Life Is Short and So Is This Book

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop to look around once in a while you could miss it. - From the movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

The trick is people who are most productive tend to say no to things that are unimportant to them and focus on what they believe matters.

I once had a smart boss who told me if I wanted to do my best work, I needed to do fewer things, and really focus on what mattered.

If you switch back and forth between multiple tasks, your brain works more slowly than it would if you focused on each activity for a period of time.

Making space in your life by using time efficiently also helps nurture creativity. I find it interesting that people who tend to be the most creative have three things in common: They’re incredibly well prepared in their fields -- they become masters of their domains by practicing for many years, day after day. They spend time deeply focused on solving a key problem or key set of problems, no matter the obstacles. They allow themselves to step away from the problem(s) on which they’re focused, so that insights can come to them in activities such as walking, or looking out on a beautiful scene.

If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep. -Dale Carnegie

when you make mistakes along the way, as I have at many points in my life, accept them as well. I’ve tried to learn from my mistakes. They’re experience – and they’re the sort of experience you won’t soon forget.

As Winston Churchill said: Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

A well known joke illustrates the point: The biggest mistake men make when they think about getting married is they assume women won’t change; the biggest mistake women make is they assume they can change men.

Character is like a tree, and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing. - Abraham Lincoln

Their peers likely will have more influence on the development of your kids' personalities than you will. If that sounds absurd, look at how immigrants’ kids develop in a non-immigrant community; they nearly always seem to speak, act and have the values of their peers, and not their immigrant parents.

Our bodies were designed by evolution to thrive on the African savanna. Twenty thousand years ago, people didn’t sit in forests or caves staring at computer screens, talking on telephones, or watching television. We were made to move, and our brains were made to think while in motion.

People also compensate for not feeling good about themselves by over-eating, drinking too much, over-working, and becoming reliant on constant or unhealthy sex to numb their pain. All of these are addictions. Taking care of yourself means finding a balance that works for you, then having the discipline to maintain that balance.

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy, you must have somebody to divide it with. -- Mark Twain

Our time on earth is limited, but you can extend your influence by helping those who will outlive you.

I’ve found you can choose to let all the things that go wrong in life depress you. Or, you can accept that things will go wrong, try to laugh, and then look at what you can do. There’s a Japanese proverb that gets right to the point: We’re fools whether we dance or not -- so we might as well dance.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

There are but three events in a man’s life: birth, life and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live. - Jean de la Bruyere

Oliver Wendell Holmes noted: Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

To figure out what you want to do, you need to know yourself. If you lie to yourself about who you are, or hide your identity from others, it will inevitably create stress, and it’s unlikely you’ll be either productive or happy. Part of knowing yourself means acknowledging what you genuinely want. If you focus on what other people expect of you, you may impress your friends, family and colleagues, but it’s unlikely you’ll be satisfied with yourself over the long term.

It wasn’t until I was in my late 30’s, when I started to work for myself investing, that I finally found a career which drew on all of my natural curiosity, had few aspects to it that I didn’t enjoy, and basically didn’t feel like work. Fortunately, everything I’d done earlier in my career wasn’t wasted. In fact, many of the experiences I’d had (and particularly my failures) became useful learning.

We spend huge amounts of our lives working; if you work from the time you’re 20 until you’re 65, five days a week, (and a great many of us work far more than that) then you will work for at least half your adult life.

For people who have a choice between jobs, there are frequently two broad options. Option 1 is doing what you love every day, but not earning as much money as you might otherwise, and/or not having as much prestige in the eyes of your acquaintances. Option 2 is doing a job you hate or find boring, but either the job itself, or the money you can make from the job, impresses other folks. To me, the choice is clear. What I find a bit shocking is that many people choose option 2, and stick with it over the course of their careers. Many other people enter fields they love, but over time forget what they love about their work, and prioritize the external recognition they receive from it. While there’s nothing wrong with being well-paid, and we all love to receive praise for good work, prioritizing external rewards over the work itself is a failing strategy.

