If you went back and fixed all the mistakes you've made, you'd erase yourself.

The 25 most popular icebreaker questions

1. What was your first job?
2. Have you ever met anyone famous?
3. What are you reading right now?
4. If you could pick up a new skill in an instant what would it be?
5. Who’s someone you really admire?
6. Seen any good movies lately you’d recommend?
7. Got any favorite quotes?
8. Been pleasantly surprised by anything lately?
9. What was your favorite band 10 years ago?
10. What’s your earliest memory?
11. Been anywhere recently for the first time?
12. What’s your favorite family tradition?
13. Who had the most influence on you growing up?
14. What was the first thing you bought with your own money?
15. What’s something you want to do in the next year that you’ve never done before?
16. Seen anything lately that made you smile?
17. What’s your favorite place you’ve ever visited?
18. Have you had your 15 minutes of fame yet?
19. What’s the best advice you’ve ever heard?
20. How do you like your eggs?
21. Do you have a favorite charity you wish more people knew about?
22. Got any phobias you’d like to break?
23. Have you returned anything you’ve purchased recently? Why?
24. Do you collect anything?
25. What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?

This place is like the Army: the shark ethic prevails, eat the wounded. In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught.

The delicate illusions that get us through life can only stand so much strain.

There is a saying that wisdom comes with age, but sometimes, age comes alone.

“Can you imagine a smart guy with a bad memory?” he asks. “When you can’t remember somebody’s name, you look stupid. Memory and smartness are integrated.”

When you start a new company, you build a shining goal, and after that, you can scale it back to something more realistic. I always use the same approach. To create an impossible vision.

He has “learned to be fair” about money, and sees it only as a tool for life planning. “Some people make too much of out of it, some make too little of it, but they have to realize, money isn’t the goal.” For him, it’s activity and contribution that matter.

There is a saying: you can live in a country as long as you’re able to leave it.

The only way for human civilization to survive is to find a way to make our brains a million times more effective than they are now.

There is a Russian saying: ‘What’s the difference between an optimist and a pessimist? A pessimist believes things are so bad, they couldn’t get any worse. An optimist knows that they can.’

Financially effective people tend to hold themselves to certain rules about money. I don’t borrow money for anything smaller than a house. I ledger every dollar in or out. I live on 80% of my income and invest the difference.

Fit, energetic people tend to have personal rules about health. I run or walk every day, rain or shine. I fill half my plate with vegetables. I don’t keep junk food in the house.

Productive people keep personal rules about work. I’m always at my desk at seven sharp. I clean out my inbox out every Friday. I don’t use social media before five o’clock.

Eat Stop Eat is a 24 hour fast developed by Brad Pilon and is probably the easiest fast to follow.

You don’t eat for 24 hours for one day a week. And that’s it.

Pick one day of the week you won’t eat on and do it. It’s easy for beginners or for people who don’t want to restrict their eating all week.

Great self-destruction follows upon unfounded fear.

Long-term consistency beats short-term intensity.

It’s interesting, raising a child, because he has the family that I didn’t have, that I wish I had had. And I’m so happy he does, and it gives me such joy to give him a healthy family. That’s the number one most important thing to me.

China is now a more common destination for African scholars studying abroad than either the US or UK.

This looks like a fascinating paper on the way that residents of small towns in Nigeria refuse polio vaccination as a way of negotiating with the government for better local services.

All of humanity’s problems come from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.