Happiness is what’s there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life.

We are highly judgmental, survival, and replication machines. We are constantly walking around thinking I need this, I need that, trapped in the web of desires. Happiness is that state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and your mind stops running into the future or running into the past to regret something or to plan something. In that absence for a moment, you have internal silence. When you have internal silence, then you are content and you are happy.

– Naval Ravikant

Instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtably, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile.

– Nikola Tesla

Frenzy is the later phase of the installation period. It is a time of new millionaires at one end and growing exclusion at the other. The paper economy decouples from the real economy… the regulatory framework [turns] impotent. It is also a time of speculation, corruption and unashamed love of wealth.

– Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital

“Those who are in love with practice without theoretical knowledge are like the sailor who goes onto a ship without rudder or compass and who never can be certain whither he is going…. Practice must always be founded on sound theory.”

– Leonardo da Vinci

Friction makes everything harder, both the good we can do, but also the unimaginably terrible. In our zeal to reduce friction and our eagerness to celebrate the good, we ought not lose sight of the potential bad.

– Link

Evolutionary change to people is always taking place, but the pace of human evolutionary change is measured in thousands of years. Human cultures change somewhat more rapidly over periods measured in decades or centuries. Microcultures, such as the way by which teenagers differ from adults, can change in a generation. What this means is that although technology is continually introducing new means of doing things, people are resistant to changes in the way they do things.

– Don Norman

Time is volatility. Education, in the sense of the formation of character, personality, and acquisition of true knowledge, likes disorder; label-driven education and educators abhor disorder. Some things break because of error, others don’t. Some theories fall apart, not others. Innovation is precisely something that gains from uncertainty: and some people sit around waiting for uncertainty and using it as raw material, just like our ancestral hunters.

– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

One of the reasons stupid, or pigheaded people do well, and when they do well they do really well, is because they are ignoring all the category norms everybody else thinks are important and they’re emphasizing something completely different.

– Rory Sutherland

The expectations market is about speculation. The real market is about investing. The stock market, then, is a giant distraction to the business of investing.

– John Bogle