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On A “Typical Day”

• Naval doesn’t have a typical day nor does he want a typical day. He’s trying to get rid of the concept of having to be at a specific place at a specific time. All he cares about is: Am I doing what I want to do? Am I being productive? Am I happy?
• Wants to break away from the concept of 40-hour weeks or 80-hour weeks or 9 to 5s. Antiquated concepts for the modern world.

On Reading

• Nobody forced Naval to read anything. Which made him love it more. Tendency to force children to read X or Y, which naturally makes them hate the process.
• Does most of his reading on Kindle but books that he really likes he buys a physical copy.
• A book isn’t an expense, it’s an investment.
• A really good book can change your life.
• “I don’t want to read everything; I just want to read the 100 great books over and over again”
• What are the great books to you? Find the books that speak to you.
• Books he’s reading (or rereading): 7 Brief Lessons in Physics, Sapiens, Jiddu Krishnamurthi or Osho (favorite philosophers), Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theories, Tools of Titans, Pre-suasion, The Lessons of History by William Durant, Story of Philosophy by William Durant, Emerson, Chesterfield, Leo Tolstoy, Alan Watts, God’s Debris by Scott Adams, Feynman, Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley, Man’s Search for Meaning
• Naval reads when he’s bored of everything else. He’s not a disciplined person, so he doesn’t set hard and fast rules for reading. He loves it so he does it often.
• Least favorite books: one good idea surrounded by hundreds or thousands of anecdotes. This is why he avoids business/self-help.
• Treats books like he treats blogs. He doesn’t fill guilty about not finishing a book because he treats each chapter as a blog post.
• Reads 1-2 hours a day, which means he’s in the top 0.0001% of readers. Real people don’t read an hour a day.
• Make it an actionable habit. How you make it a habit doesn’t matter.
• Just like the best workout for you is the one you’re most excited to do every day, the best book/blogs/Twitter to read is the one you’re excited to read every day
• If you read what everyone else is reading, you’re going to think what everyone else is thinking
• Everything people read these days are made for social approval.
• On taking notes: he’s both lazy and believes in living in the present moment so he doesn’t take notes.
• If he finds early on in the book he notices author making statements he believes to be factually untrue (or contradictions), then he puts book down because he doesn’t know what’s true and what’s false

On Habits

• Human beings are creatures of habit. Young children are born with no habit looks then they find patterns to help get them through everyday life.
• Habits are good. Allows you background process certain things so that you can solve creative problems.
• The downside: we unconsciously pick up habits and we may not realize they’re bad for us. Our attitude in life, our happiness levels, our depression levels = habits. Do we judge people? Do we move? Do we exercise? Do we read? These are all habits.
• You need habits to function, but we have a tendency to get attached to the identity these habits and then characterize yourself by then “I am depressed,” “I am shame,” etc.
• Naval’s been through many habits and “failed” many habits.
• Believes its BS “that you can’t break habits, you can only replace them.” You can un-condition yourself. You can untrain yourself. It’s just hard.
• Usually the big habit changes come when there is strong desire to do the behavior
• How/why he stopped drinking (or drinking, as much)
  • Availability – He realized “If I’m out at night where alcohol is being served, so stay in” …so he started a daily workout regime in the morning because you can’t workout in the mornings if you stay out late at night
  • Desire – Realized he was drinking because he was trying to survive longer in a social environment, he wasn’t particularly happy in.
  • Substitution Effect – Switched from hard alcohol to red wine
• Doesn’t believe in “never” and “always”
• Most positive habit that impacts his life: morning workout
• Whenever you throw a good habit at someone, they’ll tell you “I don’t have time” which is a way of saying “It’s not a priority”
• Made his #1 priority his health. Starts with physical health. Then mental health. Then spiritual health. Then family’s health.

On the Monkey Mind

• A big habit he’s trying to cultivate – turning off the monkey mind.
• Born a blank slate and living in the moment as a child. Once puberty hits, we desire for the first time. Because we desire, we form an ego/identity to get what we want. This is normal and healthy. But at some point, it gets out of control.
• We are walking down the street talking to ourselves in our heads. If you were voicing these thoughts in your head, you’d be a madman and they’d lock you up. People are judging everything they see, living in fantasy worlds about what they desire tomorrow to look like, and they’re just pulled out of base reality.
• What’s the monkey mind good for? Long range planning, problem solving, survival and replication machines that we are, but bad for our happiness.
• Mind should be a tool/servant not the master. Not something that should control you.
• People do this naturally. The people chasing thrills or flow states or orgasms are trying to get out of your own head.
• Wants sense of self to be weaker and more muted so he can live more present in every day reality.
• Allows him to seek happiness based on internal not external
• When Naval was brushing his teeth in morning of podcast, he caught his mind playing a fantasy of Shane asking him questions and answering them.
• Be completely lost in the present moment.
• We don’t live enough in Awareness. We live in our heads. But this is programmed into you by your society and environment.
• The mind is a muscle. You can train it to be fully focused on the present moment.
• Goal of meditation is not to control your mental state. It’s to recognize how out of control your mind really is. From that awareness comes liberation.
• We know intuitively we can control our mental state. That’s why people take drugs, psychedelics, smoke weed. The problem with these is external. You can control your mental state internally, but our tendency is to go to some thing or substance.
• If you’re angry about an email or message, don’t respond for 24 hours. This is because you’re in a better mental state in 24 hours.
• All the real scorecards are internal.
• There is only the present moment.
• The monkey mind will always respond with a regurgitated emotional response to what it thinks the world should be and that clouds reality. Happens a lot when people mix business and politics.

