• Acting without Knowledge – the solid support for your actions or ideas – is like getting in a car and driving blind. You have no idea where you are going or what you are missing, and are likely to end in a horrible crash, hurting yourself and others.

• There’s no getting around it – that feeling of discomfort from not knowing whether you will succeed or fail. Just one more book to read, one more person to get advice from, one more day to mentally prepare… These are the excuses we all tell ourselves, anything to put off the pain of making an effort (and possibly failing).

• Not all of us will have the chance to create a billion-dollar company. We’re too stupid, too poorly connected, too risk-averse.

• Often, the best way to become hugely successful is to work harder, faster, and longer than other people. There is No Speed Limit in life.

• No one knows or cares about your business, so you need to put in multiples of effort just to get noticed.

• Wantapreneurs (wanna-be entrepreneurs) spend years working at corporate jobs, dreaming of starting their own businesses, while spending all their free time reading books about entrepreneurship or attending “entrepreneurship” classes.

• Time that you don’t spend going DIRECTLY to your goal is wasted. This is the Law of DIRECT. If you want to date a girl, don’t date her friend - DATE THE GIRL. If you want to write fantasy novels, don’t write romance novels - WRITE A FANTASY NOVEL. If you want to start a particular kind of business, put all your energy into doing that, rather than reading books and attending college.

• A beautiful diamond doesn’t need a sales pitch. Polish and put it on display, and thousands of people will be drawn to it. Or, you could take an ugly rock and walk around attempting to sell it to thousands of people. Which would you rather do?

• Let Them Be the Ones to Say No

• To get anything of value in life, you must Ask. People rarely hand over their money or time for free. Yet, many people don’t ask, not even giving others a chance to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. They reject themselves, instead of letting others reject them.

• The desire to be original is based on foolish desires from your ego. Don’t be driven by your ego. Rather, be driven by the unselfishness of creating the best work possible. After all, most consumers don’t care if you are original. They care about the value you provide them. YOU are the one who cares about being original. Your ego wants to be able to take credit for your originality, and tell itself how great you are.

• This is hard for some artists to do. But an artist’s job is not to be original. It is to produce the best art they can for the world.

• If you think about it that way, the obsessive drive of entrepreneurs and artists to create something out of nothing sounds crazy.

• They labor for years with a higher than likely chance of failure, at which point no one will bother giving them even a little attention or recognition for the years of effort. Failure is ignored, or worse, ridiculed and criticized. It’s not surprising then that few people are entrepreneurs or artists or top athletes.

• Persistence is what finishes the 70,000-word novel, the exquisite sculpture that takes a year to complete, what launches and continues these risky, back-breaking new businesses that only make a profit after a year or three or ten (or never).

• Persistence is a trait that builds great things. It is the strategy of repeatedly hammering away, making little progress daily, but continual, until many years later the dam finally breaks and success arrives in a flood.

• Try as hard as I can, I just don’t see a way around it: the most successful people in life are overwhelmingly Producers; the least successful in life are overwhelmingly Consumers.

• Whether you’re an entrepreneur, artist, writer, or other kind of producer, the Law of Public still holds: Whatever you Create, You Must Expose it to the Public.

• If you have never produced anything, you might think this sounds like common sense, almost simplistic. Obviously, a writer releases his books, a painter displays his art, an entrepreneur launches his business or product – this is common sense, right? But the reality is that launching to the Public is difficult. Unless you have ever poured your soul and heart into something new and risky and displayed it to the world for them to judge, you just wouldn’t understand until you experience it yourself.

• The cousin of daydreaming, talking about your dreams, is also a useless activity. People love talking about their goals, their wishes, their deepest desires. It is an expression of who we are and what we want to accomplish on earth. It is personal and meaningful, and by all means, do it if you must. But understand that talking about something is separate from actually doing it. The two can coincide, but one does not equal the other. Talking is not Action. Talking is you expressing your daydreams to other people who listen politely (but don’t really care).

• We cling to fantasies that anyone can make it to the NBA, NFL, partner of the Law Firm, NYT best-selling author list, CEO of a fortune 500 firm, big Hollywood actor or actress.

• And here is where the magic happens: only by going through an open door can you see what doors are open on the other side. Step through one door, and you may open up 5 more, branching off into different paths. Maybe one leads to a new business opportunity. Maybe another leads to a more fulfilling career, one that you had never imagined. Maybe a door several doors down, hidden away deep in a tree of branches of doors, leads to you an unexpected stroke of luck and financial windfall.

• Paradoxically, Constraints often free the creator up, sparking creativity. When your options are limited to narrower choices, your brain compensates by working harder and creatively to come up with solutions. But give the brain all the time, all the ideas, all the space, all the options, and often it will struggle, overwhelmed with the expanse and variety of possibilities it can imagine.

• The most successful people act like water: nothing stops their progress. They obey the Law of FOO: Flow Over Obstacles.

• If you refuse to incorporate FOO: Flow Over Obstacles into your life, you may want to ask yourself whether you really want to accomplish your dreams, or if you’re a talker / daydreamer / bullshitter unwilling to put in the work and focus required.

• Opportunity is the actual doors open to you - don’t try to be a model if you are average-looking.

