“When 120 of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s descendants gathered at Vanderbilt University in 1973 for the first family reunion, there was not a millionaire among them.”
Repeat after me: Your rent is the maximum you’ll pay. Your mortgage is the minimum you’ll pay. – Ramit Sethi
Bitcoin: scarcer than gold, faster than fiat – Lyn Alden
Humans are both master and slave to the technium, and our fate is to remain in this uncomfortable dual role. Therefore, we will always be conflicted about technology and find making our choices difficult. – Kevin Kelley
The spirit of the individual is determined by his dominating thought habits
There are 3 Greek gods of dreams (Oneiroi):
Phobetor was thought to be the bringer of nightmares, and had the ability to appear as animals or monsters; Phantasos was believed to bring surreal and strange dreams, and was able to appear as inanimate objects, such as stones or wood. In contrast to his two siblings, Morpheus brought messages and prophesies from the gods to mortals through the medium of dreams.
What, then, is the Singularity? It’s a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. – Ray Kurzweil
One often reads predictions of the next several decades discussing a variety of demographic, economic, and political trends that largely ignore the revolutionary impact of machines with their own opinions and agendas. – Ray Kurzweil
Discipline is the strongest form of self-love.
*It means choosing what you want later over what you want now.*
Discipline shows how committed you are to your dreams, even on tough days.
Discipline is honoring the covenant you have with yourself. That’s your personal integrity.
Your future self depends on your current self to keep promises made yesterday.
-Ram Ahluwahlia
6/ “highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical.”
👉🏻Culture, independent of the biological evolutionary process, does “alter our brains, hormones, and anatomy, along with our perceptions, motivations, personalities, emotions, and many
-Jim O’Shaughnessy
The researchers, Robert J. Jackson Jr. of the New York University School of law and Prof. Joshua Mitts of Columbia Law School, found a sharp and significant rise in short sales of ETFs that track Israeli companies in the days preceding the attack
The desire to avoid feeling anxious overtakes other goals. In the worst cases, people organize their lives around avoiding anything that provokes anxiety. And while they hope that this will make them feel safe, it tends to have the opposite effect.
I know this well with weed
The principles of operation of software advances such as speech recognition can be written in just a few pages of formulas. Often a key advance is a matter of applying a small change to a single formula. The same observation holds for the “inventions” of biological evolution: consider that the genetic difference between chimpanzees and humans, for example, is only a few hundred thousand bytes of information.
“In January 2012, I beat Nadal in the finals of the Australian Open. The match lasted five hours and fifty-three minutes. Many commentators have called that match the single greatest tennis match of all time. After I won, I sat in the locker room in Melbourne. I wanted one thing: to taste chocolate. I hadn’t tasted it since the summer of 2010. Miljan brought me a candy bar. I broke off one square—one tiny square—and popped it into my mouth, let it melt on my tongue. That was all I would allow myself. That is what it has taken to get to number one.” – Djokovic
Don’t be in a hurry to “fix” things; rather, enrich your understanding in the evergoing process of discovery and finding more the cause of your ignorance – Bruce Lee
In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again – Maria Popova
When some part of a doctrine is relatively simple, there is a tendency among the faithful to complicate and obscure it. Simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. – Eric Hoffer
“Life tastes better when you’re chugging” – Ricky (and Morty)
Jacobs: He gets the value of improvisation. “In jazz, if you hit a wrong note, there’s no such thing as a wrong note. That’s the note, that’s the reality. You radically accept that, and you build on it,” he riffs. “Music is really business. …You have to be using all of your senses at the same time, and you have to be dancing with the circumstances and evolving.”
Here’s a different interpretation: a politically connected billionaire on the verge of losing his shirt called a government official—one who used to be the CEO of the company he now owned a chunk of—and convinced him to use taxpayer funds to prop up the stock market, particularly his stocks. – on Charlie Munger
In the aftermath of the moon landing, approval for that specific mission didn’t meaningfully budge. 47% said it was worth it a decade later, in 1979 and it would take 20 years for amnesia to set it and this number to reach 77% in 1989. Meanwhile opposition to further moon missions remained higher than support for one until at least the mid-1990s
he’d been exposed to the often forgotten history of technological pessimism as an under-graduate at Columbia University. This experience lead to an epiphany which he eloquently recalled:
“I discovered, to my amazement, that all through history there had been resistance…and bitter, exaggerated, last-stitch resistance…to every significant technological change that had taken place on earth.
they found that the more seasoned jumpers weren’t calmer than those about to take their first leap. Instead, the experienced skydivers showed even higher heart rates before and during the jump. The more pumped they were to take the dive, the bigger their excite-and-delight response. When you need to take a leap and want to do well, don’t worry about forcing yourself to relax. Instead, embrace the nerves, tell yourself you’re excited, and know that your heart is in it. – Kelly McGonigal’s amazing book on stress
By emphasizing the importance of reducing stress before an exam, his advice only further confirmed what students feared: Anxiety was a sign that they would do poorly. If you want to help people better cope with anxiety, a more useful strategy might be to simply tell them that you think they can handle it. Studies show that when people are told, “You’re the kind of person whose performance improves under pressure,” their actual performance improves by 33 percent. – more Kelly
How do you expect to manifest what you want if you’re afraid to openly broadcast that you want it?
If you can’t broadcast your desires, it’s fair to say you don’t own them yet. How can your desires become real if you can’t speak up about them? If you’re going to receive them, then let it be known. If you find it necessary to hide what you desire, that suggests you aren’t ready to receive. – Steve Pavlina
Why write in public? “The ability for smart, useful observations to get into the hands of people with fewer ideas but lots of capital has never been better. You can build both a reputation and balance sheet this way.” – Ramit Sethi
A lot of visible problems that you can’t seem to solve are secretly solutions you don’t want to admit to adopting to problems you don’t want to admit to having. – a mensch on Twitter
However, the pain of sitting for weeks at a time, distilling all of that knowledge into a series of 6, concise essays, was a stark reminder that feeling that you know something, and writing it down, are two vastly different things, by many orders of magnitude
The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it. – Mark Weiser
And what I’ve discovered is that from a broad perspective, people are basically the same. Everyone spends most of their time worrying about food, money, their job and their family — even people who are rich and well fed. Everyone wants to look cool and feel important — even people who are already cool and important. Everyone is proud of where they come from. Everyone has insecurities and anxieties that plague them, regardless of how successful they are. Everybody is afraid of failure and looking stupid. Everyone loves their friends and family yet also gets the most irritated by them. – Mark Manson
Factory Meat: “The goal of feed-lot animals is to blow them up fast and quickly with cheap food. That’s what we are doing to our people, too.” – Will Harris
The reaction to Fukushima was completely overblown: it is debated whether zero people or one person died from any sort of radiation at Fukushima
Our model of what’s important in SEO has been wrong for a long time. We thought content was the basis, backlinks the middle layer and user signals sprinkled on top. It turns out user signals were the basis, with a middle layer of backlinks and content understanding sprinkled on top
Jensen Huang
Jensen Huang on having a tolerance for failure. pic.twitter.com/itiaZGLcT3
— Jon Erlichman (@JonErlichman) November 28, 2023
If you want to be successful I would encourage you to grow a tolerance for failure
But the thing about failure is this: if you fail often enough, you actually might become a failure, and that’s different from being successful
So the question is how do you teach someone how to fail, but fail quickly — and to change courses as soon as you know it’s a dead end
And the way to do that is we call it intellectual honesty — we assess on a continuous basis whether something makes sense or not. And if it’s the wrong decision, let’s change our mind
Biggest regrets I have are almost exclusively things I did *not* do. — Sam, 47