It’s just anecdotal data, but everyone I know who works primarily to impress other people is unhappy or unfulfilled, regardless of how externally ‘successful’ they may seem. Almost everyone I know well who works passionately at a job for its own sake is happy, and most have been successful.

Today, because my work and personal life are highly integrated, I work over the weekends -- but I feel just as excited Sunday night as I do on Friday afternoon.

Ideally, you want a job you’d do even if you weren’t paid to do it. That’s not an economic reality for most of us, but it’s the right goal to shoot for. If you can get paid to do what you perceive as play, you have a great job.

Freud said: “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness”. While it may sound simple, if you have close friendships and love your work, the odds are quite high that you’ll be happy most of the time.

It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory. -W. Edwards Deming

Alexander Graham Bell said: “When one door closes, another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.”

At some points in your life, you may try to drive change. In those instances, I’ve found patience is a huge virtue. Change comes slowly. It’s a hard thing to accept, and people may resist it actively or passively.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein

Be curious. Kids naturally are curious and they are able to learn and progress at very rapid rates. I’ve tried to maintain my natural curiosity as I’ve gotten older and I’ve found my life is more interesting as a result.

Read widely. There’s so much wisdom written down and it's easier (not to mention less painful) to learn from others’ mistakes. No one domain or field has a lock on wisdom. I’ve been astonished how much you can learn if you read widely across a variety of fields. I read as much as I can.

As Mark Twain is alleged to have said: History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

So when decisions, ideas or new projects don’t work out, try to learn, and be open-minded. Also, see whether you can sort out whether the idea was flawed, or whether it was solid but the outcome suffered from bad luck.

To learn from your experience and the experience of others it’s important to try to be dispassionate in looking at the world and analyzing it. You need to be willing to try things you think make sense, and then to admit your mistakes, to throw away your beloved theories, and to learn from other people. This process requires a degree of humility that’s frequently lacking in the world, particularly among people who have been successful.

As the 19th century humorist Josh Billings noted: It ain’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that just ain’t so.

I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. - Thomas Jefferson

People don’t tend to achieve things in great leaps forward. Rather, we progress one step at a time, usually with small insights here or there. Whether you’re a scientist who builds on the great work of others, or a writer whose work springs from the wisdom of writers before you, or an Internet entrepreneur whose innovations succeed only because of a certain infrastructure... all of this is possible only because of small progressions from a massive foundation of wisdom and experience stretching into the distant past. We’re all standing, as Isaac Newton noted, on the shoulders of giants.

Be sure you’re comfortable with taking small steps, then build on them. The initial change will be small, and in the near term the difference may be imperceptible, but as time goes on you’ll end up in a totally different place than where you started.

You need to set the bar high enough that achieving your goals will mean something to you in the long term. And you should ensure that your goals are at least broadly realistic. But you also should try to get on a train going in the right direction.

As Benjamin Franklin wrote: “You may delay, but time will not”.

Many people are afraid of being introspective because they feel vulnerable. But without a willingness to open up, you won’t understand yourself and you can’t ultimately be truly happy.

Observe. It’s incredibly hard to have a dispassionate view of the world, even if you try your hardest. Humans are emotional animals, and we all come at the world with our own point of view based on our experience. It’s impossible in many ways to get outside that frame of reference, although with diverse experience, a lot of reading, honest self-reflection on your failures, and some thinking, it’s possible to stretch our perspective.

To be happy, it’s vitally important to be connected to other human beings whom you care about and who, in turn, care about you.

At least 80 percent of the world’s population lives on less than $10 per day (or less than $3,650 per year). I don’t know about you, but I could not imagine doing that.

About one in four people in the world lack electricity; and one in six people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water, nor can they read, or write, or sign their names. By way of contrast, I don’t even think about getting water out of the tap or taking a shower.

Most of the world is not focused on a second car, or what certain Hollywood actors did in their personal lives. They would be grateful for a good meal.