• Most people (regardless of talent and opportunity) don’t do extraordinary things. This is because they won’t do unconventional things. Why is that? They’re trapped in homeostasis.

• Life in 2017 is physically easy. You can become a master—but it’s psychologically and mentally difficult. This places a premium on mind-body mastery.

• As a general principle, it’s time to Break out of Homeostasis in a big way when you reach a point in your life where what worked to get you to where you are won't get you to the next level.

• Now it’s different: He’s reached a point where entrepreneurial books, business blogs, and even some of his more financially successful friends can no longer give him directions. For the first time in years, Carl’s confused about what to do next.

• Most yogurts, granola bars, lite sodas, cereal, and juices are falsely advertised as healthy while containing mostly sugar, allowing consumers to feel healthy while being slobs.

• The best books for this purpose are biographies of successful people, historical books, and high quality fiction. You’re not reading these books for entertainment primarily (although it can certainly be fun), you’re doing it for repetition and to focus your pattern recognition on finding different examples, applications, and associations of the selected mental models.

• One thing I’ve noticed about famous business people (especially those living before the IT era) is that you usually don’t start hearing about their exploits until after they are 30-40 years old. The problem with this is that you miss the most important part of their learning curve.

• Industrialist Andrew Carnegie said that even if you stripped him of his wealth, he would be back in operation in a matter of years. Why? Partly because he had established a great reputation and built a strong network of people who could lend him money to re-establish himself. But mainly, what he meant, was that he had already done the hardest work—in his head.

• Seneca said that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity and scientist Louis Pasteur said that in the fields of observation chance favors only the mind that is prepared.

• Microsoft was spawned by a similar type of upfront commitment, with Bill Gates phoning in to MIT and telling them he had made BASIC software (he hadn’t) to see if they were interested in meeting him and hearing more about it; when they said they were, he made the software in a few weeks together with Paul Allen.

• "A man's character is formed before he is 30." —Napoleon

• The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague.

• “In several of my books facts observed by others have been very extensively used, and as I have always had several quite distinct subjects in hand at the same time, I may mention that I keep from 30 to 40 large portfolios, in cabinets with labelled shelves, into which I can at once put a detached reference or memorandum. I have bought many books, and at their ends I make an index of all the facts that concern my work; or, if the book is not my own, write out a separate abstract, and of such abstracts I have a large drawer full. Before beginning on any subject I look to all the short indexes and make a general and classified index, and by taking the one or more portfolios I have all the information collected during my life ready for use. Therefore my success as a man of science, whatever this may have amounted to, has been determined, as far as I can judge, by complex and diversified mental qualities and conditions. Of these, the most important have been—the love of science—unbounded patience in long reflecting over any subject—industry in observing and collecting facts—and a fair share of invention as well as of common sense.”