If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.

Awareness, not age, leads to wisdom.

One toxic employee wipes out the gains for more than two superstars. In fact, a superstar, defined as the top 1% of workers in terms of productivity, adds about $5,000 per year to the company’s profit, while a toxic worker costs about $12,000 per year.

1. Weird teenage hobbies - Teenage years are the hardest time to go against social pressures. If they can go against the crowd as a teenager, they can go against the crowd as an adult.

2. Energy distortion field - If you meet with them when you're tired and defeated, you leave the room ready to run a marathon on a treadmill with max incline. Low agency people do the opposite.

3. Golden question - If you're in a 3rd world prison cell and had to call someone to get you out, who would you call? That's the highest agency person you know.

4. You can never guess their opinions - The boxer that writes poetry. The advertiser obsessed with the history of war. The beauty queen who reads Nietzsche. If their beliefs don't line up with their stereotypes, they've exercised agency.

5. Immigrant mentality - If they've moved from their hometown, that's a good sign. If they've moved from their home country, that's an even greater sign.

It takes agency to spot you're in the wrong place, resourcefulness to operationalise a move and a growth mindset to start from zero in a new location.

6. They send you niche content - Low agency people look at the social engagement of content before deeming its quality. High agency people just look at the content. They spot upcoming trends very early.

7. Mean to your face but nice behind your back - The social incentives are to be nice to people's faces and gossip behind their backs. To do the opposite requires agency because they're swimming against the social tide.

The people who really run organizations are usually found several levels down, where it is still possible to get things done.

Deleted code is debugged code.

Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.

Few things are as important to your quality of life as your choices about how to spend the precious resource of your free time.

To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.

There is a connection between freedom and self-confidence: When you are kept from expressing your deepest needs and wishes, you lose trust in their validity and in your own judgment. You survive by finding out the rules and following them, thus hiding what you really want. You make it your purpose in life to please others rather than to affirm yourself.

Don't be afraid your life will end; be afraid that it will never begin.

Satire is meant to ridicule power. If you are laughing at people who are hurting, it's not satire, it's bullying.

An unknown but certainly significant proportion of the population has almost completely given up on learning. These people seldom, if ever engage in deliberate learning and see themselves as neither competent at it nor likely to enjoy it. The social and personal cost is enormous.

Although negative self-images can be overcome, in the life of an individual they are extremely robust and powerfully self-reinforcing. Deficiency becomes identity: "I can't learn French, I don't have an ear for languages;" "I could never be a businessman, I don't have a head for figures;"...

If people believe firmly enough that they cannot do math, they will usually succeed in preventing themselves from doing whatever they recognize as math. The consequences of such self-sabotage is personal failure, and each failure reinforces the original belief. And such beliefs may be most insidious when held not only by individuals, but by our entire culture.

We’re trying to solve culture by engineering.

The test of a first-rate intellect is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

Ideology is like accent. If you think you don't have one, you haven't spent a lot of time around people who don't share yours.

A politician will do anything to keep his job—even become a patriot.

Do not learn if you do not understand.

If you don’t bring it with you, you won’t find it there.

Poem on pilgrimage (travel)

Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.