"“That was my first race, and it brought advertising of the only kind that people cared to read,” Ford wrote. He became known nationwide."

"Everything is sales."

"“I would have been the second or third person in movie history to sign a million-dollar contract, but I was the very first to turn one down,”"

"“Don’t try to be the best. Be the only.”"

"“The leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained. That may sound like the wrong word, but it conveys the thought.”"

"Most decisions aren’t made on a spreadsheet, where you just add up the numbers and a rational answer pops out. There’s a human element that’s hard to quantify, hard to explain, and can seem detached from the original goal, yet carries the most influence."

"The only important thing is what people think you are"

"A subtle problem with money is that assets are easy to measure but liabilities can be hidden. Measuring lottery winnings is simple: $3.9 million, down to the penny. But how do you measure losing your privacy? Or the nagging doubt that some friends only like you for your money? That’s way harder."

"People use the quiet car because they want serenity, but it was astounding how often it backfired. When you expect quiet, you become ultra-sensitive to the slightest noise."

"Once you accept that having the nicest home in your social group is your goal, it becomes not only an obsession but a game that cannot be won, since the group you compare yourself to shifts with each salary increase you receive."

"the more money people have, the more social debt they tend to be burdened with."

"once money goes from being a tool you can use to make yourself happy to a symbol of what other people measure you by, you are buried in a kind of social debt that’s hard to measure but has a real impact on your happiness."

"Thoreau once explained: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”"

"Naval once said: The best position to be in is rich and anonymous."

"Everything is cyclical, and the thing that’s easy miss about cyclicality is that it doesn’t require any outside force to push it in the other direction. The act of getting big is enough to make you smaller without being pushed by anyone or anything."

"We learn from history that complete victory has never been completed by the result that the victors always anticipate—a good and lasting peace. For victory has always sown the seeds of a fresh war, because victory breeds among the vanquished a desire for vindication and vengeance and because victory raises fresh rivals."

"the larger the victory, the higher the odds of a future war. World War I led to World War II, which led to the Cold War, which led to Russia invading Ukraine, and so on forever."

"a similar thing happens at companies. The bigger and more successful you become, the harder it is to maintain your success."

"Calm plants the seeds of crazy, growth plants the seeds of decline, success plants the seeds of loss. Everything is cyclical."

"There is nothing more intoxicating than victory, and nothing more dangerous."

"The more successful you become, the easier it is for people to resent your success."

"The rapper Drake says, “People like you more when you are working towards something, not when you have it.”"

"William Vanderbilt once said having a lot of money “is as a death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.”"

"Start with a dream, accomplish that dream, then what was previously considered a dream becomes a new baseline, and the gaze of your ambition moves to the next dream. Inadequacy, hard work, elation. Inadequacy, hard work, elation. Everything is cyclical."

"Shane Parrish once described the difference between passive and active stability. A rock is passively stable – it’ll keep its form without any intervention. Marriage is not. It can be stable over time, but it requires constant work, compromise, and maintenance to keep it intact."

"What you believe to be true is influenced by how much you want it to be true. The more something helps you deal with uncertainty, the lower the bar is for you to believe it’s true."

"Describing the Great Plague of London, Daniel Defoe wrote in 1722: “The people were more addicted to prophecies and astrological conjurations, dreams, and old wives’ tales than ever they were before or since.” You’ll believe just about anything that offers hope when a plague is killing a quarter of your neighbors."

"There’s a thing in the legal world called Gibson’s Law, which states that, “For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD.” No matter what argument you’re trying to make, you can find a qualified expert witness who’s willing to make it, under oath, for $500 an hour."

"People can be led to believe and defend almost anything, because the goal of a belief is often not to discover what’s true – it’s to justify past actions, or protect your reputation, or provide hope when it’s lacking, or to maximize your income, or to signal to others that you belong to the tribe."

"A belief’s allure can eclipse its truth."

"There’s no way you can remember all the details; there are just too many. So in your recollection you emphasize some memories (sharpening) and discard others (leveling)."

