Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

I grew dissatisfied with the way that we use our funerals to revise the life of the dead, to give the dead a story so different from their actual life that, in effect, we kill them all over again. No, that is too strong. Let me just say that we erase them, we edit them, we make them into a person much easier to live with than the person who actually lived.

Nie obciążaj się wszystkimi przeszłymi decyzjami, podjąłeś je bowiem w dobrej wierze, najlepiej jak potrafiłeś, a teraz, kiedy widzisz, do jakich konsekwencji doprowadził, możesz tę wiedzę wykorzystać przy następnych decyzjach.

Być bohaterem swojego życia to akt odwagi

Zwycięzcy nigdy nie rezygnują, a rezygnujący nigdy nie zwyciężają.

To have peace of mind, you have to have peace of body first.

Hiking is walking meditation. Journaling is writing meditation. Praying is gratitude meditation. Showering is accidental meditation. Sitting quietly is direct meditation.

The harder the workout, the easier the day.

You’re going to die one day, and none of this is going to matter. So enjoy yourself. Do something positive. Project some love. Make someone happy. Laugh a little bit. Appreciate the moment. And do your work. [8]

At any given time, when you’re walking down the streets, a very small percentage of your brain is focused on the present. The rest is planning the future or regretting the past. This keeps you from having an incredible experience. It’s keeping you from seeing the beauty in everything and for being grateful for where you are. You can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all of your time living in delusions of the future. [4]

Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.

A calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought. They must be earned.

Working out for me is not fun; I suffer in the short term, I feel pain. But then in the long term, I’m better off because I have muscles or I’m healthier. If I am reading a book and I’m getting confused, it is just like working out and the muscle getting sore or tired, except now my brain is being overwhelmed. In the long run I’m getting smarter because I’m absorbing new concepts from working at the limit or edge of my capability. So you generally want to lean into things with short-term pain, but long-term gain.

Compound interest is a very powerful concept. Compound interest applies to more than just compounding capital. Compounding capital is just the beginning. Compounding in business relationships is very important. Look at some of the top roles in society, like why someone is a CEO of a public company or managing billions of dollars. It’s because people trust them. They are trusted because the relationships they’ve built and the work they’ve done has compounded. They’ve stuck with the business and shown themselves (in a visible and accountable way) to be high-integrity people. Compound interest also happens in your reputation. If you have a sterling reputation and you keep building it for decades upon decades, people will notice. Your reputation will literally end up being thousands or tens of thousands of times more valuable than somebody else who was very talented but is not keeping the compound interest in reputation going.

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.

A critical quality for success is the ability to change your mind. A lot of ideas are bad until they're good. And a lot of ideas are good until they're bad.

“You only need to know the direction, not the destination. The direction is enough to make the next choice.” — James Clear

Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.

Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.

Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you’re accountable on your output, as opposed to your input—that’s the dream.

You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity—a piece of a business—to gain your financial freedom.

Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.

Ultimately, the value of planning isn’t that you execute the plan perfectly, that you catch every detail beforehand, or that you predict the future; it’s that you enforce the self-discipline to think about the project in some depth before diving in and seeing what happens.

Ze wszystkich wad bowiem najprzykrzejsza jest duma, pyszna pod osłoną pokory.

Wnet będziesz nikim nigdzie — a tak samo będzie z tym, co teraz widzisz, i z ludźmi, którzy teraz żyją. Wszystko bowiem rodzi się dla zmiany, przemiany i zniszczenia, aby co innego w to miejsce mogło powstać.

Po pierwsze: nic na oślep i nic bez celu. Po wtóre: nic innego nie mieć na względzie jak cel społeczny.

Należy rozważać, czym jest przyczyna obnażona z osłony, jakie są cele działań, czym jest ból, czym rozkosz, czym śmierć, czym sława, kto sam jest sprawcą własnego niepokoju, jak nikt nikomu nie staje w drodze, jak wszystko polega na sądzie!

7. Myśl o tym, w jakim stanie ciała i duszy powinna cię zabrać z sobą śmierć i jak krótkie jest życie, jak przepastna wieczność, przeszłość i przyszłość, jak krucha wszelka materia!

Kto się boi śmierci, boi się albo braku odczuwania, albo zmiany odczuwania. Jeżeli jednak nie będzie w ogóle odczuwał, to nie będzie odczuwał i żadnego nieszczęścia. A jeżeli inaczej będzie odczuwał, to będzie innym stworzeniem, ale żyć nie przestanie.

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

– Łańcuch mawiał, że życie sprowadza się do stania w kolejce i czekania, aż gówno spadnie ci na głowę. Każdy ma swoje miejsce w kolejce, nie można z niej wyjść, a kiedy zaczynasz sobie gratulować, że przeżyłaś swoją dawkę gówna, stwierdzasz nagle, że kolejka jest zapętlona.

To not think of dying, is to not think of living. —JANN ARDEN

If anyone can refute me—show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective—I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.

Hackman’s research describes five conditions that increase a team’s odds of success: having a real team (one with clear boundaries and stable membership), a compelling direction, an enabling structure, a supportive organizational context, and expert coaching. My own observations are similar, and I’ve come to think of the multitude of tasks that fill up a manager’s day as sorting neatly into three buckets: purpose, people, and process.

At higher levels of management, the job starts to converge regardless of background. Success becomes more and more about mastering a few key skills: hiring exceptional leaders, building self-reliant teams, establishing a clear vision, and communicating well.

This is the crux of management: It is the belief that a team of people can achieve more than a single person going it alone. It is the realization that you don’t have to do everything yourself, be the best at everything yourself, or even know how to do everything yourself. Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.

Hackman’s research describes five conditions that increase a team’s odds of success: having a real team (one with clear boundaries and stable membership), a compelling direction, an enabling structure, a supportive organizational context, and expert coaching.

The first big part of your job as a manager is to ensure that your team knows what success looks like and cares about achieving it.

Your role as a manager is not to do the work yourself, even if you are the best at it, because that will only take you so far. Your role is to improve the purpose, people, and process of your team to get as high a multiplier effect on your collective outcome as you can.

The only meaningful measure for a leader is whether the team succeeds or fails. For all the definitions, descriptions, and characterizations of leaders, there are only two that matter: effective and ineffective. Effective leaders lead successful teams that accomplish their mission and win. Ineffective leaders do not.

For as it turns out, one can revisit the past quite pleasantly, as long as one does so expecting nearly every aspect of it to have changed.

The first was that if one did not master one’s circumstances, one was bound to be mastered by them; and the second was Montaigne’s maxim that the surest sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness.

Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.

The freedom of a country can only be measured by its respect for the rights of its citizens, and it’s my conviction that these rights are in fact limitations of state power that define exactly where and when a government may not infringe into that domain of personal or individual freedoms that during the American Revolution was called “liberty” and during the Internet Revolution is called “privacy.”

But I believed that the only way you become a leading man is by treating yourself like a leading man and working your ass off.

From now on if I lost, I would be able to walk away with a big smile because I had done everything I could to prepare.

What is government but theft by consent? You’ll be moving in a society of kindred spirits.”

“Nobody admires anyone else without qualification. If they do they’re after an image, not a person.”

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.

Every business fundamentally relies on two additional factors: people and systems.

“BEGIN EACH DAY by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness—all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.”

We humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable; after working hard to get what we want, we routinely lose interest in the object of our desire. Rather than feeling satisfied, we feel a bit bored, and in response to this boredom, we go on to form new, even grander desires.

What Stoics discover, though, is that willpower is like muscle power: The more they exercise their muscles, the stronger they get, and the more they exercise their will, the stronger it gets. Indeed, by practicing Stoic self-denial techniques over a long period, Stoics can transform themselves into individuals remarkable for their courage and self-control.

By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent.

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.

“Your problem, Werner,” says Frederick, “is that you still believe you own your life.”

“Time is an illusion, a construct made out of human memory. There’s no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. It’s all happening now.”

Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.

Bridgewater’s founder, Ray Dalio, believes there is no such thing as negative feedback or positive feedback; there is only accurate feedback, and we should care enough about each other to be accurate.

Ian nodded. “It’s a folie à deux,” he said. Tony didn’t know any French, so he left to go look up the expression in the dictionary. The definition he found struck him as apt: “The presence of the same or similar delusional ideas in two persons closely associated with one another.”

“I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people,” said Schwab, “the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement.

When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.

When you really know somebody, you can’t hate them.” “Or maybe it’s just that you can’t really know them until you stop hating them.”

Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.

Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 percent—are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.

Nobody knows how many stars there are in the Milky Way—estimates range from 100 billion or so to perhaps 400 billion—and the Milky Way is just one of 140 billion or so other galaxies, many of them even larger than ours.

Buddhism was a philosophy open to all religions. This was why the Japanese had no issues with following Shintoism – their native religion – practising Buddhism, and even converting to Christianity, at the same time. ‘They’re all strands of the same rug,’ Sensei Yamada had said, ‘only different colours.’

“Talent must be a fanatical mistress. She’s beautiful; when you’re with her, people watch you, they notice. But she bangs on your door at odd hours, and she disappears for long stretches, and she has no patience for the rest of your existence: your wife, your children, your friends. She is the most thrilling evening of your week, but some day she will leave you for good. One night, after she’s been gone for years, you will see her on the arm of a younger man, and she will pretend not to recognize you.”

In certain ways I am deeply stupid. I don’t say this out of modesty. I believe that I’m more intelligent than the average human being, though perhaps intelligence should not be looked at as a single gauge, like a speedometer, but as a full array of tachometers, odometers, altimeters, and the rest.

Laughing with a man was a good step forward. First comes the laughter, then the respect, then the trust.

If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before.

It can be a terrible curse for a man to get everything he ever dreamed of. If the shining prizes turn out somehow to be empty baubles, he is left without even his dreams for comfort.

