On the ‘safe’ side, I have some cash for liquidity and emergencies, with the rest of my portfolio invested in the cheapest, broadly diversified index funds I can buy. I don’t try to pick hot stocks, and will never make more (or less) than the average market return. I’ll be holding this portfolio through thick and thin for the next several decades,

It would be absurd to list your fork on Craigslist the moment it hits your empty plate, which is why we need heuristics like the one-year rule: if you haven’t used something in the last 12 months, kick it to the curb. You can adjust this rule in either direction according to how much you value your time, and how much capacity you have to store stuf

Adams calls this strategy the ‘talent stack’. The idea is that you combine two or more skills you’re pretty good at, until no-one else has your exact mix. Since there are an infinite number of permutations, anyone who cultivates broad skills and interests can eventually fuse them into a unique stack.

The average American home contains something like 300,000 items, supplemented by a self-storage industry so vast that every US citizen could comfortably stand beneath its canopy. As Peter Diamandis points out in Abundance, if everyone else took up this lifestyle, we’d need five planets’ worth of resources to pull it off.

In Fig. 4.5, we see what happens when three friends with identical portfolios retire in quick succession: Alice retires in 1973, Bob retires in 1974, and Carol retires in 1975.

The reality is that every dollar you save is going to roughly halve in value 30 years from now—and that’s assuming inflation behaves itself, which is no guarantee. Just ask Zimbabwe.

The single most powerful way to open up your options in life is to a) have more money, or b) require less of it in the first place. The combination of simple tastes and a healthy bank balance buys you a whole lot of freedom.

if you are the owner of a book, you should crack its spine and extract the marrow by any means necessary—dog-ear the pages, scribble all over it, feed it crumbs and coffee stains, sleep with it under your pillow. Reading is an interaction between author and reader, not a passive one-way street.

The same cannot be said of work, or love, or learning. These intentional activities involve effort and engagement, and in return, generate continual fascination and challenge. The best kind of work, study, or play involves a ‘flow’ state of concentration, at the perfect juncture between challenge and resistance. So long as our pursuits are sufficie