Video of my trip from New York to Titusville, Florida to watch the launch of the Artemis II mission around the Moon, the farthest humans have hitherto traveled away from Earth.
I booked the flight from LGA to FLL, and MCO to EWR, using Frontier Airline's GoWild! program. I also used Greyhound and public transport.
Assuming “in the air” means you aren’t suspended by anything like a plane.
There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes.
Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
No one can compete with you on being you.
Society, business, & money are downstream of technology, which is itself downstream of science. Science applied is the engine of humanity.
Basically, when you're competing with people, it's because you're copying them. It's because you're trying to do the same thing. But every human is different. Don't copy.
Basic arithmetic and numeracy are way more important in life than doing calculus. Similarly, being able to convey yourself simply using ordinary English words is far more important than being able to write poetry, having an extensive vocabulary, or speaking seven different foreign languages
The people who have the ability to fail in public under their own names actually gain a lot of power.
Forget rich versus poor, white-collar versus blue. It's now leveraged versus un-leveraged.
Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you're accountable on your output, as opposed to your input. That's the dream.
Forty hour work weeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes—train and sprint, then rest and reassess
Each level has increasing leverage, increasing accountability, increasingly specific knowledge. You're adding in money-based leverage on top of labor-based leverage. Adding in code-based leverage on top of money and labor allows you to actually create something bigger and bigger and get closer and closer to owning all the upside, not just being paid a salary.
You start as a salaried employee. But you want to work your way up to try and get higher leverage, more accountability, and specific knowledge. The combination of those over a long period of time with the magic of compound interest will make you wealthy.
Stay out of things that could cause you to lose all of your capital, all of your savings. Don't gamble everything on one go. Instead, take rationally optimistic bets with big upsides.
No one is going to value you more than you value yourself.
If you get into a relative mindset, you're always going to hate people who do better than you, you're always going to be jealous or envious of them.
When you try and do business with somebody, if you have any bad thoughts or any judgments about them, they will feel it.
Literally, being anti-wealth will prevent you from becoming wealthy, because you will not have the right mindset for it, you won't have the right spirit, and you won't be dealing with people on the right level. Be optimistic, be positive. It's important.
Politics is an example of a status game. Even sports are an example of a status game. To be the winner, there must be a loser.
The problem is, to win at a status game, you have to put somebody else down. That's why you should avoid status games in your life-they make you into an angry, combative person. You're always fighting to put other people down, to put yourself and the people you like up.
Spend more time making the big decisions.
There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you're with, and what you do.
If you're going to live in a city for ten years, if you're going to be in a job for five years, if you're in a relationship for a decade, you should be spending one to two years deciding these things.
I learned how to make money because it was a necessity. After it stopped being a necessity, I stopped caring about it. At least for me, work was a means to an end. Making money was a means to an end. I'm much more interested in solving problems than I am in making money.
When you grow up, you're playing the school game, or you're playing the social game. Then you're playing the money game, and then you're playing the status game. These games just have longer and longer and longer-lived horizons. At some point, at least I believe, these are all just games. These are games where the outcome really stops mattering once you see through the game.
How do you get [to retirement]?
Well, one way is to have so much money saved that your passive income (without you lifting a finger) covers your burn rate.
A second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero—you become a monk.
A third is you're doing something you love.
You enjoy it so much, it's not about the money.
Art is anything done for its
own sake.
Lusting for money is bad for us because it is a bottomless pit. It will always occupy your mind. If you love money, and you make it, there's never enough. There is never enough because the desire is turned on and doesn't turn off at some number. It's a fallacy to think it turns off at some number.
I value freedom above everything else. All kinds of freedom: freedom to do what I want, freedom from things I don't want to do, freedom from my own emotions or things that may disturb my peace.
I think business networking is a complete waste of time. And I know there are people and companies popularizing this concept because it serves them and their business model well, but the reality is if you're building something interesting, you will always have more people who will want to know you. Trying to build business relationships well in advance of doing business is a complete waste of time. I have a much more comfortable philosophy: "Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you."
When someone spends too much time talking about their own values or they're talking themselves up, they're covering for something.
Your own failures are written within your psyche, and they are obvious to you. If you have too many of these moral shortcomings, you will not respect yourself. The worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem. If you don't love yourself, who will?
Amazing how many people confuse wealth and wisdom
My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment.
They're highly linked; knowing the long-term consequences of your actions and then making the right decision to capitalize on that.
Picking the direction you're heading in for every decision is far, far more important than how much force you apply.
I would rather understand the basics really well than memorize all kinds of complicated concepts I can't stitch together and can't rederive from the basics.
The "monkey mind" will always respond with this regurgitated emotional response to what it thinks the world should be. Those desires will cloud your reality. This happens a lot of times when people are mixing politics and business.
The number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be.
The good news is, the moment of suffering when you're in pain—is a moment of truth. It is a moment where you're forced to embrace reality the way it actually is. Then, you can make meaningful change and progress. You can only make progress when you're starting with the truth.
What we wish to be true clouds our perception of what is true. Suffering is the moment when we can no longer deny reality.
Very smart people tend to be weird since they insist on thinking everything through for themselves.
It's really important to be able to uncondition yourself, to be able to take your habits apart and say, "Okay, this is a habit I probably picked up when I was a toddler trying to get my parent's attention. Now I've reinforced it and reinforced it, and I call it a part of my identity. Does it still serve me? Does it make me happier? Does it make me healthier? Does it make me accomplish whatever I set out to accomplish?"
I try not to have too much I've pre-decided. I think creating identities and labels locks you in and keeps you from seeing the truth.
The moment you tell some body something dishonest, you've lied to your-self. Then you'll start believing your own lie, which will disconnect you from reality and take you down the wrong road.
