that works with human beings to solve credit card fraud 298 | * This kind of man-machine symbiosis enabled PayPal to stay in business 299 | * Think of what professionals do in their jobs today. Computers might be able to do some of these tasks, but they can’t combine them 300 | * Better technology in law, medicine, and education won’t replace professionals; it will allow them to do even more 301 | * Today, more than 97% of recruiters use LinkedIn and its powerful search and filtering functionality 302 | * Today’s companies have an insatiable appetite for data, mistakenly believing that more data always creates more value. But big data is usually dumb data. Computer’s don’t know how to compare patterns from different sources or how to interpret complex behaviors 303 | * **The most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computer alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems** 304 | * Indefinite fears about the far future shouldn’t stop us from making definite plans today 305 | 306 | ### Chapter 13: Seeing Green 307 | 308 | * Most clean tech companies crashed because they neglected one more of the seven questions every business must answer 309 | * The **7 questions** every business must answer (Tesla is a great example of a company that nailed all seven of these questions) 310 | * The engineering question: **Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements?** 311 | * Companies must strive for 10x better because merely incremental improvements often end up meaning no improvement at all for the end user 312 | * Only when your product is 10x better can you offer the customer transparent superiority 313 | * The timing question: **Is now the right time to start your particular business?** 314 | * Is the tech you’re working with ready to be introduced into the market 315 | * The monopoly question: **Are you starting with a big share of a small market?** 316 | * You can’t dominate a submarket if it’s fictional, and huge markets are highly competitive, not highly attainable 317 | * The people question: **Do you have the right team?** 318 | * (Talking about clean tech failures) These salesman-executives were good at raising capital and securing government subsidies, but they were less good at building products that customers wanted to buy 319 | * Pass on any company whose founders dressed up for pitch meetings 320 | * Never invest in a CEO that wears a suit — got us to the truth a lot faster 321 | * If he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech 322 | * The distribution question: **Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product?** 323 | * Tesla took this really seriously 324 | * Better place (a company that outfitted gas cars with batteries) thought its technology spoke for itself, so they didn’t bother to market it clearly 325 | * Tesla decided to own the entire distribution chain 326 | * The durability question: **Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future?** 327 | * Every entrepreneur should plan to be the last mover in her particular market 328 | * The secret question: **Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?** 329 | * (Talking about clean tech) They deluded themselves into believing that an overwhelming social need for alternative energy solutions implied an overwhelming business opportunity for clean tech companies of all kinds 330 | * Great company have secrets: specific reasons for success that other people don’t see 331 | * Social entrepreneurship is a myth 332 | * Whatever is good enough to receive applause from all audiences can only be conventional, like the general idea of green energy 333 | * The best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve 334 | * A valuable business must **start by finding a niche and dominating a small market** 335 | 336 | ### Chapter 14: The Founder’s Paradox 337 | 338 | * Are all founders unusual people? 339 | * **Almost all successful entrepreneurs are simultaneously insiders and outsiders** 340 | * The famous and infamous have always served as vessels for public sentiment: they’re praised amid prosperity and blamed for misfortune. 341 | * The Aztecs considered their victims to be earthly forms of the gods and then they cut your heart out. These are the roots of monarchy: every king was a living god, and every god a murdered king. Perhaps every modern king is just a scapegoat who has managed to delay his own execution 342 | * Celebrities are supposedly American royalty 343 | * But Elvis self destructed, Michael Jackson turned into a drug-addicted shell of his former self. Brittney shaved her head. 344 | * Perhaps the only way to be a rock god forever is to die an early death 345 | * We alternatively worship and despise technology founders just as we do celebrities 346 | * (Talking about Howard Hughes, tech entrepreneur, obsessed with flying planes) He liked to remind people that he was a mere mortal, not a greek god — something that mortals say only when they want to invite comparisons to gods. But when his crazy act turned into a crazy life, he became an object of pity as much as awe 347 | * (Talking about bill gates and his fate) A court ordered that Microsoft be broken apart. Gates spend most of his time responding to legal threats instead of building new technology. 348 | * Steve Job’s return to apple demonstrated the irreplaceable value of company’s founder 349 | * Jobs was also the insider of his own personality cult. He could act charismatic or crazy, perhaps according to his mood or perhaps according to his calculations. 350 | * But all his eccentricity backfired on him in 1985 when Apple’s board kicked jobs out his own company when he clashed with the professional CEO brought in to provide adult supervision. 351 | * The creation of new value cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals. 352 | * Apple’s value crucially depended on the singular vision of a particular person. 353 | * Companies that create new technology often resemble feudal monarchies rather than organizations that are supposedly more modern. **A unique founder can make authoritative decisions, inspire strong personal loyalty, and plan ahead for decades.** 354 | * The lesson for business is that we need founders 355 | * The lesson for founders is that individual prominence and adulation can never be enjoyed except on the condition that it may be exchanged for individual notoriety and demonization at any moment — so be careful 356 | * **Founders are important because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company** 357 | * To believe yourself invested with decide self-sufficiency is not the mark of a strong individual, but of a person who has mistaken the crowd’s worship — or jeering — for truth. 358 | * The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind 359 | 360 | ### Conclusion: Stagnation or Singularity? 361 | 362 | * Is there anything to say about the very distant future? 363 | * Nick Bostrom describes 4 possible patterns 364 | * Recurrent collapse (ups and downs), Plateau, Extinction, or Takeoff 365 | * Which of the four will it be? 366 | * If we define the future as a time that looks different from the present, then most people aren’t expecting any future at all; instead, they expect coming decades to bring more globalization, convergence, and sameness. 367 | * It’s hard to see how global patterns could last indefinitely 368 | * **We cannot take for granted that the future will be better, and that means we need to work to create it today** 369 | * Out task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better — to go from 0 to 1 370 | * The **first step is to think for yourself** 371 | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------