Category: Notes

The extent of someone’s courage or cowardice can not be measured in ordinary times. All is revealed when something happens.

– Ben Horowitz

Success traps can be harder to get out of, because at least with failure traps, there’s incentives to change things. With success traps, the incentives are to keep doing the same thing.

– Greg McKeown

If you want to be successful in business (in life, actually), you have to create more than you consume. Your goal should be to create value for everyone you interact with. Any business that doesn’t create value for those it touches, even if it appears successful on the surface, isn’t long for this world. It’s on the way out.

– Jeff Bezos

All the the returns come from being non-consensus and right – and every company has to shift from non-consensus to consensus to ultimately succeed.

– Delian Asparouhov

Tourist and purist – that’s my main device to understand the sections of culture, that move culture forward. You have a purist, that’s like, I know the whole art history of everything, you can’t do this, this was done 20-times before you thought of it. Like, this is the pure institution. Then there’s the tourist, who’s bright-eyed, curiosity-driven, that has a lust for learning, and they support whatever.

– Virgil Abloh

The North Pole, South Pole and Everest, it’s mostly mental. I’m not physically more fit than other people doing the same stuff or other people trying to do the same stuff and failing. It’s a mental thing and it’s definitely about preparation. You need to be well prepared.

– Erling Kagge, explorer

You were born into a world where most things were made by human consciousness. You may die in a world where nothing is made by human consciousness.

– Erik Hoel

A universal law of economics says the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its position in the economic equation suddenly inverts. When nighttime electrical lighting was new and scarce, it was the poor who burned common candles. Later, when electricity became easily accessible and practically free, our preference flipped and candles at dinner became a sign of luxury.

– Kevin Kelly

I failed pretty hard at my first startup – it sucked! – and am doing pretty well on my second. The thing I wish someone told me during the first one is that no one else thinks about your failures as much as you do, and that as long as don’t psych yourself out you can try again.

– Sam Altman