On Happiness

• There are no answers that apply to everyone when it comes to happiness.
• Naval’s definition keeps evolving (one year ago was different than it is today)
• Happiness is a default state that happens when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life.
• Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. Internal silence = content and happiness
• People believe happiness is about positive thoughts. It’s not about positive thoughts because every positive thought holds within it a negative thought.
  • Every positive thought holds within it a seed of a negative thought (for example, if you “he’s attractive,” you’re implying that someone else is unattractive)
• The more Naval accepts the current state of things, the less his mind is moving, the more happier and content he will be.
• The happiness is found in the present moment.
• Nature has no concept of happiness.
• The complete and utter insignificance of the self. No expectation for life so you has no cause for happy/unhappy. Neutral state is perfection state. What you’re left with is not boring. It’s perfection.

On Foundational Values

• Values = a set of things you will not compromise on.
  • Honesty. Anyone who he can’t be honest around, he doesn’t want to be around because he is forced to be past thinking or future thinking. It leads him to be less present in moment.
  • No short term thinking or dealing. Anyone who is around him who even deals with someone else in short term thinking, Naval doesn’t want to be around. All the benefits in life come from compound interest (money, fitness, relationships, etc.).
  • Peer relationships, not hierarchical relationships. Not above anyone or below anyone. If I can’t treat someone like a peer or they can’t treat me like a peer, then I don’t want to interact with anyone.
  • No anger. Good when he was young but doesn’t serve him anymore. “Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand waiting to throw at someone.” Cut angry people out of his life.
  • Freedom. Old definition for Naval: “freedom to do whatever I want, whenever I want.” New definition: “freedom from reaction, freedom from being angry”
  • Everything that I did, everything that was done to me brought me to this exact moment.
• If people are fighting or quarrelling, it’s because their values don’t line up.
• “Praise specifically, criticize generally.”
• Find a partner whose values line up with yours.
• Marriage has changed his values a little but not a lot.
• Having a child answers the question of what’s the meaning of life. Your values inherently become less selfish

On Mistakes

• Mistakes are only obvious in hindsight.
• Found he made the same series of mistakes by reviewing what he was doing year after year. Ask yourself: “2008, what was I doing/how I was feeling? 2009, what was I doing/how I was feeling?”
  • For Naval, everything he was doing… he should’ve been doing… but with less emotion and anger.
• “You’re born, you have a set of sensory experiences, and then you die.” Life is going to play out the way it’s going to play out. Some good, some bad. How you interpret the experiences is up to you.

On Singularity

• If we produce a general-purpose AI, that AI could hack its own code, make itself smarter and out evolve us to the point where we are either immortal or obsolete or something in between.
• “Religion for nerds”
• The people who are pushing it mostly the “armchair scientists.” Naval believes he knows enough to know how little we know.
• There is so much complexity in nature and to believe we are going to go into a world of perfection once AI comes along is delusional.
• On a long enough timescale, technology will advance to the point you can 3D print atomic bombs.
• Naval believes Singularity is not going to happen in his lifetime.
• Singularity gives you hope for the future, so you stop living in the present moment, so you start living for tomorrow.

On Education

• Education system is completely obsolete.
  • Memorization doesn’t make sense when we have Google
  • Learning speeds are different for everyone.
  • Learning style are different for everyone.
• Education system was created when there no such thing as self-guided learning.
• Colleges and school come from a time period when books were rare. Knowledge was rare. Babysitting was rare. Crime was common. Violence was prevalent.
• The Internet is the greatest web of knowledge ever created completely connected. If you actually desire to learn, everything you desire to learn is on there.
• Schools create social relationships, but is this really the best way?
• Other problem with schools is what do you choose to learn?
• We don’t teach (and maybe we shouldn’t but worth considering):
  • Cooking
  • Nutrition
  • How to have happy, positive relationships
  • How keep your body healthy and fit
  • Meditation
  • Practical construction of technology
• Kids are learning machines, they just need the tools.

