One of the fundamental struggles of life is recognizing we have a body and a mind. If you can’t handle the dual, you’re in trouble. The body is “creatureliness”, yet you are ‘A worm and a God’   Need to be important not to die -> need to be important for this most important person (parent, lover, culture). Feeling important -> self esteem -> feeling good about oneself.

“The virtue of prosperity is temperance; the virtue of adversity is fortitude”

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?”

Biggest ideas in this book: 1- Compatible desires (either symmetric desires or asymmetric desires) 2- Easy path focuses on what you can do and not changing what others want or naturally do 3- A free person spends their time choosing among attractive alternatives 4- Know what you want. Do what makes you uniquely happy and do not compromise your desires. Act creating consequence leading to your happiness 5- Recognize everyone else is different and unique - both in what makes them happy and therefore how they act

Why do I get angry when I am insulted? Because I entertain the verity of the insult.

If you think that only which is your own to be your own, no man will ever compel you, no man will hinder you, you will never blame or accuse no man, you will do nothing involuntarily, no man will harm you, you will have no enemy, for you will not suffer any harm.  

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.

Discretion is the wonderful virtue of being able to see the way things are, and act accordingly.   The forces governing life are knowable, and to an extent controllable. This knowledge and control requires effort, talent, experience, mind and Fortune. 

There is nothing worth thinking but has been thought before; we must only try thinking it again.   Our endeavor must be to strive until our personality attains entelechy—it’s full development. 

Increasing effectiveness of intervention to the system: 12. Constants, parameters, numbers. 11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows. 10. The structure of material stocks and flows. 9. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change. 8. The strength of negative feedback loops. 7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.

If you’re not moving into a mathematically oriented career, that’s fine. But you can still do math. Math is woven into the way we reason. And math makes you better at things.   Math is a science of not being wrong about things, its techniques and habits hammered out by centuries of hard work and argument. 

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

Seneca believed that “philosophers don’t practice what they preach” What counts, is one’s attitude toward wealth, which is the wise man’s servant and the fool’s master; he, like any good Stoic, could lose all he had without being a whit less happy. 

He was taught to dress plainly and to live simply, to avoid all softness and luxury. His body was trained to hardihood by wrestling, hunting, and outdoor games.  

  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. 

A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.   Happiness does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them.  It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness. 

The potential energy of humans is usually curtailed, leaving only flatness.   Change your approach to discover new ways of seeing and for animating and awakening.  The distance separating our eyes means that there is a difference between the view each produces—thus there is no single “correct” view.  The displacement,  parallax , is what allows us to perceive depth and greater meaning. 

Why are the laws important?   The laws will allow you to react to others not with emotion but with the desire to understand where their behavior might come from.  You will become more tolerant as you become less likely to judge and instead accept their flaws as part of human nature. 

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.