List of Quotes

Some quotes I collect, wrapped in a narrative. They’re either inspirational or a nice way to explain things that I will copy and use in a conversation.

Obsession and Focus

1. It is hard to be wildly successful at anything you aren’t obsessed with.
2. Everyone enjoys winning. What matters is do you enjoy the preparation?
3. In the short term, you are as good as your intensity. In the long term, you are only as good as your consistency. Amateurs have a goal. Professionals have an obsession.
4. Obsession is intrinsic motivation, which is a feeling of autonomy + mastery + sense of purpose.
5. Great people are obsessed.
6. Before getting swept up in the competitions that define so much of life, ask yourself whether you even want the prize on offer.
7. Thinking long-term is the biggest overlooked advantage hidden in plain sight.
8. Yes is easy, but carries a burden. No is hard, but enables you to focus on the more important things.
9. Expend energy so that you can eventually find the few things you do exceptionally well. But the experimentation phase has to end eventually.
10. The more focused you are, the easier it is to become world-class at whatever you commit to.
11. We feel like we need more time, but what we’re craving is more focus. What we need is a smaller surface area.
12. If you don’t sacrifice for what you want, what you want becomes the sacrifice.
13. Improving personal inputs improves output. Focus on your daily habits – they are non-negotiable priorities.
14. The most powerful productivity tool ever invented is simply the word no.
15. The person who carefully designs their daily routine goes further than the person who negotiates with themselves every day.
16. A lot of people say they want to be great, but they’re not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve greatness. They have other concerns, and they spread themselves out. … Greatness isn’t easy to achieve. It requires a lot of time, a lot of sacrifices. It requires a lot of tough choices. It requires your loved ones to sacrifice, too.
17. The biggest decision you make daily is what to focus on. And that begins with your waking minutes.
18. Time is the friend of the consistent and the enemy of the inconsistent.
19. If you don’t have consistent scheduled time for your top goals, you don’t have top goals
20. Self-motivated people always feel urgency. They want to move fast, do better and win. They push themselves, without you needing to do so. Instead of worrying if they are moving fast enough, you worry if they are going too hard and at risk of burnout.
21. Fortune favors the focused.
22. We don’t waste time by making the wrong decisions. We waste time by falling victim to routine and not making any decisions.
23. Ordinary people can do extraordinary things by choosing to be what most people are unwilling to be: consistent, hardworking, patient, and determined.
24. The path to differentiated results looks like madness to the masses. As the adage goes, if you do what everyone else does, you’ll get the same results everyone else gets. Extraordinary success requires misunderstood choices.
25. Obsession beats talent.
26. Comfort is the killer of dreams.
27. Focus on what you control.
28. Successful people say no to almost everything. Focus.
29. IDK = No. If you’re uncertain, the answer is no.
30. Winners focus on Winning. Losers focus on Winners.
31. There’s no such thing as “I don’t have enough time”. You always have time - everyone has the same amount of time. You don’t have the right priorities.
32. You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight.
33. Consistently boring days make for extraordinary decades.
34. 90% of success can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time without convincing yourself that you’re smarter than you are.
35. Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.
36. Find something for which you have so much passion that you are willing to endure the pain.

Education and Learning

1. College goals are artificial and game-able, but also because encourages a default operational loop of ‘wait for an authority figure to tell you what to do next.’
2. The common trait of people who supposedly have vision is that they spend a lot of time reading and gathering information, and then they synthesize it until they come up with an idea.
3. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.
4. Driving is the last time most adults learn a new skill. Never stop learning.
5. School tests weaknesses. Life rewards strengths.
6. Someone who tries to read but doesn’t understand about the need to search will end up reading bad books, and will wonder why people who read a lot like to do something so boring.
7. Anxiety, worry, and terror are all the same thing, just to differing degrees. If you’re not feeling fear, then you’re not doing anything important. So when you feel fearless, stop and re-evaluate what you’re doing wrong with your life.
8. Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.
9. Get paid for your mind, not your time. Ideas are currency and quality is valuable. Respect yourself, then sell yourself. Experience and expertise are hard earned.
10. Evaluate yourself often, and constantly adjust your workflow.
11. Innovation is all about being willing to be wrong, because innovation requires missteps. They’re not a bug, they’re a feature.
12. Real wealth, he understood, was autonomy.
13. Better to make a mistake and learn from it than to rob yourself of the lesson.
14. Show me a person who’s afraid to look bad, and I’ll show you a person you can beat every time.