"What you think is true is heavily based on what you’ve experienced, and you remember the parts of your experiences that make good stories, confirm stereotypes, and connect dots between other experiences."

"It is far easier to fool yourself into believing a falsehood than admit a mistake. Changing your mind is rarer than it should be, leading us to cling to false beliefs."

"The core of a scientific lifestyle is to change your mind when faced with information that disagrees with your views, avoiding intellectual inertia, yet many of us praise leaders who stubbornly stick to their views as “strong.” The great physicist Richard Feynman hailed “distrust of experts” as a cornerstone of science, yet herd mentality and blind faith in authority figures is widespread. Logic forms the basis of scientific reasoning, yet wishful thinking, irrational fears, and other cognitive biases often dominate decisions."

"Beliefs are not just about what we know; They are social signals that offer clues about how we established our beliefs, our confidence in our intelligence, and our ability to pass reliable truth to other people."

"We should want an expert who is willing to change their mind, but what we actually want is someone who’s confident enough to never have to."

"A lot of times we’re not interested in truth – we’re interested in the elimination of uncertainty, and that fact alone causes us to believe things that have little relation to reality."

"“A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.” – Kevin Kelly"

"“The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.” – Ernest Dimnet"

"“It doesn’t take much to convince us that we are smart and healthy, but it takes a lot of facts to convince us of the opposite.” – Dan Gilbert"

"“Insecurity is the mother of greed.” – Will Durant"

"“The greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism.” – William Osler"

"“Better to get your dopamine from improving your ideas than having them validated. “ – Nat Friedman"

"“It’s good to have people in your life who you don’t want to disappoint.” – Warren Buffett"

"“The thing that is least perceived about wealth is that all pleasure in money ends at the point where economy becomes unnecessary. The man who can buy anything he covets, without any consultation with his banker, values nothing that he buys.” – William Dawson"

"“Assuming you rise to the top, please remember: what made you great may not be appropriate for the next generation.” – Richard Hamming"

"“Nobody gives a shit about anything except how they feel.” – Will Smith"

"“I believe pretty strongly that your overarching aim in life and work is to always be making yourself obsolete.” – Tim Hanson"

"“Your capacity for gratitude is inversely proportional to your sense of entitlement.” – Mark Brooks"

"“Your calendar is a better measure of success than your bank account.” – James Clear"

"“The purpose of life is to experience things for which you will later experience nostalgia.” – FedSpeak"

"“The way to be safe is to never be secure.” – Ben Franklin"

"“Write your obituary, then work backwards to live it.” – Buffett"

"Physicist David Deutsch says “optimism is a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success.”"

"The reason things tend to get better is that there are so many blunders, screw-ups, and disasters to learn from. You can’t separate one from the other. Evolution doesn’t teach by showing you what works, but by destroying what doesn’t."

"The biggest innovations don’t occur when everyone is happy and gainfully employed; they happen when there’s enough stress to push people into gear, forcing problem-solving."

"Nassim Taleb says, “The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!”"

"Innovation and advancement tend to compound. One person raises the bar over the previous limit, and that becomes the baseline for a new generation to aim for and build upon."

"Charlie Munger says, “The world is not driven by greed; it’s driven by envy.” You see someone accomplish a new feat and think, “I should be able to do that too – and even better.”"

"Einstein reportedly once said that his own major scientific talent was his ability to look at an enormous number of experiments and journal articles, select the very few that were both correct and important, ignore the rest, and build a theory on the right ones."

"a wide funnel and tight filter. Be willing to read anything that looks even a little interesting, but abandon it quickly and without mercy if it’s not working for you."

"When reading an article, book, or report, ask, “Will I still care about this in a year?”"

"Asking how long you’ll care about the information you read pushes you to focus on permanent things and care little about temporary things – a great mindset for long-term thinking."

"People don’t remember books; they remember sentences."

"Even in the best book you’ve ever read, what do you remember? A couple sentences, a few stories. Those sentences and stories might change your life, but they’re all you’ll take away from a book."