A few glasses of wine can be the difference between finding a man a hilarious companion or an insufferable moron.

Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment.

The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.

The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.

In this new economy, three groups will have a particular advantage: those who can work well and creatively with intelligent machines, those who are the best at what they do, and those with access to capital.

Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.

The Deep Work Hypothesis: The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.

That was the age of great men, doing what was right.” He frowned down at the broken rubble choking the floor of the colossal room. “This is the age of little men, doing what they must. Little men, with little dreams, walking in giant footsteps.

“Got to have fear to have courage,”

“Bad news is never a surprise. Just a disappointment.”

Only friends get left behind. Enemies are always at your heels.

“It’s a sad fact, but pain only makes you sorry for yourself.”

In my experience, a friend is merely an acquaintance who has yet to betray you.

One should learn the lessons of history. The mistakes of the past need only be made once.”

Logen had no wish to lead. The time was he’d hungered after fame, and glory, and respect, but the winning of them had been costly, and they’d proved to be hollow prizes. Men had put their faith in him, and he’d led them by a painful and a bloody route straight back to the mud. There was no ambition in him anymore. He was cursed when it came to making decisions.

A great leader must share the hardships of his followers, of his soldiers, of his subjects. That is how he wins their respect. Great leaders do not complain.

“Evil?” Bayaz snorted his contempt. “A word for children. A word the ignorant use for those who disagree with them. I thought we grew out of such notions long centuries ago.”

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.

The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.

How to Create a Good Habit The 1st law (Cue): Make it obvious. The 2nd law (Craving): Make it attractive. The 3rd law (Response): Make it easy. The 4th law (Reward): Make it satisfying.

Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.

Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.

The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.

Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.

The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this.

“In theological terms? The pride of universal guilt. It’s a form of vanity and egomania. She holds herself responsible for things that could not possibly be her fault. As if she controlled everything, as if other people’s suffering came about as punishment for her sins.”

“Quim,” she said, “don’t ever try to teach me about good and evil. I’ve been there, and you’ve seen nothing but the map.”

The tribe is whatever we believe it is. If we say the tribe is all the Little Ones in the forest, and all the trees, then that is what the tribe is. Even though some of the oldest trees here came from warriors of two different tribes, fallen in battle. We become one tribe because we say we’re one tribe.”

Both of them have a higher allegiance to their own conscience than to the rules others set down for them. It’s a failing, if your object is to maintain order, but if your goal is to learn and adapt, it’s a virtue.”

Samodyscyplina to sztuka robienia tego, na co nie mamy ochoty. Obok samokontroli, czyli sztyki nierobienia tego, na co mamy ochotę.

I tam się dowiedziałem, że okazując litość drugiemu człowiekowi, pozbawiamy go siły, a dając wsparcie, wzmacniamy go.

Kiedyś się bałem i nie robiłem albo zwlekałem w nieskończoność, dzisiaj się boję, ale robię.

Pup, puk - strach puka do drzwi, otwiera mu odwaga, a tam nikogo nie ma. Dwóch chłopców stoi na górce. Chcą zjechać w dół na sankach, ale się boją. I tak stoją. Jeden w końcu mówi: "Ja jadę, bo jak mam się tak bać, że się wywrócę, to już wolę się wywrócić"

Bo kiedy pomagamy pokonywać trudności innym, to sami też uczymy się czegoś nowego. Bo kto przewiezie innego człowieka na drugi brzeg, to sam też tam dopływa.

Posiadanie wiąże się z ogromnym obciążeniem - strachem i lękiem o wszystko. Natomiast bycie "wśród" rzeczy daje ogromny komfort, większy niż bycie "z" rzeczami lub, nie daj Boże, "dla" rzeczy.

Chodząc po górach, nie analizowałem kroków lecz po prostu je robiłem. Nawet cofając się, człowiek wykonuje jakiś ruch. Najgorzej jest stanąć w miejscu i ciągle się rozglądać.

Now you know how to hack your brain using active recall and spaced repetition in Readwise. A final word: Even though Mastery looks like flashcards, it’s not about memorization. It’s about reprogramming your mind to spot patterns, form connections, and resurface to you the right idea at the right time. You can [read more about this reprogramming idea here](https://blog.readwise.io/hack-your-brain-with-spaced-repetition-and-active-recall/).

These buttons inform our spaced repetition when to show you this information next. Really important (or hard to remember) cards sooner. Not so important (or easy) cards later.

That's it! You now know how to apply active recall to any highlight you wish to seriously master. Now let's talk about the second principle of Mastery: spaced repetition. Spaced repetition is a technique for spacing out when you review material. It uses your feedback to show you information at the optimal time for retention, minimizing how long you spend reviewing.

Now, let's try converting a passive highlight to active recall using cloze deletion. First, click the Master button below (or use the keyboard shortcut: m). Then, highlight (or tap) the word "master", then hit Save.

Creating question & answer pairs and then quizzing yourself on them is the most powerful form of active recall, but can be a lot of effort. That’s why we offer both Q&A and cloze deletion.

See what we did there? All we had to do was hide one of the words in your passage in order to elevate your review from passive to active! This fill-in-the-blank is the first form of active recall embedded into Readwise. It’s called cloze deletion and is great for everyday use.

For example, simply reading the fact: "Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492" would be passive. Filling in the following blank would be active: "Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492."

The first principle of Mastery is called "active recall." Active recall is when we challenge our minds to retrieve a certain piece of information rather than passively reviewing the same. Cognitive science has repeatedly demonstrated that active recall significantly strengthens memory compared to passive review.

How many times have you read a great book that had the potential to change your life, but you ended up doing nothing different? The problem is that we forget too much. To solve this problem, we developed Mastery. Mastery is our label for the one-two punch of spaced repetition and active recall applied to your highlights. Used together, you’ll retain substantially more of what you read with significantly less effort. Here’s how to get started.

Have clear goals. Identify and don’t tolerate the problems that stand in the way of your achieving those goals. Accurately diagnose the problems to get at their root causes. Design plans that will get you around them. Do what’s necessary to push these designs through to results.

Seek out the smartest people who disagreed with me so I could try to understand their reasoning. Know when not to have an opinion. Develop, test, and systemize timeless and universal principles. Balance risks in ways that keep the big upside while reducing the downside.

Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.

The most important thing is that you develop your own principles and ideally write them down, especially if you are working with others.

Meditation has benefited me hugely throughout my life because it produces a calm open-mindedness that allows me to think more clearly and creatively.

Experience taught me how invaluable it is to reflect on and write down my decision-making criteria whenever I made a decision, so I got in the habit of doing that.

If you can think for yourself while being open-minded in a clearheaded way to find out what is best for you to do, and if you can summon up the courage to do it, you will make the most of your life.

Making a handful of good uncorrelated bets that are balanced and leveraged well is the surest way of having a lot of upside without being exposed to unacceptable downside.

Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals.

I believe that the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. By failing well, I mean being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game.

Sukces to mieć to, co się chce. Szczęście to chcieć tego, co się ma.

Spełnione marzenia nie mają ceny

W życiu są rzeczy, które warto, I są rzeczy , które się opłaca, ale nie zawsze to , co warto, się opłaca , I nie zawsze to, co się opłaca, warto.

Rozwijamy się I zdobywamy doświadczenie wtedy, gdy wychodzimy poza strefy komfortu I gdy sytuacja wykracza poza nasze pierwotne plany I oczekiwania

Skuteczność jest miarą prawdy

Zmień swoje słownictwo, a zmienisz swoje życie.

Profesjonalizm nigdy nie jest dziełem przypadku. Pasja rodzi profesjonalizm. Profesjonalizm daje jakość, a jakość to jest luksus w życiu.

Before you can lie to another, you must first lie to yourself.

If there’s something you want to do later, do it now. There is no “later.”

“Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.”

In the morning, I work out, and however long it takes is how long it takes. I do not start my day until I’ve worked out. I don’t care if the world is imploding and melting down, it can wait another thirty minutes until I’m done working out.

World’s simplest diet: The more processed the food, the less one should consume.

Doctors won’t make you healthy. Nutritionists won’t make you slim. Teachers won’t make you smart. Gurus won’t make you calm. Mentors won’t make you rich. Trainers won’t make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself.

How do you learn to accept things you can’t change? Fundamentally, it boils down to one big hack: embracing death.

CHANGING HABITS: Pick one thing. Cultivate a desire. Visualize it. Plan a sustainable path. Identify needs, triggers, and substitutes. Tell your friends. Track meticulously. Self-discipline is a bridge to a new self-image. Bake in the new self-image. It’s who you are—now. [11]

I think working out every day made me happier. If you have peace of body, it’s easier to have peace of mind. [7]

The most important trick to being happy is to realize happiness is a skill you develop and a choice you make. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles. It’s just like losing weight. It’s just like succeeding at your job. It’s just like learning calculus.

If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.

Confucius says you have two lives, and the second one begins when you realize you only have one. When and how did your second life begin?

Happiness, love, and passion…aren’t things you find—they’re choices you make.

The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower. We live in the age of Alexandria, when every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away. The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that is scarce. [3]

Read a lot—just read. [2]

Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.

Julius Caesar famously said, “If you want it done, then go. And if not, then send.” What he meant was, if you want it done right, then you have to go yourself and do it. When you are the principal, then you are the owner—you care, and you will do a great job. When you are the agent and you are doing it on somebody else’s behalf, you can do a bad job. You just don’t care. You optimize for yourself rather than for the principal’s assets.

What you feel tells you nothing about the facts—it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts.

Karma is just you, repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve.

You cannot hide anything from yourself. Your own failures are written within your psyche, and they are obvious to you. If you have too many of these moral shortcomings, you will not respect yourself. The worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem. If you don’t love yourself, who will?

