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

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.

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.

Similarly, someone with lots of skill but a weak network won’t realize his or her fullest potential. So, you need both.

It got a little stressful in my first two years of high school, trying to make conference calls with investors in between classes, but I definitely learned a lot of important time-management lessons.

One theme that fascinates me is cognitive enhancement. It seems only a matter of time until we live in a world where steroids for the brain are readily available to all. And once we come to grips with that reality,

The internet tends to make smart people smarter and dumb people dumber.

By the way, I have trouble listening to what [Cheney] says sometimes because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he’s talking, but my response is this.

Sometimes people get really sniffy about the films you choose if you’ve done more dramatic projects or you’re classically trained.

I sometimes wonder if the manufacturers of foolproof items keep a fool or two on their payroll to test things.

Sometimes people do you a favour when they drop out of your life.

I usually can find a way to do a character to make it real and work. But sometimes it’s a struggle sustaining that, because there’s such a level of personal involvement and personal, physical, and emotional distraughtness.

Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it, and my heart is going to cave in.

Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once and it’s too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst.

You want to have fun but you also want to work well. Sometimes I was quite happy at Ferrari, because we would have fun, but then they could not stop having fun and go back to the real work.