"“One of the great things to learn from Darwin is the value of extreme objectivity,” Munger once said. “He tried to disconfirm his ideas as soon as he got ‘em. He quickly wrote down in his notebook anything that disconfirmed a much-loved idea.”"

"If you’re not blessed with perfect empathy, the trick to opening your mind to viewpoints you disagree with is to find people whose views on one topic you respect – that checks the box in your head that says “this person isn’t crazy” – and listen to them about topics you disagree on."

"“The appetite for applause counts amongst the lowest of human character traits.” – Jan-Willem van der Rijt"

"“If you find the right balance between desperation and fear you can make people do anything.” – Trevor Noah"

"“Happiness is that feeling you get right before you need more happiness” – Don Draper"

"“Inherited wealth is as certain a death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.” – William Vanderbilt"

"“Don’t try to fix people. Just set boundaries.” – Shibetoshi Nakamoto (pseudonymous)"

"“Injuries done to us by others tend to be acute; the self-inflicted ones tend to be chronic.” – Nassim Taleb"

"“The most accurate metric for your love of someone is how you feel about their flaws.” – Mark Manson"

"“In the soil of every satisfaction sprout the seeds of discontent.” – Dee Hock"

"“Recognize what you like about somebody. Admire it as a quality separate from that particular person, rather than confusing it with him or her. What you admire about them are qualities that exist separately from the particular (and therefore flawed) example that they constitute.” – Darren Brown"

"“People might refuse to believe something even if it can help them live a little longer, if believing it will make them live a lot sadder.” – Cass Sunstein"

"“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.” – Kahneman"

"“If we can’t laugh at something, we can’t think rationally about it.” – Clay Johnson"

"A lot of mistakes in life come when you think risk is something caused by external forces, when in fact the weight of your own success is enough to pull you down without any outside help"

"And for each it’s fair to say that past success directly led to future failure through entitlement, jealousy among competitors, and bureaucratic bloat"

"Everything is cyclical, and the thing that’s easy miss about cyclicality is that it doesn’t require any outside force to push it in the other direction."

"The act of getting big is enough to make you smaller without being pushed by anyone or anything."

"It’s almost like the larger the victory, the higher the odds of a future war."

"Not surprisingly, that’s gotten harder to maintain now it’s a tech and retail goliath."

"Managers vying for attention often rank themselves off a simple metric: How many employees report to them. The incentive, then, is to hire tons of people – even if they have little work to do – so a manager can say, “400 people report to me,” which signals their alleged value and importance. And you can only pull that off at a company with so much money and so much success that obnoxious budgets are approved."

"Never be so foolish as to believe that you are stirring up admiration by flaunting the qualities that raise you above others. By making others aware of their inferior position, you are only stirring up unhappy admiration, or envy"

"you think you’re highlighting your accomplishments, but often what you’re doing is highlighting others’ relative lack of accomplishments, which breeds envy instead of admiration."

"Sometimes it seems that it might be better to go back to those simpler days, that one might get more out of a less complex life. But it cannot be done. One changes with prosperity. We all think we should like to lead the simple life, and then we find that we have picked up a thousand little habits which we are quite unconscious of because they are a part of our very being-and these habits are not in the simple life. There is no going back-except as a broken man."

"At the individual level, I think cyclicality can be managed around the edges."

"Most things in your life are, at best, actively stable. Left alone they’ll follow the natural path of cyclicality."

"But if there’s constant intervention and management – managing your expectations, managing your reputation, managing how you advertise yourself and who you surround yourself with – you have at least a shot at keeping something good going for the longest period of time."

"Visa Founder Dee Hock once said, “We are built with an almost infinite capacity to believe things because the beliefs are advantageous for us to hold, rather than because they are even remotely related to the truth.”"

"There’s a thing in the legal world called Gibson’s Law, which states that, “For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD.”"

"So there’s one reason you believe the things you do: A belief’s allure can eclipse its truth."

"Gordon Allport and Leo Postman – came up with what they called leveling and sharpening effects in memory."

