“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.

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,

Monetary policy cannot do much about long-run growth, all we can try to do is to try to smooth out periods where the economy is depressed because of lack of demand

Goals aren’t enough. You need goals plus deadlines: goals big enough to get excited about and deadline to make you run. One isn’t much good without the other, but together they can be tremendous.

I’ll be yours until the stars fall from the sky, yours until the rivers run dry. In other words, until the day I day.

The little island seemed to float on the dark lake-waters. Trees grew on it, and a little hill rose in the middle of it. It was a mysterious island, lonely and beautiful.

A picture story just doesn’t run like a film. It doesn’t have 24 frames per second. It doesn’t deal with this illusion of movement.

There is so much to do on a film set. It is an extraordinarily invigorating and wonderful place to be, when things are running well.

As long as a journalist tells the truth, in conscience and fairness, it is not his job to worry about consequences. The truth is never as dangerous as a lie in the long run. I truly believe the truth sets men free.

I never intended to be a run-of-the-mill person.