How to live

Even if you work inside the system, you don’t need to let the system work inside of you. And if you summon up the boldness to go in a different direction, others might even surprise you by following along.

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it.

It’s pretty funny when you see how, being comfortable with being disliked, actually makes you even more likeable. It’s one of the many ways in which life can be really unfair.

The less time you spend thinking about or reading about or reacting to or writing about what anyone else is doing, the more time and positive energy you have to make your product the absolute best.

Which is how you will win.

I don't make resolutions, ever since I discovered the two perfect ones years ago:

1. Become a more terrifying version of yourself.

2. Do what you already do, but more so.

In that earlier era, when we still drank from garden hoses, losing a job sucked, but it mostly didn’t take your community with it. In this new era, losing a job means getting gutted. Not only do you lose your paycheck, but you lose access to all the people and places where you used to have your non-work-but-actually-at-work fun.

John Cleese: “Now I suggest to you that a group of us could be sitting around after dinner, discussing matters that were extremely serious like the education of our children, or our marriages, or the meaning of life, and we could be laughing, and that would not make what we were discussing one bit less serious. Solemnity, on the other hand, I... See more

Our lives don’t have to become others’ cheap food for consumption.