Books I enjoyed

All programming requires is a creative mind and the ability to organize your thoughts. If you can visualize a system, you can probably implement it in a computer program.

No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.

Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?

All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms of fear - are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.

Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision.

Clean code always looks like it was written by someone who cares.

Our most basic emotional need is not to fall in love but to be genuinely loved by another, to know a love that grows out of reason and choice, not instinct. I need to be loved by someone who chooses to love me, who sees in me something worth loving. That kind of love requires effort and discipline. It is the choice to expend energy in an effort to benefit the other person, knowing that if his or her life is enriched by your effort, you too will find a sense of satisfaction—the satisfaction of having genuinely.

There’s no point in being unhappy about things you can’t change, and no point being unhappy about things you can.

One of the deep mysteries of the origin of life is the almost indecent haste with which it arose on Earth.

Every decision you make contributes to your character and shapes the kind of person you are.

The greatest of all weaknesses is the fear of appearing weak.

It is not hard to make money in the market. What is hard to avoid is the alluring temptation to throw your money away on short, get-rich-quick speculative binges. It is an obvious lesson, but one frequently ignored.

If you don't pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.

The easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

Every time your customers purchase from you, they’re deciding that they value what you have to offer more than they value anything else their money could buy at that moment.

The whole secret to winning big in the stock market is not to be right all the time, but to lose the least amount possible when you’re wrong.

What we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore—plays in defining the quality of our life.

Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in light of the information available until that point.

We see people and things not as they are, but as we are.

If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.

Money’s greatest intrinsic value—and this can’t be overstated—is its ability to give you control over your time.

To be effective engineers, we need to be able to identify which activities produce more impact with smaller time investments. Not all work is created equal. Not all efforts, however well-intentioned, translate into impact.

History has shown that governments will inevitably succumb to the temptation of inflating the money supply.

Girard discovered that we come to desire many things not through biological drives or pure reason, nor as a decree of our illusory and sovereign self, but through imitation.

No system of government, no economic system, no currency, and no empire lasts forever, yet almost everyone is surprised and ruined when they fail.

History has shown that governments will inevitably succumb to the temptation of inflating the money supply.

Because everything that begins must end. What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.

Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better.

A bad goal makes you say, “I want to do that some day.” A great goal makes you take action immediately.

Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.

Removing Japan would also have a big effect on ocean currents.

It boils down to this: you aren’t allowed to tell them what their problem is, and in return, they aren’t allowed to tell you what to build. They own the problem, you own the solution.

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

Life with a cheat code isn't life. Our existence isn't something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That's what it is to be human - the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.

No one tells you it's all about to change, to be taken away. There's no proximity alert, no indication that you're standing on the precipice. And maybe that's what makes tragedy so tragic. Not just what happens, but 

We’re as smart as evolution made us. So we’re the minimum intelligence needed to ensure we can dominate our planets.

Money’s greatest intrinsic value—and this can’t be overstated—is its ability to give you control over your time.

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time

Humans," said the puppeteer, "should not be allowed to run loose. You will surely harm yourselves.

The human eye is a wonderful device. With a little effort, it can fail to see even the most glaring injustice.

The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size.

Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.

And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.

Because you have the most marvelous youth, and youth is the only thing worth having.

In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it. In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.

People are willing to work free, and they are willing to work for a reasonable wage; but offer them just a small payment and they will walk away.

It was easier to be brave when you were someone else.

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.

If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing your limits, and if you’re not pushing your limits, you’re not maximizing your potential.

Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.

Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something.

High-stakes testing culture—be it for school examinations, job interviews, or professional licensing—creates perverse incentives to “teach to the test,” or worse, cheat.

So it is with statistics; no amount of fancy analysis can make up for fundamentally flawed data. Hence the expression “garbage in, garbage out.

Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

Why did the chicken cross the road? Because it maximized his utility.

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.

The difference between doing a good job and doing a lousy job is driven by how many people a leader has to keep happy.

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible.

We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.

The computer focuses ruthlessly on things that can be represented in numbers. In so doing, it seduces people into thinking that other aspects of knowledge are either unreal or unimportant. The computer treats reason as an instrument for achieving things, not for contemplating things. It narrows dramatically what we know and intended by reason.

It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget".

If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.

Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it

Everyone shines, given the right lighting.

The free market doesn't exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict the freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How 'free' a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition.

Often we don’t realize that our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past.

The choices we make within the boundaries of the twists of fate determines who we are.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen. —Earl Wilson

No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.

One essential characteristic of modern life is that we all depend on systems—on assemblages of people or technologies or both—and among our most profound difficulties is making them work.

The Scrum Master, the person in charge of running the process, asks each team member three questions: 1. What did you do yesterday to help the team finish the Sprint? 2. What will you do today to help the team finish the Sprint? 3. What obstacles are getting in the team’s way? That’s it. That’s the whole meeting

There is nothing I dislike more in the world than people who care more about ideology than they do about people.

The gap between a dumb and a clever person may appear large from an anthropocentric perspective, yet in a less parochial view the two have nearly indistinguishable minds.

Happy brains are all alike; every unhappy brain is unhappy in its own way.

The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth.

Sometimes your associates will say “Everybody else is doing it.” This rationale is almost always a bad one if it is the main justification for a business action. It is totally unacceptable when evaluating a moral decision. Whenever somebody offers that phrase as a rationale, in effect they are saying that they can’t come up with a good reason.

The question that runs through these disputatio is the following: What if “horror” has less to do with a fear of death, and more to do with the dread of life?

But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.

Tonight, some thirty thousand couples will have their first date because of OkCupid. Roughly three thousand of them will end up together long-term. Two hundred of those will get married, and many of them, of course, will have kids. There are children alive and pouting today, grouchy little humans refusing to put their shoes on right now, who would never have existed but for the whims of our HTML.

No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it—and the process won’t be easy.

Typically, people who exercise, start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change

Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it.

Computer language is just another language with its own grammar; it just happens to be much more logical than French.

People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.

For superforecasters, beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.

The Enlightenment sought to rid the world of myths, but the nation could not justify itself without them.

“Life is struggle.” I believe that within that quote lies the most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.

We are morphing so fast that our ability to invent new things outpaces the rate we can civilize them.

Never let a good crisis go to waste. It’s the universe challenging you to learn something new and rise to the next level of your potential.

Losers have goals. Winners have systems.

We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.

God created not species but the algorithm for creating species.

You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.

To effectively contain a civilization’s development and disarm it across such a long span of time, there is only one way: kill its science.

Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it and welcome every moment.

You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don’t know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.

If you’re going to make a desperate, hopeless act of defiance you should make it a good one.

The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.

The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to truth.

Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness.

In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.

The decent method you follow is better than the perfect method you quit.

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.

Rejection exists for a reason — it’s a means to keep people apart who are not good for each other.