“I’ve always loved to write, and I kept a diary of what I thought about my business, being an entrepreneur and other things of interest to me.”

If you really understand something, you can: 1) explain it using a clear metaphor and 2) explain the strongest counter-argument to the idea.

Rule of thumb: Be skeptical of things you learned before you could read. E.g., religion.

Taking on short term risk can involve switching jobs, joining new groups / associations in the area, launching a personal blog, running an experiment within your existing job. These are some practical ways to inject volatility into your life, and thus some risk.

I’m skeptical of passive learning. If you don’t write down what you’re hearing and learning, what the odds you remember it?

If frequency with which you cite an education credential does not decrease over the course of your life, you’re not accomplishing very much.

Expose yourself to as much randomness as possible.

I to the We means that both the individual’s effort and the power of the network matter, and they work in tandem. Someone with no skill won’t get very far, no matter how strong the network.

I have a broad range of interests, so I’ll always be working on something.

Long-term goals are dangerous. They limit you. They hinder you from reacting to new conditions.

Sometimes Plan B can have the same desired outcome, but a different path for getting there.

Expose yourself to as much as possible. Attend conferences no one else is attending. Read books no one else is reading. Talk to people no one else is talking to.

Sometimes I have to pause to make the distinction between Ben the teenager and Ben the businessman.

I’m just the smallest dot in a big map of human history.

I really focused on three things in high school – my company, basketball and my school work.

I don’t want to be normal. I want to be something else.

I suspect the debate over the ethics will be much more heated than the debate over steroids in baseball or any other sport, where the use is limited to a select group of freakish athletes.

The only really safe thing to do is to write a diary of where you’ve been, what time you went to bed, what you ate. If I wrote honestly about everything I think it’d be a disaster. It would cause a lot of trouble.

Please read my diary, look through my things and figure me out.

If you read, you’ll judge.

Though my father was Norwegian, he always wrote his diaries in perfect English.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

I paint the way some people write an autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages from my diary.

The reason for my starting a diary is that I have no real friend.

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me.