Philosophical

Success leads to the greatest failure, which is arrogance and pride. Failure can lead 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.

As you get older, you realize that no one has all the answers. It turns out that life is an exercise in living with the certainty of uncertainty.

Perhaps this self you've been treasuring for so long is itself the work of many hands.

The search for purpose is really a search for a place, not an idea. It is a search for a location in the world where you want to be part of making things better for others in your own small way.

You cannot flourish without a larger purpose. And that's lucky in a way, because our society cannot flourish without your reaching for a larger purpose, either.

People often say find your passion. But there's more to it than that. Not all passions are enough. Just existing for your desires feels empty and insufficient, because our desires are fleeting and insatiable. You need a loyalty.

We are not so good. We are humans, and, as such, we are, without our quite knowing it, always living at least partly in the dark.

Don't just follow the trends. Think in terms of the physics approach of first principles — rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there.

I believe we're shaped by our failures, by our weaknesses and setbacks, at least as much as we are by our successes. In many cases, those failures make ultimate success possible.

When you are free from self-doubt, you fail better. Because you don't have your defenses up, you can accept the criticism. You don't become so preoccupied with that failure that you forget how to learn from it.

The right reason to go to college is so you can find new ways to awe yourself by reflecting on how fascinating the world we live in is. We are actually on a giant rock hurling through space. It's a crazy interesting world we are living in.

These stories we tell about ourselves — they're almost like our infrastructure, like railroads or highways. We can build them almost any way we want to. But once they're in place, this whole inner landscape grows up around them.