Top Highlights

• Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to di...
• If we feel no chance to improve our lives, we’ll have excessive drug addiction, depression, violence, and all of the things that are starting to happen with alarming frequency now. I believe these symptoms of unhappiness will go away, if we bring everybody up in the same way that a rising tide lifts all boats.
• We’ve got unprecedented amounts of stress, mental illness, and breakdowns that manifest as physical illnesses. An eight-hour workday, for a knowledge worker, is like a 16-hour day for the industrial laborer. It’s pushing the majority of humans past their limits, and with the productivity gains of today and tomorrow, it’s no longer the best business...
• The nine-month school calendar is rooted in the agricultural age. And it made sense then. In 1870, 70-80% of Americans were employed in agriculture. There was so much labor and help needed in the summer that they actually had the children working as well, and so the children couldn’t go to school in the summer. Makes perfect sense.
• Using Panjiva, I can type in a product like “paddle boards” and it will show me all the containers coming into the country that mention paddle boards in the contents. It will show me the date of each, how much it weighed, what factory sent it, and what customer received it. It will show me this data over time, and I can drill down to all the shipme...