We don’t realize that Cleopatra lived closer to our time than she did to the construction of those famous pyramids that marked her kingdom.

Like anything that involves people, seen over a long enough timeline universal issues begin to emerge.

The power of being a student is not just that it is an extended period of instruction, it also places the ego and ambition in someone else’s hands.

It’s the sense of superiority and certainty that exceeds the bounds of confidence and talent.

We know what decisions we must make to avoid that ignominious, even pathetic end: protecting our sobriety, eschewing greed and paranoia, staying humble, retaining our sense of purpose, connecting to the larger world around us.

When we are aspiring we must resist the impulse to reverse engineer success from other people’s stories. When we achieve our own, we must resist the desire to pretend that everything unfolded exactly as we’d planned. There was no grand narrative. You should remember—you were there when it happened.

We have no patience for waiting.

start with a small bet and iteratively scale your ambitions as you go.

it is the sense of our own path and how to stay on it without getting distracted by all the others that intersect it.