Philosophy isn’t just an abstract intellectual exercise. At its core, it focuses on improving our understanding of humanity, of how we evolve as individuals in a society.

We’ve evolved from living in tribes and thinking of kings as gods to valuing human rights as part of a nation-state. All these changes, including the birth of science itself, started with philosophy.

The purpose of philosophy is not to convey literal truth in the form of the beliefs of the philosophers and their words, but rather for those philosophers and their thoughts to provoke and improve your own thinking.

A key philosophical technique for understanding other people, ideas and theses is to ask yourself both what’s right and wrong about them.

The search for truth begins with questions.

one of the things I’ve said about entrepreneurship is that it should include an embedded theory of human nature. If you develop a theory about how human beings identify themselves, connect with others, view themselves to be part of a group and pursue a theory of the good, the conclusions you reach can help you design a product or service that appeals to people on a fundamental level.

everyone wants to be the hero of their own story, and great entrepreneurs make every user or customer a hero.

Aristotle taught us to revise our theories based on practice. The loop between theory and practice is to engage with the world to generate the theory, apply that theory to the world, and use the results to refine that theory. Lather, rinse, repeat.

My oft-quoted aphorism, “If you’re not embarrassed by your first product launch, you’ve launched too late,” is all about making sure that you’re balancing theory and practice. It doesn’t mean don’t have a theory. But it does mean to always be refining your theory with engagement.

Nietzsche felt that while the past was great, what really mattered was the creation of the new

Rather than trying to copy the past, he believed we should pursue the act of creating better versions of ourselves.

Entrepreneurs invent businesses that attack the current “idols” (industry, markets, products) by creating something new and disruptive.

In the search for truth, language itself is where we need to start our examination.

“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.”

That focus on language and what that means for identities, how we communicate and how we collaborate is one of the key learnings I drew from studying Wittgenstein

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a very good online resource for finding and studying the great philosophical questions of the past.

a core part of philosophy — all the way back to Socrates — is discussion.

finding time for discussing philosophy (even via Zoom) can be a powerful tool to build greater, deeper understanding.