I think this point really deserves repeating: You could take the equivalent of 26 years worth of vacation time in one amazing gap year. That is equal

happened, exceeded the worst case at the time. I have called this mental defect the Lucretius problem, after the Latin poetic philosopher who wrote that the fool believes that the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest one he has observed.

“Oh, well—he wasn’t going to write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony anyway.”

Bushnell’s Law states, “All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master.”

Consumers are not loyal to cheap commodities. They crave the unique, the remarkable, and the human. Sure, you can always succeed for a while with the cheapest, but you earn your place in the market with humanity and leadership.

habits. As Steve Jobs reflected, “I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why.” Along the same lines, my college roommate’s motto was “Do...

DO I LIKE TO TAKE SMALL STEPS OR BIG STEPS?

The two short-lived sources of joy are the joy of novelty and the joy of perceived agency.

If time is relative, we don’t need to assume one minute means one minute. Perhaps, five minutes could be squeezed into one minute, of five hours, or five years. The compression of time is not a matter of compounding activities, but the compounding of meaning.

Zen, the Reason of Unreason; The Wisdom of Confucius; the Torah; the Holy Bible; Tao, to Know and Not Be Knowing; The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation; As a Man Thinketh; The Essential Gandhi; Walden, or, Life in the Woods; the Book of Mormon; The...

“I must apologize: if I had more time I would have written a shorter letter.”

The second highly sustainable source of joy is the joy of ease.