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

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,

That’s more important even then what their background is or what they’ve done before, how good they are, how new they are or whatever. All that stuff is really secondary to just getting along with the person.

The day before every revolution that’s ever happened, that revolution was impossible. The day before Rosa Parks, that was impossible. The day after, it was inevitable.

But coming home that day, walking downhill with a panorama of valley and hills before me, I turned my gaze inward, and what I saw, stopped me in my tracks.

Sometimes bad things have to happen before good things can.

No beer before 5 p.m., wait… did I just say that?

How have I never realized before that for all the strong, kind parts of him, there are also hurting, broken parts?

For some strange reason, we believe that anyone who lived before we were born was in some peculiar way a different kind of human being from any we have come in contact with in our own lifetime.

There had never before been any star in that place in the sky.