Kurt Vonnegut, talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope:

“Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of b

Jim Simons: "I’m not an extremely fast thinker myself; I just work hard."

That was all I needed to do—work hard, not fast. A paper I published in '68 took me five years. But it has had 1,850 citations. For a math paper, that’s an awful lot.

There’s too much emphasis on a person’s being able to answer questions quickly."

You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” ~ Zig Ziglar.

Toolkit to activate excitement:

Act on your highest excitement

Whatever options are available to you at any given moment, choose the option that contains more excitement than the other (even if the excitement is just a little bit more)

To the best of your ability

Act on it to the best of your ability, taking it as far as you can until you can take it

"How to clarify a concept you can't articulate:
​
1. Change mediums. Draw it. Photograph it. Sing it.
2. Change levels. Explain what is one level up (bigger picture) or one level down (finer details).
3. Change fields. What would this concept look like in different fields?"

(James Clear newsletter)