Whether it’s business, exercise, romance, friendship, whatever, I think the meaning of life is to do things for their own sake. Ironically, when you do things for their own sake, you create your best work. Even if you’re just trying to make money, you will actually be the most successful.

Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.

Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.

Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.

Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you. ↓ Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.

Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity.

Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it. It is much more about understanding than purely hard work. Yes, hard work matters, and you can’t skimp on it. But it has to be directed in the right way.

Honesty is actually a blunt instrument, which bloodies more than it cuts. Your honesty is likely to offend people; it is much more prudent to tailor your words, telling people what they want to hear rather than the coarse and ugly truth of what you feel or think. More important, by being unabashedly open you make yourself so predictable and familiar that it is almost impossible to respect or fear you, and power will not accrue to a person who cannot inspire such emotions.

When it comes to power, outshining the master is perhaps the worst mistake of all.

Impatience, on the other hand, only makes you look weak. It is a principal impediment to power.

Never take your position for granted and never let any favors you receive go to your head.

Never discriminate as to whom you study and whom you trust. Never trust anyone completely and study everyone, including friends and loved ones.

The key to power, then, is the ability to judge who is best able to further your interests in all situations. Keep friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent.

Without enemies around us, we grow lazy. An enemy at our heels sharpens our wits, keeping us focused and alert. It is sometimes better, then, to use enemies as enemies rather than transforming them into friends or allies.

But the human tongue is a beast that few can master. It strains constantly to break out of its cage, and if it is not tamed, it will run wild and cause you grief. Power cannot accrue to those who squander their treasure of words.

Learn the lesson: Once the words are out, you cannot take them back. Keep them under control. Be particularly careful with sarcasm: The momentary satisfaction you gain with your biting words will be outweighed by the price you pay.

War can make an already difficult existence impossible.

The citizens of Sarajevo were lovely people who had not harmed anyone, yet were being harmed. I did not know them or their past lives, but they were very vulnerable and it is the vulnerability of human life that – when it is stripped down to its basics – makes us all the same.

Surgery hasn’t had the profile of other health issues such as communicable or preventable diseases. Yet surgically treatable conditions kill 17 million people each year; more than tuberculosis, malaria and HIV/AIDS combined, according to a study in The Lancet.

A major advance was the development of damage-control resuscitation, which involves replacing lost blood with preheated blood, thus minimizing the effects of cold and poor clotting. These techniques have now been adopted by all the major trauma centres in the developed world.

I also couldn’t believe that what purported to be legal in Sharia law was nothing more than outright murder and torture. I was astonished and sickened by the cruelty that one human being could bring to bear on another, and it filled me with revulsion.

The combination of hypothermia (cold), coagulopathy (impaired ability of the blood to clot) and acidosis (raised acidity) is called the ‘trauma triad of death’.

Why do I keep going back to areas of pure misery and heartache? The answer is simple: to help people who, like you and I, have a right to proper care at this most precarious time of their lives.

In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.

When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.

Among all these social improvements, one in particular is found to significantly reduce family size–the empowerment of women.44 Wherever women have the vote, wherever girls stay in school for longer, wherever women are in charge of their own lives and not dictated to by men, wherever they have access to good healthcare and contraception, wherever they are free to take any job and their aspirations for life are raised, the birth rate falls. The reason for this is straightforward–empowerment brings freedom of choice and when life offers more options for women, their choice is often to have fewer children. The faster and more fully women are empowered, the quicker a nation will move through Stage 3 and on to Stage 4.

It is no accident that the planet’s stability has wavered just as its biodiversity has declined–the two things are bound together. To restore stability to our planet, therefore, we must restore its biodiversity, the very thing we have removed. It is the only way out of this crisis that we ourselves have created.

Even more startling is the fact that 96 per cent of the mass of all the mammals on Earth is made up of our bodies and those of the animals that we raise to eat. Our own mass accounts for one third of the total. Our domestic mammals–chiefly cows, pigs and sheep–make up just over 60 per cent. The remainder–all the wild mammals, from mice to elephants and whales–account for just 4 per cent.

It took a million years of unprecedented volcanic activity during the Permian to poison the ocean. We have begun to do so again in less than two hundred.

Today, the average person in the United States eats over 120kg of meat each year. People in European countries eat between 60kg and 80kg each year. The average Kenyan eats 16kg of meat, and the average person in India, a nation in which vegetarianism is common because of religious beliefs, eats less than 4kg each year.

Singapore is linking all its parklands with green corridors and has turned 100 hectares of prime land on its shoreline into a water reservoir and garden featuring a grove of 50m artificial supertrees that power themselves with solar panels, irrigate the gardens with the water they have collected and filter the air.

The pictures from Apollo 8 had transformed the mindset of the population of the world. As Anders himself said, ‘We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.’

Some cities, like Copenhagen, are installing systems of centralised district heating which draws its heat energy from geothermal plants or the waste produced in the city itself. The big, expensive buildings at the heart of a city can be required to meet high standards of insulation and energy efficiency.

The hope and expectation of many environmental economists is that a sixth wave of innovation–the sustainability revolution–is almost upon us. In this new order, innovators and entrepreneurs will make fortunes by devising products and services that reduce our impact on the planet.

Forty hour work weeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes—train and sprint, then rest and reassess.

Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.

Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.

The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner.

Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it.

One of the early lessons in leadership, whether it is via direct management or indirect influence, is that people are not good at saying precisely what they mean in a way that others can exactly understand.

Being an introvert is not an excuse for making no effort to treat people like real human beings, however. The bedrock of strong teams is human connection, which leads to trust.

Especially as you become more senior, remember that your manager expects you to bring solutions, not problems.

The second purpose of a 1-1 is a regular opportunity for you to speak privately with your manager about whatever needs discussing.

Great managers notice when your normal energy level changes, and will hopefully care enough to ask you about it.

Good managers know that delivering feedback quickly is more valuable than waiting for a convenient time to say something.

Your manager should be the person who shows you the larger picture of how your work fits into the team’s goals, and helps you feel a sense of purpose in the day-to-day work. The most mundane work can turn into a source of pride when you understand how it contributes to the overall success of the company.

My job as tech lead was to continue to write code, but with the added responsibilities of representing the group to management, vetting our plans for feature delivery, and dealing with a lot of the details of the project management process.

Developing a sense of ownership and authority for your own experiences at work, and not relying on your manager to set the entire tone for your relationship, is an important step in owning your career and workplace happiness.

„Nie, moje dziecko! Inny jest cel życia naszego. Mnie nie wyrządzisz krzywdy, ale sobie, moje dziecko!”. A udowodnij mu w sposób łagodny a przekonywający, że tak jest w istocie i że ani pszczoły, ani w ogóle istoty gromadnie żyjące tak nie postępują. A trzeba to zrobić bez ironii i bez obelg, ale w sposób uprzejmy i niedotkliwy dla duszy. A i nie tak, jak z katedry lub by cię podziwiał ten, kto obok was stoi. Ale zwracając się do jednego, choćby kto inny był przy tym. Pamiętaj o tych dziewięciu radach głównych, a przyjmij je jakoby dary Muz. I zacznij raz być człowiekiem, dopóki jesteś przy życiu. A wystrzegać się należy zarówno gniewu, jak i pochlebstwa. I jedno, i drugie bowiem jest niespołeczne i szkodliwe. A w chwili gniewu pamiętaj, że niemęska to rzecz gniew; owszem, łagodność i uprzejmość, jak są bardziej ludzkie, tak i bardziej męskie. I tylko tu okazuje się siłę i ścięgna, i męskość, a nie w chwili gniewu i oburzenia. O ile bowiem jest co bardziej objawem równowagi, o tyle i siły. A jak smutek, tak i gniew jest objawem słabości. W obu bowiem tych wypadkach otrzymało się rany i uległo się im. A jeśli chcesz, przyjmij i dziesiąty dar od przewodnika Muz: szalone jest żądanie, by ludzie źli nie popełniali występków. Kto tego chce, chce rzeczy niemożliwej. A zgodzić się na to, by wobec innych tak postępowali, i żądać, by wobec ciebie nie grzeszyli, byłoby nierozumne i tyrańskie.

Ogórek gorzki — to go rzuć. Ciernie na drodze — to się usuń. Wystarczy to. A nie dodaj: po co to w świecie? Bo wyśmiałby cię przyrodnik tak, jak wyśmiałby cię stolarz lub szewc, gdybyś im czynił wymówki, że widzisz w pracowni wióry i odcinki ich wytworów. A przecież oni mają gdzie je wyrzucić. A wszechnatura nie ma takiego miejsca poza sobą. Ale to dziwne w tej jej sztuce, że sama się w sobie ogranicza, a wszystko, co wewnątrz niej zdaje się psuć, starzeć i nie przedstawiać żadnego pożytku, przemienia w siebie samą i stwarza z tego właśnie inne rzeczy nowe. A nie czuje potrzeby żadnego materiału z zewnątrz, ani miejsca, dokąd by odrzucała to, co zbyt zepsute. Wystarcza więc jej i miejsce, które do niej należy, i tworzywo, które jest jej własnością, i sztuka jej właściwa.

Most of what people think is money is really credit, and credit does appear out of thin air during good times and then disappear at bad times. For example, when you buy something in a store on a credit card, you essentially do so by saying, “I promise to pay.” Together you and the store owner create a credit asset and a credit liability. So where do you take the money from? Nowhere. You created credit. It goes away in the same way. Suppose the store owner rightly believes that you and others won’t pay the credit card company and that the credit card company won’t pay him. Then he correctly believes that the credit “asset” he has isn’t really there. It didn’t go somewhere else; it’s simply gone. As this implies, a big part of the deleveraging process is people discovering that much of what they thought of as their wealth was merely people’s promises to give them money. Now that those promises aren’t being kept, that wealth no longer exists. When

1. Intelligent Awareness 2. Modify Expectations/Realign Difficulty 3. Identify and Visualize the Change Target 4. Apply Mathematics to the Goal 5. Segment Goal into Its Daily Action 6. Identify Threats to the Target 7. Identify the Right Battlefield 8. Attack Bad Habits with Inconvenience/Pain 9. Act until Echo

You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.

