- Be independent
- Commit
- Fill your senses
- Do nothing
- Think super long-term
- Intertwine with the world
- Make memories
- Master something
- Let randomness rule
- Pursue pain
- Do whatever you want now
- Be a famous pioneer
- Chase the future
- Value only what has endured
- Learn
- Follow the great book
- Laugh at life
- Prepare for the worst
- Live for others
- Get rich
- Reinvent yourself regularly
- Love
- Create
- Don’t die
- Make a million mistakes
- Make a change
- Balance everything
3. FILL YOUR SENSES
Maximize your inputs. See all the places. Eat all the food. Hear all the music. Meet all the people. Kiss all the beauties. Be insatiable. Life is short. How to experiencie it all? Here’s the key: Here’s your mission: Nothing twice. Never eat the same food twice. Never go the same place twice. Never hear the same thing twice. Everything only once. Be systematic. Follow guides. “Top Places You Must Visit”. “Greatest Movies of All Time”. “Best Restaurants in Town”. Go through them all. That’s the optimized way to experience the most, without repetition.
How amazing that everything you’re doing is both the first and the last time. The thrill of the first. The sentimentality of the last.
Practice seduction. Be with a different person every night. Every lover is different. Don’t allow relationships. Remember: no repetition. But after decades of this, you’ll need something radically new. Stay in one place. Be with one person. Buy a home. Raise a baby. It’s terrifying, but if you don’t, it will the one experience you never had.
2. COMMIT
You’ve been looking for the best person, place, or career. But seeking the best is the problem. No choice is inherently the best. What makes something the best choice? You. You make it the best through your commitment to it. Your dedication and actions make any choice great. This is a life changing epiphany. You can stop seeking the best option. Pick one and irreversibly commit.
When a decision is irreversible, you feel better about it. You think you want more choice and more options. But when you have unlimited choice, you feel worse. The English word “decide” comes from latin “to cut off”. To go one direction means you’re not going other directions.
Commit to one career path. Build your expertise and reputation over time. Because you cut off other options, you won’t be derailed by distraction.
Find a community of like-minded people. Don’t waste your energy fighting norms. The more social ties we have, the happier we are. The bond of friendship is one of the deepest joys of life. Notice these words: ties, bond. These are words of commitment. We say we want freedom, in theory. But we actually prefer this warm embrace.
You’re defined by what you do repeatedly. If it’s not important, never do it. If it’s important, do it every day.
Marry. Marry someone full of kindness who is committed to putting you in the center of their life. Falling in love is easy. Staying in love is harder. Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.
10. PURSUE PAIN
The right thing to do is never comfortable. How you face pain determines who you are. Always take the harder option. Always push into discomfort.
Pain’s power relies on surprise. If you expect it, it’s weaker. If you choose it, it’s gone. Choosing pain makes it bearable. It loses its power to hurt you. You become its master, not victim. Pain is coming anyway. Don’t get a shield. Get a saddle. Tame it.
The best way to learn a foreign language is to stop speaking your mother tongue. No matter how embarassing or frustrating, communicate only in your new language. Necessity is the best teacher. But it hurts.
The English word “passion” comes from the Latin word “pati”, meaning “to suffer or endure”. To be passionate about something is to be willing to suffer for it – to endure the pain it’ll bring. But don’t be a masochist. Be a scholar of pain. Every pain has a lesson inside, and a reason why it hurts. Analyze it. Understand it.
The easy road leads to a hard future. The hard road leads to an easy future. Steering towards the pain is how to live.
17. LAUGH AT LIFE
Humor is the spirit of life – a sign of healthy, vibrant mind and soul. Humor means using your mind beyond necessity, beyond reality, for both noticing and imagining. That’s why we admire a quick wit. It shows you quickly looked at something from many angles, found ther one that amused you the most, and considerately expressed it to someone else. Observation, creativity, and empathy, all in an instant.
Humor puts distance between an event and yourself. Comedy is tragedy plus time. Time belittles anything by showing it’s not as bad as it seemed. Humor does that instantly.
Someone says life is hard. The comedian says “Compared to what?”. Comedians are philosophers.
Comedy doesn’t care what’s true, and neither should you. Whatever makes you happy is what works. Humor trascends reason. Life is meaningless. That’s what’s funny. Besides, it makes you very appealing. Everyone wants to be with someone who’s having more fun. At every moment in life, choose whatever action or angle amuses you. Laughing at life is how to live.