Luck and Risk

1. Opportunities multiply as they are seized. Risk multiply the opportunities seized.
2. Take as much risk as you can afford. If you’re not failing, you’re being too conservative. When in doubt, then, follow your curiosity, and fail there. That’ll bring you to the frontiers of knowledge, where there are many gaps for you to explore.
3. Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a ten percent chance of a one hundred times payoff, you should take that bet every time.
4. Luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. Opportunities parade past all of us all the time. The key is that you must be paying attention to see them, you must be willing to take risks, you must expose yourself to the possibility of massive failure and you must believe in what you are doing so much that you do it anyway.

Relationships and People

1. Most of my close friends only have 4-5 close friends. Most of the productive people I know at work are focused on one or two things, not 5. The way to maximize your enjoyment in life is to keep your surface area small. It’s a lot of work but if the happiest people I know are any indication, it’s a lot less work to keep it small than to maintain it when it’s large.
2. Winning an argument was never more important than preserving the relationship. If you want to move fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
3. Find people thinking from first principles rather than from what’s reasonable or what someone else believes.
4. Go do something great and your network will instantly emerge.
5. The truth may sting, but silence can leave a scar.
6. Potential isn’t about where you start but how far you’ll travel.
7. The measure of a man is what he does when he has power.
8. People who struggle early build the skills to excel later.
9. We become the people whose opinion we care about.
10. The most intelligent people have the the will to think and the will to know.
11. People exist on a spectrum between explorers and exploiters. Explorers take risks and try new things. Exploiters, on the other hand, thrive within what already exists, using (sometimes using up) what they find there.
12. The doers are the major thinkers. The people who really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker-doer in one person.
13. In choosing who you spend time with you choose who you are.
14. Most people are interested. Few are truly committed. Interested people act when it’s convenient; committed people act no matter what. Interested people do the minimum; committed people push beyond limits. Interested people wait to be told; committed people take the initiative.
15. People that are self reflective, think in a detailed way - the more nuanced your thinking is, the less people are going to be like you, which makes you feel alone.
16. Stay away from negative people.
17. Difficulty reveals character.
18. Do not be afraid of outgrowing your friend. Friends are to help your own journey, not to hinder it.
19. Self-interest is the lever that moves people.
20. Networking is about what you can provide not take.
21. You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
22. Rather than asking people for their opinion, ask them for their advice.