"So in your recollection you emphasize some memories (sharpening) and discard others (leveling)."

"The core of a scientific lifestyle is to change your mind when faced with information that disagrees with your views, avoiding intellectual inertia, yet many of us praise leaders who stubbornly stick to their views as “strong.”"

"One, when you change your mind you can feel like all the hard-fought effort you put into establishing your previous beliefs was wasted."

"Two, when you change your mind, moving from one belief to another, it can be hard to take the new belief seriously – changing beliefs offers proof that the new belief may be short-lived, especially in the eyes of others."

"I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands."

"Deciding what to pay attention to is hard, overlooked, and most important, it’s a negative skill – it’s about what you willfully ignore as much as what you actively seek out."

"“Oh it’s very simple. My secret had been I know what to ignore.”"

"The best reading strategy I’ve come across is the idea of a wide funnel and tight filter."

"There are two types of knowledge: Expiring and permanent."

"One, there’s a lot of it, eager to capture our short attention spans. Two, we chase it down, anxious to squeeze out insight before it loses relevance."

"Permanent knowledge tends to be principles and frameworks that help you make sense of expiring information."

"More specifically, they remember stories."

"If I can remember a few great stories and epic lines, it’s a win."

"Charles Darwin, according to Charlie Munger, wasn’t exceptionally bright, but became a first-class scientist because he spent his life trying to prove himself wrong."

"When those two things align – a person you admire disagrees with you about something fundamental – pay close attention. There’s a good chance this is information you’ll want stored in your head."

"Evolution doesn’t teach by showing you what works, but by destroying what doesn’t."

"One of the most dangerous mental traps is the appealing fiction – something that’s false or uncertain but you want it to be true so desperately that you believe it as an established fact."

"I often think about this trap with optimism. Just general long-term optimism – believing that things will be better in the future than they are today."

"But those who accept optimism can be just as blind to reality."

"The optimism bias protects us from accurately perceiving the pain and difficulties the future undoubtedly holds, and it may defend us from viewing our options in life as somewhat limited."

"First, they may not. The sole fact that things improved in the past offers no assurance of the future."

"1. Most good things happened because of a reaction to a bad thing. So one reason I’m optimistic is specifically because I know there will be problems that push people into fixing what’s wrong with the world."

"Part of the reason commercial air travel is relatively safe is because after every accident comes an intense learn-and-fix process that reduces the odds of future accidents."

"The reason things tend to get better is that there are so many blunders, screw-ups, and disasters to learn from."

"“The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!”"

"2. The constant human desire to one-up past successes, and the generational knowledge transfer, is a pure example of compounding in action."

"Does the same hold true for technology, science, and business? Of course. A first-year med student today likely has more medical knowledge than an experienced senior doctor did 50 years ago."

"art of that is a simple generational knowledge transfer. It’s pure compounding: People spend years or decades discovering a new truth, then the next generation begins their careers with those new truths."

"Another part is driven by the need to one-up the current leader of a field."

"“The world is not driven by greed; it’s driven by envy.”"

"3. As crazy as the world is, the core drivers of economic growth are still in place."

"Secure property rights. A scientific view of the world. Widely available and open sources of funding. Rapid communication and cheap transport of goods."

"You should remain an optimist."

"One is the specific events. What did this person do right? What did that country do wrong? What ideas worked? What strategies failed?"

"But their usefulness is limited."

"The second kind of history to learn from are the broad behaviors that show up again and again, in multiple fields and different eras."

"The same rule of thumb works in the other direction: the broader the lesson, the more useful it is for the future."

"Nothing separates us from human beings in earlier eras than how much less disease affects us. If we moderns lived for one year with the sort of death rates our pre–industrial age ancestors perpetually lived with, we’d be in societal shock."

"It’s weird to think that Covid would be easier to deal with if we hadn’t made so much infectious-disease progress over the last century."

"Carl Jung had a theory called enantiodromia. It’s the idea that an excess of something gives rise to its opposite."

"Oh, it’s easy. I can tell you who didn’t make it out. It was the optimists. The optimists. Yes."

