The only moment that really exists is now—even tomorrow or yesterday are just thoughts in the current moment. So, nothing exists outside of right now. You're not necessarily going to be around for any appreciable period of time. Everything you do will be forgotten, like everything in the past has been forgotten, It's not to say it's meaningless, but it's more to say that you create your own meaning; you interpret your own meaning; you are the meaning of your own life.

If you want to operate at maximum productivity, efficiency, and creativity, you're going to work on things that you're excited about at the moment you're excited about them and accept nothing less. It is better to sit on your butt and do nothing than it is to work on things that you are not excited about.

I do believe that 99% of effort in life is 'wasted'. And it's not wasted in the sense that you don't learn something; you do learn something. But if you look back at all the term papers you wrote and all the classes you took and all the people you dated and on all the thoughts you had and all the things you stressed about and all the decisions you made, 99% of them didn't matter; they were inconsequential; and there were a few 1% decisions that did matter.

Probably the biggest misconception is the biggest poison in the water that... basically no one ever gets over, because it's too deep, is prescriptions ... The how-tos, methods, techniques, follow this, follow that ... These things are just such crap. They lead to so much pain. They lead to so much waste of a life.

The first thing you have to get away from is this fear of saying that I want more success. That's all crap. I don't care if you're a heathen, if you're true, then you won't listen to people who tell you you're a heathen. Those things are such the road to Hell.

Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett kind of say that everybody they know who's smart is an avid reader, and I have a hard time refuting that. I have yet to meet someone who I consider to have a very high-functioning level of intelligence who doesn't read for fun. Underline those last two words: for fun.

If there was a meaning to life, then we would all be stuck trying to figure out that meaning, and the moment that a person found that meaning and shared it with everybody else, then we would all be enslaved to that particular meaning. So, I think it's liberating that there's no meaning to life; you can create your own meaning...

This appreciation, in general, just walking around being full of gratitude, it's all just hoo-wee. It's just pie in the sky. It's not .... There's nothing there.

Things to aspire to move past in your life: First, you want to get out of your parents' basement. Then you're living with roommates. Then you wanna get away from roommates ... Then you're driving to work. Then you want to get of a commute. Then you're waking up to an alarm clock. Then you want to get away from an alarm clock. Then you're basically living a highly calendared and scheduled life. You want to get away from your calendar. Then, finally, you want to get away from email and text messages.

The problem, the mistake, that you made is in looking to copy others and looking for mentors and looking for others who are successful, thinking that they'll give you some stupid advice that's going to make you successful, and that's just not true.

I do think clear thinking allows you to make better decisions and have better judgment—and better judgment is everything. If you have good judgment in this life, you're going to thrive in the modern world, because you will be applying judgment everywhere.

I have no interest in, you know, the masses looking at everything that I write. It's for a very specific person, and an individual must be willing to reach for it if he wants it. I'm not going to come down, because it's not for the masses; it's for an individual who truly wants it.

Whoever these people you went to, if they gave you their opinion, it's a waste of time. And there really is nothing else available in this world other than opinion. Because the number of people who are seeking truth in this world and the number of people who are giving truth in this world are basically zero.

I think, 100 years from now, people will look back, and it will be considered laughably archaic that we used to pass around pieces of paper, [and we] had something literally called a 'money printing press' that they could [use to] print as much money as they wanted in the background. And so, by doing that, they impoverished all of society in a hidden way.

I just feel like the attacks on free speech are the single most disgusting feature of modern technology and modern society. And the fact that Twitter and Facebook censor so often and so freely... If I could wish anyone out of existence, I would wish the trust & safety teams and their jobs out of existence. I think censorship has no place on these platforms. We are absolutely capable of taking care of ourselves...

Whenever you work with people, there is largely nothing but ineffectiveness and unreliability and essentially will usurp the individual's resources.

The road to recovery for anything, really, is honesty and truth. It's being honest with oneself and exposing one to truth.

The point of reading is to spark your own creativity and to spark your own thoughts. So, it's almost like you're starting a fire in your brain.

Believe me, your theory of knowledge, right now, is not good enough. Whatever you think it is, you can upgrade it. As we were talking about before, judgment is the most important thing.

You don't need to be right a lot in this world, especially in the digital domain. In the physical domain, being wrong can have very large consequences; but in the digital domain, being wrong can have not much consequences. You may lose the money you bet, or you wrote a piece of code that was useless, but being correct can have huge consequences.