The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.

Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked about by selfish impulses, to kick against fate and the present, and to mistrust the future.

The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.

Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.

It is, in other words, not objects and events but the interpretations we place on them that are the problem. Our duty is therefore to exercise stringent control over the faculty of perception, with the aim of protecting our mind from error.

As a little psychological nudge to help you build your daily review habit, we've built a streak counter. You maintain your streak by reviewing your daily highlights at least once per day (within the 24 hour window of your email send time). Check out the leaderboard here: [Top Readwise Streaks](https://readwise.io/highscores)

Streaks

Highlights from PDFs

Gift Readwise

If you're an avid highlighter of Kindle books, you've probably encountered the Kindle highlight limit. Basically, for copyright reasons, many publishers set limitations on how much of a book you can export through highlights. For example, if you highlight more than 10% of many books, those highlights above the limit will be truncated with a "...". We understand how incredibly frustrating this can be because often the books we highlight the most are the ones we most want to post-process! Unfortunately, we have no way around this limit at this time.

Kindle Highlight Limits

We're often asked: What happens if I delete a highlight in Readwise? Does it disappear in Kindle? Conversely, we're also asked: What happens if I delete a highlight in Kindle? Does it disappear in Readwise? In both cases, the answer is no. If you delete a highlight in Kindle, it will be preserved in Readwise. If you delete a highlight in Readwise, it will be preserved in Kindle.

Deleting Highlights in Kindle

Many modern note-taking apps such as [Notion](https://notion.so) (our favorite!) accept [Markdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown) as their preferred import format of choice. Accordingly, Readwise enables you to export to Markdown all your notes and highlights on a book-by-basis for use elsewhere. Simply head to the [Books](https://readwise.io/library) or [Articles](https://readwise.io/articles) menu from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard) and click the down arrow.

Export to Markdown

There are two ways to handle books and articles you don't want to see in Readwise. The first method is to set the book's frequency to "Never" from the [Books](https://readwise.io/library) menu. The book will continue to be accessible from your library, but its highlights will not be resurfaced in your Daily Readwises. The second method is to delete the book so that it does not appear anywhere in Readwise. You can do this from the [Books](https://readwise.io/library) menu as well. Note that if you delete a book, Readwise will not re-import the book on subsequent resyncs.

Deleting Books

If you're an Evernote lover, you can use Readwise to automatically (and continuously) export all your highlights from all sources to Evernote. Simply select the Evernote Export option from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard) and follow the instructions from there. Note: Exporting to Evernote is a premium feature.

Export to Evernote

Have you ever found yourself highlighting an entire fluff-filled paragraph even though all you really wanted were the key sentences at the beginning and end? You can cut this fluff by taking special notes while you read. These notes instruct Readwise to combine multiple, non-adjacent highlights into a single annotation. Simply highlight the first string of text you want to combine and add the note .c1 ("c" for "concatenate"). Then, highlight the second string of text and add the note .c2. Upon importing into Readwise, these two highlights will be combined into a single annotation. Read more here: [How to Combine Highlights On-the-Fly with Readwise](https://blog.readwise.io/combine-highlights-on-the-fly/).

Concatenation Tags (Combining Highlights)

Did you know you can add chapters to your highlights in Readwise? In addition, you can generate a nifty table of contents which you can use to quickly navigate a book and refresh your memory of the book's organization. You add this chapter data by taking a special note while you read. Simply highlight the title of each section and add a note beginning with a period (.) followed by an h (for "heading") and then the number 1 through 3 representing the section's position in the hierarchy. For example, with a book organized into parts, chapters, and sections, you would denote all parts as .h1, all chapters as .h2, and all sections as .h3. Read more here: [How to Add Chapters to Your Highlights in Readwise](https://blog.readwise.io/add-chapters-to-highlights/).

Heading Tags (Creating a Table of Contents)

Do you ever wish that your highlights were tagged with useful keywords and categories, but never bothered because the process of tagging is just too cumbersome? There's an easy way to tag your highlights, found only in Readwise called, inline tagging. An inline tag is a special note taken while you read that's automatically converted into a tag in Readwise. Tagging in the moment is much faster than tagging after the fact, and once your highlights have keywords and categories, they're much easier to review and reference. Simply highlight a passage and add a note beginning with a period (.) followed by a single word or abbreviation (with no spaces). You can also train Readwise to interpret shorthand! Read more here: [How to Tag Your Highlights While You Read](https://blog.readwise.io/tag-your-highlights-while-you-read/).

Inline Tagging

COMING SOON! In addition to the general purpose methods for mastering a passive highlight in Readwise (cloze deletion and question & answer), there's also a special active recall method called term. If you pay attention, much of any nonfiction book is spent "coming to terms" in which the author carefully explains what he or she means by specific words. Sometimes authors even introduces new terms. For example, the term antifragile in Nassim Taleb's Antifragile. If you master the terms in a nonfiction book, your understanding will skyrocket compared to a passive reading. To convert a highlight to a term, hit the Master icon in the web app (keyboard shortcut m).

Terms (Mastery)

NEW! Not only can you convert a highlight to a Question & Answer flashcard while using Readwise, you can also create Q&A while you read. You create a flashcard by taking a special note while you read. Simply highlight the passage containing the memorable idea and add a note beginning .qa (for question & answer). Then type your question to your future self ending with a question mark followed by the answer. When this highlight is resurfaced in Readwise, it will be in the form of a question. Talk about retaining what you read!

Question & Answer Tag

Question & Answer (Mastery)

Readwise offers increasing degrees of active recall intensity (Mastery). The least demanding is a deceptively simple technique called [cloze deletion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloze_test), more commonly known as "fill in the blank". With cloze deletion, a salient keyword is hidden from the passage, giving you an opportunity to pause and actively recall the missing information. This might sound trivial, but the simple act forces you to focus on the surrounding context and search your mind. This effort, in turn, is scientifically proven to form stronger memories enabling you to retain profoundly more of what you've read. To apply cloze deletion to a highlight, hit the Master icon in the web app (keyboard shortcut m).

Cloze Deletion (Mastery)

Readwise helps you remember more of what you read using two principles borrowed from cognitive science: [spaced repetition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition) and [active recall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_recall). Active recall (also known as quizzing, testing, or retrieval) is the process by which we challenge our minds to retrieve a piece of information. Simply rereading a passage from time to time, on the other hand, is passive. Rereading is no doubt better than never revisiting the passage, but research has repeatedly shown that active recall is significantly more effective. So how can you take advantage of active recall in Readwise? For any highlight that you wish to deliberately commit to memory, hit the Master icon in the web app (keyboard shortcut m). You can then convert that highlight from a passive passage to be reread to a flashcard to be actively recalled. In turn, you'll retain vastly more of what you read.

Active Recall (Mastery)

When you start using Readwise, its proprietary [spaced repetition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition) algorithm assumes by default that each of your highlights is of equal quality, equal relevance, and equal difficulty. For most people, this is not entirely true. Some highlights are better than average; some are below. Some highlights are especially relevant right now; some not so much. Some highlights are hard to remember; some are easy. You can take control of this algorithm by supplying feedback in the web app. If a highlight is better than average, especially relevant, or difficult, instruct Readwise "More" (keyboard shortcut 2). You'll see this highlight more often than average. If a highlight is in the middle, instruct Readwise "Later" (keyboard shortcut 3). You get the idea. If you consistently supply feedback, you'll watch the quality of your reviews steadily improve. In turn, you'll retain significantly more of what you read.

Spaced Repetition Feedback Buttons

Readwise helps you remember more of what you read using two principles borrowed from cognitive science: [spaced repetition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition) and [active recall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_recall). Spaced repetition is a scientifically proven method for efficient learning that progressively increases the time between reviews of previously learned material. Basically, we remember things better if we spread our reviews out over time rather than cramming. If you stop to think about it, reading a book is kind of like cramming. We intensely learn about a single subject for a few weeks. Then we move onto the next book. Readwise uses your highlights from to space out each book you've read into perpetuity. The result is that your retain profoundly more of what you read.

Spaced Repetition Basics

Why does Readwise focus so much on retention? For the same reasons that founders should reduce churn in a SaaS business before investing in growth; or investors should buffer their portfolios against losses before seeking gains; or bodybuilders should prevent muscle loss before adding lean mass. No matter what you’re doing, the best way to grow is to first prevent losses. Think of it this way: If you've got a leaky bucket, you're better off fixing the leak before pouring water in the top. For those of you who prefer numbers: If you start with a portfolio worth $100 and lose 50%, you now need to earn 100% to breakeven. This principle, of course, also extends to learning.

Why Retention?

Do you sometimes come across a profound highlight in your Daily Readwise that makes you wish that book were resurfaced more? Good news! You can instruct Readwise to "Show this book more often" by clicking the down arrow in the upper right corner of the web app (you can also use the keyboard shortcut: +). Going forward, the probability this book is resurfaced will be increased. You can tell Readwise to "Show this book less often" (keyboard shortcut: -) or even "Never show this book again" too.

In-Line Book Tuning

Is there a particular book that pops up a little too frequently in your Daily Readwises? Or maybe there's a book that you wish you saw more often? You can increase or decrease the frequencies of each book or article using a feature called "tuning". Simply select the [Preferences](https://readwise.io/preferences) menu from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard) and toggle the Customize Books or Customize Articles option. For users with many books, this is one of the most powerful features in Readwise. Pro tip: You can also increase or decrease the frequency of a particular book conveniently during your Daily Readwise.