On Decision Making

• Someone who makes correct decisions 80% of the time rather than 70% of the time will be valued by the market 100x more.
  • Similar how a great baseball player might hit .300 and be worth 100x more than a .200 hitter.
• If you can be more rational, then you’re going to non-linear returns on your life.
• The best mental models Naval has come across have come from evolution, game theory, Charlie Munger, Nassim Taleb, Benjamin Franklin. Different models apply to different situations
• We’re very bad at predicting the future.
• Being successful is about not making mistakes (a Charlie Munger mental model).
• Set up systems, not goals (Scott Adams)
• Naval doesn’t use a checklist
• In an ideal world, he would let no reaction pass without it being stripped, searched, examined and then let go. But the reality is that would take a lot of time. His goal is to unlearn habituated learned responses so he can make better decisions

On Money

• Huge diminishing returns on money. When a billionaire gives away X amount of dollars, it means they “overshot.”
• Money is a boat anchor around his neck. Because it is something you are then fearful of losing.
• Instead of looking for money, he asks: “can I do something interesting and new? Can I create something brand new that the world needs that is congruent with my morals?” He’ll never have problems sleeping at night. He’ll never have to sell something he wouldn’t buy.

On Evaluating Integrity

• Ways to figure out if someone has integrity:
  • Do they use long term thinking?
  • How do they treat other people?
  • Do they go around talking about how honest they are? Signal for dishonesty.
• Negotiations with high integrity people is usually very easy.
• Further Reading: The Art of Manipulation
• First time, he warns them. Then, he just distances himself from them. Cuts them out of his life.
• “The closer you get to me, the better your values have to be.”
• To find a worthy mate, be worthy of a worthy mate (Charlie Munger)
• If being ethical were profitable, everybody would do it
• “Easy choices, hard life; hard choices, easy life” (Jerzy Gregorek)

On Evaluating Intelligence

• Real knowledge is intrinsic
• Fancy words + big concepts mean they probably don’t know what they’re talking about
• The smartest people can explain things to a child (if you can’t explain it to a child, then you don’t know it)
• If you are using words that your audience doesn’t know, you’re being dishonest and trying to pull one over their eyes
• Further Reading: Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe, Thinking Physics by Lewis Carroll Epstein
• The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers.

On Rational Buddhism

• Try everything, test it, be skeptical, keep what’s useful, discard what’s not.
• Buddhism + science/evolution
• People will say, “Past lives you did this” or “chakra opening” …Naval chooses not to believe this because he hasn’t been able to verify it on his own. It may be true, it may be false… but it’s not falsifiable
• You can map the tenets of Buddhism into a virtual reality simulation

On the Meaning of Life

• Three options:
  • It’s personal. You have to figure out your own meaning.
  • There is no meaning/purpose of life. Nobody will remember you, so you have to create your own meaning. You have to decide if this is a play you’re just watching or is there a self-actualization dance I’m doing? Is there a specific thing I desire?
  • We’re headed towards a heat death of the universe where there’s no concentrated energy. Where everything is one. Entropy goes up. Disorder of the universe only goes up. We’re pushing towards all becoming one thing. As living systems, what we’re doing is accelerating getting to that state. “Unsatisfying if you’re looking for personal meaning in your life.”

Misc.

• On friendship: Use Buffet’s guide – “energy, intelligence, integrity”
• On jealousy: Naval was cherry picking different traits… “I want his body, I want her money, his personality” …but you can’t pick and choose traits.
• When you’re working on your internal stuff, people don’t get anything out of that. Because it doesn’t benefit anybody else but yourself. Only the individual transcends.
• Big thing Naval stopped believing in: macroeconomics. It doesn’t make falsifiable predictions, so it goes against the essence of science. But he believes microeconomics and game theory are fundamental. He extends this beyond economics. Micro > Macro. Change yourself before changing your family, your neighbor, the world.
• Identities and labels keep you locked away from the truth. If all your beliefs are able to be explained into neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious because they are prepackaged.
• One of the biggest ones to consider: how should society be organized? Everyone has certain beliefs. Capitalist, socialist, etc. But is there a single “right” culture? Hard to say.
• If you’re taking information from this podcast and scribbling down notes to do other things… remember, you don’t need to do anything. All you should do is what you want to do.
• No one is going to beat you at being you. Listen, absorb, but don’t try to emulate.
• Each person is uniquely qualified in something. Find the business that needs you the most, find the project that needs you the most, the art that needs you the most (follow your life’s gifts). There’s something out there just for you.
• The worst outcome in the world is not having self-esteem. If you don’t love yourself, who will?
• There are no new ideas, but it’s the combination of Idea + Execution + Passion that makes a winner.
• If you’re in startups… Go find the thing you can commit to for 10 years because that’s how long it will take to get a good outcome.
• Great people have great outcomes. Follow them.
• If he could change something about himself: Less timebound. Less greedy about signing up for things.
• Science is the study of truth. Applied science becomes technology. Technology is what separates us from the animals. Mathematics is the language of science/nature.
• Most common mistake: The idea or belief that you are going to be made happy by some external circumstance. We’re addicted to the desiring. We’re addicted that this external thing will bring us some happiness and joy.

