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| Tweet | Link |
|---|---|
| Huge fan of having role models in life. It can also be clarifying to have anti role models — specific people you do *not* want to emulate. |  |
| If you really understand something, you can: 1) explain it using a clear metaphor and 2) explain the strongest counter-argument to the idea. | |
| Keep your identity small and avoid nouns. It’s fine to be introverted or extroverted but it’s limiting to *identify* as “an introvert.” #WDS | |
| Are your friends (spending time with right people) the easiest route to self-improvement and a long, healthy life? Yes: http://t.co/ngCakONH | |
| Buy experiences, not things. Experiences = memories = happiness for years later, whereas we quickly adapt to *things*. http://t.co/ovXtDL7s | |
| Ask yourself: “What makes me angry?” It’s uncommon framing but can reveal a lot about one’s values, priorities, passions. | |
| How to Avoid Burnout: Marissa Mayer – You can’t have everything you want, so protect the things that really matter – http://t.co/aY9RiDsk | |
| Upside of taking a chance: we overestimate the value of what we have, underestimate the value of trying something new: http://t.co/1NYONZ7d | |
| Christmas: The day on which Americans give thanks to China for making our favorite toys, electronics, and clothes. | |
| “Competent” is often a better adjective than “smart” or “intelligent” when talking about a person because it forces specificity and context. | |
| The POTUS doesn’t “run the country.” Such phrasing overstates prez power in the political system, negates vast decentralization of country. | |
| I don’t get when ppl say they have “no regrets” in life. I understand “look forward, not backwards,” but still. Regret is a powerful teacher | |
| Some *say* they’d rather be well-respected than well-liked, but for most people I think the desire to be liked by others is overwhelming. | |
| A proximate reason a guy/gal marries: years of dating has led to neglect of friends, and with a breakup he fears being single AND friendless | |
| “Opposites attract” remains a popular expression, but so wrong. Studies show we prefer people who look like us, think like us, agree with us | |
| High IQ combined with high insecurity: a uniquely toxic one-two punch. (inspired by B. Horowitz blog post) | |
| Some people can be passionate about the *process* of company building — what the company actually does is not as important. | |
| Classic trade-off when hiring: someone who’s inexperienced yet hungry vesus someone who’s experienced but not as much to prove. | |
| Some people work in non-profits because they’re not interested in money. But obsessing about money is what many non-profits have to do. | |
| Fundamental questions to ask of someone: What are you doing? And why are you doing it? (via LessWrong) | |
| Andy Grove’s suggested way to discover your business’s key competitor: Imagine you had a gun with one bullet. At whose head would you point? | |
| If “public pensions” were popularly known as “government-employee pensions,” I suspect more people would become engaged / enraged. | |
| Bad salespeople talk your ear off. Good salespeople know to shut up and listen. | |
| It’s always helpful to specify times in the other person’s time zone, and it’s a must if you’re working for the person or are lower status. | |
| Appearing unimpressed or uninfluenced by someone who’s more successful is a common way people try to raise their own status. | |
| So much of writing is not writing the sentences themselves but organizing the sentences and paragraphs in a way that makes sense. | |
| Reading is not just about the content of the text. It’s allocating quiet time / space to think and reflect on the issues raised by the text. | |
| High capital costs, high switching costs, or huge network effects appear to be three reliable pillars of defensibility in tech businesses. | |
| In most contexts, when people hear “reform” they think “progress in the right direction,” regardless of specific details. | |
| Overheard: “The problem in education is that we have educators running the school systems. Pilots are not CEOs of the airline companies.” | |
| A lot of times it’s better to catch the end of a big wave than the peak of a small wave. | |
| Random writing thought: cut “very” in front of adverbs and adjectives. At times, perversely, it even weakens the next word. | |
| There’s nothing wrong w/ not being “passionate” about your 9-5 job if it gives you plenty time to pursue ur serious, hard-to-monetize hobby | |
| A litmus test for a good person in your life: can you be your truest and most natural self around him or her? | |
| Lists of numbered points where the total number is too pat (5, 10, 15, 20, etc) usually have more fluff than a list of points w/ an odd #. | |
| Preface an otherwise banal aphorism with “My father once taught me” and it becomes rich with generational credibility. | |
| When you’re giggling, you know you’re doing something right. (Surprisingly profound advice from a friend.) | |
| If frequency with which you cite an education credential does not decrease over the course of your life, you’re not accomplishing very much. | |
| Sometimes we laugh because a joke is funny. Sometimes we laugh to show we’re smart enough to understand the joke in question. | |
| Litmus test for mood: impatience when listening to music. In a good mood, everything usually sounds good. Bad mood, always clicking “Next.” | |
| The airline you fly the most is the one you think is the worst. | |
| “That’s such a huge generalization!” is not a rebuttal against a generalization, nor is identifying a random exception. | |
| People who do not have a tidy, short answer to the question “What do you do?” are usually pretty interesting. | |
| An ideal: work all day with entrepreneurs, but have your meals (and twice-daily conversations) with journalists and academics. | |
| People too quickly assume that suffering, pain, and hardship “builds character.” Sometimes suffering is just….suffering. | |
| The hardest type of criticism to take is about self-perceived strengths. Yet this is the most important to hear. | |
| I’m amused by self-styled “busy” people. Busyness is as much a matter of identity as it is a reflection of time availability and schedule. | |
| Looking back on experiences, we remember the highest or lowest moment, and how they ended. | |
| Overheard: A key sign of maturity is realizing that *you* are not the baseline against which all opinions / behavior etc should be compared. | |
| If a woman tells me she loved / had a great time in high school, I can predict many things about her. (The converse is not true.) | |
| One of the best ways to improve a friendship with person X is to become friends with X’s friends. I.e, have mutual friends. | |
| It’s strange that it’s easier to call someone geographically / physically closer to you, even though a phone call is a phone call. | |
| Why say “indefatigable” if you can say “tireless?” Short, punchy words are best. | |
| How many business brainstorming sessions include the phrase, “If we had scale…” Yes. Every idea is interesting at scale. | |
| We learn about who someone is by the choices they make when the choice isn’t obvious. | |
| Environmentalism is the leading secular religion. | |
| “Learn by doing” – doing something yourself is almost always the best way to learn something. Extremely simple yet so rarely followed. | |
| How many billion dollar companies started with the founder saying, “I want to start a billion dollar company.” My opinion: few. | |
| When we’re unsure of how we feel, we often try to convince ourselves by trying to convince someone else of the point. | |
| In an attempt to focus ourselves to make an important decision, we often overrate the stakes, causing unnecessary stress and add’l paralysis | |
| Self-understanding, like happiness, is never fully achieved. It’s an on-going pursuit and sometimes excessive explicit focus hurts the cause | |
| Why do we often say an essay or person is “smart”? When it/the person makes *us* feel smart. We love feeling like we “got it.” | |
| Intelligent people have a remarkable ability to rationalize irrational actions, to re-tell history to fit their preferred, comfy narrative. | |
| Formal school helps neuter your natural “what interests me” sensor b/c to succeed in school you cannot ask yourself that Q, you do as told. | |
| Smart is like vanilla ice cream. There are thousands of really smart people. I value eccentricity, weirdness, interestingness. Black swans. | |
| Most actively seek positivity and happiness. Another approach is to try to eliminate negativity and things that make you unhappy. | |
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