23. CREATE
The way to live is to create. Die empty. Get every idea out of your head and into reality. Calling yourself creative doesn’t make it true. All that matters is what you’ve launched. Make finishing your top priority.
Which would you rather be? Someone who hasn’t created anything in years because you’re so busy consuming? Or someone who hasn’t consumed anything in years because you’re so busy creating? It’s better to create something bad than nothing at all. Most of what you make will be fertilizer for the few that turn out great. But you won’t know which is which until afterward. Keep creating as much as you can.
Embrace what’s weird about you, and use it to create. Picasso was asked if he knew what a painting was going to look like when he started it. He said, “No, of course not. If I knew, I wouldn’t bother doing it”. Don’t just express yourself. Create questions, not answers. Explore whatever excites you the most. If you’re not excited by it, your audience won’t be either.
Imitate your heroes. It’s not copying because it won’t be the same. Most creations are new combinations of existing ideas. Originality just means hiding your sources.
Live in a city. Cities are more conducive to creativity. Genuises come from cities. It reminds you of your audience. Ultimately, you need to connect with people, not trees. Stay in situations where you’re forced to show your work to others. Collect ideas in a crowd. Create in silence and solitude. Distribute your work as widely as you can. Do whatever it takes to call attention to it.
14. VALUE ONLY WHAT HAS ENDURED
The longer something lasts, the longer it will probably last. Something that’s been around for a year will probably be around for another year. Something that’s been around for fifty years will probably be around for another fifty years. The longer something lasts, the more people know and depend on it, solidifying its place in our world. Only these proven things are worth your time and attention.
So the way to live is to ignore everything new. All of it. Let the test of time filter everything. Value only what has endured. Ignore all news. If it’s important, there will eventually be a good book about it. When people ask you about current news, proudly have no opinion. The modern life is shallow and distracted. The timeless life is deep and focused.
Live in the past. Watch the greatest movies of all time. Read the classics. Listen to the legends. These things have lasted because they work so well. Time is the best filter. Be the last to adopt a technology, after it’s cheaper; better, and no longer changing. Pity the early adopters, exploring the pitfalls, like the first mouse caught in the mousetrap.
Speaking, writing, gardening, accounting, persuasion, and survival skills. These skills have hardly changed in a century. They’re unlikely to change in your lifetime. Master the fundamentals, not new tricks.
21. REINVENT YOURSELF REGULARLY
Are you more emotional or intellectual? Early bird or night owl? Liberal or conservative? No. Disagree with the question. You aren’t supposed to be easy to explain. Putting a label on a person is like putting a label on the water in a river. It’s ignoring the flow of time.
Your identity. Your meanings. Your trauma. They’re all based on the core idea that you’re in a continuum, living a story. But there is no line between moments in time. There is no story. You’re an ongoing event -a daily improvisation- responding to the situation of the moment.
The way to live is to regularly reinvent yourself. Every year or two, change your job and move somewhere new. Change the way you eat, look, and talk. Change your preferences, opinions and usual responses. Try the opposite of before. Disconnect from your past.
At every little decision, ten times a day, choose the thing you haven’t tried. Act out of character. It’s liberating. Get your security not from being an anchor, but from being able to ride the waves of change. The wise keep their hands free.
24. MAKE A MILLION MISTAKES
You learn best from your mistakes. This is true. So you should deliberately make as many mistakes as possible. Try absolutely everything, all the time, expecting everything to fail. Just make sure that you capture the lessons from each experience. And never make the same mistake twice.
Deliberate mistakes are inspiring. Trying to write a great song is hard. Trying to write a bad song is easy and fun. You could do it in one minute, right now. Live your whole life this way. Jump into action without hesitation or worry. While everyone else is nervously preparing, you jump right in, unafraid to fail.
Ignore every warning so you can find out for yourself. See, you only really learn when you’re surprised – when your previous idea of something was wrong. If you’re not surprised, it means the new information fits in with what you already know.
The people devasted by failure are the ones who didn’t expect it. They mistakenly think failure is who they are instead of the result of one attempt. If you’re prepared for endless failures, you’ll never think of yourself as a failure. Your growth zone is your failure zone. Both are at the edge of your limits. That’s where you find a suitable challenge. Aim for what will probably fail.