Book Tuning

It's not uncommon for a Readwise user to have more than 10,000 highlights in his or her catalog. If this user reviews 10 highlights per Daily Readwise, it'd take nearly three years to go through them all (assuming no new highlights during that time!). Because of this, we've built a "resurfacing algorithm" which tries to show you the "right highlight at the right time" kind of like Spotify trying to serve up daily mixes based on your listening history. The Readwise algorithm also enables you to take control and manually "tune" many of its settings. You can do this by selecting the [Preferences](https://readwise.io/preferences) menu from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard) and toggling the various settings.

Readwise Resurfacing Algorithm

The Readwise web app has two views which we call "Scroll Mode" and "Review Mode". Scroll Mode displays highlights vertically. This is great for quick scanning, juxtaposing highlights, or Cmd/Ctrl + Fing with a search term. Review Mode displays highlights one at a time in a horizontal view. This is great for focusing all your attention on a single passage and taking actions, such as tagging, noting, or spaced repetition, before moving on to the next. You can switch between these views by toggling the button in the upper right corner of the Readwise web app or using the keyboard shortcut ll.

Scroll Mode versus Review Mode

Advanced Usage

Bonus Highlight

One of the nice things about having all your highlights synchronized in a single repository is that it's easy to retrieve the excerpt you're looking for. You can hunt for a particular highlight by browsing the particular [Book](https://readwise.io/library) or [Article](https://readwise.io/articles), by using your [Tags](https://readwise.io/tags), or, of course, by using good old fashioned search. A search box is displayed in the upper right corner of most Readwise screens. Alternatively, you can go to the [Search](https://readwise.io/search) page to query your entire Readwise catalog.

Searching

Readwise is built for power readers so the web app has been designed for power users. This means, of course, that we have all kinds of keyboard shortcuts. There's not enough room to list them all here, but almost all shortcuts are discoverable if you hover over an action in the web app.

Using Keyboard Shortcuts in the Web App

The first time you see a highlight resurfaced in Readwise, it will have a blue dot in the upper left corner. This indicates that the highlight is still "unprocessed" similar to an unread email. Once you read the highlight or perform an action, the highlight will then be considered "processed". This is helpful for readers wishing to systematically review all their highlights, either in whole or for particular books. You can also mouseover the dot to see additional data, such as when you originally took the highlight.

Processing Highlights

Many times a highlight resurfaced in Readwise will not be enough. You'll want to return to the highlight in the context of the book or article. You can automatically launch the Kindle app (assuming it's installed) and open the book to the appropriate location by clicking the down arrow in the upper right of each highlight and selecting "Open this book in Kindle". Note: Due technical limitations, this only works on desktop (not mobile) and only from the web app (not email).

Opening in Kindle App

Want to quickly copy and paste a highlight for use elsewhere? Perhaps in an article you're writing, a Slack discussion, or a Twitter debate? Simply click the down arrow in the upper right of each highlight and select "Copy highlight text". Pro tip: You can also use the keyboard shortcuts cc and cx to copy a highlight to the clipboard.

Copying Highlight to Clipboard

It's easy to share particularly salient highlights on Twitter and Facebook through Readwise. Simply click the Share link underneath the noteworthy highlight in the Readwise Email or click the share icon in the Readwise web app and follow the instructions from there. (Pro tip: you can also use the keyboard shortcut s). Readwise will generate a "text shot" (an image as opposed to text) to which you can add your own commentary. We recommend tagging the original author to give him or her a little boost as well.

Sharing to Twitter or Facebook

We highly recommend taking notes alongside your highlights. After all, the best way to read between the lines is to write between the lines. Any notes you take in Kindle, iBooks, Instapaper, and elsewhere will be automatically imported to Readwise and attached to the respective highlight. You can edit this note in the Readwise web app by clicking the note icon, clicking into the body of the note itself, or using the keyboard shortcut n. Of course, you can also add notes to any highlight that doesn't have one already.

Noting

Tags are a great way to organize your highlights by topic, keyword, or a variety of other use cases. You tag in the Readwise Email by clicking the Tag link underneath each highlight. You tag in the Readwise web app by clicking "Add tags" or using the keyboard shortcut t. You can then browse highlights on a tag-by-tag basis by selecting [Tags](https://readwise.io/tags) from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard). (You can also add tags while you read using a special Readwise feature called [Inline Tagging](https://blog.readwise.io/tag-your-highlights-while-you-read/)!)

Tagging

Let's be honest: Many of our highlights are not so good. Maybe we highlighted a fragment because of Kindle's annoying refresh rate. Maybe we highlighted a passage that made sense in the moment, but makes no sense now. Either way, if Readwise resurfaces a highlight that's unlikely to have any future value to you, you should "discard" it. You discard in the Readwise Email by clicking the Discard link underneath each highlight. You discard in the Readwise web app by clicking the Discard button or using the keyboard shortcut d. Note: Discarded highlights are not permanently deleted. You can retrieve them any time by selecting [Discards](https://readwise.io/discards) from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard).

Discarding

If you see a highlight your particularly love and/or you'd like to make easily retrievable, you can "favorite" it. You favorite in the Readwise Email by clicking the Favorite link underneath each highlight. You favorite in the Readwise web app by clicking the heart icon or using the keyboard shortcut f. You can view all these favorited highlights at any time by selecting [Favorites](https://readwise.io/favorites) from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard). Note: Once you have enough, you'll start receiving a special Daily Readwise on Sundays comprised only of your favorite highlights.

Favoriting

Basic Features

Many of us have books in our library that we never want to see again. Maybe the book no longer relevant to our lives. Or maybe you and your significant other share a Kindle account. Either way, it's easy to disable whole books from being resurfaced in Readwise. Simply go to [Books](https://readwise.io/library) from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard) and click the down arrow for the book you no longer wish to see. Then move the frequency slider to "Never". You can also conveniently disable a book during a Daily Readwise by selecting the down arrow in the upper right of the web app and clicking "Never show me this book again".

Disabling Books

Have you been reading and highlighting on Kindle for years? I know I have. During that time, my interests have gone from real estate investing, to securities analysis, to sailing, to Stoicism, to startups, and beyond. It's safe to say that what I was interested in six years is hardly what I'm interested in now. If that's the case for you too, you can bias the Daily Readwise towards more recently taken highlights by selecting the [Preferences](https://readwise.io/preferences) menu from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard) and toggling the Highlight Recency option. You'll still see your old highlights: just less often than new highlights. (You can use Highlight Recency to bias towards old highlights too.)

Highlight Recency

Change the Number of Paper or Audiobook Highlights

By default, you're set to receive five (5) of your highlights per Daily Readwise. For many users, this is the optimal setting. If it's not ideal for you, you can easily increase or decrease the number of highlights by selecting the [Preferences](https://readwise.io/preferences) menu from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard) and toggling the Highlights Per Day option.

Change the Number of Daily Readwise Highlights

By default, you're set to receive your Daily Readwise email in the morning at 8:00 AM Eastern Time. For many users, this might be perfect. If you're in a different time zone, or if Readwise fits better into a different part of your daily routine, you can easily change this send time by selecting the [Preferences](https://readwise.io/preferences) menu from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard) and toggling the Email Send Time option.

Customize Email Send Time

All of us go through periods of extreme busyness from time to time. During those times, it can be a little overwhelming to watch emails pile up in your inbox. To account for this, Readwise will automatically downgrade your frequency if you're unable to read the emails. First from every day to every other day, then from every other day to every week. It works the same in reverse. Once you start reading your emails again, your frequency will be automatically upgraded.

Automatic Email Frequency Adjustment

By default, you'll receive a Daily Readwise email once per day. You can change this preference to be every other day, weekly, or never by selecting [Preferences](https://readwise.io/preferences) menu from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard) and toggling the Email Frequency option.

Change Email Frequency

Customizing Readwise

If you have a bunch of highlights from a random source, such as an obscure reading or note-taking app, and that source lets you export your annotations in CSV format, you can easily import those into your Readwise account in one fell swoop. You can do this by selecting [Bulk Import](https://readwise.io/import_bulk) from the [Add Highlights](https://readwise.io/sync) menu and following the instructions from there to properly format your file.

CSV Import

As software designed specifically for nonfiction power readers, you'd think we'd dogmatically eschew all forms of social media. Not true! We believe that Twitter, used judiciously, can be a profound source of wisdom, rife with deep thoughts worthy of revisiting, just like a profound highlight from a good book. You can connect your Readwise account to Twitter by selecting the [Add Highlights](https://readwise.io/sync) menu from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard) and clicking the [Twitter](https://readwise.io/twitter_start) link.

Twitter

There are two ways you can start using Readwise with paper or audiobooks. The first is to add those titles to a special shelf in Readwise by clicking [Paper or Audiobooks](https://readwise.io/quick) from the [Add Highlights](https://readwise.io/sync) menu. You'll then start receiving the most popular highlights from those books as part of your Daily Readwise. The second way is to manually add highlights to Readwise by typing or pasting them in. You can do this by selecting [Freeform Input](https://readwise.io/import_freeform) from the [Add Highlights](https://readwise.io/sync) menu.

Freeform

Readwise isn't limited to just books. You can also use it with highlights from articles. There are myriad apps out there, but one of the most popular is Pocket. To connect your Pocket account select the [Add Highlights](https://readwise.io/sync) menu from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard) and click on the [Pocket](https://readwise.io/pocket) link.

Pocket

Readwise isn't limited to just books. You can also use it with highlights from articles. There are myriad apps out there, but our favorite by far is Instapaper. The Instapaper reading experience is silky smooth and they offer an API which we can use to seamlessly synchronize with Readwise every highlight you take. To connect your Instapaper account select the [Add Highlights](https://readwise.io/sync) menu from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard) and click on the [Instapaper](https://readwise.io/instapaper) link.

