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"A takeaway from that is that no matter what you’re doing, you should be comfortable with a lot of stuff not working. It’s normal."
"Everyone needs their own Stress Factory Comedy Club – a strategy to try something you don’t know will work and absorb the damage of its failure in a manageable way."
The Mind of a Benevolent Dictator
"It doesn’t make any sense for nature to do anything that isn’t beneficial to everything under its domain. Therefore nature’s plans must be good and beneficial to all."
"We should accept nature’s plan, even if it doesn’t feel great in the moment, because we can trust that it will lead to the well-being of all of humanity and the universe."
"Death will come whenever it comes, but your focus should be on living a good life while you have it."
"Life is long enough for you to achieve your wildest dreams. You’re just so busy wasting it that you get to the end without living much of it."
"Even if you had a thousand years to live, it would feel short to you, because all the distractions and random things that pop up would swallow any time that you have."
"The real failure mode to avoid is intentionally pursuing a path that doesn’t bring you any joy."
"I’m not saying you should lay down on the beach all day. I’m saying you should find something that’s enjoyable to you, and valuable for the world."
Some Advice Gathered from People Smarter than Me
"Make it incredibly easy to do whatever you want to do. You want to design your life for the least effective, least intelligent, least conscientious version of yourself. That person is probably an idiot."
"Avoiding obvious catastrophic failure modes is often more important than improving procedure in minor ways."
Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle
"You can choose to sleepwalk through life and accept the path that's been laid out for you. You can choose to accept the world as it is. But you don't have to. If there's something in the world you feel is wrong, and you have a vision for what a better world could be, you can find your guiding principle, and fight for a cause."
From Becoming A Somebody to Becoming No One
"Before all of this happened, I was trying to control everything in the outside world to match my patterns so that I could feel good. Even from a pure logic standpoint vs. innate desire, controlling everything outside of me in order to feel a certain way seemed like a very precarious way to live."
"At the end of the day, the only reason why anyone does anything is to feel a certain way. So why not play the game of addressing the root cause vs. continue to play an un-winnable game. I tried it and went hard in the paint, and it just seemed trying to make everything in your life perfect all the time is an impossible task."
"As someone who believes in Science, I was highly skeptical of many of these phenomena until they started to happen to me in ways so visceral that they are impossible to ignore or deny…"
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