Tom Schmidt

Everything you want comes at a cost. Travel comes with delays and lost baggage. Fame comes with haters. Kids come with wiping butts.

The sooner you learn to pay those taxes, gladly – the happier you will be.

Historian and philosopher Will Durant on play:

"Let us ask the gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than in consuming them. In Utopia, said Thoreau, each would build his own home; and then song would come back to the heart of man, as it comes to the bird when it builds its nest. If we cannot build our... See more

Stephen Schwarzman on the inflection points no one sees:

“Every entrepreneur knows the feeling: that moment of despair when the only thing you are aware of is the giant gap between where you find yourself and the life and business you imagine. Once you succeed, people see only the success. If you fail, they see only the failure. Rarely do they see... See more

Alex Hormozi had a great line about this:

“Heroes and villains always have the same back story— pain. The difference is what they choose to do about it. Villain says ‘the world hurt me, I'll hurt it back’ Hero says ‘the world hurt me, I'm not gonna let it hurt anyone else. Heroes use pain. Villains are used by it.”

When your goal is persuasion, don’t begin with new information. Begin by agreeing with what they already believe. Meet them where they are. Only then can you hope to lead them to where you want them to go.

And OpenAI appears to continue to decide its model names by sprinkling the blood of a virgin intern into a bag of Scrabble tiles, praying to get something good, and picking whatever jumble of letters comes out.

A timely reminder from Clear Thinking:

“ One reason the best in the world make consistently good decisions is they rarely find themselves forced into a decision by circumstances. ”

The best questions are organizing principles, magnets, ways of seeing.