19. LIVE FOR OTHERS
Even if you prefer solitude, you have to admit that being a valuable member of a group is smarter. The best way to be safe if to help others be safe. The best way to be connected is to help others be connected. Ultimately, you’re lifted by those around you.
The quality of your life is tied to the quality of your community, neighborhood, and country.
Psychologists, philosophers, and religions all agree on one thing. Helping others is a better path to happiness than helping only yourself. Giving makes you happier than receiving. People with strong social ties live longer, healthier, happier lives. The most miserable people are self-absorbed. So aim to be the opposite.
After age twenty, you need deliberate effort to make new friends. Friends are made, not found. Ask open-ended questions, asking people’s thoughts. Ask them to elaborate on whatever they’ve said. Show that you’re interested. Allow silence. Don’t fill it.
Appreciate differences. A conversation with a clone of yourself would be boring.
Success in business comes from helping people – bringing the most happiness to the most people. The best marketing is being considerate. The best sales approach is listening. Serve your clients’ needs, not your own. Business, when done right, is generous and focused on others. It draws you out of yourself, and puts you in service of humanity.
20. GET RICH
Money can represent freedom, safety, experience, generosity, attractiveness, power, or whatever you want. But really money is as neutral as math. Because it’s neutral, people have projected all kinds of meaning onto it. Your biggest obstacle to getting rich is the harmful meaning you’ve attached to it. Your biggest advantage can be projecting a helpful meaning onto it. Make it mean you’re on the right path. Make it a game. Make it mean you’re free.
Aiming to be rich is aiming to be useful to the world. It’s striving to do more for others. Serving more. Sharing more. Contributing more. The world rewards you for creating value. Pursue wealth because it’s moral, good and unlimited.
To get rich, don’t think about what’s valuable to you. Think about what’s valuable to others. To do the opposite is the cliché of the starving artist. Making money is a skill like any other. Learn it and practice it as you would do anything else. Study profitable companies the way an artist studies great art. Apply their best techniques to your own pursuit.
It’s unsustainable to create value without asking anything in return. Remember that many people like to pay.
Use other people’s ideas. Ideas are worth almost nothing. Execution is everything. The world is filled with ideas, yet so few take action and make them happen. Better to be filled with action than ideas.
Invent for a very small niche of people who need something that doesn’t exist. Instead of making a key, then looking for a lock, find something locked, then make its key. Get in early on an industry that’s developing quickly. More risk, more opportunity, more investors, more rewards.
Money won’t change you, but it will amplify who you are. You only need to get rich once. When you win a game, you stop playing. Once you’ve done it, take it with you and do something else.
22. LOVE
Not love, the feeling, but love the active verb. It’s not something that happens to you. It’s something you do. To love something, first you have to connect with it. Give it your full attention. Deliberately appreciate it. Learning is loving. The more you learn about something, the more you can love it.
The hardest part of connecting with someone is being honest. If you say what you think someone wants to hear, you’re preventing a real connection. Manners are shallow. Honesty is deep. Always tell the truth, or they’ll never know the real you, so you’ll never really feel loved. Don’t exaggerate to be more entertaining. Don’t downplay. If you downplay your achievements to make someone else comfortable, you’re preventing connection with that person and even with yourself. Just be honest. If you’ve done something great, say so.
If you have feelings for someone, and you don’t let that person know, you’re lying with your silence. Be direct. It saves so much more trouble and regret.
You could live with others, pleasing only them. You could live in solitude, pleasing only yourself. But ideally, when with others, be the same person you’d be when alone.
And then there’s romantic love. You never really regret falling in love. Do it as much as possible. It’s easy to love someone’s best qualities, but it’s work to love their flaws. When one of you is being childish, the other needs to be an adult. Like a dance, you can’t both dip at the same time. One of you has to stay upright to keep the other from collapsing.
Having a child is like being in love. It’s such a tight bond. You’re so close. So much trust. So much support. But, just like the other people you love, your child’s interests and values will be different than yours. Just give them a great environment where they can thrive. Give them the safety to experiment, make mistakes, and fail up.
