First Light.

You don't lose focus when the phone buzzes. You lose it an hour earlier, when you start waiting for it to.

Startups take off because the founders make them take off.

Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use.

I made 5,127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one.

Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee.

Most deals aren't lost to a competitor. They die in your drafts folder, three days after the meeting went well.

Most people today rarely step outside their comfort zones. We are living progressively sheltered, sterile, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged, safety-netted lives.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.

I think I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it.

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.

The customer who stopped complaining didn't get happier. They left.

I think as long as you're breathing, you have a chance to do something about it.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn't know it as well as you thought.

Always invite AI to the table.

Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

Nobody finishes because they're disciplined. They finish because they were willing to make something bad first.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

The stall that lasts thirty years isn't the one with the best recipe. It's the one where somebody replaced the wok before it failed.

Don't take breaks from distraction. Instead take breaks from focus.

It's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.

Be the human in the loop.

Your margin is my opportunity.

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.

The uncle carrying his own gas cylinder up four flights at seventy-eight decided that at forty. He just didn't know it was a decision.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy.

Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use.

I have never worked a day in my life without selling. If I believe in something, I sell it, and I sell it hard.

Keeping your options open charges rent. It just never sends you the invoice.

Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.

Exercise is the most potent longevity drug.

Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.

Live in the future, then build what's missing.

It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.

Our plan is to lead the public with new products rather than ask them what kind of products they want. The public does not know what is possible, but we do.

The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win.

Rest and avoidance look identical from the outside. Only one of them ends.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely.

Always invite AI to the table.

Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.

Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions.

You know your weight to the decimal. Ask what you can stand and you will quote a figure from ten years ago.

If you don't produce, you won't thrive — no matter how skilled or talented you are.

You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old.

Be the human in the loop.

I have never worked a day in my life without selling. If I believe in something, I sell it, and I sell it hard.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

Exercise is the most potent longevity drug.

The staircase beside the escalator is always empty. That is not a fact about staircases.

Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.

It's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.

Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use.

We plan to lead the public with new products rather than ask them what kind of products they want.

You could be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow.

The uncle who has run the same stall for thirty years did not lack options. He spent them once, early, and got thirty years back.

Unfortunately, in today's unhealthy society, 'normal' or 'average' is not the same as 'optimal.'

In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner.

If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.

Always invite AI to the table.

Success is 99 percent failure.

We are living progressively sheltered, sterile, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged, safety-netted lives.

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to seem to like.

Treat AI like a person, but tell it what kind of person it is.

Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.

The advice you give most easily is the advice you have taken least. You are not being wise for your friend — you are talking to yourself with better manners.

Exercise is by far the most potent longevity 'drug.'

The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable.

Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use.

There are more things likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

The uncle who still cycles to the wet market at eighty-two did not get lucky at eighty-one. He got stubborn at fifty.

Don't follow your passion; rather, let it follow you in your quest to become so good that they can't ignore you.

The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

Be the human in the loop.

I never dreamed about success. I worked for it.

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

Keeping every door open is not freedom. It is a decision to stand in the hallway — and the hallway is where the years go.

You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft that you will die without ever realizing your true potential.

Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.

It's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.

Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use.

I made 5,127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learnt from each one.

You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.

Exercise is the most potent longevity drug we have.

Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don't simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.

The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.

Always invite AI to the table.

Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

Envy is a map you are too proud to read. It points, with embarrassing accuracy, at the life you actually want.

Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.

Keep your identity small. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

This is the worst AI you will ever use.

The details are not the details. They make the design.

You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.

You are not running out of time. You are running out of attention, and you keep spending it on the things that will never send you a bill.

The obstacle is the way.

The best founders I know are in a permanent state of mild discomfort, and they've learned to interpret that as evidence they're working on the right thing.

The way to have good ideas is to have lots of ideas and throw away the bad ones.

Most people spend more time planning their vacation than they spend planning their lives.

The best founders don't have better ideas. They have better tolerances for discomfort.

Most people overestimate what they can do in one day, and underestimate what they can do in a year.

Every sentence you write is a test of how clearly you understand the thing you're trying to say.

Clear writing is clear thinking. You can't write well what you don't understand well.

Your first thought is rarely your best thought. The work is training yourself to wait for the second one.

You can't think yourself into a new way of acting, but you can act yourself into a new way of thinking.

The best founders are not visionaries. They are curators of problems worth solving.

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.

The most valuable real estate is the top of your to-do list.

The best way to complain is to make things.

The person avoiding the work will always find time to explain why the work is impossible.

The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.

The gym is the simplest place to practice discipline because the consequences of quitting are immediate and visible.

The person doing the work knows more than the person watching the work.

The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.

Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.