Instapaper

Any time you highlight a book or document that was manually loaded onto your Kindle device (rather than purchased directly from Amazon), that highlight is saved to a local text file called My Clippings.txt. You can upload this file to Readwise to add all those highlights from sideloaded documents to your account. Upload My Clippings.txt by selecting the [Add Highlights](https://readwise.io/sync) menu from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard) and clicking on the [My Clippings](https://readwise.io/import_clippings) link.

My Clippings.txt

Consistently revisiting the best part of our ebooks is great, but how can we do the same for paper and audiobooks? At first, we didn't have a solution for these books. Now we do. You can add paper and audiobooks to a special shelf in Readwise. After doing so, you'll start receiving their most popular passages as part of your Daily Readwise (provided we have enough data). It's not the same as revisiting your own highlights, but it's surprisingly close! You can add those books by selecting the [Add Highlights](https://readwise.io/sync) menu from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard) and clicking on the [Paper or Audiobooks](https://readwise.io/quick) link.

Paper and Audiobooks

Even though Amazon Kindle commands a staggering share of the ebook market (some reports suggest north of 90%!), Readwise also supports highlights from Apple iBooks. You can synchronize your iBooks highlights by selecting the [Add Highlights](https://readwise.io/sync) menu from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard) and clicking on the [iBooks](https://readwise.io/ibooks) link. You'll need to follow the instructions from there.

iBooks

If you don't use Chrome or Firefox with the Readwise extension installed, you'll need to manually "resync" your Kindle highlights from time to time. You can manually resync by selecting [Add Highlights](https://readwise.io/sync) from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard) and clicking on the Amazon Kindle icon from a desktop computer. Readwise will also send you a friendly reminder every 45 days without resyncing in case you forget.

Manually Syncing Kindle

Any time you highlight a Kindle book purchased directly from Amazon, that highlight will be synchronized in the Amazon cloud (provided your device is connected to the internet). The Readwise browser extension retrieves those highlights and saves them in your Readwise account. So long as you use Chrome or Firefox with the Readwise extension installed, Readwise will continuously synchronize with Amazon in the background. If you don't use Chrome or Firefox with the Readwise extension, you'll need to manually resync your Kindle highlights from time to time.

How Kindle Syncing Works

Synchronizing Your Data

Some people ask us why we've decided to bootstrap Readwise through revenues rather than raise venture capital. It's a complicated answer to a complicated question, but long story short, we concluded that bootstrapping would better enable us to focus on our small niche market of "nonfiction power readers" rather than casual readers. You can read more about this decision here: [Why We're Bootstrapping Readwise](https://blog.readwise.io/why-were-bootstrapping-readwise/).

Bootstrapping

Many people ask us about how Readwise got started. It began in 2016 when [Tristan Homsi](https://twitter.com/homsiT) and [Daniel Doyon](https://twitter.com/deadly_onion) connected through an obscure comment about reading lists on Hacker News and subsequently bonded over a mutual interest in so-called "reading tech". One thing led to another and they decided to collaborate on an MVP, which launched in May 2017. Readwise has organically evolved ever since.

About Us

Most of our growth to date has come from users like you generously spreading the word. If you plan to share Readwise with your friends or family, be sure to invite them using your custom-generated [invite link](https://readwise.io/invite). This way both you and your friend will get an extra free month of Readwise! You can find your invite link and the status of any referrals here: [Invite Friends to Readwise](https://readwise.io/invite).

Invite Friends

Readwise offers a native mobile app for both iOS and Android. The mobile app does everything the web app can do and more. Among other things, the mobile app enables you to "highlight" physical books using your phone's camera (OCR). On iOS, you can also install a widget that rotates different highlights on your home screen throughout the day. You can find links to each platform here: [Readwise Mobile Apps](https://readwise.io/homescreen).

Installing the Readwise Mobile App

The [Account Settings](https://readwise.io/preferences/account) menu (navigable from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard)) is where you can modify your subscription, update your billing info, export all your data, and delete your account. Note: If you delete your account, every bit of your data will be permanently wiped from our servers and cannot be recovered.

Account Settings

You can easily view all your highlights on an article-by-article basis (assuming you've connected Instapaper, Highly, or Medium to your account) by selecting [Articles](https://readwise.io/articles) from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard). Just like the [Books](https://readwise.io/library) view, you can see statistics for each article such as how many highlights you've taken and the date of your last highlight, and you can perform actions such as increasing or decreasing the frequency of seeing a particular article in your [Daily Readwise](https://readwise.io/dailyreview).

Articles (Library)

While the cornerstone of Readwise is the Daily Readwise, which makes it fun and easy to consistently review the best parts of what you've read, many of our users also like to review all their highlights from a single book in chronological order. Doing so shortly after having finished is one of the best ways we know to solidify all your takeaways from that book. If you have too many highlights to "process" a book in one sitting, Readwise remembers where you left off so you can pick up the process in a future session.

Book or Article Review (Library)

You can easily view all your highlights on a book-by-book basis by selecting [Books](https://readwise.io/library) from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard). From the [Books](https://readwise.io/library) view, you can see statistics for each book such as how many highlights you've taken and the date of your last highlight, and you can perform actions such as increasing or decreasing the frequency of seeing a particular book in your [Daily Readwise](https://readwise.io/dailyreview).

Books (Library)

The [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard) is the command center of your Readwise experience. From here, you can access your [Daily Readwise](https://readwise.io/dailyreview), add more highlight sources (such as Kindle, iBooks, and Instapaper), view highlights by book or article, customize your [Preferences](https://readwise.io/preferences), [Search](https://readwise.io/search), and more. To get to your Dashboard, simply click the Readwise logo in the upper left corner of the web app or click this link: [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard).

Readwise Dashboard

Readwise makes it fun and easy to review and retain the best parts of what you've read. It does this two ways. The first is the Readwise Email, which is intended for casual consumption, perhaps while drinking your morning coffee or riding the train into work. The second is the Readwise web app, which is intended to enable active engagement, for example tagging and taking notes. You can use the web app by clicking the banner at the top of each Readwise Email or by clicking [Daily Readwise](https://readwise.io/dailyreview) from the [Readwise Dashboard](https://readwise.io/dashboard) at any time.

Daily Readwise in Email & Web App

What is this book _How to Use Readwise_? It's our version of a user manual explaining how to get the most out of Readwise. These highlights will be resurfaced like those from any other book, meaning you can perform all the standard actions: you can make particular highlights appear more or less often; you can favorite and discard; and so on. We sincerely hope these tips help you get more out of Readwise! If not, you can disable this book from resurfacing at any time.

Introduction

Getting to Know Readwise

A MANAGER’S JOB IS TO . build a team that works well together, support members in reaching their career goals, and create processes to get work done smoothly and efficiently.

To manage people well, you must develop trusting relationships with them, understand their strengths and weaknesses (as well as your own), make good decisions about who should do what (including hiring and firing when necessary), and coach individuals to do their best.

For managers, important processes to master include running effective meetings, future proofing against past mistakes, planning for tomorrow, and nurturing a healthy culture.

Good design at its core is about understanding people and their needs in order to create the best possible tools for them. I’m drawn to design for a lot of the same reasons that I’m drawn to management—it feels like a deeply human endeavor to empower others.

Cover and Move, Simple, Prioritize and Execute, and Decentralized Command.

If an individual on the team is not performing at the level required for the team to succeed, the leader must train and mentor that underperformer. But if the underperformer continually fails to meet standards, then a leader who exercises Extreme Ownership must be loyal to the team and the mission above any individual. If underperformers cannot improve, the leader must make the tough call to terminate them and hire others who can get the job done. It is all on the leader.

The greatest of these was the recognition that leadership is the most important factor on the battlefield, the single greatest reason behind the success of any team.

Extreme Ownership. Leaders must own everything in their world. There is no one else to blame.

Ego clouds and disrupts everything: the planning process, the ability to take good advice, and the ability to accept constructive criticism. It can even stifle someone’s sense of self-preservation. Often, the most difficult ego to deal with is your own.

We learned that leadership requires belief in the mission and unyielding perseverance to achieve victory, particularly when doubters question whether victory is even possible.

If your boss isn’t making a decision in a timely manner or providing necessary support for you and your team, don’t blame the boss. First, blame yourself. Examine what you can do to better convey the critical information for decisions to be made and support allocated.

For this reason, they must believe in the cause for which they are fighting. They must believe in the plan they are asked to execute, and most important, they must believe in and trust the leader they are asked to follow.

“A king fortifies himself with a castle,” observed the Count, “a gentleman with a desk.”

He had said that our lives are steered by uncertainties, many of which are disruptive or even daunting; but that if we persevere and remain generous of heart, we may be granted a moment of supreme lucidity—a moment in which all that has happened to us suddenly comes into focus as a necessary course of events, even as we find ourselves on the threshold of a bold new life that we had been meant to lead all along.

“The principle here is that a new generation owes a measure of thanks to every member of the previous generation. Our elders planted fields and fought in wars; they advanced the arts and sciences, and generally made sacrifices on our behalf. So by their efforts, however humble, they have earned a measure of our gratitude and respect.”

But imagining what might happen if one’s circumstances were different was the only sure route to madness.

That sense of loss is exactly what we must anticipate, prepare for, and cherish to the last of our days; for it is only our heartbreak that finally refutes all that is ephemeral in love.

For what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.”

By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.

This fact alone virtually guaranteed technological tyranny, which was perpetuated not by the technology itself but by the ignorance of everyone who used it daily and yet failed to understand it. To refuse to inform yourself about the basic operation and maintenance of the equipment you depended on was to passively accept that tyranny and agree to its terms: when your equipment works, you’ll work, but when your equipment breaks down you’ll break down, too. Your possessions would possess you.

