If you’re looking toward the long-term goal of getting wealthy, you should ask yourself, “Is this authentic to me? Is it myself that I am projecting?” And then, “Am I productizing it? Am I scaling it? Am I scaling with labor or with capital or with code or with media?”

Death wakes people up and the closer it gets, the more awake and aware we become. When the end is near, we suddenly start thinking, What the hell am I doing? Why did I wait this long? Until then, most of us go through life as if we had all the time in the world.

I thought the dulling of perception was an inevitable consequence of age just as the lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim. I didn't understand that clarity is in the mind.

Intelligence is not borne out of self-discipline or suppression. In the one instance it is wholly the pursuit of desire, the primitive man pursuing the object he desires. In the other instance, the intelligent man sees the significance of desire and sees the conflict; the primitive man does not, he pursues anything he desires and creates suffering and pain. So to me self-discipline and suppression are both alike—they both deny intelligence.

If you ask your robot to cook italian dinner 

Intimacy is the only completely satisfying answer to stimulus-hunger, recognition-hunger, and structure-hunger. 

Images give logos to perception.   One must be receptive to the image, the image the moment it appears. 

The kitchen is not a place of labor, but a field of fantasy and play.   If you can read and follow directions, you can cook. 

  Break out a journal and write out the ways you’ve been hurt or are still in harm’s way.   Give your pain shape and absorb its power.  Use that story, the list of excuses, to fuel your ultimate success.  Most white men have no idea how hard it can be to be  the only .  It makes you want to stay home some days because to go out in public is to be completely exposed, vulnerable to a world that tracks and judges you. 

Interesting:  Aristotle defined vice as the ways of behaving least conducive to happiness and virtue as the ways of behaving most conducive to happiness.   Dreams shed light on the dim places where reason has yet to voyage. 

In all versions of the Faust legend, the hero is offered something he desperately wants - power or knowledge or a fast-ball that will beat the Yankees - and all he has to do is give up his soul.   Versions end up either tragic or comic depending on whether the devil successfully collects the soul at the end of the work.  (P. xxiv)

  A Black Swan is an event with 3 attributes: It is an outlier, as it lies beyond the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can point to its possibility.  It carries an extreme impact.  In spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it seem explainable and predictable.