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Q: Where does first-principles thinking come from?

“When you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physicists discover counterintuitive new things, like quantum mechanics. They do that by thinking from ‘first principles’: building their reasoning from the ground up.”

“I would encourage people to use the mental tools of physics and apply them broadly in life. They are the best tools.”

“The normal way we conduct our lives is reasoning by analogy. That means we do something because it’s similar to something else, or what other people are doing.”

“When you think this way, you only get slight iterations. It’s easier to reason by analogy rather than from first principles, so that’s what we do most of the time.”

—

“You’re not going to create revolutionary cars or rockets in forty hours a week. It just won’t work. Colonizing Mars isn’t going to happen on forty hours a week.”

“Nobody ever changed the world on forty hours a week.”

Would you like me to give you a formula for success?

It’s quite simple.

Double your rate of failure.

— Thomas J. Watson

The only way to escape from the prison of fear is action.

— Joe Tye

Very astute and observant people know that what a person insults you with is often nothing more than the label they can’t acknowledge they actually give themselves.

If you realize this, you can keep your cool in such a conversation.
If not, you may get hooked into a mutual ego-defense session—i.e., an argument—with the person, unknowingly accepting their invitation to play a particular shadow game with them.

People work harder to avoid pain than to get pleasure.
While everyone wants pleasure as much as they can get it, their motivation to avoid pain is actually far stronger.

So when faced with the prospect of pain, the brain will work harder than it would to gain access to pleasure.

“Since where you place your attention is where you place your energy, when you wake up in the morning and immediately start putting your attention and energy on all the people you have to see that day, the places you have to go, the objects you own, and the things you have to do in the three-dimensional world, your energy becomes fractured.

All of your creative energy is flowing away from you, to all the things in the outer world that compete for your attention—your cell phone, your laptop, your bank account, your house, your job, your coworkers, your spouse, your kids, your enemies, your pets, your medical conditions, and so on.”

“Every person, object, thing, place, or situation in our familiar physical reality has a neurological network assigned to it in our brain and an emotional component connected to it because we’ve experienced all these things.

Therefore, as you place your attention on all these elements, your energy is flowing away from you and it leaves little energy in your inner world of thoughts and feelings to create something new in your life.”

“You can’t understand the world if you never see it.”

Traveling is the best education you will ever receive.
It immerses you in another culture.
It shows you how other people live day-to-day.
And it gives you a greater appreciation for your own opportunities and privileges.

You are going to die — we each get a finite amount of time on this earth.
So do something bold.
Something courageous.
Something ambitious.

Sleep is not the absence of wakefulness. It is far more than that.

Described earlier, our nighttime sleep is an exquisitely complex, metabolically active, and deliberately ordered series of unique stages.

Numerous functions of the brain are restored by, and depend upon, sleep. No one type of sleep accomplishes all. Each stage of sleep—light NREM sleep, deep NREM sleep, and REM sleep—offer different brain benefits at different times of night. Thus, no one type of sleep is more essential than another. Losing out on any one of these types of sleep will cause brain impairment.

Up to this point, we have discussed the power of sleep after learning to enhance remembering and avoid forgetting. However, the capacity to forget can, in certain contexts, be as important as the need for remembering, both in day-to-day life (e.g., forgetting last week’s parking spot in preference for today’s) and clinically (e.g., in excising painful, disabling memories, or in extinguishing craving in addiction disorders).

Moreover, forgetting is not just beneficial to delete stored information we no longer need. It also lowers the brain resources required for retrieving those memories we want to retain, similar to the ease of finding important documents on a neatly organized, clutter-free desk. In this way, sleep helps you retain everything you need and nothing that you don’t, improving the ease of memory recollection. Said another way, forgetting is the price we pay for remembering.

People fear cocaine, heroin, and drugs.
But not alcohol.

And yet…

Alcohol kills 3 million people every year (WHO data)
More than 200 diseases are caused or worsened by alcohol
Alcohol is the leading cause of liver failure and cancer
Alcohol destroys more families than any drug

Even worse:

Alcohol is the only drug that people pressure you to take.

Nobody will ever say:
“Come on, have some heroin. Be a sport.”

1. The Art of Living by Thich Nhat Hanh
2. Stolen Focus by Johann Hari
3. The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer
4. Ikigai by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles

1. The Book of Joy by Dalai Lama XIV and Desmond Tutu
2. Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
3. The Happiness Equation by Neil Pasricha
4. The Little Book of Lykke by Meik Wiking

1. Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
2. The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
3. The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
4. Essentialism by Greg McKeown