@maxua

Games are puzzles to solve, just like everything else we encounter in life. They are on the same order as learning to drive a car, or picking up the mandolin, or learning your multiplication tables. We learn the underlying patterns, grok them fully, and file them away so that they can be rerun as needed. The only real difference between games and reality is that the stakes are lower with games.

We know very little about self-development. But we do know one thing: People in general, and knowledge workers in particular, grow according to the demands they make on themselves

Averaging stamps out diversity, reducing anything to its simplest terms. In so doing, we run the risk of oversimplifying, of forgetting the variations around the average. […] One can, in fact, define statistics as the study of the nature of variability.

If you’re in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get rich, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.

If you want to make a killing trading tech stocks, find a friend in the t-shirt business between San Francisco and San Jose and ask to be alerted any time a rush order gets placed. Conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley states, “If it’s not on a t-shirt, it didn’t really happen.

Thiel told Zuckerberg “just don’t fuck it up,” which the CEO now says was pretty much the only advice he got from Thiel in the company’s early years.

For a long time there wasn’t even a Portuguese word for “entrepreneur.” Money was something you had or you didn’t in Brazilian culture, and people who made their fortunes quickly were eyed suspiciously. In telenovelas, the entrepreneur is always the villain.

The best use you can make of a Black-Berry [or any other always-connected smartphone] is to buy them for all of your competitors. They’ll never have time for another creative thought. […] Managing your information intake is one of the most important tasks for an entrepreneur. You should err on the side of less.

Never run out of cash. If you don’t manage your cash, it will manage you.

In the New World of Work there are a few simple strategies for making money. They are well established: get big, get special or forget it.