"And they died of a broken heart."

"The trick is being able to survive the short-run problems so you can stick around long enough to enjoy the long-term growth."

"It’s intuitive to think you should either be an optimist or a pessimist. It’s hard to realize there’s a time and a place for both, and that the two can – and should – coexist. But it’s what you see in almost every successful long-term endeavor."

"An important lesson from history is that the long run is usually pretty good and the short run is usually pretty bad. It takes effort to reconcile those two, and learn how to manage them with what seem like conflicting skills."

"Instead he called it TIME, with the idea that saving readers time with succinct stories was the most value a publisher could add. “Show me a man who thinks he’s objective and I’ll show you a man who’s deceiving himself,” Luce said."

"Everyone wants to believe they’re thinking independently, with an understanding of how things work and why things are happening. But everyone has only seen the world through the narrow lens of their own experiences and social circles."

"And the easiest way to deal with that blindness is to reject things you come across that don’t match how you think the world works."

"A second reason people believe what they want to believe is incentives."

"An important lesson from history is that everyone sees the world through a different lens, and incentives can cause smart people to embrace and defend ideas that range from goofy to disastrous."

"But it’s nearly impossible for something big to happen because of one event, one person, or one group."

"The world is stable enough that one person, company, or event almost never moves the needle much on their own."

"“Real history is the story of lots of things happening at the same time.”"

"The other reason big events rarely have one cause is that all important events have ancestors – siblings, parents, grandparents, cousins – that have to be understood and recognized to understand how an event happened."

"Viewing events in isolation makes it easier to place blame or admiration on a single person. It’s not until you study an event’s long roots that you recognize the chain of events that leads to something meaningful happening."

"It makes forecasting hard, politics nasty, and learning specific lessons from big events harder than we’d like to think. The same story, again and again."

"The biggest risk is what no one sees coming, because if no one sees it coming no one’s prepared for it, and if no one’s prepared for it its damage will be amplified when it arrives."

"One is that they instantly shove the world in a new direction and become the grandparents of a bunch of seemingly unrelated events."

"Two, and most important, is that no one saw them coming. They surprised nearly everyone."

"Two things happen when you’re caught off guard. One is that you’re vulnerable, with no protection against what you hadn’t considered. The other is that surprise shakes your beliefs in a way that leaves you paranoid and pessimistic."

"Driving by car surged after 9/11 as people avoided air travel, leading to more excess car deaths than casualties from the actual terrorist attacks."

"An important lesson from history is that the risks we talk about in the news are rarely the most important risks in hindsight."

"The same story, again and again."

"Some of the most important topics are the hardest to teach, and real world experience is the only school."

"There are no easy rules to learn and memorize – you’ve got to figure those out for yourself."

"resident James Garfield died because the best doctors in the country didn’t believe in germs, probing Garfield’s bullet wound after an assassination attempt with ungloved, unwashed fingers that almost certainly contributed to his fatal infection."

"More lives have been spoiled by competence than by poverty; indeed, I doubt whether poverty has any effect at all upon a strong character, except as a stimulus to exertion."

"In normal times the average professional man makes just a living and lives up to the limit of his income because he must dress well, etc. In times of depression he not only fails to make a living but has no surplus capital to buy bargains in stocks and real estate. I see now how very important it is for the professional man to build up a surplus in normal times. Without it he is at the mercy of the economic winds."

"In some fields our knowledge is seamlessly passed down across generations."

"Knowledge in some fields is cumulative. In other fields it’s cyclical (at best)."

"There are occasional periods when society learns that debt can be dangerous, greed backfires, and more money won’t solve all your problems. But it quickly forgets and moves on. Again and again. Generation after generation."

"So any topic guided by behavior – money, philosophy, relationships, etc. – can’t be solved with a formula like physics and math."

"Neil deGrasse Tyson says, “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”"

"Cyclical knowledge, and the inability to fully learn from others’ past experiences, means you have to accept a level of volatility and fragility not found in other fields."