A system just can’t respond to short-term changes when it has long-term delays.

• Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

Always be closing.

Am meisten erreicht man, wann man den Lustgewinn aus den Quellen psyschicher und intellektueller Arbeit genügend zu erhöhen versteht.

• Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur

Be a parent to yourself.

• A wise Hacker News user

Defend those who are absent.

• Steven Covey, 7 Habbits of Highly Effective People

Don’t confuse effort with result.

• Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

Don’t judge decisions by their outcome.

• Distillation of ideas in Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness

Don’t use parantheses. Either give the subject its rightful stage or remove it for it lacks importance.

Euphemisms are the mother tongue of manipulation. […] if someone doesn’t use straight language, don’t act straight away

• Mikael Krogerugs & Roman Tschäppeler, The Communication Book

Explicit is better than implicit.

• The Zen of Python

Greet people like a labrador.

• Heavily inspired by analogies used in Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People

Hustle while you wait

• Inspired by description of Malcolm X in Alex Haley’s Malcom X

I stop writing every day at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that and the next day’s work goes surprisingly smoothly.

• Haruki Murakami

If communication does not work, you should ask yourself: what state am I in at the moment

• Mikael Krogerugs & Roman Tschäppeler, The Communication Book

If you want to be a good intuitive Bayesian […] you need to protect your priors. […] that might mean turning off the news.

• Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths, Algorithms to Live By

If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path that is more difficult in the short term.

• Naval Ravikant as quoted in Eric Jorgenson’s The Almanack of Naval

If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.

— Leslie Lamport

Impatience with actions, patience with results.

• Naval Ravikant as quoted in Eric Jorgenson’s The Almanack of Naval

Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage. […] serves an almost exclusively negative function.

• David Foster Wallace as quoted in D.T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story

Measure twice, cut once.

• Steven Covey, 7 Habbits of Highly Effective People

Most important things are a marathon, not a sprint.

Most things don’t work; and that’s okay.

Needs and wants are different in degree, not in kind.

• Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme

Never do anything that’s not important.

Nie mehr will ich meine Augen niederschlagen, wenn eine schöne Frau mir begegnet.

• Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

People tend to over-explore

• Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths, Algorithms to Live By

Probably every vice was once a virtue.

• Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History

Signs misguide us in any single case, but they guide is right in the majority of them.

• Polya, How to Solve It

Sleep when tired.

• Distillation of Nick Cammarata tweet

Sometimes scantiness of nourishment restores the system.

• Nassim Taleb, Antifragile

The old is expected to stay longer than the young in proportion to their age.

• Nassim Taleb, Antifragile, in reference to Power-law distributed phenomena

The truth can set you free.

• Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

To what use am I now putting the power of my soul?

• Marc Aurel, Meditations,

What you do on your bad days matters more than what you do on your good days.

• Kevin Kelly, 103 bits of advice I wish I had known

When everyone is sick, we no longer consider it a disease.

• Naval Ravikant as quoted in Eric Jorgenson’s The Almanack of Naval

When in doubt: go to bed; don’t eat; don’t buy.

[…] when you take risks, insults by half-men […] are similar to barks by non-human animals: you can’t feel insulted by a dog.

• Nassim Taleb, Antifragile

Will anyone sneer at me? That will be his concern; mine will be to ensure that nothing I do or say deserve the sneer.

• Marc Aurel, Meditations

You can’t expect above-average outcomes from an average approach.

• Distillation of Paul Graham’s Beating the Averages

You don’t know whose dog died today.

You must study the endgame before anything else.

• Peter Thiel and Blake Masters quoting Raùl Capablanca in Zero to One

Your obligation is that of active participation.

• Edsger Dijsktra