8. MASTER SOMETHING
Be a monomaniac on a mission to be truly great at something difficult. Pick one thing and spend the rest of your life getting deeper into it. The more you learn about something, the more there is to learn. You see what normal people don’t see. The path gets more and more interesting as you go. The most rewarding things in life take years.
If you haven’t decided what to master, pick anything that scares you, fascinates you, or infuriates you. Don’t ask, “Is this the real me?” Or “Is this my passion?”. Those questions lead to endless searching and disappointment. People don’t fail by choosing the wrong path – they fail by not choosing. Make your choice, then make a lifetime commitment to constant improvement.
You need ritual, not inspiration. Every day, no matter what, you must practice.
Move to the most ambitious place in your field. (Actor? Hollywood. Tech? Silicon Valley. Etc). Don’t live somewhere pleasant surrounded by normal people. Live among your fellow freaks, where obsession is normal and ambition is rewarded. You don’t get extreme results without extreme actions. Think of the legendary achievers: the geniuses, brilliant artists, record-breaking athletes, or self-made billionaires. Do you think those people were well-balanced?
Nobody cares what you’re bad at, and neither should you. Amplify your strengths. Nobody will see the rest. Mastery is not about doing many things. It’s doing one thing insanely well. Resist the urge to branch out into something new. You can do anything, but not everything.
26. BALANCE EVERYTHING
All bad things in life come from extremes. Too much of this. Too little of that. When we lack balance, we’re upset. Over-worked, under-loved, over-eating, under-sleeping. Even positive traits, when taken too far, become negative. Like when someone is generous to a fault, or amusing to a fault. Too much of a specific strength is a weakness. If you rise to great heights in only one area, you’re a one-legged giant: easily toppled.
Virtue is in the balance between extremes. Between the insecure and the egomaniac: confidence. Between the uptight and the clown: grace. Between the coward and the daredevil: courage. Between selfishness and sacrifice: generosity. So, the way to live is to balance everything. Balance your need for stability with your need for surprise. Balance input and ouput, consumption and creation, stability and adventure, body and spirit. Your opposing needs become each other’s remedy.
Balance your needs versus the needs of others. Balance your knowledge. Read books on core subjects you know nothing about. Balance your political opinion. Talk with smart people in the opposite camp until you’re not opposite anymore. Balance two languages. A second language is one of the best things for your brain, and can add a new type of balance, like living half the year in another culture, speaking only your other language. Balance your response to situations. Do you tend to change yourself, change the environment, or change nothing and leave? Find which you do too much and which you don’t do enough, then rebalance.
15. LEARN
You get healthy by learning healthy habits. You get wealthy by learning valuable skills. You build a great interpersonal life by learning people skills. Most misery comes from not learning.
If you’re not embarassed by what you thought last year, you need to learn more and faster. When you’re really learning, you’ll feel stupid and vulnerable.
Find that exciting moment when you get a completely new perspective. Like a movie that reveals something at the end which changes the way you think of everything you’ve seen before. If you’re not having these moments often, find new inputs.
Whatever scares you, go do it. Then it won’t scare you anymore. Whatever you hate, get to know it. Then you won’t hate it anymore.
Talk with people you usually avoid. Pursue objects you know nothing about, and experiences unlike anything you’ve done before. If you’re not surprised -if you didn’t feel your brain changing- then you didn’t really learn.
Sacrifice the things you used to believe, and the ways you used to be. Learning leaves a trail of little deaths.
Information doesn’t stick without emotion. You learn better when you’re having fun.
Take notes. Review them often. Knowledge fades and eventually disappears unless you keep it refreshed. Internalize it. Don’t expect to just look it up when you need it. Integrate it into how you think.
Knowledge is often described simply – “in a nutshell”. But the inside of a nutshell is complex. So crack open nutshells to understand them better. Put concepts in a nutshell to keep them in your pocket and pass them around.
Communicate knowledge to others to make sure you understand. Don’t quote. Put it in your own words without looking up or referencing what others said. If you can’t explain it yourself, you don’t know it.
To communicate clearly, you have to think clearly. Writing is refined thinking. Public speaking tests your writing on a real audience. Great public speaking comes from great private thinking.
Share what you learn so it can be received by others, even when you are long gone.
Learning makes you a better person and makes the world a better place. Learning is a pursuit you can’t lose. As you age, you’ll lose muscle and beauty, but you won’t lose your wisdom. Learning is how to live.
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