(b) How do you celebrate your small victories?

That steep descent to zero is what I call The Nothingness of Money. It’s when the pointlessness of money is no longer theoretical; it’s truly understood . This delineation is important.It is only when the finiteness of life is glaringly obvious that things change.

And finally, those 20 communities are all part of the larger 500-person community.

When he thinks about it—and he does think about it, sometimes—he wonders whether this is all a mistake and he ended up in the wrong head. Because he can’t help but notice that next to him at all times is a hectic ball of orange fuzz that was living here when he moved in.

Above all, mammoths want to fit in—that’s what tribespeople had always needed to do so that’s how they’re programmed. Mammoths look around at society to figure out what they’re supposed to do, and when it becomes clear, they jump right in.

On the largest scale, we’re all a part of a few vast pan-national cultural clouds—where customs like shaking hands, waving hi, New Year’s Eve, birthdays, card games, sports fandom, and tipping, to name a few, have taken on broadly shared meaning. Each nation is a smaller cloud with its own sub-culture.

The mind’s superiority over the iPhone lies not in its computational power, but in its ability to continue thinking well after it has shut the iPhone down. Thought begets thought, and if you allow it to compound enough, it becomes an engine of innovation that produces all kinds of magical things.

Death illuminates the fact that this very moment is all we really have in this life.

When I encounter a startup with a lame-sounding idea, I ask "What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?" Now it's a puzzle, and the burden is on me to solve it. Sometimes I can't think of an answer, especially when the idea is a made-up one. But it's remarkable how often there does turn out to be an answer. Often it's one the founders themselves h... See more