All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The story so far:In the beginning the Universe was created.This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work, wheareas economics represents how it actually does work.
The conventional wisdom is often wrong.
A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.
All the time you're saying to yourself, 'I could do that, but I won't,' — which is just another way of saying that you can't.
So I have just one wish for you – the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.
ZERO TO ONE EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.
Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.
Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule,
If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right—dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in—is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.
In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).
By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse resume to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready--for nothing in particular.
Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this ethos when he wrote: “Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances…. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution.
Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.
You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.
the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.
Most of a tech company’s value will come at least 10 to 15 years in the future.
moving first is a tactic, not a goal.
you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.
The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.
The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.
In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.
Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it.
Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know.
anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter.
First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.
As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.
The most successful companies make the core progression—to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets—a part of their founding narrative.
Success is never accidental.
Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other?
if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.
Watson, Deep Blue, and ever-better machine learning algorithms are cool. But the most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?
Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that’s true, you should fight and win.
Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth.
take unorthodox ideas seriously today, and the mainstream sees that as a sign of progress. We can be glad that there are fewer crazy cults now, yet that gain has come at great cost: we have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered.
Competition can make people hallucinate opportunities where none exist.
What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.
Jobs planned the iPod to be the first of a new generation of portable post-PC devices, but that secret was invisible to most people.
Every living thing is just a random iteration on some other organism, and the best iterations win.
This would be depressing but for one crucial fact: humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these miracles technology.
the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places,
There’s nothing wrong with a CEO who can sell, but if he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech.
People are scared of secrets because they are scared of being wrong. By definition, a secret hasn’t been vetted by the mainstream. If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right—dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in—is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.
Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done.
The Field of Dreams conceit is especially popular in Silicon Valley, where engineers are biased toward building cool stuff rather than selling it. But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it’s harder than it looks.
only by believing in and looking for secrets could you see beyond the convention to an opportunity hidden in plain sight.
Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.
Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that’s true, you should fight and win. There is no middle ground: either don’t throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly.
Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know. So who do you tell? Whoever you need to, and no more. In practice, there’s always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody—and that’s a company. The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside.
no company has a culture; every company is a culture.
But there is no reason why technology should be limited to computers. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.
For Hamlet, greatness means willingness to fight for reasons as thin as an eggshell: anyone would fight for things that matter; true heroes take their personal honor so seriously they will fight for things that don’t matter.
...a lone genius might create a classic work of art or literature, but he could never create an entire industry.
The other buzzword that epitomizes a bias toward substitution is “big data.” Today’s companies have an insatiable appetite for data, mistakenly believing that more data always creates more value. But big data is usually dumb data. Computers can find patterns that elude humans, but they don’t know how to compare patterns from different sources or how to interpret complex behaviors. Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst (or the kind of generalized artificial intelligence that exists only in science fiction).
The best place to look for secrets is where no one else is looking.
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon.
the culture was strong enough to transcend the original company.
Take the hidden paths.
leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum.
Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better—to
A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.
The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.
What you learn from others you can use to follow.What you learn for yourself you can use to lead.
Moral: to the extent you can choose, work on problems you think will be important.
The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.
Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.
Intuitive: The word conveys, I think, a diffuse annoyance at our inability to understand how we come by such knowledge.
the metaphysicist has no laboratory.
The absolute truth is that if you don’t know what you want, you won’t get it.
Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.
Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.
Norvig: I think one of the most important things is being able to keep everything in your head at once. If you can do that you have a much better chance of being successful. That makes a small program easier. For a bigger program, you need extra tools to be able to handle that.
We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.
The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.
There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.
You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young.""Why, what did she tell you?""I don't know, I didn't listen.
Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty.
Weak emperors mean strong viceroys.
Discontent is the first necessity of progress. —THOMAS A. EDISON
I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.
A truth that's told with bad intentBeats all the lies you can invent.
We become what we behold.
He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite & flatterer..
They accumulate A world in which Man is by his nature the enemy of Man
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.
Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.
The most sublime act is to set another before you.
The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.
Exuberance is beauty.
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.