Link (Amazon)

Quick, well-written, and witty read. Hugh MacLeod was a copywriter for a Manhattan ad agency. Then, when he lost all hope of ever “making it,” he sat down at a bar and started drawing comics on index cards for fun. The rest is history… He gives 39 (well, 40) short lessons you can apply to your own life. Worth a read for anyone who wants (or is considering) creating on the Internet.

• The more original your idea, the less good advice other people can give you. This is because they have zero frame of reference for this idea working for anybody else.
• You don’t know if your idea is any good the moment it is created.
• Good ideas alter the power balance in relationships. That is why good ideas are always initially resisted.
• Doing anything worth doing takes forever. 90% of what separates successful people and failed people is time, effort, stamina.
• Even after Hugh’s cartooning took off, he still had a job in advertising to stay attached to the real world. Most people would not do this. He was not dependent on his $$ from corporate marketing so it made him more powerful to do whatever he wanted
• Practical advice: find an extra hour or two in the day and commit to doing something with it
• The better the idea, the more “out there” it will seem. So you’ll probably have one-tenth of the support you need
• Your wee voice vs. your adult voice. (page 27)
• Everyone is creative.
• Don’t worry about the equipment. It doesn’t matter.
• Do you make the thing exist or not? Ship things.
• “The first rule of business is never sell something you love. Otherwise, you may as well be selling your children.” (Not sure I agree. But an interesting idea.)
• Human beings have this thing called “The Pissed Off Game.” No matter what happens or how lucky we get, we tend to always be pissed off about something. (Choose happiness in every moment.)
• On writer’s block: If you’re looking at a blank piece of paper and nothing comes to you, then go do something else. Writer’s block is a symptom of feeling like you have nothing to say, combined with the rather weird idea that you should feel the need to say something.
• The best way to get approval is to not need it.
• The less you can live on, the more chance your idea will succeed.
• The rise is better than the peak: It’s hard to invent a new language when people are already invested heavily in your old language. They’ve already invested in learning the old you. They don’t want to learn the new you, too.
  • For example, Neil Young was booed off stage when he tried to play new country-and-western material. Once people know you for one thing, they will have a hard time accepting you doing something else.
• Start blogging (published in 2009 but still true today)
• People don’t scale: no matter how meteroic your rise to the top is (or isn’t), you still have to do the same day-to-day realities as other human beings.
  • Birth, sickness, death, raising your family, eating food, etc. Whatever is truly meaningful
  • Sometimes, one needs that big adventure of “making it” in order to realize this
  • Reminds me of Jim Carrey quote: “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”
• None of Hugh’s success happened “on purpose.”
  • If you are successful, it’ll never come from the direction you predicted.
• Book summed up: “Work hard. Keep at it. Live simply and quietly. Remain humble. Stay positive. Create your own luck. Be nice. Be polite.”

Link (Amazon)

An incredible read on spirituality. No amount of notes could do this one justice. I recommend if you’re interested in exploring mediation/consciousness or are curious. An open mind is always a plus.

• There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing you are not the voice of your mind – you are the one who hears it. (Awareness)
• Vast majority of your thoughts have no meaning at all. They have no effect on anything or anybody, except you. They are simply making you feel better or worse about what is going on now, what has gone on in the past, or what might go in the future
  • Example: If you spend your time hoping it doesn’t rain tomorrow, you are wasting your time. Your thoughts don’t change the rain.
• Why do we verbalize what we see? If you study this carefully, it’s because the narration makes you feel more comfortable with the world around you
• You use the thoughts in your mind as a protection mechanism, a form of defense, to make you feel more secure
• When you have a problem, don’t ask “What should I do about this?” Ask “What part of me is being disturbed by this?”
• Objective Awareness > Losing Yourself in the Outer Situation
• To attain true inner freedom, you must be able to objectively watch your problems instead of being lost in them
• Don’t try to make the person stop talking? Just try to get to know what you live with inside by externalizing the voice.
• You are not your thoughts. You are simply aware of your thoughts.
• You have always been a conscious receiver of all that was.
• The Buddhist Self, Hindu Atman, and the Judeo-Christian Soul all are the Awareness/seat of self
• Have you ever noticed that when you’re deeply absorbed in your phone/laptop/TV, you have no awareness of where you’re sitting or what else is going on in the room?
• If you ever want to re-center, just start saying “hello” inside, over and over. Then notice that you are aware of that thought. Don’t think about being aware of it, that’s just another thought.
• You think you are the sum of your learned experiences, but you are actually the center of your awareness
• What differentiates a conscious, centered being from a person who is not so conscious is simply their focus of awareness
• Centered being = your consciousness is always aware of being conscious
• Meditation = contemplating the nature of Self
  • This is why meditation is the highest state. It is the return to the root of your being, the simple awareness of being aware
• Ask “Who am I?” (Ramana Maharshi). Ask it and you will notice you are the answer.

