We’re wired up to think about the world in simple linear terms, because that’s how most of the things around us work. If you plant one seed, you get one carrot. If you produce one more dongle, you earn one more dollar. Your hair steadily grows by a fraction of a millimetre each day; you don’t just wake up one morning looking like the lovechild of

We've seen that autonomy is a necessary condition for human flourishing, but so are binding constraints. This apparent contradiction is pithily reconciled in an adage attributed to the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Freedom is the power to choose our own chains.”

Let’s go back to Grandpa and his mattress stash. If he invested that original $100, it’d be worth $106 by the end of the first year. It’s pretty hard to get excited about six bucks. But the following year, the investment returns would start accruing on that $6, as well as on the original investment. After three years, he’d be earning returns on top

bid $50, purely for the hell of it. You have no idea what’s in that box either, but you think I must know something, so you bid $100. Now I think you know something, and raise my own bid to $200. A third person enters the gallery, sees the two of us engaged in a heated bidding war over a mysterious box, deduces that we must have information about

We’re not in here to eat mozzarella and go to Tuscany. We’re not in here to accumulate money. We’re in here mostly to sacrifice, to do something. The way you do it is by taking risks. Nassim Taleb

There are two ways to be free: you can either get more money, or require less of it. The first is obvious, but the second doesn’t get enough love. Let's call it ‘fuck-you frugality’.

Good news, everyone! Compounding returns are still a wondrous and beautiful thing. The trick is to build enough momentum to break free from the opposing forces of inflation and taxation. Parking your money in the bank means you’re losing money very safely. It’s talent-in-the-ground behaviour. To beat inflation and tax, you have to move some of your

So the question is not what to cut. Our starting point is that everything gets cut, and has to earn its way back into consideration. The question is: what to load up on? Some people choose to min-max on money: they’re single-mindedly focused on stacking up cash, and are willing to do whatever it takes to get more of it. Others jump on every

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.