This was the beginning of surveillance capitalism, and the end of the Internet as I knew it.

There is no turning back, only going forward—for Mario and Luigi, for me, and for you. Life only scrolls in one direction, which is the direction of time, and no matter how far we might manage to go, that invisible wall will always be just behind us, cutting us off from the past, compelling us on into the unknown.

We can’t erase the things that shame us, or the ways we’ve shamed ourselves, online. All we can do is control our reactions—whether we let the past oppress us, or accept its lessons, grow, and move on.

The attempts by elected officials to delegitimize journalism have been aided and abetted by a full-on assault on the principle of truth. What is real is being purposefully conflated with what is fake, through technologies that are capable of scaling that conflation into unprecedented global confusion.

You should always let people underestimate you. Because when people misappraise your intelligence and abilities, they’re merely pointing out their own vulnerabilities—the gaping holes in their judgment that need to stay open if you want to cartwheel through later on a flaming horse, correcting the record with your sword of justice.

Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality…and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

Don’t go where it’s crowded. Go where it’s empty. Even though it’s harder to get there, that’s where you belong and where there’s less competition.

I made sure nothing else interfered. Not recreation, not my job, not travel, not girls, not organizing the Mr. Europe contest. I took time for all those things, of course, but my first priority remained working out a hard four or five hours per day, six days per week.

I never felt that I was good enough, strong enough, smart enough. He let me know that there was always room for improvement. A lot of sons would have been crippled by his demands, but instead the discipline rubbed off on me. I turned it into drive.

Stay hungry. Be hungry for success, hungry to make your mark, hungry to be seen and to be heard and to have an effect. And as you move up and become successful, make sure also to be hungry for helping others.

To be successful, however, you must be brutal with yourself and focus on the flaws. That’s when your eye, your honesty, and your ability to listen to others come in. Bodybuilders who are blind to themselves or deaf to others usually fall behind.

When I wanted to know more about business and politics, I used the same approach I did when I wanted to learn about acting: I got to know as many people as I could who were really good at it.

It might seem like I was handcuffing myself by setting such specific goals, but it was actually just the opposite: I found it liberating. Knowing exactly where I wanted to end up freed me totally to improvise how to get there.

The Don considered a use of threats the most foolish kind of exposure; the unleashing of anger without forethought as the most dangerous indulgence. No one had ever heard the Don utter a naked threat, no one had ever seen him in an uncontrollable rage. It was unthinkable. And so he tried to teach Sonny his own disciplines. He claimed that there was no greater natural advantage in life than having an enemy overestimate your faults, unless it was to have a friend underestimate your virtues.

Lawyers can steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks.”

He had long ago learned that society imposes insults that must be borne, comforted by the knowledge that in this world there comes a time when the most humble of men, if he keeps his eyes open, can take his revenge on the most powerful. It was this knowledge that prevented the Don from losing the humility all his friends admired in him.

You let women dictate your actions and they are not competent in this world, though certainly they will be saints in heaven while we men burn in hell.

“Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than government. It is almost the equal of family. Never forget that. If you had built up a wall of friendships you wouldn’t have to ask me to help.

Cultivating judgment about the difference between virtue and vice is the beginning of wisdom, something that can never be out of date.

Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it. Ideologues are people who pretend they know how to “make the world a better place” before they’ve taken care of their own chaos within.

So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.

“Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

“Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.”

The problem is that extraordinary performance comes only from correct nonconsensus forecasts, but nonconsensus forecasts are hard to make, hard to make correctly and hard to act on.

Second-level thinkers know that, to achieve superior results, they have to have an edge in either information or analysis, or both. They are on the alert for instances of misperception. My son Andrew is a budding investor, and he comes up with lots of appealing investment ideas based on today’s facts and the outlook for tomorrow. But he’s been well trained. His first test is always the same: “And who doesn’t know that?”

The error is clear. The herd applies optimism at the top and pessimism at the bottom. Thus, to benefit, we must be skeptical of the optimism that thrives at the top, and skeptical of the pessimism that prevails at the bottom.

Risk control is the best route to loss avoidance. Risk avoidance, on the other hand, is likely to lead to return avoidance as well.

Rule number one: most things will prove to be cyclical. • Rule number two: some of the greatest opportunities for gain and loss come when other people forget rule number one.

“Experience is what you got when you didn’t get what you wanted.” Good times teach only bad lessons: that investing is easy, that you know its secrets, and that you needn’t worry about risk. The most valuable lessons are learned in tough times.

“There’s a big difference between probability and outcome. Probable things fail to happen—and improbable things happen—all the time.” That’s one of the most important things you can know about investment risk.

The key turning point in my investment management career came when I concluded that because the notion of market efficiency has relevance, I should limit my efforts to relatively inefficient markets where hard work and skill would pay off best.

I desire you as deeply as I ever have, but I understand that the fervor of a desire is irrelevant to its justice.

Maybe the one real advantage to getting older is that you have the time to pull your head a little bit farther out of your ass.

“He said that life boils down to standing in line to get shit dropped on your head. Everyone’s got a place in the queue, you can’t get out of it, and just when you start to congratulate yourself on surviving your dose of shit, you discover that the line is actually circular.”

“Chains used to claim that there’s no freedom quite like the freedom of being constantly underestimated,”

THE LAST Mistake was a place where the underworld of Camorr bubbled to the surface; a flat-out crook’s tavern, where Right People of every sort could drink and speak freely of their business, where respectable citizens stood out like serpents in a nursery and were quickly escorted out the door by mean-looking, thick-armed men with very small imaginations.

“When you don’t know everything you could know, it’s a fine time to shut your fucking noisemaker and be polite.”

Better to be a mystery, in his book, than to make a cheap refrain of something that had caught her attention.

‘Difficult’ and ‘impossible’ are cousins often mistaken for one another, with very little in common.”

“I’m getting a bit annoyed,” said Locke, “with those who praise our previous escapades as an excuse for forcing us into even riskier ones.

So this is what a command is. Staring consequences in the eye and pretending not to flinch.

The real magic of the Sinspire was woven from its capricious exclusivity; deny something to enough people and sooner or later it will grow a mystique as thick as fog.

“If I have offended you, madam—I would unsay what I said, or undo what I did.” The briefest hesitation, just the thing for conveying sincerity. The trustiest tool in his verbal kit. “I would do it the moment you told me how, if you only gave me the chance.”

“People in their right minds never take pride in their talents,” said Miss Maudie.

The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

There are just some kind of men who—who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

Value Creation. Discovering what people need or want, then creating it. Attracting attention and building demand for what you’ve created. Turning prospective customers into paying customers. Value Delivery. Giving your customers what you’ve promised and ensuring that they’re satisfied. Bringing in enough money to keep going and make your effort worthwhile.

The trick is to find an attractive market that interests you enough to keep you improving your offering every single day.

Learn everything you can from your competition, and then create something even more valuable.

The essence of effective marketing is discovering what people already want, then presenting your offer in a way that intersects with that preexisting Desire.

As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

Every successful business (1) creates or provides something of value that (2) other people want or need (3) at a price they’re willing to pay, in a way that (4) satisfies the purchaser’s needs and expectations and (5) provides the business sufficient revenue to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue operation.

Your primary desire, says Epictetus, should be your desire not to be frustrated by forming desires you won’t be able to fulfill.

Hedonic adaptation has the power to extinguish our enjoyment of the world. Because of adaptation, we take our life and what we have for granted rather than delighting in them. Negative visualization, though, is a powerful antidote to hedonic adaptation. By consciously thinking about the loss of what we have, we can regain our appreciation of it, and with this regained appreciation we can revitalize our capacity for joy.

Throughout the millennia and across cultures, those who have thought carefully about desire have drawn the conclusion that spending our days working to get whatever it is we find ourselves wanting is unlikely to bring us either happiness or tranquility.

Negative visualization, in other words, teaches us to embrace whatever life we happen to be living and to extract every bit of delight we can from it. But it simultaneously teaches us to prepare ourselves for changes that will deprive us of the things that delight us. It teaches us, in other words, to enjoy what we have without clinging to it.

Stoic tranquility was a psychological state marked by the absence of negative emotions, such as grief, anger, and anxiety, and the presence of positive emotions, such as joy.

One key to happiness, then, is to forestall the adaptation process: We need to take steps to prevent ourselves from taking for granted, once we get them, the things we worked so hard to get.

For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.

“And that,” put in the Director sententiously, “that is the secret of happiness and virtue—liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.”

‘He who is brave and patient enough to peer into the darkness his whole life will be first to see a flicker of light in it.’

Could anyone who had never seen stars possibly imagine what infinity is, when, most likely, the very concept of infinity first appeared among humans inspired, once upon a time, by the nocturnal vault of the heavens? Millions of shining lights, silver nails driven into a dome of dark blue velvet .

“Pray for miracles, but plant cabbages.”

Arrogance was the vice of good leaders.

He was the worst kind of Christian, Philip realized: he embraced all of the negatives, enforced every proscription, insisted on all forms of denial, and demanded strict punishment for every offense; yet he ignored all the compassion of Christianity, denied its mercy, flagrantly disobeyed its ethic of love, and openly flouted the gentle laws of Jesus. That’s what the Pharisees were like, Philip thought; no wonder the Lord preferred to eat with publicans and sinners.

The power of a king was not absolute, after all: it could be restrained by the will of the people.

How terrible, Jack thought, to be old and know that your life has been wasted.

“When you’re thinking, please remember this: excessive pride is a familiar sin, but a man may just as easily frustrate the will of God through excessive humility.”

He had to learn that those who treated him in a hostile way did so out of weakness. He saw the hostility and reacted angrily, instead of seeing the weakness and giving reassurance.

