Author Archives: leo

What’s valuable when everything is free: Immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, findability. kk

work you love & are great at & other people want & you get paid

Don’t argue on Twitter. Build the future. ej/bs

The important thing is the value of what I can produce over 50 years. hk

& nobody is happy. lck

Don’t wish for less problems, wish for more skills. If you don’t like where you are, change it! you’re not a tree! Jim Rohn

In the novels, Joe Pike has bright red arrows tattooed on his arms, pointing forward. We don’t stop, we don’t slow down, we don’t revisit past decisions, we don’t second guess. pmarca on ferriss

Is it true? Is it true in my context? Do I want to apply it? All advice cancels to zero. naval

The final destination of self-improvement is self-acceptance mark

You just need to decide. seth

You’ll run out of it when you need it most. seth

Focus your time on important/non-urgent activities. 7 habits

Develop the ability to focus without distraction on cognitive demanding tasks.Don’t multitask.Avoid distractions.Block out time for deep work.Eliminate shallow obligations. Deep work

Kurt Vonnegut

What would you choose?A – $1M bottom line to your company, 100% guaranteedB – $1B , 1% chance Does your boss want you to pick choice A? Would your boss let you pick choice B? Astro Teller

Writing isn’t hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.Resistance is the urge to procrastinate, delay, wait, the belief that you’re not ready.Resistance is a sign you are doing something of significance.Resistance never goes away: “Henry Fonda was still throwing up before each stage performance, even when he was seventy-five”. The war of art

A prayer:This day of my life will never come again.I will never see this sunrise again.I will never see the person having breakfast with me again, just this way.Nothing in my life like this will ever come again. Tedx

Preparing to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.Thinking about doing the thing isn’t doing the thing.Scheduling time to do the thing isn’t doing the thing.Hating on yourself for not doing the thing isn’t doing the thing.Reading about how to do the thing isn’t doing the thing. Reading this isn’t doing the thing. The onlyContinue reading “You are not doing the thing”

For each task, set a quality target. Then hit it with the minimum effort necessary.But deploy your full strength, to hit the target as fast as possible. NS

Developing a strategy is easy but that executing that strategy is much harder, especially if that requires a significant change in human behavior. Most people are just trying to survive battling that whirlwind and don’t have the time or energy to do something new. 4DX

We all are haunted by the visions of the person we could be but aren’t.Turn pro: show up every day. show up no matter what. stay on the job all day.‘I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp’. The war of art

Embrace pain from pushing your limits, learn from mistakes. Principles

Is there anything I’m doing today that, knowing what I now know, I wouldn’t get into today, if I had to do it over? Is there anything you are doing because you are stuck in a recurrent scheme for which you can no longer find the why? Brian Tracy / Erika Lemay

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

Your year really begins when you move to a new home, start school, quit a job, have a big breakup, have a baby, quit a bad habit, start a new project, or whatever else. Sivers

What am I not saying that needs to be said? What am I saying that’s not being heard? What’s being said that I’m not hearing? Reboot

How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want? What benefit do I get from the conditions I say I don’t want? Reboot

You can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn’t engage the identities of any of the participants. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you. PG

What’s the ONE thing I can do, such that by doing it everything else will become easier or unnecessary? book

If a person is struck by an arrow, is it painful? If the person is struck by a second arrow, is it even more painful?In life, we can’t always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. This second arrow is optional. More zen stories

If you feel anything less than “hell yeah!” about something, say no. Refuse almost everything. Do almost nothing. But the things you do, do them all the way. Why would you ever choose to be with someone who is not excited to be with you? Sivers post/book ; Mark Manson post

If you ask yourself what you spend your time on that’s bullshit, you probably already know the answer. Unnecessary meetings, pointless disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people’s mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.If you’re a freelancer or a small company, you can fire or avoid toxic customers.Things we like tend to become moreContinue reading “Life is short”

If you could do tomorrow over again, would you? Most of us live programmed lives. Tomorrow is set, finished, done, and you haven’t even started it yet. And we accept that as part of the deal in setting goals and reaching them. But what about the tomorrow thirty days from now? Or a year? IfContinue reading “Tomorrow”

Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. James Clear’s post/book

What happened yesterday already happened. It’s a gift and an asset from your previous self. You don’t have to accept if you don’t want to. It’s harder to change careers if you spent years in school getting a degree. But the correct approach is to ignore it, and change if the new thing will haveContinue reading “Ignore sunk costs”

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears,Continue reading “Bird by bird”

Buridan’s donkey is standing halfway between a pile of hay and a bucket of water. It keeps looking left and right, trying to decide between hay and water. Unable to decide, it eventually dies of hunger and thirst.Don’t be a donkey. You can do everything you want to do. You just need foresight and patience.IfContinue reading “Don’t be a donkey”

Actually, as you’ve probably guessed, the best time to start was last year. The second best time to start is right now. Seth

False beliefs: The way to love

The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you’re being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly.And yet I’ve definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of aContinue reading “How to lose time and money”

If you had a manager that talked to you the way you talked to you, you’d quit. If you had a boss that wasted as much of your time as you do, they’d fire her. If an organization developed its employees as poorly as you are developing yourself, it would soon go under. Seth

Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “ItContinue reading “Before the law”

The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour. But there’s another way of using time that’s common amongContinue reading “Maker’s schedule”

A young farmer was padding up the river. He was in a hurry. As he looked ahead, he spied another vessel, heading rapidly downstream toward his boat. This vessel seemed to be making every effort to hit him. He rowed furiously to get out of the way, but it didn’t seem to help. He yelledContinue reading “Anger”

Everyone who’s worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. Most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time, which means it’s a disaster to let the wrongContinue reading “The top idea in your mind”

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer hasContinue reading “Meditations”

People speak different love languages: Physical touch Acts of service Quality time Words of affirmation Receiving gifts Quiz

Stop thinking, and end your problems.What difference between yes and no?What difference between success and failure?Must you value what others value,avoid what others avoid?How ridiculous! Other people are excited,as though they were at a parade.I alone don’t care,I alone am expressionless,like an infant before it can smile. Other people have what they need;I alone possessContinue reading “Tao”

Think for a moment that I granted you a right — you can buy 10% of one of your classmate’s earnings for the rest of their lifetime. There’s nothing wrong with getting the highest grades in the class, but that isn’t going to be the quality that sets apart a big winner from the restContinue reading “Investment”

What are the most important problems in your field? Are you working on one of them? Why not? Richard Hamming / PG