Part II – infinite energy

• Energy is the key. Look at the times in your life when you were in love or inspired by something or excited, you were so filled with energy you didn’t want to eat.
• You have a wellspring of beautiful energy inside of you. When you are open you feel it, when you are closed you don’t. (Some eighty-year-old people have the energy and enthusiasm of a child.)
• If enjoying a full life means experiencing high energy, love, and enthusiasm all the time, then don’t close
• If you really want to stay open, pay attention when you feel love and enthusiasm. Then ask yourself why you can’t feel this way all the time. Why does it go away? The answer is obvious: it only goes away when you choose to close.
• When your energy is open, your energy starts flowing out of you. It affects other people. People can pick up on your energy and you’re feeding them with this flow. You become a source of light for all those around you.
• Always tired and never enthused? Life is no fun. Always inspired and filled with energy? Every minute of every day is an exciting experience.
• Nothing is worth closing your heart for. NOTHING.
• The awakened being lives in the “now” because they are present to life. Each experience and moment is so beautiful. Every moment is beautiful because you are open.
• Blockage occurs when you hold onto things. Like imagine if a car passed by you and you thought about it all the time. This is a blockage. You need to let it go through you.
• Two kinds of experiences can block the heart: you  either are trying to push energies away because they bother you or you’re trying to keep energies close because you like them.
• The fact that you even want to go through this process of freeing the energy flow means you are great. You will get there. Just keep letting go.
• We now experience the daily need to defend our self-concepts instead of our bodies. Our major struggles end up being with our own inner fears, insecurities, and destructive behaviors rather than outside forces
• You are living on a planet spinning around the middle of outer space, and you’re either worrying about your blemishes, the scratch on your new car, or the fact that you burped in public. It’s not healthy.
• The words you choose matter. If someone says “How was your day?” and you say “I’ll survive” … what is that telling you about your view of life? You see it as a threat.
• If you aren’t centered, your consciousness is just following whatever catches its attention. Your energy is scattered.
• If you can learn to be centered with the small things, you can also become centered with the big things.

Part III – freeing yourself

• Your attempts to protect yourself actually creates more problems
• Don’t fight it. Realize and accept life is not under your control. Life is always changing, and if you’re trying to fight it, you’ll never fully live
• When your heart is weak, it becomes susceptible to lower vibrations, and one of the lowest of all vibrations is fear.
• It’s the root of all prejudices and the negative emotions of anger, jealousy, and possessiveness. If you had no fear, you could be perfectly happy living in this world
• Life is surrounding you with people and situations that stimulate growth. You don’t need to decide who’s right or wrong. You don’t have to worry about other people’s issues.You only have to be willing to open your heart in the face of anything and everything.
• Consciousness is always drawn to the most distracting object – the loud noise, the bumped toe, the hurt heart
• Anything you put out comes back
• The secret of the ascent is to never look down, always look up
• Take out the thorn, don’t live with it (aka solve the root cause of your problems)
• People will use their relationships to hide their thorns. If you care for each other, you are expected to adjust your behavior to avoid bumping into each other’s soft spots. 
• You want to talk to people because you find them interesting, not because you’re lonely. You want to love because you truly love, not because you need to avoid your inner problems
• Self-consciousness, jealousy, insecurity, anxiety are all examples of fear
• External changes are not going to solve your problem because they don’t address the root of your problem
  • Hiding behind finances, people, fame, adoration will not solve your issue
• When you see the mind telling you how to fix the world and everyone in it in order to suit yourself, don’t listen. Stop correcting others to feed your own ego
• Use linking to remind yourself you’re in the seat of self every time you get in your car, walk through a door, etc.
• Deal with your problems like you’re life depends on it, because it does
• Ask “Why?” when emotions come up.
• Do you really need to feel embarrassed if you forget someone’s name? Or if someone forgot your name?
  • This a life of pain. Remember: you’re sitting on a planet spinning around in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
• If you feel embarrassed, it’s just a feeling. It’s just a part of creation.
  • Same for any other emotion. Feelings cannot objectively hurt you.
• All the noise in your mind: an attempt to avoid stored pain. [HF!]
• On the other side of pain is ecstasy.

Part IV – going beyond

• When you say, “I was the high school football captain” or “I was a rockstar 10 years ago” … those are thoughts. The actual situation doesn’t exist anymore. But those situations exist inside of you.
• Just one wrong thought and the structure starts to crumble.
• If anything happens that challenges how you view things, you fight. You defend. You rationalize. You get frustrated and angry over little things.
• You are nice to people when they behave in accordance with your expectations. You do this so you encourage them to act like that more often. We are all doing this to each other every day.
• You will see that you’re literally taking all your memories, piling them together in an orderly fashion, and saying that’s who you are. But you are not the events, you’re the one who experienced the events. How can you define yourself as the things that happened to you?
• Events that happen in the moment don’t happen to you. They belong to the moment.