Rule of thumb: Learning about a customer and their problems works better as a quick and casual chat than a long, formal meeting.

Rule of thumb: You should be terrified of at least one of the questions you’re asking in every conversation.

With the exception of industry experts who have built very similar businesses, opinions are worthless. You want facts and commitments, not compliments.

Every time you talk to someone, you should be asking at least one question which has the potential to destroy your currently imagined business.

While using generics, people describe themselves as who they want to be, not who they actually are. You need to get specific to bring out the edge cases.

If you just avoid mentioning your idea, you automatically start asking better questions. Doing this is the easiest (and biggest) improvement you can make to your customer conversations.

Rule of thumb: If they haven't looked for ways of solving it already, they're not going to look for (or buy) yours.

It boils down to this: you aren’t allowed to tell them what their problem is, and in return, they aren’t allowed to tell you what to build. They own the problem, you own the solution.

Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set before them as their goal—such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength of many of them.

As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.

And one might wonder what there was in a love that had to be so watched over, what a love could be worth that needed such strenuous guarding.

He became especially fond of the younger, Alexey, who lived for a long while as one of his family. I beg the reader to note this from the beginning.

“From my conviction—my impression. Because Smerdyakov is a man of the most abject character and a coward. He's not a coward, he's the epitome of all the cowardice in the world walking on two legs. He has the heart of a chicken.

For the secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go [pg 280] on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance.

“Mitya, don't give me any more wine—if I ask you, don't give it to me. Wine doesn't give peace. Everything's going round, the stove, and everything. I want to dance. Let every one see how I dance ... let them see how beautifully I dance....”

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”

The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement.

In my opinion it’s very important for central banks to target debt growth with an eye toward keeping it at a sustainable level—i.e., at a level where the growth in income is likely to be large enough to service the debts regardless of what credit is used to buy.

A key reason the long-term debt cycle can be sustained for so long is that central banks progressively lower interest rates, which raises asset prices and, in turn, people’s wealth, because of the present value effect that lowering interest rates has on asset prices.

Generally speaking, because credit creates both spending power and debt, whether or not more credit is desirable depends on whether the borrowed money is used productively enough to generate sufficient income to service the debt.

This type of cycle—where a strong growth upswing driven by debt-financed real estate, fixed investment, and infrastructure spending is followed by a downswing driven by a debt-challenged slowdown in demand—is very typical of emerging economies because they have so much building to do.

Credit is the giving of buying power. This buying power is granted in exchange for a promise to pay it back, which is debt.

While policy makers generally try to get it right, more often than not they err on the side of being too loose with credit because the near-term rewards (faster growth) seem to justify it. It is also politically easier to allow easy credit (e.g., by providing guarantees, easing monetary policies) than to have tight credit. That is the main reason we see big debt cycles.

Typically debt crises occur because debt and debt service costs rise faster than the incomes that are needed to service them, causing a deleveraging.

Economies whose growth is significantly supported by debt-financed building of fixed investments, real estate, and infrastructure are particularly susceptible to large cyclical swings because the fast rates of building those long-lived assets are not sustainable.

One classic warning sign that a bubble is coming is when an increasing amount of money is being borrowed to make debt service payments, which of course compounds the borrowers’ indebtedness.

He has made peace with the idea that part of life is facing your failures, and sometimes those failures are people you once loved.

We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.”

Ethical leaders choose a higher loyalty to those core values over their own personal gain.

I saw in Dick kindness and toughness, confidence and humility. It would take me decades to realize that those pairs were the bedrock of great leadership.

Ethical leaders do not run from criticism, especially self-criticism, and they don’t hide from uncomfortable questions. They welcome them.

We would teach that great leaders are (1) people of integrity and decency; (2) confident enough to be humble; (3) both kind and tough; (4) transparent; and (5) aware that we all seek meaning in work. We would also teach them that (6) what they say is important, but what they do is far more important, because their people are always watching them. In short, we would demand and develop ethical leaders.

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

Doubt, I’ve learned, is wisdom. And the older I get, the less I know for certain. Those leaders who never think they are wrong, who never question their judgments or perspectives, are a danger to the organizations and people they lead. In some cases, they are a danger to the nation and the world.

A commitment to integrity and a higher loyalty to truth are what separate the ethical leader from those who just happen to occupy leadership roles. We cannot ignore the difference.

Theranos had cleverly played on this insecurity. As a result, Walgreens suffered from a severe case of FoMO—the fear of missing out.

“When you strike at the king, you must kill him.” Todd Surdey and Michael Esquivel had struck at the king, or rather the queen. But she’d survived.

So the only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.

“If there is any one secret of success,” said Henry Ford, “it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. “To know all is to forgive all.”

It made Ender listen more carefully to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise.

“Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you.

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.

“This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe, and those we never think to question.

Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him.

In essence what relativity says is that space and time are not absolute, but relative to both the observer and to the thing being observed, and the faster one moves the more pronounced these effects become. We can never accelerate ourselves to the speed of light, and the harder we try (and faster we go) the more distorted we will become, relative to an outside observer.

The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh 200 billion pounds.

For the first 99.99999 percent of our history as organisms, we were in the same ancestral line as chimpanzees. Virtually nothing is known about the prehistory of chimpanzees, but whatever they were, we were. Then about seven million years ago something major happened. A group of new beings emerged from the tropical forests of Africa and began to move about on the open savanna.

When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.

In any major crisis, what you do in the first few hours defines it forever.

It bears mentioning that in Russia there is no respect for the individual and his or her rights. People can be sacrificed for the needs of the state, used as shields, trading chips, or even simple fodder. If necessary, anyone can disappear. A famous expression of Stalin’s drives right to the point: “If there is no man, there is no problem.”

Instead of 150 million Russians sharing the spoils of mass privatization, Russia wound up with twenty-two oligarchs owning 39 percent of the economy and everyone else living in poverty.

With the brakes off, the oligarchs embarked on an orgy of stealing. The tools they used were many and with no law enforcement to stop them, their imaginations ran wild. They engaged in asset stripping, dilutions, transfer pricing, and embezzlement, to name but a few of their tricks.

‘There’s no such thing as a mistake,’ said Jack, remembering what Sensei Yamada had once said when he himself had needed a second chance. ‘As long as you learn from it, then it’s a lesson.’

‘I’ve always believed, a child is not a vase to be filled but a fire to be lit,’

‘Haiku is a keen observation of the world around you,’ she lectured. ‘A great haiku verse should pin the moment; express the timelessness of it.’

A nation that draws too broad a difference between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools!’

‘When a friend asks you, “What is it?”, “What’s the matter?” or even “What made you smile?”, haiku is the answer to that “what?”,’ she explained. ‘You cannot share your feelings with others unless you show the cause of those feelings. Haiku is about sharing the moment.

‘Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.

‘I know not how to defeat others, I only know how to win over myself,’ he whispered, drawing them closer with his words. ‘The real and most dangerous opponents we face in life are fear, anger, confusion, doubt and despair. If we overcome those enemies that attack us from within, we can attain a true victory over any attack from without.’

‘Death is not the biggest fear you should have. Your biggest fear is taking the risk to be truly alive.

‘The fifth “View” is natural wisdom. When one is calm, undisturbed and at peace, things can be seen in their true light. This naturally leads to the development of wisdom.’

‘The third “View” is to soothe the spirit. Let go of any trivial thoughts, distracting emotions or mental irritations. Imagine they are snow in your mind. Let them all gradually melt away.’

‘The fourth “View” is fulfilment. As your worldly thoughts dissipate, begin to fill your body with ki. Envisage yourself as an empty vessel. Pour in your spiritual energy as if it were honey. Let it fill you from the bottom of your feet to the top of your head.’

The boy sold what people called library candy, made from tearing the covers off of books, peeling off the binding glue, boiling it down, and reforming it into bars you could wrap in paper. The stuff tasted like wax, but there was protein in the glue, protein kept you alive, and the city’s books were disappearing like the pigeons.

Kolya seemed fearless, but everyone has fear in them somewhere; fear is part of our inheritance. Aren’t we descended from timid little shrews who cowered in the shadows while the great beasts stomped past? Cannibals and Nazis didn’t make Kolya nervous, but the threat of embarrassment did—the possibility that a stranger might laugh at the lines he’d written.

Heroes and fast sleepers, then, can switch off their thoughts when necessary. Cowards and insomniacs, my people, are plagued by babble on the brain.

Doing better next time. That’s what life is.”

“Anyone can face ease and success with confidence. It is the way we face trouble and misfortune that defines us. Self-pity goes with selfishness, and there is nothing more to be deplored in a leader than that. Selfishness belongs to children, and to half-wits. A great leader puts others before himself. You would be surprised how acting so makes it easier to bear one’s own troubles. In order to act like a King, one need only treat everyone else like one.”

Above all, he has learned the trick of saying a great deal less than he knows.”

Respect costs you nothing, and nothing gets a man killed quicker than confidence.”

“Suffering is what gives a man strength, my boy, just as the steel most hammered turns out the hardest.”

“Life is a series of things we would rather not do.”

It can be a fearsome weapon, patience. One that few men ever learn to use.

People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.

“Yes, Ferro. Power makes all things right. That is my first law, and my last. That is the only law that I acknowledge.”

“I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes.” Cosca stretched his chin up and scratched at his scabby neck. “The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.”

“No one cares about the past any more,” he whispered. “They don’t see that you can’t have a future without a past.”

“You’ve made some mistakes, but haven’t we all? They’re in the past, and can’t be changed. There’s nothing to be done now except to do better, eh?”

The more you learn, the more you realise how little you know. Still, the struggle itself is worthwhile. Knowledge is the root of power, after all.”

A friendship between a man and a woman was what you called it when one had been pursuing the other for a long time, and had never got anywhere. He had no interest in that arrangement.