Life

1. Stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn’t be ignoring.
2. You can buy people’s skills but not their hearts. You can buy people’s time but not their loyalty. The most valuable things must be earned.
3. The best time to network is when you don’t need a network.
4. Your fear occurs in proportion to the importance of the task. The more something scares you, the more necessary it is to your growth.
5. We’re all driven by the fundamental desire to be appreciated.
6. It’s depressing how lossy all our attempts at communication are, written or otherwise.
7. Mentors and peers shouldn’t only be within your field. Make a list of your top mentors, and aggressively pursue them, both in and out of your field.
8. There is a world of difference between something that’s impossible and something that’s almost impossible.
9. What we consider defining moments matter less to life satisfaction than the accumulation of tiny moments that didn’t seem to matter at the time. In the end, everyday moments matter more than big prizes. Tiny delights over big bright lights.
10. Don’t work for anyone you don’t respect or admire, and only work with people you enjoy. Limit exposure to toxic negative people.
11. We spend 99% of our lives working towards moments that will encompass a mere 1% of our lives, then we feel nostalgic about the 99%.
12. The days are long but the decades are short.
13. Lazy communication has massive speed cost. Be thorough.
14. Don’t be afraid to look stupid.
15. People don’t leave their companies, they leave their managers.
16. Beliefs determine actions, actions determine results, and results reinforce your belief. In this way, beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies.
17. A lot of mistakes come from copying people playing a different game than you.
18. Satisfaction does not come from money, rewards, status or praise; it comes from impressing yourself. Mistaking the former for the latter is a source of enormous misery.
19. The price of success is paid in private. Visible triumphs are built on invisible work.
20. Statistically speaking, a “normal person” is physically unhealthy, emotionally anxious/depressed, socially lonely, and financially in debt. Don’t be normal.
21. Universal appeal means universal indifference.
22. The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered “Man! Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”
23. Have fun, play to win.
24. Build trust, not attention.
25. Success can be measured by the number of hard discussions you are willing to have and make.
26. Everyone is replaceable. That is the fate of most people. The game of life is to become irreplaceable, like no one can replace Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon… that is the ultimate position of power.
27. The best returns in life come from compound interest.
28. If life is comfortable, there is no growth. Seek uncomfortable scenarios.
29. Define core values, and never stray.
30. Charisma = Power + Presence + Warmth
31. Build a reputation as the person who knows how to ‘gets stuff done’.
32. The year is made in the first six months.
33. Times of crisis are desirable. They mean growth.
34. It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

Venture

1. I very frequently get the question: “What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: “What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?” And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two – because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time… we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, “Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,” or “I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.” Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it. Rather than focus on what will change, focus on what stays the same.
2. If I’m building a health-care company, I don’t want a health-care CEO. If I’m building a manufacturing company, I don’t want a manufacturing CEO. I want somebody really smart to rethink the assumptions from the ground up. After all, retail innovation did not come from Walmart; it came from Amazon. Media innovation did not come from Time magazine or CBS; it came from YouTube and Twitter and Facebook. Space innovation did not come from Boeing and Lockheed; it came from Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Next-generation cars did not come from GM and Volkswagen; they came from another Musk company, Tesla. I can’t think of a single, major innovation coming from experts in the last thirty, forty years.
3. Where do I think the next amazing revolution is going to come? There’s no question that digital biology is going to be it. For the very first time in our history, in human history, biology has the opportunity to be engineering, not science.
4. If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’
5. It’s easier to build a hard company than an easy one. If you’re building a photo-sharing app, nobody bothers. But if you’re building flying cars, supersonic aeroplanes or nuclear power startups people proactively want to help you for free because they want to be a part of this interesting thing.
6. Netflix: “At the end of the day, we’re competing with sleep.”
7. A smart founder leaves her company in a moment when it actually does better without her. The expectation that secession is failure causes a lot of damage. If you really care about the mission, it might be better to change the system in a way that allows it to thrive.
8. If someone says, “That can’t possibly be right, because if it was, everyone would do it.” When I hear that, I know we’ve either come up with something really good or something really stupid, but it’s certainly not mediocre. Pay attention when you hear this, because all breakthroughs are initially things that no one does until they know about them, and then everyone does them.
9. People buy products to show others what they believe in: their cause, their why. Sell the why. The goal is to have customers who believe what you believe in.
10. Trust can’t be bought. It has to be earned. It’s hard-won and easily lost. It’s a brand’s most valuable asset. It must be protected at all costs. Marketing is earning trust at scale.
11. Don’t make them think. Make it obvious.
12. The best leaders don’t wait for perfect information. They aren’t paralyzed if there are too many unknowns and are comfortable making decisions with what’s available right now.

Other

1. To the extent that it is an empire, America is an empire defined not by its ability to expand geographically to capture existing resources, but by its ability to expand technologically to create new ones.
2. Societies move forward when people embark on projects knowing they wont experience the outcome.
3. Consensus is regression to the mean.
4. Our brains are built to enjoy stories.