In other words, there is a big difference between mental force and mental character. Mental character is akin to moral character. It is forged by experience and effort, carved into the hinterland of the mind.

The most successful people are mildly delusional status inflators. They maximize their pluses, thus producing self-confidence, and decide their minuses are not really that important anyway, thus eliminating paralyzing self-doubt.

As the Japanese proverb puts it: Don’t study something. Get used to it.

There used to be four life phases—childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Now there are at least six—childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement, and old age.

He is on guard against his weaknesses. He pays attention to the sensations that come up from below. He makes tentative generalizations and analyses and focuses on sensations anew. He continues to wander and absorb, letting the information marinate deep inside. He is playing, picking up this and that. He sees a section of the landscape and slowly

Wisdom doesn’t consist of knowing specific facts or possessing knowledge of a field. It consists of knowing how to treat knowledge: being confident but not too confident; adventurous but grounded.

The more complicated the landscape, the more the wanderer relies on patience. The more confusing the scene, the more tolerant his outlook becomes. He not only has an awareness of his own ignorance, but of his own weakness in the face of it. He knows that his mind will seize on the first bit of data it comes across and build a universal theory

There is the Pareto Principle. We have in our heads the idea that most distributions fall along a bell curve (most people are in the middle) But this is not how the world is often organized. The top two percent of Twitter users send 60 percent of the messages. The top 20 percent of workers will contribute a giant share of any company’s actual

Eventually—not soon, not until after many months or years of arduous observation, with dry spells and frustrating longueurs—the wanderer will achieve what the Greeks called métis. This is a state of wisdom that emerges from the conversation between Level 1 and Level 2. Métis is very hard to put into words. A person with métis possesses a mental map