Part IV – the path of unconditional happiness

• Do you want to be happy? Then just decide to be happy. Most people don’t give themselves that choice because they don’t think it’s under their control. It is though.
• The purpose of your life is to enjoy and learn from your experiences. You were not put on Earth to suffer.
• There’s always something that can bother you, if you let it.
• Affirm all you want is to be at peace and to appreciate life.
• Meditation strengthens your center of consciousness so that you’re always aware enough to not allow your heart to close. Just have fun with the different situations that unfold
• There really is no reason for tension or problems. Stress only happens when you resist life’s events
• It’s not life’s events that are causing problems or stress. It’s your resistance to life’s events that are causing this experience.
• It is actually possible to never have another problem for the rest of your life. This is because events are not problems, they’re just events. Your resistance to them is the problem.
• On daily work: daily work is fun. In fact, it’s easy. Your work is just what you do with yourself during the day while you’re spinning on a planet through empty space.
• Life is giving you a gift. The gift is the flow of events that take place between your birth and death. These events are exciting, challenging, and create tremendous growth. To comfortably handle this flow, remain open.
• Best teacher in life = death. Death shows you are not your body. Death shows men and women are equal. Death teaches there is no difference between the rich and the poor.
• A wise being completely and totally embraces the reality, the inevitability, and the unpredictability of death
• Death is the greatest teacher in all of life
• Awakened people would care if death were to come in a day, week, month, or year. They would continue living exactly as they are.
• Scarcity makes things precious. Life is scarce.
• Live as though you are on the verge of death, because you are.
• Discussion of the dichotomy of life, often called The Tao or The Way. 
• Life as a pendulum (the Way)
  • Think of life as a pendulum. How long can a pendulum stay at one of its most outermost positions, only for a moment. But how long can a pendulum rest? Forever.
  • Someone heavily addicted to smoking (one extreme) will have to spend an equal amount of time to quit smoking (other extreme)
  • Extremes are good teachers
  • When you spend your energy trying to maintain the extremes, nothing goes forward. You get stuck in a rut.
  • The Way is in the middle because that’s the place where energies are balanced
• Where are you living? Are you centered/balanced? The extremes create opposites, the wise avoid them. Find balance in the center and you will live in harmony.
• All religions talk about the same concept: The individual consciousness falls into the Universal Oneness.
• One can merge into God.
• To differentiate is to judge. Where there used to be judging, there is now respecting, loving, cherishing.
• Aim to treat all as a mother treats her child: with unconditional love. She thinks the child is beautiful. She doesn’t focus on the shortcomings, in fact she doesn’t even see them as shortcomings.
• Your relationship with God is the same as your relationship with the sun. If you hid from the sun for years and then chose to come out of your darkness, the sun would still be shining as if you had never left
• The saint sees that God goes into ecstasy when He looks upon this earth, under all conditions, and at all times. Ecstacy is the only thing God knows. God’s nature is eternal, conscious bliss.

Link (Amazon)

For anyone interested in psychology. Duke’s academic plus poker background make this at a fascinating perspective. Lots of “a-ha” moments.

• Quality of our lives = the quality of our decisions + luck.
• Many people believe Pete Carroll got it wrong because the play he called didn’t work.
• No one wakes up in the morning and says, “I want to be close-minded and dismissive of others.” Most of what we do daily is automatic processing. We rarely examine our habits and defaults
• “Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.” It is the prelude to every great decision that has ever been made too.
• Losses feel two times as bad as wins feel good
• In most decisions, we are not betting against others. We are actually betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing.
• How we think about abstract beliefs:
  • (1) We hear something, (2) We think about it and vet it, determining whether it is true or false, then we (3) form our belief
• How we actually form abstract beliefs:
  • (1) We hear something, (2) We believe it to be true, (3) Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it was true or false
• Our preexisting beliefs influence the way we experience the world (football games, protest)
• Fake news works because people who already hold beliefs consistent won’t question the evidence
• We want to think well of ourselves and feel the narrative of our life story is a positive one. Being wrong doesn’t fit into that narrative.
• Being smart can make your bias worse
  • I.e. the better you are with numbers, the better you are at spinning those numbers to conform to and support your beliefs
• There is always a degree of uncertainty. Practically nothing is black and white (0% or 100%).
• Self-serving bias: we take credit for the good stuff and blame the bad stuff on luck
• In single vehicle accidents, 37% of drivers still found a way to blame someone else
• What accounts for most of the variance in happiness is how we’re doing comparatively.
• To change a habit, you must keep the old cue and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.
• If a ship is going from New York to London and the ship’s navigator introduces a one-degree navigation error, it would start off as barely noticeable. But unchecked, it would miss London by miles because the one-degree miscalculation compounds mile after mile
• In the long run, the more objective person will beat the more biased person.
• Don’t ignore an idea because you don’t like who or where it came from (don’t let the messenger dictate your opinion of the message).
• Two people whose positions on an issue are far apart will move toward the middle after a debate or skilled explanation of the opposing position.
• John Stuart Mill’s → Open-mindedness is the only way to learn.
• Ask friends/family, what might I be missing about this? Look for a devil’s advocate (dad, Compound Writing)
• “And” is an offer to contribute. “But” is a denial and repudiation of what came before.
• Good results and processes compound.
• Temporal discounting: our tendency we have to favor our present-self at the expense of our future-self (we are willing to take an irrationally large discount to get a reward now instead of waiting for a bigger reward later)
  • Lottery winners
• 10-10-10 – Suzy Welch
  • What are the consequences of each of my options in ten minutes? In ten months? In ten years?
• Bad outcomes can have an impact on your emotions going forward which can lead to more bad outcomes (called tilt in poker)
  • Importance of controlling your emotions
• Examples of warning signs to cause you interrupt your thought pattern
  • Illusions of certainty (“I know,” “I’m sure,” “I knew it,” “0%” or “100%” and absolutes)
  • Irrational outcome fielding (“I can’t believe how unlucky I got,” “I planned it perfectly,”
  • Generalized characterizations of people (“typical idiot”)
  • Sweeping generalizations of types of people (“East Coast,” “California values”)
  • Characterizing something as “wrong”
  • Lack of compassion
• Belief leads to a bet which leads to a set of outcomes
• Negative visualization – those who imagine obstacles in their way are more likely to achieve success
• Once something occurs, we no longer think of it as probabilistic (or ever having been probabilistic)

