Long

Fear is good. Fear is good because it is our brain's way of identifying the things about which we are ignorant. We should look at our fear not as a reason to avoid the things that frighten us, but as a reason to engage them.

Don't be afraid of fear. Because it sharpens you, it challenges you, it makes you stronger; and when you run away from fear, you also run away from the opportunity to be your best possible self.

The happiest and most successful people I know don't just love what they do, they're obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them. They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball.

There are 30,000 days in your life. I realized there are no warmups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Every day we're writing a few more words of a story. Instead of trying to make my life perfect, I tried to make it interesting.

Success leads to the greatest failure, which is pride. Failure leads to the greatest success, which is humility and learning. In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.

The daily activity that contributes most to happiness is having dinner with friends. The daily activity that detracts most from happiness is commuting. Eat more. Commute less.

A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment, luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and probably income, luckiest in their educational and career opportunities — those are the folks who reap the largest rewards.

Life is about nouns and verbs. It's about action, about people doing. When you cut out adjectives and adverbs, you cut out the things that qualify action, or interpret or analyze action. You reach the pure essence of experience.

You don't have to have a dream. Be micro-ambitious. Put your head down and work with pride on whatever is in front of you. You never know where you might end up.

Be hard on your opinions. A famous bon mot asserts opinions are like assholes in that everyone has one. There is great wisdom in this but I would add that opinions differ significantly from assholes in that yours should be constantly and thoroughly examined.

A sense of humor will be your life preserver in what could definitely be a veil of tears. Relish it. Cultivate it. It is vital to your existence.

You are now entering a world filled to the brim with idiots. Since there are so many idiots out there, you may actually start to think you're crazy. You are not. They are idiots.