The Paradox of Choice – Barry Schwartz
Dianetics – L. Ron Hubbard

Energy is good. Passion is bullshit.

“What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Timing is often the biggest component of success.

One should have a system instead of a goal.

Appearances matter. Dress up.

Goals are for losers. →That’s true most of the time.

If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it.

Exercise, food, and sleep should be your first buttons to push if you’re trying to elevate your attitude and raise your energy.

What’s real to you is what you imagine and what you feel. If you manage your illusions wisely, you might get what you want, but you won’t necessarily understand why it worked.

The smartest system for discerning your best path to success involves trying lots of different things-sampling. (For entrepreneurial ventures it might mean quickly bailing out if things don’t come together quickly.)

Overcoming obstacles is normally an avoidable part of the process. But you also need to know when to quit.
→Persistence is useful, but there’s no point in being an idiot about it.

Things that will someday work out well start out well.
→Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way.
→Small success can grow into big ones, but failures rarely grow into successes.

It’s generally true that if no one is excited about your art/product/idea in the beginning, they never will be.

Success isn’t magic; it’s generally the product of picking a good system and following it until luck finds you.

The Success Formula:

You can raise your market value by being merely good, not extraordinary, at more than one skill.
→When it comes to skills, quantity often beats quality.

The Knowledge Formula:

Don’t read the news to find truth, it is a foolish waste of time.
→Don’t think of news as information. Think of it as a source of energy.

It helps to see the world as math(probability & statistics) and not magic.

Skills every adult should gain a working knowledge:

• public speaking
• psychology
• business writing
• accounting
• design(the basics)
• conversation
• overcoming shyness
• second language
• golf
• proper grammar
• persuasion
• technology(hobby level)
• proper voice technique

There is a transformative power of praise versus the corrosive impact of criticism.

Positivity is far more than a mental preference. It changes your brain, literally, and it changes the people around you. It’s the nearest thing we have to magic.

Knowledge is power. But knowledge of psychology is the purest form of that power.

The single best tip for avoiding shyness involves harnessing the power of acting interested in other people.

Try to figure out which people are thing people and which ones are people people.
→Thing people enjoy hearing about new technology and other clever tools and possessions. They also enjoy discussions of processes and systems, including politics.
→People people enjoy only conversations that involve humans doing interesting things.

See the world as a slot machine that doesn’t ask you to put money in.
→All it asks is your time, focus, and energy to pull the handle over and over.

💡The single biggest trick for manipulating your happiness chemistry is being able to do what you want, when you want.

The timing of things can be more important than the intrinsic value of the things.

The search for happiness:

1. Continually work toward having control of your schedule.
2. Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are.
   →When you choose a career, consider whether it will lead to a lifetime of ever-improved performance, a plateau, or a steady decline in your skills.
3. You need to master imagination.
   →Pessimism is often a failure of imagination.
   →If you can’t even imagine an improved future, you won’t be happy no matter how well your life is going right now.
4. Remember that happiness is not a mystery or magic.
   →Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to go good.

Recapping the happiness formula:

• eat right
• exercise
• get enough sleep
• imagine an incredible future(even if you don’t believe it)
• work toward a flexible schedule
• do things you can steadily improve at
• help others (if you’ve already helped yourself)
• reduce daily decisions to routine

Three practical ways to schedule exercise in a marriage or marriage-like situation:

1. Join an organized team.
2. Always exercise at the same time every day.
3. Exercise together

Summary

Focus on your diet first and get that right so you have enough energy to want to exercise.

Exercise will further improve your energy, and that in turn will make you more productive, more creative, more positive, more socially desirable, and more able to handle life’s little bumps.

Once you optimize your personal energy, all you need for success is luck.
→You can’t directly control luck, but you can move from strategies with bad odds to strategies with good odds. For example, learning multiple skills makes your odds of success dramatically higher than learning one skill.

If you learn to control your ego, you can pick strategies that scare off the people who fear embarrassment, thus allowing you to compete against a smaller field.
→And if you stay in the game long enough, luck has a better chance of finding you.
→Avoid career traps such as pursuing jobs that require you to sell your limited supply of time while preparing you for nothing better.

Happiness is the only useful goal in life.
→Unless you are a sociopath, your own happiness will depend on being good to others. And happiness tends to happen naturally whenever you have good health, resources, and a flexible schedule.
💡Get your health right first, acquire resources and new skills through hard work, and look for an opportunity that gives you a flexible schedule someday.

💡Some skills are more important than others, and you should acquire as many of those key skills as possible, including public speaking, business writing, a working understanding of the psychology of persuasion, an understanding of basic technology concepts, social skills, proper voice technique, good grammar, and basic accounting.

Develop a habit of simplifying. Learn how to make small talk with strangers, and learn how to avoid being an asshole. If you get that stuff right—and almost anyone can—you will be hard to stop.

Eat right, exercise, think positively, learn as much as possible, and stay out of jail, and good things can happen.

Look for patterns in every part of life, from diet to exercise to any component of success.

💡Try to find scientific backing for your observed patterns, and use yourself as a laboratory to see if the patterns hold for you.
→Challenge common beliefs and belief systems. ex: lifestyle habits such as when and what you should eat, when and how long you should sleep, when and where should you work, as well as societal norms, the status quo, and institutionalized religious beliefs.

Most important, understand that goals are for losers and systems are for winners. People who seem to have good luck are often the people who have a system that allows luck to find them.