Further Readings

• The Half-Life of Facts by Samuel Arbesman
• Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation by Gabriele Oettingen

Link (Amazon)

Love the practical nature of this book. Scott’s storytelling makes this a must-read. Would highly recommend for anyone interested in psychology, persuasion, or how to live an incredible life.

• When your energy is right, you perform better at everything you do (similar to Kevin Kelly’s rule: enthusiasm is worth 25 IQ points).
• Market rewards execution over good ideas.
• Systems > Goals
  • Goal: Lose 20 pounds
  • System: Eating right
  • If you do something every day, it’s a system. Systems have no deadlines, and on any given day, you can’t tell if they’re moving in the right direction.
• Used affirmations. Wrote every day 15 times – “I, Scott Adams, will be a famous cartoonist.”
• If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it.
• Take care of yourself first so you can do a better job of taking care of others.
• If you pursue selfish objectives, and do well, eventually your focus will turn outward to taking care of others.
• Every second you look at a messy room and think about fixing it is a distraction from more important thoughts.
• Pay attention to your mood after you exercise. Typically always positive.
• Ideas change the world every day, and often from ordinary people.
• You almost always learn something valuable in the process of failing. (!!)
• Things that will someday work out well start out well. (Interesting hypothesis)
• Practice is obvious. You have to figure out what to practice.
• Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. (Good + Good > Excellent)
• Simplicity trumps accuracy
• Everything you learn becomes a shortcut for something else.
• Don’t think of the news as information. Think of it as an energy source.
• If you see something that impresses you, you are morally obligated to voice your praise.
• We don’t always have an accurate view of our own potential.
• Psychology = lifelong study
• People don’t use reason for important decisions in life. The reality is that reason is just one of the drivers of our decisions, and often the smallest one
• How to be a top 10% conversationalist: Smile, ask questions, avoid complaining and sad topics, and have some entertaining stories ready to go
• How to overcome shyness: pretend you are an acting instead of interacting
• The most effective way of getting people to stop trying to persuade you is to say “I’m not interested.”
• Spend time with and around people who represent what you would like to become without trespassing, kidnapping, or stalking. Their good energy will rub off on you.
• The biggest trick for manipulating your happiness is being able to do what you want, when you want.
• Work can become pleasure if you have the ability to decide when you’re going to do it
• Anything that you can make slow and steady improvement at makes you feel you’re on the right track
• Pessimism is often a failure of imagination. If you can imagine a future being brighter, it lifts your energy and produces a sensation of happiness
• Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good
• Happiness formula: Eat right, exercise, get enough sleep, imagine incredible future, work a flexible schedule, do things you can steadily improve at, help others, reduce daily decisions

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Link (Amazon)

A must-read for anyone who wants to create. Short but powerful. Odds of re-reading: close to 100%.

• There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t and the secret is this: It’s not hard to write. It’s hard to sit down to write.
• Resistance is the most toxic force on this planet.
  • From age 24 to 32, Resistance kicked Pressfield’s ass from East Coast to West Coast and back thirteen times, and he didn’t even realize his biggest enemy was staring him in his face (relatable)
• Defeating Resistance is about listening to our hearts. What would happen if we listened to our inner calling?

