The best entrepreneurs are logical enough to think of unpopular truths and then social enough to make those truths popular.

In venture capital and content creation, originality is really, really valued. Whether you call it originality, being disobedient, or being contrarian—the combination of being analytical and not fully obedient has been important.

How Media Gets Us to Mars “Do you want to get to Mars or just write articles about it?” Well, it turns out we are going to have to write articles about Mars—lots of them—to get to Mars. For any technology we want to drive forward, we must own the discourse. Bitcoin taught us this. If you write with more energy and more zeal than opponents,

At each stage of life, I used my current skill and applied it in a new domain to learn another skill. I never started completely at zero; I was always building from a previous skill.

Mortality is the main source of scarcity. If we had more time (or infinite time), we would be less concerned with whether something was faster. The reason speed has value is because time has value; the reason time has value is because human life spans are finite.

Today we have ninety-year-old laws wielded by seventy-year-old people to prevent twenty-somethings from using twenty-first century technology.

Financial independence is also personal and ideological independence. If you have financial independence, the crowd can’t economically cancel you. If you have a financial cushion, which anybody can build by cutting consumption, you can ride out challenges.

When legacy institutions are beyond saving, build something better. And bury them.

The past has all been the prologue. Now I’ve got a canvas to play with. Some people make a bit of money and go sit on the beach. I think of money as a stick of dynamite. It is leverage to go and blow up the obstacles in the path of my next goal.