Limits can be applied to any system in order to dramatically improve the outcome without having to dramatically improve the inputs. I didn’t add more time in my life to be healthy, I just changed the limits that I was addressing with the time I already had available. “Give me a lever long enough…and I shall move the world.” Addressing the limit is

The Greeks also saw work as a curse. The Greek god of hard labor was Ponos, taken from the Latin poena for sorrow. Manual labor was for slaves, and hard work was looked down upon. Plato and Aristotle believed work was for the majority so that the elite might “engage in pure exercises of the mind—art, philosophy, and politics.”

The development of the frontal lobe in humans means that, unlike apes, humans are not driven wholly by instinct. We evolved the ability to process and make decisions. This is no trivial or marginal change. It’s that ability to make decisions that have led to our dominance on Earth. Unlike any other species, we must make choices.

It is in seeking a path with no risk, no mistakes, and no variation (stable income, clear promotion path) that Max has in fact exposed himself to a massive downside—getting fired at forty without a skillset for creating new systems or operating in complex environments, the metaphorical car falling on his head.

The rapid development of technology and globalization has changed the leverage points in accumulating wealth: money, meaning, and freedom. The social and technological inventions of the past one hundred years have brought us to the “End of Jobs” while making entrepreneurship safer, more accessible, and more profitable than ever.

More Money, More Freedom, and More Meaning

Happiness, he explains, isn’t just something that happens. We can’t buy it with money or command it to happen no matter how much power we have. It doesn’t depend on outside events, but our interpretation of them. Happiness is a condition which can be prepared for and cultivated. It’s that ability to control our own inner experience that will

Expected Value is the sum of all possible values for a random variable, each value multiplied by its probability of occurrence. It’s what poker players use to make betting decisions and it’s how entrepreneurs think about their businesses and decisions.

as Steve Jobs notes: “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” 2