Resistance: Defining the Enemy

• Any act act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long term growth, health, or integrity will elicit Resistance.
• The more important a call or action to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.
• The warrior and the artist live by the same code: the battle must be fought every day.
• The danger of Resistance is greatest just before the finish line. If you’re just about to publish, you might just stop because you think “it’s not good enough.” Fuck that.
• There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny.
• The working artist will not tolerate trouble in her life because she knows trouble prevents her from doing the work.
• All of society exists to feed your Resistance [HF!].
  • Attention Deficit Disorder, Seasonal Affect Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder aren’t diseases. They’re marketing ploys created by marketing departments and drug companies.
  • Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product
• Doctors estimate 70-80% of their business is non-health-related.
• What does Resistance feel like?
  • First – Unhappiness. We feel like hell. Misery. We’re bored, restless. There’s guilt but we can’t put our finger on the source.
  • Second – Vices. Dope, booze, adultery, web surfing.
  • Third – Clinical. Depression, aggression, dysfunction.
  • Fourth – Actual crime and physical self-destruction.
• The truly free individual is only free to the extent of his own self-mastery (Socrates)
• Resistance leads to criticizing others. Individuals who are realized in their own lives almost never criticize others. If they speak at all, it is to offer encouragement.
• If you’re asking yourself, “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.
• The more we feel fear about something, the more certain we can be the enterprise is important to us and the growth of our soul
• The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.
• You’re not alone when you’re with your craft.
• The more energy we spend stroking support from friends/colleagues, the weaker we become and the less capable we are of handling our business.
• Defeating Resistance is like giving birth. It seems absolutely impossible until you remember that women have been pulling it off for the past 50 million years.

Combating Resistance: Turning Pro

• The professional is there 7 days a week.
• “I write only when inspiration strikes,” Somerset Maugham. “Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”
• Professional has a sense of humor about his failure.
• Tony Koppelman on failure – “You’re where you want to be, aren’t you? So you’re taking a few blows. That’s the price of being in the arena and not on the sidelines. Stop complaining and be grateful.”
• The professional knows fear only exists in your head. When you are in action, fear goes away.
• The professional knows he does not know everything.
• Editors are not the enemy, critics are not the enemy (external). These are outside forces. Resistance is the enemy (internal). 
• The professional loves her work. She is invested in it wholeheartedly. But she does not forget her work is not her.
• It’s better to be in the arena getting stomped by the bull than it is in the stands or in the parking lot.
• The professional does not allow the actions of others to define his reality. Tomorrow morning the critic will be gone, but the writer will be facing the blank page.
• Ancient Spartans knew any enemy was nameless and faceless.
• The pro keeps on coming.

Beyond Resistance: The Higher Realm

• Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.
• Pressfield missed Watergate because he was working (sign of a professional).
• As soon as you finish one, start the next one. The work is the reward.
• The work exists only as potential. It needs a human to bring this into the material plane. 
• Once one commits to a project, all sorts of things occur that otherwise would have never occurred. Whatever you can dream, you can do. You need to begin though.
• INCREDIBLE TIP: Take a pocket recorder on walks
• Artists are modest because they know they’re not doing the work, they’re simply taking dictation (Joe Rogan talks about this re: standup).
• There is no difference between “creative people” and “non-creative people.” We’re all creatives. Only some execute on that voice in their head though.
• Your ideas in your head (your thoughts) are powerful forces that are as real and solid as the earth
• The moment a person learns they have terminal cancer, a profound shift takes place. At one stroke, he’s become aware of what really matters.
• Faced with imminent execution, all assumptions are called into question: What does our life mean? Have we lived it right? Are there vital acts we need to perform, crucial words to speak? Is it too late?
• Miraculously, cancers go into remission. Is it possible the disease itself evolved as a consequence of actions taken (or not taken)?
• The Ego’s job is to take care of business in the real world. It’s an important job. But there are worlds other than the real world. That’s when the Ego gets into trouble.
• Ego vs. Self.
• The Self believes:
  • 1. Death is an illusion. The soul endures and evolves through infinite manifestations. 
  • 2. Time and space are illusions. Time and space operate only in the physical sphere, and even here, don’t apply to dreams, visions, transports. In other dimensions, we move “swift as thought” and inhabit multiple planes simultaneously. 
  • 3. All beings are one. If I hurt you, I hurt myself. 
  • 4. The supreme emotion is love. Union and mutual assistance are the imperatives of life. We are all in this together. 
  • 5. God is all there is. Everything that is, is God in one form or another. God, the divine ground, is that in which we live and move and have our being. Infinite planes of reality exist, all created by, sustained by and infused by the spirit of God.
• When suburban kids take Ecstacy and dance all night at a rave, they’re seeking the Self. When we try to alter our state, we’re seeking the Self. The Self is our deepest being.
• Ego responsible for Resistance.
• Ego fears we will succeed.
• We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we’re stuck with it. Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.
• Van Gogh never found a buyer for any of his art in his entire lifetime (!!)
• The artist must do the work for its own sake. To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.
• The new mom weeps in awe at the little miracle in her arms. She knows it came out of her but not from her, through her but not of her. Ask yourself, like the new mother: what do I feel growing inside of me? Let me bring this forward, if I can, for its own sake and not for what it can do for me or how it can advance my standing.
• What would Arnold Schwarzenegger do on an unusual day when he wasn’t feeling like himself? He wouldn’t phone a friend. He would work out. For working out is the reward.
• Do the work for its own sake, not for attention or applause.
• Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention. It’s a gift to the world. Don’t cheat the world of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.