If you cannot decide, the answer is no.
If they wrote it to make money, don't read it.
We think of ourselves as fixed and the world as malleable, but it's really we who are malleable and the world is largely fixed.
We accept the voice in our head as the source of all truth. But all of it is malleable, and every day is new. Memory and identity are burdens from the past preventing us from living freely in the present.
One day, I realized with all these people 1 was jealous of, I couldn't just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn't say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you're not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.
Tell your friends you're a happy person. Then, you'll be forced to conform to it. You'll have a consistency bias. You have to live up to it.
Your friends will expect you to be a happy person.
The important thing is to do something every day. It doesn't matter what it is. The best workout for you is one you're excited enough to do every day.
90 percent of thoughts I have are fear-based. The other 10 percent may be desire-based.
I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and strengthen as I get older. I want it to be weaker and more muted so I can be more in present everyday reality, accept nature and the world for what it is, and appreciate it very much as a child would.
You should always be internally ready for a complete change. Whenever we say we're going to try to do something or try to form a habit, we're wimping out.
Commit externally to enough people. For example, if you want to quit smoking, all you have to do is go to everybody you know and say, "I quit smoking. I did it. I give you my word."
When you really want to change, you just change. But most of us don't really want to change—we don't want to go through the pain just yet. At least recognize it, be aware of it, and give yourself a smaller change you can actually carry out.
Anything you have to do, just get it done.
When you have inspiration, act on it right then and there.
"Set up systems, not goals."
If there's something you want to do later, do it now. There is no "later."
Science is, to me, the study of truth. It is the only true discipline because it makes falsifiable predictions. It actually changes the world.
Applied science becomes technology, and technology is what separates us from the animals and allows us to have things like cell phones, houses, cars, heat, and electricity.
Social approval is inside the herd. If you want social approval, definitely go read what the herd is reading. It takes a level of contrarianism to say, "Nope. I'm just going to do my own thing. Regardless of the social outcome, I will learn anything I think is interesting."
If you view yourself as a loser, as someone who was cast out by society and has no role in normal society, then you will do your own thing and you're much more likely to find a winning path.
Read everything you can.
And not just the stuff that society tells you is good or even books that I tell you to read. Just read for its own sake. Develop a love for it.
Even if you have to read romance novels or paperbacks or comic books. There's no such thing as junk. Just read it all. Eventually, you'll guide yourself to the things that you should and want to be reading.
Nature speaks in mathematics. Mathematics is us reverse engineering the language of nature, and we have only scratched the surface. The good news is you don't have to know a lot of math. You just have to know basic statistics, arithmetic, etc. You should know statistics and probability forwards and backwards and inside out.
"Be exactly who you are.”
Holding back means staying in bad relationships and bad jobs for years instead of minutes.
Courage isn't charging into a machine gun nest. Courage is not caring what other people think.
Value your time. It is all you have. It's more important than your money. It's more important than your friends. It is more important than anything. Your time is all you have. Do not waste your time.
The modern struggle:
Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising...
Up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games, and addictive drugs
Basically, in physics, the arrow of time comes from entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states entropy only goes up, which means disorder in the Universe only goes up, which means concentrated free energy only goes down. If you look at living things (humans, plants, civilizations, what have you) these systems are locally reversing entropy.
Humans locally reverse entropy because we have action.
In the process, we globally accelerate entropy
until the heat death of the Universe. You could come up with some fanciful theory, which I like, that we're headed towards the heat death of the Universe. In that death, there's no concentrated energy, and everything is at the same energy level. Therefore, we're all one thing. We're essentially indistinguishable.
What we do as living systems accelerates getting to that state. The more complex system you create, whether it's through computers, civilization, art, mathematics, or creating a family—you actually accelerate the heat death of the Universe. You're pushing us towards this point where we end up as one thing.
Honesty is a core, core, core value. By honesty, I mean I want to be able to just be me. I never want to be in an environment or around people where I have to watch what I say.
I only want to be around people I know I'm going to be around for the rest of my life. I only want to work on things I know have long-term payout.
I only believe in peer relation-ships. I don't believe in hierarchical relation-ships. I don't want to be above anybody, and I don't want to be below anybody. If I can't treat someone like a peer and if they can't treat me like peer, I just don't want to interact with them.
The moment you have a child, it's this really weird thing, but it answers the meaning-of-life, purpose-of-life, question. All of a sudden, the most important thing in the Universe moves from being in your body into the child's body. That changes you. Your values inherently become a lot less selfish.
If I can't verify it on my own or if I cannot get there through science, then it may be true, it may be false, but it's not falsifiable, so I cannot view it as a fundamental truth.
Try everything, test it for yourself, be skeptical, keep what's useful, and discard what's not.
Everyone is corrupted. Wisdom is the discarding of vices and the return to virtue, by way of knowledge.
If wisdom could be imparted through words alone, we'd all be done here.
There is actually nothing but this moment. No one has ever gone back in time, and no one has ever been able to successfully predict the future in any way that matters. Literally, the only thing that exists is this exact point where you are in space at the exact time you happen to be here.
At best, the past is some fictional little memory tape in my head. As far as I'm concerned, my past is dead. It's gone. All death really means is that there are no more future moments.
I always spent money on books. | never viewed that as an expense
That's an investment to me.
I bought a lot of old student instruments from a high school and I'm wondering how hard it's going to be to sell them.
3 Conn baritones
1 Olds barritone
1 Normandy clarinet
1 Bundy clarinet
I got them for about $250 and I still need to pick them up. There was one picture of a baritone which seems to have a good lacquer but it's dented. There was also a picture of a clarinet and I can't say much about that. I don't know much about instruments.
What's your opinion?