the hifi principle: Get high-fidelity (HiFi) information—information that’s close to the source and unfiltered by other people’s biases and interests.

I had the self-confidence that I could figure out what came next without needing to know all the details, the self-knowledge to know that I valued time over money, the self-control to get up the next day without missing a beat, and the self-accountability to set a higher standard for performance than I ever had before.

Self-control is about creating space for reason instead of just blindly following instincts.

The greatest aid to judgment is starting from a good position.

The most valuable people, he continued, weren’t the ones with the best initial ideas, but the ones with the ability to quickly change their minds.

Money is not the only opportunity cost to consider. It’s just the most direct and visible, and for that reason people tend to focus on it. They convince themselves that what’s easy to see is all that matters. But in many cases, the real value to thinking through opportunity costs is to understand the indirect hidden costs. Time is not as easy to se

The changes are too gradual to notice until they’re too large to address.

The quality of what you pursue determines the quality of your life. We think things like money, status, and power will make us happy, but they won’t. The moment we get them, we’re not satisfied. We just want more. The psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell coined a term

As Frederic Maitland purportedly once wrote, “Simplicity is the end result of long, hard work, not the starting point.”