Free will is an illusion. People always choose the perceived path of greatest pleasure.
Beware of advice about successful people and their methods. For starters, no two situations are alike. Your dreams of creating a dry-cleaning empire won't be helped by knowing that Thomas Edison liked to take naps.
There's kind of a toll you have to pay with a cat; if you don't pet her for 10 minutes she'll bother you for six hours.
I'm a poor artist. Through brute force, I brought myself up to mediocre. I've never taken a writing class, but I can write okay.
I love magazines. It's such McNugget kind of information.
Informed decision-making comes from a long tradition of guessing and then blaming others for inadequate results.
Many, if not most, career opportunities come to you through people you know. So the more people you know, the more opportunities you have. Improving your social network is a great example of a system for moving from lower odds to better odds without having a specific goal.
Obviously there's not much options when you're a cartoonist - you pretty much either work at home or rent an office I guess, and working at home just seems easier.
We must develop knowledge optimization initiatives to leverage our key learnings.
Consultants have credibility because they are not dumb enough to work at your company.
One strategy for getting ahead is being incredibly good at a particular skill; you need to be world-class to stand out for that skill. In my case, I layered fairly average skills together until the combination became special.
Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.
You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public.
Remember there's no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.
If you have a reasonable system for pursuing success, it can survive a lot of face-plants along the way. That knowledge makes success seem accessible. If you think successful people have some sort of superpower or special connections, why try?
Home is pretty utopian.
The computer cuts my production time in half. I love it.
You give anybody a billion dollars, and of course they are passionate. Passion is one of those things like willpower in that there's 'magical thinking' about it. You've got to be careful about 'magical thinking.'
We don't always have an accurate view of our own potential. I think most people who are frightened of public speaking and can't imagine they might feel different as a result of training. Don't assume you know how much potential you have. Sometimes the only way to know what you can do is to test yourself.
For most people, it's easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion. I've been involved in several dozen business ventures over the course of my life, and each one made me excited at the start. You might even call it passion.
Technology will definitely solve all our problems, but in the process it will create brand new ones. But that's O.K. because the most you can expect from life is to get to solve better and better problems.
I burned out my drawing hand by using it too much. The common word for it is writer's cramp. The fancy words for it are focal dystonia. The symptom in my case was a pinky finger that went spastic when I tried to draw.
Scientists will eventually stop flailing around with solar power and focus their efforts on harnessing the only truly unlimited source of energy on the planet: stupidity. I predict that in the future, scientists will learn how to convert stupidity into clean fuel.
The world is like a reverse casino. In a casino, if you gamble long enough, you're certainly going to lose. But in the real world, where the only thing you're gambling is, say, your time or your embarrassment, then the more stuff you do, the more you give luck a chance to find you.
You don't argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don't argue when a women tells you she's only making 80 cents to your dollar. It's the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.
Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.
Nothing inspires forgiveness quite like revenge.
When times are bad, the gloves come off and employers are less nice. People become disposable.
I don't get embarrassed by the same things that other people do. I would say that probably the biggest thing that holds people back is, 'If I do this, I'm going to look like an idiot if it doesn't work out.'