January 2024

We are who we are when nobody else is watching.

The story we tell ourself is the most powerful story.

All you have to do is to follow the advices that you give to others.

Have you ever noticed how some people talk a lot, but say very little? Where you leave a conversation with them, and can’t even remember the main takeaways?

“If you want a recipe for unhappiness, spend your time accumulating a lot of money and let your health and relationships deteriorate.”

“We love the things we love for what they are.” - Robert Frost

“I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.” - Carrie Fisher

“If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.” — Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“Awareness, not age, leads to wisdom.” — Publius Syrus

If you’re stuck, change your perspective.

What you see from 20,000 feet is very different from what you see from 2 feet.

Different perspectives reveal different solutions.

A lot of progress can be made by avoiding mistakes.

Ringelmann Effect — Members of a group become lazier as the size of their group increases. Based on the assumption that “someone else is probably taking care of that.”

things even out in the longer run.

time is a thief, it slips away.

The trouble is you think you have time

One sense of “normal” is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best. ​> These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don’t think you’re weird, you’re living badly.

People commonly use the word “procrastination” to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what’s happening as merely not-doing-work. We don’t call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.