• But if we think of ourselves 90% of the time, and others do the same, then the attention they actually pay to us is negligible, if it exists at all. Of most attempts we make, whether it’s to start a new business, write a book, ask a girl or guy out, or try our hand at something new, the majority of people simply don’t have their attention focused on our success or failure. They are preoccupied with their own attempts to do similar things, or simply don’t care enough about our lives to follow our every move.

• For your passion, you should be an elitist. An elitist has higher standards than everyone else. An elitist takes their craft more seriously, works harder than anyone else, and believes that they’re among the best, if not the best. And if they aren't among the best yet, then they should be working harder than anyone to get there because they believe that they are good enough to be.

• Being an elitist means you take your passion more seriously than others do, and as such demand more of yourself and hold yourself to higher standards than the rest of the population.

• People make all sorts of proclamations about following their dreams and how they “wish” they could be millionaires or get in shape, then they spend nights and weekends watching TV and eating ice cream.

• But again, being right does not always translate into being successful.

• Whatever their true intentions, the harsh reality is people with losing mentality wouldn’t succeed in even the fairest system ever designed. They lack the drive, competitiveness, talent, or skill to make it, whether they’re in a primitive hunter-gatherer tribe, communist China, socialist Finland, or capitalist USA.

• Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. The rest is up to God, the universe, fate, Allah, karma, genetics, destiny, whatever else you believe in.

• Life is unfair; this is factual. Accept it as part of your daily existence same as you accept breathing air as part of being human. Then get on with your mission.

• DROP: Don’t Rest On Past (Laurels). Don’t get complacent, thinking you’ve done enough. The past is ancient history. What matters is the next challenge ahead of you.

• If all you care about is being happy in life, you might as well just give up the rat race, give up any struggle, and just retire to a beach somewhere. Give up any dreams you ever had, give up any desire for luxuries, and live life as a happy poor person. You can meditate every morning and live a life of complete Zen, free of desire. These are probably the happiest people of all.

• Top businessmen spend 99% of their time growing their businesses, attempting to provide value for customers. Customers, meanwhile, spend 99% of their time buying products from businesses and, when dissatisfied, criticizing the product or service.

• Becoming a Creator compared to being a Critic is like the difference between putting your body through an intense football training regimen vs. watching people play football on TV. It’s fighting in a war as a soldier vs. watching soldiers fight in a war movie. Creating is far more difficult, intense, and challenging than simply passively watching and critiquing from afar.

• They never graduate to a CREATOR, remaining forever in the infantile, inferior, passive role as CRITIC, and never succeed at anything difficult or grand.

• People who Create for others begin to understand the unique challenges and actions required to succeed. They blame others less, they work harder, and they unlock their creativity and potential. Critics remain forever locked in their passive mindset, consuming and criticizing what Creators make.

• The success attitude looks for any edge to win. The failure attitude looks for any excuse to quit.

• The greatest basketball player, Michael Jordan did this. If you watch interviews or read stories about him, you’ll notice he had an unhealthy, almost pathological competitive drive. He looked for insults and slights anywhere he could find them. Hell, he would create them out of thin air. It was as if his brain needed something to give him an obsessive work ethic and drive, fuel to push him harder and harder than anyone else was willing to push.

• Judge not on what you did in the past, but on your effort on the present mission.

• Successful people earn everything they get, because of one simple rule: No one gives success or power to you. It’s up to you to pay the price success demands: hard work, long hours, mental or physical exertion, or money.

• You are better able to see that There are No Rules, that the pursuit of wealth in the form of 1s and 0s or pieces of paper is indeed silly and just a game, that the most important things in life are humans and their experiences, rather than their rules and ideas.

• The most successful in life were not just trailblazers or pioneers of the physical world, but also the mental.

• Your failures in the past have absolutely no bearing on what you can accomplish right now. They may give you clues, but not the full story. Maybe your math class’s teaching style was just not a good fit for your way of learning. Maybe you just weren’t in the right state of mind to learn math back then. Maybe all it takes is one slight tweak to what you’re doing and all of a sudden you turn from failure into success.

• Change your mindset. Change yourself. And you just might find that your past definition of yourself was completely wrong.

• Every successful person is a nobody their entire life up until the day they become successful. Every new day is fresh, completely separate from yesterday and all the days before that, with a fresh chance to do things differently. You can become a completely new person overnight. That book you wanted to write forever but never could – you could sit down right now and write for 30 straight days and finish it. That out-of-shape body you’ve lugged around your entire life could be something completely different in 6 months. That business you wanted to start but never had the courage to, could begin today.

  • great

• Fads come and go. Trends arrive with a splash and disappear just as fast. But what stands the test of time has a timeless quality that all people, regardless of the times they lived in, have found useful and valuable.

• What is timeless doesn’t change, and is always useful. Thus, focus your efforts on the timeless, and you will be focusing on something solid.

• The world will always value a good story, a delicious meal, and a warm smile.

• Some things never go out of style. Stand on the solid ground of the timeless, resist the urge to dance in the wind.

• Stretch (a bow) to the very full, And you will wish you had stopped in time. Temper a (sword-edge) to its very sharpest, And the edge will not last long. When gold and jade fill your hall, You will not be able to keep them safe. To be proud with wealth and honor Is to sow seeds of one's own downfall. Retire when your work is done, Such is Heaven's way.

• Everything Ends Retire when the Work is Done