“As a general rule, the more immediate pleasure you get from an action, the more strongly you should question whether it aligns with your long-term goals.”

WHY IS IT so easy to repeat bad habits and so hard to form good ones?

People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them.

Put another way, the costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.

With outcome-based habits, the focus is on what you want to achieve. With identity-based habits, the focus is on who you wish to become.

When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy.

Perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.

Motivation is overrated, environment often matters more.

You get what you repeat.

The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.

How can I make it obvious? How can I make it attractive? How can I make it easy? How can I make it satisfying?

In fact, the tendency for one purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption

What do you want to stand for? What are your principles and values? Who do you wish to become?

Redesign your life so the actions that matter most are also the actions that are easiest to do.

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.

Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.

When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing.

When our thoughts – which bring actions – are filled with hate against anyone, Negro or white, we are in a living hell. That is as real as hell will ever be.

For evil deeds may better than bad words be borne.

The hands of the guilty don’t necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.

I would not leave anything to a man of action as he would be tempted to give up work; on the other hand, I would like to help dreamers as they find it difficult to get on in life.

Who would ever care to do brave deed, Or strive in virtue others to excel, If none should yield him his deserved meed Due praise, that is the spur of doing well? For if good were not praised more than ill, None would choose goodness of his own free will.

Successful people aren’t born that way. They become successful by establishing the habit of doing things unsuccessful people don’t like to do. The successful people don’t always like these things themselves; they just get on and do them.

Love may be likened to a disease in this respect, that when it is denied a vent in one part, it will certainly break out in another; hence what a woman’s lips often conceal, her eyes, her blushes, and many little involuntary actions betray.

So many of our conversations (about affirmative action) have been dishonest