12 Rules for Life

1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back 4:30 2. Treat yourself like you are someone you care about 16:23 3. Make friends with people who want the best for you 22:53 4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today 25:45 5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them 37:23 6.Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world 48:51 7. Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient) 58:46 8 Tell the truth, or at least don't lie 9. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't 1:05:00 10. Be precise in your speech 11. Do not bother children when they are skateboarding 1:11:45 12. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street 1:17:06

Rising Strong as a Spiritual Practice

Why the riskiest thing you can do is play it safe

Better Together: Humanity + Machine Learning

The FBI's Negotiating Secrets

Related Blog: The Negotiation Edge

Change Your Mind

To be a human being, to have a brain, is to be a creature that learns. A lot of learning is incremental and slow.

Think holistically about yourself, not treating yourself like a machine simply. Always thinking in guiding meaning of life. What's meaning for you at meta level.

Do not allow anyone to prioritize things for you.

There is things you know. There is things you don't know. There is things you don't know you know. There is things you know you don't know you know.

The brain ...can color experience... it is a living, growing, always changing organ ... the role of incrementalism and building up skills...

Aristotle had this very impressive idea that human beings are happiest and they flourish when they use their best capacities all at once together. That's when you feel most alive.

Fund your dream

How do ideas travel?

A TED playlist to watch:   How do ideas travel?

Mapping ideas worth spreading:

Talk to Strangers

The beauty of what we'll never know

"...

So when we said goodbye that night, I realized he had also shown me the secret point of travel, which is to take a plunge, to go inwardly as well as outwardly to places you would never go otherwise, to venture into uncertainty, ambiguity, even fear.

At home, it's dangerously easy to assume we're on top of things. Out in the world, you are reminded every moment that you're not, and you can't get to the bottom of things, either.

3:25Everywhere, "People wish to be settled," Ralph Waldo Emerson reminded us, "but only insofar as we are unsettled is there any hope for us."...

I don't believe that ignorance is bliss. Science has unquestionably made our lives brighter and longer and healthier. And I am forever grateful to the teachers who showed me the laws of physics and pointed out that three times three makes nine. I can count that out on my fingers any time of night or day. But when a mathematician tells me that minus three times minus three makes nine, that's a kind of logic that almost feels like trust.

4:51The opposite of knowledge, in other words, isn't always ignorance. It can be wonder. Or mystery.Possibility. And in my life, I've found it's the things I don't know that have lifted me up and pushed me forwards much more than the things I do know. It's also the things I don't know that have often brought me closer to everybody around me....Knowledge is a priceless gift. But the illusion of knowledge can be more dangerous than ignorance.......transformation comes when I'm not in charge, when I don't know what's coming next, when I can't assume I am bigger than everything around me. And the same is true in love or in moments of crisis. Suddenly, we're back in that trishaw again and we're bumping off the broad, well-lit streets; and we're reminded, really, of the first law of travel and, therefore, of life: you're only as strong as your readiness to surrender.
In the end, perhaps, being human is much more important than being fully in the know."