Category: BookExcerpts

Quotes from Stoic Emperor

Apr 7, 2018
Those with a little power tend to covet the spotlight.

Those with a lot of power tend to carefully avoid it.

Apr 11, 2018
Virtue cannot be bought, but it can be sold.

Whatever the offer, it is too low.

Apr 12, 2018
Highly efficient way to internalize a complex non-fiction book:

-Read on Kindle.
-Highlight heavily.
-Export highlights.
-Edit down to core insights.
-5-10 minutes of reading.
-Keep that in cloud.

Can pull this up on any device and quickly recall my core takeaways.

Apr 12, 2018
Delusion can grow rapidly.

It devours individuals, institutions, societies.

The larger it grows, the more dangerous it feels to puncture it.

The blowup will hurt, but letting it go too far is fatal.

It is wise to deal with a delusion while it is still smaller than you.

Apr 18, 2018
Worthwhile things are hard to do.

You feel foolish and out of your depth when you start.

Many find that intolerable and retreat to their comfort zone.

Each master was able to endure being a beginner.

Some learn to love it.

They live on the bleeding edge of their capacities.

Apr 19, 2018
Where should the righteous man stand?

Between the mob and the scapegoat.

Apr 21, 2018
Conviction is much more powerful than “positive thinking.”

Positive thinking is fragile and easily shattered by random tragedy.

Random tragedy is an inevitable feature of life.

Conviction guides you through misfortune.

It does not wish it away.

Purpose outdoes positivity.

Apr 28, 2018
Education system was designed to produce factory workers. Obsolete. Young people are entering an age of increasing complexity and rapid change. Capacity for continual self-directed learning is crucial. Those that struggle with abstract thinking and complex tasks will suffer.
Show this thread

Apr 28, 2018
How can you thrive?
-Learn fast. Move quickly.
-Harness tech.
-Abandon sunk costs.
-Resist distraction.
-Understand crowd behavior.
-Rhetoric is rewarded in networked society.
-Global society concentrates rewards among A+ players and those in a few fields with talent shortages.
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May 5, 2018
Good speakers are often dutiful writers.

Rewriting a sentence eight times will tend to affix a few fairly melodious variations of it into your readily accessible memory.

May 13, 2018
The modern world provides endless opportunities to do useless things that look and feel like work.

It is quite possible to be both completely overworked and completely unproductive.

You can get away with this for years in many workplaces.

Oct 5, 2018
Short term thinking is everywhere.

Noisy feuds over little prizes.

The long term thinker will be king.

Win the decade, not the day.

Aug 23, 2018
Effective action begins with the reduction of ineffective action.

You can’t do anything if you are trying to do everything.

We are limited in energy and attention.

The world is chaotic and very complex.

Every choice is a sacrifice.

Choose consciously.

Aug 23, 2018
A warrior must subdue himself before he can subdue his enemies.

Clear eyes see accurately.

The quiet mind thinks calmly.

The steady hand strikes decisively.

Mad passion flares brightly and quickly burns itself out.

Stoke the steady flames of discipline, wisdom, and will.

Aug 17, 2018
Reaction is the enemy of creation.

Creation requires deep sustained focus.

This focus is under constant attack by “notifications” that encourage you to respond to unending false emergencies.

Protect your attention and direct it to where it is most valuable.

Excerpts from ‘How to Work Hard’

Excerpts from the essay ‘How to Work Hard‘ by Paul Graham

There’s a faint xor between talent and hard work.

If great talent and great drive are both rare, then people with both are rare squared. Most people you meet who have a lot of one will have less of the other.

But you’ll need both if you want to be an outlier yourself.

And since you can’t really change how much natural talent you have, in practice doing great work, insofar as you can, reduces to working very hard.

What I’ve learned since I was a kid is how to work toward goals that are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. You’ll probably have to learn both if you want to do really great things.

The most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working without anyone telling you to.

Now, when I’m not working hard, alarm bells go off.

Like most little kids, I enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or did something new.

As I grew older, this morphed into a feeling of disgust when I wasn’t achieving anything.

I do make some amount of effort to focus on important topics. Many problems have a hard core at the center, surrounded by easier stuff at the edges. Working hard means aiming toward the center to the extent you can. Some days you may not be able to; some days you’ll only be able to work on the easier, peripheral stuff. But you should always be aiming as close to the center as you can without stalling.

The bigger question of what to do with your life is one of these problems with a hard core. There are important problems at the center, which tend to be hard, and less important, easier ones at the edges. So as well as the small, daily adjustments involved in working on a specific problem, you’ll occasionally have to make big, lifetime-scale adjustments about which type of work to do. And the rule is the same: working hard means aiming toward the center — toward the most ambitious problems.

The more ambitious types of work will usually be harder, but although you should not be in denial about this, neither should you treat difficulty as an infallible guide in deciding what to do.

As well as learning the shape of real work, you need to figure out which kind you’re suited for.

What you’re suited for depends not just on your talents but perhaps even more on your interests. A deep interest in a topic makes people work harder than any amount of discipline can.


It can be harder to discover your interests than your talents. There are fewer types of talent than interest, and they start to be judged early in childhood, whereas interest in a topic is a subtle thing that may not mature till your twenties, or even later.


The best test of whether it’s worthwhile to work on something is whether you find it interesting. That may sound like a dangerously subjective measure, but it’s probably the most accurate one you’re going to get. You’re the one working on the stuff. Who’s in a better position than you to judge whether it’s important, and what’s a better predictor of its importance than whether it’s interesting?

For this test to work, though, you have to be honest with yourself. Indeed, that’s the most striking thing about the whole question of working hard: how at each point it depends on being honest with yourself.

Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It’s a complicated, dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point.

You have to understand the shape of real work,

see clearly what kind you’re best suited for,

aim as close to the true core of it as you can,

accurately judge at each moment both what you’re capable of and how you’re doing,

and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result.

This network is too complicated to trick.

But if you’re consistently honest and clear-sighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape, and you’ll be productive in a way few people are.

Flow – The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Book excerpts from the book:

He concludes that the most important trait of survivors is a “nonself-conscious individualism,” or a strongly directed purpose that is not self-seeking. People who have that quality are bent on doing their best in all circumstances, yet they are not concerned primarily with advancing their own interests. Because they are intrinsically motivated in their actions, they are not easily disturbed by external threats.

Narcissistic individuals, who are mainly concerned with protecting their self, fall apart when the external conditions turn threatening. The ensuing panic prevents them from doing what they must do; their attention turns inward in an effort to restore order in consciousness, and not enough remains to negotiate outside reality.

Without interest in the world, a desire to be actively related to it, a person becomes isolated into himself.

Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest philosophers of our century, described how he achieved personal happiness: “Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.”

There could be no better short description of how to build for oneself an autotelic personality.

The peak in the development of coping skills is reached when a young man or woman has achieved a strong enough sense of self based on personally selected goals, that no external disappointment can entirely undermine who he or she is. For some people the strength derives from a goal that involves identification with the family, with the country, or with a religion or an ideology. For others, it depends on mastery of a harmonious system of symbols, such as art, music, or physics.

Unselfconscious self-assurance: Richard Logan .. found one common attitude shared by survivors .. – .. was the implicit belief that their destiny was in their hands. They did not doubt their own resources would be sufficient to allow them to determine their fate. In that sense one would call them self-assured, et at the same time, their egos seem curiously absent: they are not self-centered: their energy is typically not bent on dominating their environment as much as on finding a way to function within it harmoniously.