Everyone wants hacks or shortcuts, but there’s literally no such thing.

If anyone tries to sell you one, you should run away.

The only “hack” is relentless consistency. It’s not glamorous—and it's not fun—but it works.

If you want to get lucky, start increasing your luck surface area.

It’s hard to get lucky watching TV at home. It’s easy to get lucky when you’re engaging and learning—physically or digitally.

Put yourself in a position to get lucky.

Hustle culture told you that free time is lost productivity.

The reality: free time is a "call option" on future interesting opportunities.

When you have free time, you have the headspace and bandwidth to pursue new ideas. Free time creates alpha.

Learning when to say no creates...

If it bothers you to see other people succeed, you’re definitely not gonna make it.

Distance yourself from anyone who spends time bringing others down.

Celebrate everyone’s wins and you’ll start winning more. A rising tide lifts all boats.

Society celebrates experts in any given field.

But as author David Epstein finds in Range, many experts succeed because of the range of pursuits that preceded their main endeavour.

Become a polymath. Generalize first, specialize later.

It's very in vogue to say hard work is overrated—but it’s not quite true.

What you work on is more important than how hard you work, but if you're striving for great things, you have to work hard.

• You can get to the top-10% by either working hard OR smart.
• You can only re...

The concept of “mentorship” has become way too formal. Asking someone to be your mentor can come across as a big commitment.

Instead of focusing on finding a formal mentor, build a Personal Board of Advisors.

The key features of a Personal Board of Advisors:

There’s no shortage of great ideas, just a shortage of people willing to put in the effort to capitalize on them.

Execution requires a combination of:

• Intensity: To execute sprints of focused energy.
• Consistency: To execute a marathon of these sprints.

Ideas a...

Life gets so much better when you realize you can learn from anyone. No one is too old, young, rich, or poor to teach you something valuable.

Everyone has formed their own map of reality. By gathering data points from the maps of those around us, we sharpen the resolution of our own.

Most advice sucks.

It's well-intentioned, but it's dangerous to use someone else's map of reality to navigate yours—even if they're experienced.

Winners learn to filter and selectively implement advice—take the signal, skip the noise.

Fear generates clicks—the media knows it and they capitalize on it. So if you watch the news, you're hit by a barrage of pain, suffering, and fear.

The message is to avoid your neighbour—to fear thy neighbour.

Always remember: There are a few bad people out there, but most people are ...

It's in vogue to say that you should learn to say no in order to protect your time.

In reality, it depends.

As a general rule of thumb:

Early on, say yes—it puts you into growth-conducive situations. Saying yes allows you to expand your luck surface area.

Once you're estab...

An empowering realization: Most of the people you admire are unremarkable.

Their success is not due to some intrinsic difference.

They simply built leverage to scale efficiently and had a powerful combination of effort, focus, long-term consistency, and luck.

Nothing just happens—that’s for the movies, not real life. You have to kick down the door and blast through to the other side.

Big decisions are better made fast than slow. Slow typically leads to overthinking and paralysis that keeps people from making the leap. Fast allow...

Money is very directly correlated with happiness up to a baseline level of needs (food, shelter, etc.).

Beyond that level, there are clear diminishing returns to the happiness derived from each incremental dollar.

In some cases, there is negative utility from an incremental dollar as ...

You can read every business and self-help book in the world, but ultimately the only way to learn is by screwing it up.

Reading and studying are nothing without battle-testing.

Don’t fear failure—just learn to fail smart & fast.

Interesting people sound impressive, but the reality is that being INTERESTED is more important than being INTERESTING.

Interested people ask questions, listen, and observe. They are prone to diving deep to understand the world around them.

They win by compounding knowledge efficientl...

In reality, there are 5 types of wealth:

• Financial (money)
• Social (relationships)
• Physical (health)
• Mental (health, knowledge, faith)
• Time (freedom)

The blind pursuit of financial wealth can rob you of the others. Never let t...

The timelines we create for ourselves are mostly just arbitrary nonsense.

We create these fake timelines:

• I need to hit [X] title by [X] age.
• I need to have [Y] salary by [Y] age.
• I need to win Forbes [X] under [X] otherwise I'm a failure.

Once you're past your first job, no one will ask about that stuff—if they do, you shouldn't take that job.

To be successful, you either need to learn how to build or you need to learn how to sell. People who know how to build AND sell are unbeatable. 

If you aren't technically gifted,...

Most of your friends aren’t really your friends.

They’re just along for the ride when it’s fun, convenient, or valuable—they'll disappear when it's not.

Your real friends are there when it is none of those things. They are there when you have nothing to offer in return.

Cherish ...