1:04 Two paths to happiness: One path is success; you get what you want, you satisfy your material needs. Or like Diogenes, you just don’t want in the first place.

6:00 I would have done everything the same except I would have done it with less anger, less emotion, less internal suffering because that was optional. Don’t make suffering as proxy for progress.

7:42 Many desires are unnecessary and can be sources of unhappiness. If you want to be successful, you have to be choosy about your desires. You can’t be great in everything.

32:22 At any moment when you’re not having a good time, when you’re not really happy, you’re not doing anyone any favors.

45:47 If I had to summarize how to be successful in life in two words, I would just say productize yourself. That’s it. Just figure out what it is that you naturally do that the world might want that you can scale up and turn into a product, and it’ll eventually be effortless for you. Yes, there’s always work required, but it won’t even feel like work to you, it’ll feel like play to you, and modern society gives us that opportunity.

So it’s much better to treat this like a search function to find the people who need you the most, to find the work that needs you the most, to find the place you’re best suited to be at, and it’s worthwhile to spend time in that exploration before diving into exploitation. The biggest mistake in a world with so many choices is premature commitment. If you prematurely commit to being a lawyer or a doctor and now you’ve got like five years invested into that, you might have just completely missed, you might just end up in the wrong profession, wrong place, the wrong people for thirty years of your life grinding away, and yes, the best time to figure that out was before, but the second best time is now, so just change it.

The real currency of life is attention. 53:20 A rational person should cultivate indifference to things that are out of their control.

58:28 It’s okay if you had 50 small failed ventures or 50 small failed job interviews. The number of failures doesn’t matter.

1:03:24 You want to be optimistic in the general, but you want to be skeptical about specific things. Every specific opportunity is probably a fail.

1:08:57 Pleasure can override happiness and create kind of this illusion of happiness. If you ask people when they felt genuinely happy for an extended time, they were probably doing some variation of nothing.

1:20:02 When you want something, you will act on it with maximal capability. And that’s the time to act on it. In the mean time, [you] just do it because other people or the society tell you that you should do it, or you feel slightly guilty about it. These are half-hearted efforts. And half-hearted efforts don’t get you there.

1:21:50 Anxiety and stress are interesting — they’re very related. Stress is when your mind is being pulled in two different directions at the same time. If you look at an iron beam, when it’s under stress, it’s because it’s being bent in two different directions. When your mind is under stress, it’s because it has two conflicting desires at once.

For example, you want to be liked but you also want to do something selfish, and you can’t reconcile the two, so you’re under stress. You want to do something for somebody else, but you want to do something for yourself. You don’t want to go to work but you want to make money — so you’re under stress.

One of the ways to get through stress is to acknowledge that you actually have two conflicting desires and either resolve it, pick one and be okay losing the other, or decide later. But at least just being aware of why you’re stressed can help alleviate a lot of stress.

A lot of anxiety is piled up because we move through life too quickly, not observing our own reactions to things. We don’t resolve them. This goes counter to what I was saying earlier about not reflecting too much on things, but you reflect on the problems to observe them and solve them. You don’t reflect on them to feel better about yourself.

1:24:19 We don’t spend enough time thinking about the big questions in life. They are big questions for good reasons. 1:40:43 3 Big Questions:

• Who are you with?
• What are you doing?
• Where are you living?

1:25:15 Any moment when you’re not in that moment, you are dead to that moment.

1:25:33 If you want to do a thing and you are fully into it, then it’s not a waste of time. Don’t do things that you don’t want to. If you don’t want to do it and your mind is running away from it and you’re reacting against it and you’re wishing you were somewhere else and you’re thinking about some other thing or you’re anticipating some future thing or regretting some past thing or being fearful of something, then that’s wasted time.

3:14:38 The alpha male eats last. The alpha male feeds everybody else first and then gets to eat last.

• They don’t just take the lead. They take responsibility. And they eat last — not because they have to, but because they choose to.
• It’s not about domination or ego — it’s about duty, service, and strength that uplifts others.

The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. ^{1 2 3 4}

You have to enjoy your journey, the journey is all that there is; even success fades quickly.

We can’t put labels like introvert, extrovert, pessimistic etc. Humans are so dynamic and changes every moment. It depends on case-to-case basis.

Be your own best friend.